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Land Use Policy 28 (2011) 460–471

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Land Use Policy

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Conceptualising ‘shadow landscape’ in political ecology and rural studies

Raymond L. Bryanta, Angel Paniaguab,∗, Thanasis Kizosc

a Department of Geography, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdomb Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales CSIC, C/Albasanz n. 26-28, 3D26, E-28037 Madrid, Spainc Department of Geography, University of the Aegean, University Hill, Mytilini 81100, Greece

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 18 December 2009Received in revised form24 September 2010Accepted 25 September 2010

Keywords:Shadow landscapePolitical ecologyDepopulated areasRural studiesMarginal cultures

a b s t r a c t

This paper develops the concept of ‘shadow landscape’ in order to describe the essential otherness andseemingly distinctive if ever contingent properties of in-between rural places characterised by histor-ical depopulation and cultural marginalisation. It does so first of all through a critically sympatheticassessment of how these areas have been portrayed in the fields of political ecology and rural studies.In political ecology, reference has long been made to ‘depopulated areas’ whereas in rural studies therehas been recently talk of ‘marginal cultures’. The result tends to be a ‘pre-given socio-spatial container’(Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003) that often obscures more than it reveals about these distinctive locations.The paper thereafter outlines the concept of shadow landscape as a means by which to understand theseareas, and does so via a discussion of marginality, scale, socio-nature and ‘cultures of depopulation’. In theprocess, some of the key material and discursive issues that surround these ‘imagined communities’ arebrought into focus. The conclusion considers a future research agenda based on an understanding shapedby the concept of shadow landscape.

© 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Despite much work on political, social and economic trends,there still remains relatively limited understanding about thoserural areas that are shaped by historical depopulation and culturalmarginalisation. Clearly, complex processes are at play here. Theassociation between depopulation and cultural marginalisation isnot an automatic one. Indeed, not all depopulated areas experiencecultural marginalisation (for example, some rural areas in centralNorth America) while not all areas experiencing cultural marginal-isation are depopulated (think, for instance, of some rural areas incentral Europe). Nonetheless, the combination of historical depop-ulation and cultural marginalisation does characterise many ruralareas, albeit in complicated and fluid ways (Cloke, 2005; Castreeand Braun, 2006; Urry, 2003; Harrison et al., 2006).

Further, and while acknowledging the role of location-specificcircumstances in generating variable outcomes on the ground, thispaper argues that the intertwining of cultural marginalisation andhistorical depopulation is often marked by four main elements: (1)marginality or the multifaceted process by which some peoples andplaces are rendered peripheral; (2) scale and the scalar politics bywhich some rural areas are defined and transformed by externaland often distant actors; (3) socio-natures or the partly humanized

∗ Corresponding author.E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Paniagua).

and domesticated landscapes that characterise rural areas; and (4)(socio)cultures of depopulation being the genesis of narratives oflocation-specific decline that shape a rural area’s broader reputa-tion and ‘name’. The interaction between these elements is suchthat specific outcomes are always contingent even as the relativeinfluence of individual elements varies over time and space. Suchvariability in how historical depopulation and cultural marginali-sation come together to shape a specific locale is clear from work inparticular on rural areas around the northern rim of the Mediter-ranean (e.g. Black, 1992; Buller, 2008; Paniagua, 2009; Kizos et al.,2009), in northern Japan (Palmer, 1988), and the UK’s ‘peripheral’regions like Wales (Cloke et al., 1998; Clout, 1972) and highlandScotland (Stockdale et al., 2000; Turnock, 1995).

In many respects, the sorts of rural areas that we are con-cerned with in this paper are ‘in-between’ places – neither denselypopulated human settlements nor ‘pure’ wilderness zones. Yetthey have distinctively humanised landscapes suggesting less feraltimes when they played a more central role in human affairs. Ruinsdot the landscape providing evidence of prior settlements, eco-nomic activities and military capacity, even as ostensibly they area seeming testament to cultural and economic dilapidation. Histo-ries of cultural bereavement are underscored and institutionalisedvia local museums that resurrect the past even as they seek to serveas a catalyst for local social and economic revival.

Apparently by-passed by history, these in-between places havealso often been under served by academe. In some cases, academicshave been too busy chasing stories of greater contemporary res-

0264-8377/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2010.09.005


R.L. Bryant et al. / Land Use Policy 28 (2011) 460–471 461

onance to the major population centres to linger over relativelydepopulated places of bygone glory. In other cases, they havestudied these places only insofar as they provide grist for ‘bigger’academic debates over human behaviour – for instance, concern-ing human population pressure on land or the role of capitalism inmaking and unmaking regions. Whatever the reason, many schol-ars have been reluctant in general to shed light on these areas asan end in itself – and without having other theoretical or policy-linked agendas. At the same time, however, they have sometimesnonetheless provided invaluable insights that represent pointerstowards a fuller conceptualisation of these in-between areas.

