Číslo 3, roč. 111 (2024)

This article delves into the theoretical dimensions of landscapes in transition, provides a comprehensive literature review and outline summary, and contextualizes the theory within the contemporary Anthropocene framework. It is focused on synthesizing and interconnecting the theoretical approaches to landscape in transition in the articles in this special issue, the scope of which is extended by incorporating additional perspectives to supplement and enrich the understanding of the issue. Through an Anthropocene lens, the article conceptualizes landscapes as crucial intermediaries, vividly depicting the convergence of large-scale, global influences or planetary events and local occurrences. The conclusion advocates a pluralistic understanding that embraces differentiated perspectives and a more-than-human approach.

By focusing on the changes to the industrial landscape that can be identified visually and within the materiality of the built environment, this paper discusses the transformation of the industrial landscape and its meaning that has been produced by the human agency that has emerged in damaged industrial places after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence and post-Soviet deindustrialisation. It shows that there is a sense of emptiness related to the ruination and abandonment of the industrial landscape in people’s experiences and memories of Soviet industrial districts. However, it is evident that such emptiness is a transitional stage that creates the conditions for the emergence of new beginnings. The paper reveals that the industrial districts today are active places in which various individual economic activities and economic structures have emerged. The research is based on the two Lithuanian former Soviet industrial cities of Alytus and Marijampolė.

The article analyses the temporalities attributed by tourism-related literature to transitions of the environment of the Bohemian Forest in the second half of the long 19th century, with a special focus on the gales and bark beetle outbreak that occurred in the 1860s and 1870s. The expansion of both individual and organised tourism in the region from the late 1870s aligned with its economic decline, which followed a period of rapid development associated with eliminating the damage caused by the outbreak, an occurrence that severely affected the health of the forest and the inhabitants of the Bohemian Forest region. The article suggests that tourism acted as a resilience strategy, enabling adaptation to socio-economic uncertainties engendered by living in a more-than-human world. In addition to nationalist motives, the perception of nature and its transitions played a key role in the establishment of tourism in the region, which was often characterised by its forests.

The region of Lusatia in Germany is characterised by a permanent state of uncertainty – as a consequence of decades of resettlements due to lignite mining as well as structural changes resulting from the German reunification. This article discusses an inclusive concept of post-mining landscapes and the presencing of their pasts in regional discourses, given that lignite mining in Lusatia mainly took place in the settlement area of the autochthonous minority of the Sorbs/Wends. Since the end of lignite mining is planned for 2038, historicizing perspectives such as a World Heritage initiative are becoming increasingly important, leading to a new conceptualisation of the post-mining landscape primarily as a practice of past presencing itself, which functions as a coping mechanism for facing up to new uncertainties, thereby emerging as a new action arena for the negotiation of regional identity, belonging and power structures.