Issue 3, Vol. 111 (2024)

This article delves into the theoretical dimensions of landscapes in transition, providing a comprehensive literature review and outline summary and contextualize the theory within the contemporary Anthropocene framework. Focused on synthesizing and interconnecting theoretical approaches to landscape in transition in the articles in this special issue, it extends its scope 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 or global influences or planetary events and local occurrences. The conclusion advocates for a pluralistic understanding that embraces differentiated perspectives and a more-than-human approach.

The paper discusses the transformation of the industrial landscape after the restoration of Lithuania's Independence and post-Soviet deindustrialisation, and the aspects communicating the meaning of this changes. It focuses on the changes identified visually, and within the materiality of the built environment. The paper analyses the people’s perception of the changed Soviet industrial landscape and the meanings the industrial places gain in transformation. It shows that the sense of an “empty place” rest in people's experiences, and their memories about what Soviet industrial districts were. But it became evident that an “empty place” is a transitional stage that creates the conditions to the emergence of new beginnings. The paper unfolds that today the industrial districts are active places in which various individual economic activities and economic structure emerge. The research is based on two Lithuanian Soviet industrial cities of Alytus and Marijampolė.

The article analyses the temporalities attributed by the 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 in the 1860s and 1870s. The expansion of both individual and organised tourism in the region since the late 1870s aligned with the economic decline of the region following its rapid development connected to the elimination of the damages caused by the outbreak, which 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 brought by living in a more-than-human world. Apart from 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 – from decades of resettlements for lignite mining to structural changes due to the German Reunification. This article discusses an inclusive concept of post-mining landscapes and the presencing of their pasts in regional discourses, considering, that in Lusatia lignite mining 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 gaining in importance, leading to a new conceptualisation of the post-mining landscape mainly as a practice of past presencing itself, functioning as a coping mechanism to face new uncertainties and therefore, becoming a new action arena for the negotiation of regional identity, belonging and power structures.