Research of Cultural Geography

The increasing physical and mental illness burden on healthcare systems, coupled with the neoliberal de-institutionalisation and privatisation of care, has led to a growing preoccupation in contemporary societies with the ways our everyday environments relate to wellbeing, happiness and quality of life.

With the exploration of the environment as a site for disease prevention and health promotion a priority at WUR, research in this subtheme contributes to the person/environment/health complex through a particular focus on everyday lived experience and its attendant politics.

Social protection and care interventions for marginalized and vulnerable populations are indispensable if we are to ensure the quality of life and justice for all members of our societies; to do so, it is essential that any intervention takes full account of these people’s voices and experiences. At the same time, valuable insights can be gained by targeting institutions that can respond to changing local and transnational environments, resources, and actors in order to innovates their services and programmes for the wellbeing of marginalized and vulnerable people.

Our research attends to both participants’ individual, embodied experiences and the sociopolitical dimensions of governing, organizing and collective action, and in so doing it contributes to in-depth case studies of the politics of intervention into and transformation of the lives of marginalized and vulnerable people.

The increasing physical and mental illness burden on healthcare systems, coupled with the neoliberal de-institutionalisation and privatisation of care, has led to a growing preoccupation in contemporary societies with the ways our everyday environments relate to well-being, happiness and quality of life.

Researchers of the Cultural Geography Group who are working in close cooperation with other chair groups on the intersections between tourism, accessibility and health are engaged in two lines of research. The first focuses on the therapeutic role of natural environments (e.g., blue- and greenspaces like forests, water and care farms). The second attends to the impacts of significant demographic and epidemiological trends (e.g., ageing, growing proportions of chronic illness and disability affecting people’s mobility, senses and cognition) on the accessibility of tourism and travel opportunities.

Tourism is increasingly put forward by international, national and local nature conservation and development organizations, governments and the tourism industry as a promising mechanism to resolve societal problems related to the conservation-development nexus. As a consequence new institutional arrangements, policies and practices emerge at different levels of scale (from the local to the global) in various developing countries.

However, many of these are neither theoretically nor empirically judged on their merits and contributions to sustainable development. This research is a collaborative effort to address current knowledge gaps in sustainable tourism development in a number of developing countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Namibia) as well as European countries (the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal).

Architects, landscape architects, planners, urbanists, engineers and related professionals often pursue clear-cut goals based on taken for granted problems. Their attempts have not been without success. The history of cities can provide ample examples of how planning, development and design have actually made the world a better place. However, these professional solutions have also unintendedly contributed to increasing social, cultural and economic inequality, exclusion and marginalization among city dwellers.

This research agenda is therefore focused on urban governance and the politics of space and place and introduces reflexive theories and approaches to understand the politics of planning and design in urban contexts. By studying Inclusion, exclusion and democratic innovation, Conflicts and power and Materiality and object formation we contribute to the ongoing democratisation of urban governance, to enhance the adaptive capacity and resilience of urban governance, and to improve the quality of plans and designs for the end users.

Transnational mobility is one of the greatest challenges of the 21^st century. While nation-states have long been recognised as a the only political entities that should govern the movement of people, capital, care, knowledge and skills, many nation-states’ core functions and sources of legitimacy are being challenged, re-evaluated and re-worked in the face of growing volumes and diversified forms of transnational mobility.

In a time of large refugee streams, a rise in popularity of border walls and travel bans, there is an urgent need for critical perspectives that consider how people from different walks of life are forging – through a dynamic multiplicity of transnational mobilities and moorings – alternative ways in which to respond to fortified borders, and organise and make use of resources and relations to meet their needs.

The experiential dimensions of tourism, nature conservation and landscape planning and design are increasingly recognized as crucial to both understanding and successful interventions. The quest for worthwhile experiences drive tourism, and is vital to conservation efforts and factors that influence landscape interventions. Emotions are at the very heart of our experiences, shaping and colouring them.

This research agenda seeks to understand the diversity of experiences and emotions in the context of tourism, nature and landscape. Investigations address cultural and psychological antecedents as well as consequences in terms of preferences, sources of conflict, and impacts on the physical and social environment. Knowledge is used to critically reflect on and shape current policy and management practices, identify publicly appraised interventions, and mitigate negative consequences of the quest for worthwhile experiences.

Landscapes change continuously and over varying temporal and spatial scales. Unravelling the processes and controls behind these changes is essential to understand the structure and history of the present-day landscape. This is especially important because strong links exist between landscape character, heritage, and feelings of local and regional identity – which in turn are vital in future landscape development, tourism, and planning. Within the Cultural Geography Group we work on landscape history and heritage from various interrelated angles and disciplines (e.g. landscape archaeology, historical geography, cultural geography), as well as on a wide variety of topics. Common denominators are found in the focus on long-term processes, human-landscape interactions and the implementation of scientific data in future landscape management.

In dealing sensibly with landscape heritage the issue is not how to reach stability or fossilization at some perceived ideal ‘stage’, but how to identify changes and manage them effectively for all stakeholders. This both applies to cultural remains as ‘physical’ elements (e.g. archaeological sites, historical monuments, parcellations) and as intangible heritage (e.g. practices, field names, folklore).

Our research starts from the idea that nature is deeply cultural. Landscapes are places we experience and sites where we encounter others, but also the product of projections of (national) identity. Especially natural landscapes and the ways we experience these are often orchestrated and idealized. Animals, whether domesticated or wild, are interesting beyond being static specimens of their species, and are increasingly found to respond to local conditions and historical relations. Their experiences, agency and newly emerging relations are then appealing to study together with the ways humans try to understand and manage them.

By engaging with the experiences and meanings of both humans and other animals, we extend the idea of material culture as something shared with animals. This generates new understandings of what it means to manage or care for animals in a variety of settings: in nature conservation, on farms, in zoos, and in relation to tourism and leisure.