In the case of political ecology, the issue of ‘depopulated areas’has played a significant if at times elusive role in the evolution ofthis research field. Indeed, it was one means by which this newfield of study was fashioned from the late 1970s by helping toestablish its identity and authority in terms of wider debates inthe environmental social sciences during that era. Yet if discussing‘depopulated areas’ was part-and-parcel of defining political ecol-ogy, it has also tended to lead to the creation of a ‘pre-givensocio-spatial container’ (Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003) that ironi-cally has impeded the development of well-rounded and detailedknowledge about areas labelled ‘depopulated’. On the other hand,political ecology work notably on political and economic marginal-ity, and more recently scalar politics, provides genuine insights ontrends and dynamics surrounding rural in-between places aroundthe world.

Meanwhile, the interdisciplinary field of rural studies hastended to have a ‘love–hate’ relationship with such places. Earlyattention on them soon gave way to an abiding preoccupation withthe ‘larger’ societal trends that have been seen to have ‘workedover’ these places – counter-urbanisation being a case in point(which has been quite prominent at times particularly in muchAnglo-American centred research). More recently, research reflec-tive of a ‘cultural turn’ has been encouraging in its attention to fluididentity formation and differentiated lifestyles. And yet, even here,work on ‘marginal cultures’ is still at times suggestive of discur-sive framings that reflect a de-centred view of rural in-betweenplaces (Lopez-I-Gelats et al., 2009). While marginality, as we shallsee below, is certainly part of the story, it needs to be situated inthe context of other trends and dynamics that suggest the need formore complicated and contingent cultural designations.

In seeking to make sense of this complex picture, this paperintroduces the concept of ‘shadow landscape’ in order to describethe essential otherness and seemingly distinctive if ever contingentproperties of in-between rural places characterised by histori-cal depopulation and cultural marginalisation. Going well beyondother descriptors such as ‘spectral landscapes’ (Weinstock, 2004;Matless, 2008) or ‘the dark side of the landscape’ (Barrell, 1980)which at best describe only very partially the sorts of rural areasand associated human–environmental dynamics of concern herein,this concept encompasses the four key elements noted above (i.e.marginality, scale, socio-nature, cultures of depopulation) even asit seeks to describe how, together, these elements are more thanthe sum of their parts. In the process, this conceptual framework isconstructed by drawing on the best of relevant work in rural stud-ies and political ecology – research fields that provide partial yetintriguing pointers towards the more detailed and comprehensiveaccount that we seek.

The structure of the paper is designed to facilitate this centralaim. Thus, it begins with a critical yet sympathetic assessment ofhow rural areas marked by cultural marginalisation and historicaldepopulation have often been portrayed in the fields of politicalecology and rural studies. The paper thereafter outlines the conceptof shadow landscape as a means by which to understand these areasin a more comprehensive way, and does so notably via discussion

of the notions of marginality, scale, socio-nature and ‘cultures ofdepopulation’. In the process, some of the key material and discur-sive issues that surround these ‘imagined communities’ are broughtinto focus. The conclusion considers a future research agenda basedon an understanding shaped by the concept of shadow landscape.

‘Depopulated areas’ in political ecology

The oft-elusive or partial treatment of in-between rural placescharacterised by historical depopulation and cultural marginali-sation can be seen in the evolution of political ecology over theyears. True, this research field has developed an enviable reputa-tion for highly sophisticated analyses of rural areas, until recently,mainly in the South. Yet this work has been largely focused onrural areas marked by dense settlement and/or stable if not grow-ing populations. Thus, political ecologists have been much lessinterested in developing ‘rich thick descriptions’ of the in-betweensort of rural places of concern here (but see Black, 1990 for afascinating case study of northern Portugal). On the whole, thishas been true both for ‘structural’ and ‘post-structural’ politicalecology, as scholars have zeroed in on denser and/or increasingpopulated rural settlements in order to probe such things as classdynamics (Watts, 1983), gender relations (Rocheleau et al., 1996),or state impositions (Peluso, 1992; Tan-Mullins, 2007). Indeed,rapidly growing interest in a broadly defined ‘urban political ecol-ogy’ has only served to reinforce the links of this field of inquiry tourban places featuring relative and contemporary human density(Peet and Watts, 1996; Swygnedouw, 2004; Heynen et al., 2006).

And yet, curiously enough, political ecology might never havebecome a major research field if not for the attention it has sporad-ically given over the years to in-between rural places of decliningor diminished human density. In effect, these areas have been apowerful source of evidence – a foil as it were – in the struggle of ageneration of scholars against politically and socially prominentneo-Malthusian arguments. Propelled by the powerful imageryof writers such as Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin, these argu-ments focused on the world’s rapidly expanding human population(mainly in the South) and its apparently catastrophic impact on thebiophysical environment (Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Forsyth, 2003;Adams, 2009).

