The railway landscape and more-than-human heritage

– an Essay

Resumé

In the contemporary Finnish inventories and discussion on
cultural heritage and heritage environments, it has become
somewhat commonplace to distinguish three discrete, yet interrelated aspects: Architectural history, history itself and the value of
the landscape. Within these three different aspects of heritage
values listed above, the landscape-related one are apparently the
most vaguely elaborated, and generally accepted and satisfactory
criteria have not been developed so far.
In this essay I will be focusing on landscape-related heritage values
as a category, that has the potential to transcend the nature-culture
dichotomy, thus also paving the way for a new understanding of
“culture” in cultural heritage studies.
I will employ the concept ”more-than-human”, notably proposed
by David Abram in 1996, simply as a substitute for “nature”. In the
mainstream environmental philosophy of the recent decades, the
latter has been seen as increasingly problematic, as it appears to imply
humanity as being separate from the rest of nature (and historically
has been used exactly for the purpose of such demarcation).
These recent post-humanist critiques, questioning the culturenature dichotomy, have also echoed through heritage discourses
during the recent years. Especially inspired by the concept of ruderal
heritage developed by the human geographer Caitlin DeSilvey, heritage is here understood as products of human – non-human relations,
past and present, that are manifested in the landscape.
I will ask, how the more-than-human heritage becomes visible in
the Finnish railway landscapes, through selected case examples presented through photographic material. This photographic material
has been mostly produced during the ongoing heritage inventories
of the Finnish railway network carried at the Finnish Railway Museum,
while also accompanied by examples produced in relation to my
arts-based doctoral research project, still undergoing in the Aalto
University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Finland.
Firstly, I will discuss the relation between heritage and landscape,
and then move on towards heritage dimensions of the (Finnish) railway landscape. I will begin by noting the difference between landscape as a panoramic view from the train, and the railway as tangible
heritage environment, or landscape. It is claimed that these two are
interlinked, and the connection is made visible through Wolfgang
Schivelbush’s notion of ‘foreground’, as well as that of ‘proximity’,
proposed by Finnish geographer J.G. Granö already in the early
20th century.
The emergent qualities in the proximity of railway, especially
vegetation in the railway embankment and its surroundings, are
seen as important contributors of landscape heritage values – both
as the foreground of the passenger’s view, and as material and living
“objects” or properties in the railway environment as a heritage
landscape. I will discuss their connections, before finally taking on
examples of more-than-human heritage in some more limited, distinctive heritage “sites” related to the railway, such as abandoned
alignments and railway guard’s cottage sites. These may not be relevant to the passenger experience of landscapes, but they still offer
an insightful, parallel perspective to the more-than human heritage
in railway landscapes.
My methodological orientation also emphasizes the importance
of the visual and photographic medium. Photographs are not innocent “windows” to the reality of things, although under certain conditions they may enable the sensory, material world to speak for
itself, through its own forms. The assertive, argumentative power
of photographs, however, seems dependent on the visual qualities of the photographs themselves.
This essay emphasizes the connection between heritage and landscape. My main argument in this essay is that heritage in general,
but especially that of the railway, involves a strong more-than-human
dimension, which suggests looking at heritage in new ways, to make
sense of the historical relations between human and non-human
worlds, while also embracing change, emergence and resulting temporal depth, that is constantly being produced by temporal processes and non-human agencies, at work in the landscape. This kind
of dynamic understanding of heritage also opens towards a utopian,
future-oriented view; that of an increasing awareness of coexistence
between human and nonhuman worlds.
The structure of this essay is the following: before discussing
empirical cases, I will set the ground by discussing the landscape
dimension of railway heritage, by briefly addressing the landscape
in the railway journey experience, and how railway landscape has been addressed in Finnish heritage discourse thus far, moving then on to recent critiques of anthropocentric heritage understandings,
that also seem to underline the fundamental connectedness of heritage and landscape. Then I will discuss the concepts of landscape
and the related notion of proximity or foreground, as that is the
spatial range where material qualities of the railway environment
and the panoramic view from the moving train are interlinked. Then,
through a set of empirical cases, I finally turn towards the railway
as heritage landscape, as well as to a few heritage ‘sites’ related to
the railway – the typical heritage approach – and discuss the more than human aspects and processes like vegetation and ruination
for their landscape-related heritage values