In political ecology, which has sought to combine ‘concernsof ecology and a broadly defined political economy’ (Blaikie andBrookfield, 1987:17), a critique of neo-Malthusianism was centralfrom the start. While one prominent theme was the detailed dis-section of the fallacies of Hardin’s metaphor of the ‘tragedy of thecommons’, another strand was focused on the matter of the envi-ronmental impact of ‘overpopulation’ or more precisely pressure ofpopulation on resources (PPR). For some, sweeping neo-Malthusianclaims about over-population merited equally sweeping denunci-ations of Western neo-colonialism and racism (Buchanan, 1973).For others, those claims prompted a more complex response thatsought to situate increasing human population numbers in a widercontext of the political economy of development and environmen-tal change (Blaikie, 1985). Most famously, Blaikie and Brookfield(1987:34) in their classic work on land degradation concluded afterhaving canvassed an array of historical and contemporary exam-ples that ‘degradation can occur under rising PPR, under decliningPPR, and without PPR’. Combined with other work (e.g. Bassett,1988 on peasant–herder conflicts in northern Ivory Coast), thisinsight signalled the need for closer attention to ultimate versusproximate causation in land management as well as the ‘progres-sive contextualisation’ of unequal power relations (Vayda, 1983):a rich agenda for research in political ecology ever since (Jones,2008).


462 R.L. Bryant et al. / Land Use Policy 28 (2011) 460–471

Yet crucial to this insight was a recognition that environmen-tal degradation could increase even under conditions of decliningPPR. As Blaikie and Brookfield (1987:28) observed, ‘periods of pop-ulation decline have often been periods of severe damage to theland’ (even as, conversely, there was evidence that periods of pop-ulation increase led to localised land improvement, see Tiffen etal., 1994). Seemingly at odds with ‘common sense’, this observa-tion was related to a view – popularised by the Danish economistEster Boserup in the 1960s – that increasing human populationsand population densities enabled civilisations to flourish insofaras they enabled economies of scale in terms of labour and capitaldeployment. For, if concentrated human populations could create‘landesque’ capital, which Blaikie and Brookfield (1987:9) definedas ‘any investment in land with an anticipated life well beyondthat of the present crop, or crop cycle’ (for example: stone walls,terraces, irrigation systems), then the ‘de-concentration’ of thosepopulations was linked to the unravelling of many if not all of thesebenefits due to the high ongoing labour costs of their maintenance.

The motif of depopulated areas has been associated with polit-ical ecology in diverse ways – albeit, typically being used to tell abroader or different story. Often, for instance, it has been linked toa critique of dominant approaches to environmental understand-ing and action – what Robbins (2004:12) describes as the role of ‘ahatchet, cutting and pruning away the stories, methods and poli-cies that create pernicious social and environmental outcomes’.For example, scholars note how a (highly misleading) discourseof depopulated areas has been used by elites as a justification forcolonial conquest whether in order to claim ‘pristine environments’in Latin America (Denevan, 1992; Sluyter, 1999) or ‘wastelands’ inAsia (Gadgil and Guha, 1992). In turn, this discursive work of colo-nial (and often postcolonial) elites has been accompanied by thecreation of a worldwide network of national parks and protectedareas involving the systematic displacement of local peoples. Here,the ‘imposition’ of wilderness (Neumann, 1998) created ‘naturecemeteries’ (Luke, 1997) in a process of ‘coercive conservation’(Peluso, 1993). Such a worldwide campaign has combined shift-ing scientific justifications and a moralising politics of endangeredspecies protection to demonise local human populations as a pre-cursor to their forcible eviction from targeted areas (Jacoby, 2001;Adams and Hutton, 2007) – a campaign that has implicated bothstate and ‘civil society’ groups (Neumann, 2004; Wilson and Juntti,2005; Bryant, 2009).

That motif crops up in a more literal manner in Escobar’s (2008)magisterial account of Afro-Columbian activism in aid of ‘territo-ries of difference’. Here, military-linked population displacementsand killings along Columbia’s much-contested Pacific coast reflect‘the territorial and cultural imperatives of imperial globality . . . [inwhich] displacement is an integral element of Eurocentric moder-nity and development’ (Escobar, 2008, pp. 64–65). Yet here, too, thequestion of depopulated areas is subsumed in much larger issuesand debates–notably centred on how local social movements candefend local territories and ways of life, achieve resettlement inthe area, and generally assert ‘alternative’ ways of doing things(see also Escobar, 2010; Rocheleau and Roth, 2007). Other workin political ecology, meanwhile, has noted ‘tragic’ depopulation inrural areas, frequently in relation to so-called ‘demographic col-lapses’ precipitated usually by disease epidemics (such as smallpoxand measles), punitive labour demands and land confiscations bycolonial rulers – or lethal combinations of all three. Once more,however, talk about depopulated areas is usually a backdrop toother, more central preoccupations such as shifting peasant liveli-hoods and agrarian practices (for example, see Zimmerer, 1996;Richards and Lawrence, 2009 on the Peruvian Andes).

Some political ecologists thus invoke depopulated areas in orderto describe those power-laden meanings and practices that often

exist when human population numbers and ‘valuable’ natures arejuxtaposed. Yet insight about in-between rural places characterisedby historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation is usuallya secondary or even incidental aim here, as broader political andintellectual debates prevail. Nonetheless, there are many impor-tant insights to be gained from engagement with political ecology– hence why we draw on it below with reference to marginality,scale and socio-nature in elaborating the concept ‘shadow land-scape’. The main point in this section, though, is that politicalecology, on the whole, has tended not to provide in-depth analysesof in-between rural places marked by historical depopulation andcultural marginalisation akin to those accounts that it has indeedprovided on rural areas marked by dense settlement and/or stableif not growing populations.

From rural depopulation to ‘marginal cultures’ ingeographical rural studies: evolutions, turns or morecomplex ways?

The field of rural studies has been somewhat fuller in itstreatment of in-between rural places characterised by historicaldepopulation and cultural marginalisation. The specific histori-cal trajectory of such scholarship is important here. Above all, itdeveloped from the 1950s with a core focus on Europe, NorthAmerica and the Antipodes. Unlike a once South-focused politicalecology, a North-focused rural studies was thus never implicatedin politically and ideologically charged research contesting neo-Malthusian claims of a ‘population explosion’ in Asia, Africa andLatin America. Scholars in rural studies did not therefore frame in-between rural places of a kind that are of interest in this paper interms of broader population controversies as per the work of manypolitical ecologists (although they certainly did address issues sur-rounding population change, see below).

It would be wrong, though, to think that scholars in rural studieshave not themselves been partial when approaching the question ofhow to understand these in-between places. In fact, they have hadsomething of a love–hate relationship with them over the yearsreflective of wider intellectual currents that have swept throughacademe in general, and rural studies in particular. Such intellectualferment – valuable though it has been in diverse ways – has hadthe effect of limiting the elaboration of well-rounded accounts ofin-between rural places characterised by historical depopulationand cultural marginalisation.

Consider some of the key shifts that have taken place in ruralstudies. Scholars in the research field thus took an early interestin depopulation linked to an appreciation of fundamental changesto rural life in England that had occurred in the second half ofthe 19th century (Clout, 1972). By the 1950s and 1960s, thatinterest was heightened insofar as it was linked to the great post-war exodus from countryside to city that took place in manyNorthern countries, and that the increasingly positivist social sci-ences sought to analyse. Specifically, the latter sought quantitativeindicators of decline that were to be used to inform shifting pol-icy preferences and practices. Beginning in the late 1960s andthrough the 1970s, however, the focus became one of documentingurban influences on these in-between rural areas, notably the phe-nomenon of counter-urbanisation (Phillips, 1996). In this context,rural areas were simply considered as the ‘hinterland’ of developedurban centres from which the ‘benefits’ of development (incomes,infrastructure and services) are diffused (Hadjimichalis, 2003). Inland-use terms, these rural areas were routinely (and often stillare, it must be said, especially in policy circles) defined as sup-plementary spaces to urban areas – that is, what is left over afterurban spaces are defined through indicators such as population



density and numbers (OECD, 1994; Hoggart et al., 1995). Framedhere mainly in terms of processes of urbanisation and counter-urbanisation, these in-between places were a conceptual adjunctto the featured urban actor (Phillips, 1996). This was also the casein the parallel articulation of them in policy terms as agriculturedominated countryside whose main purpose was to service eco-nomically more important urban areas. Here, and because theseareas were framed in keeping with urban-centred interests andconcerns, planning policies produced by powerful urban-basedplanners largely ignored local rural particularities (Marsden, 1999;Richardson, 2000; Larsen, 2008). The result tended to be limitedunderstanding about the specificity of these areas since researchand associated policy-related planning about them was usuallyonly a means to other ends (e.g. urban food provisioning, account-ing for new trends in urban morphology).

Critical scholars began to question these framings of ruralareas from the late 1980s (Cloke and Little, 1997). Indeed, someeven challenged the utility of the concept of the ‘rural’ itself(Hoggart, 1990). Behind such criticism was the belief that previousapproaches could not encompass the complex transformations andrealities of rural societies and spaces. The outcome of this intel-lectual challenge was a so-called ‘cultural turn’ in rural studiesstarting in the 1990s that pledged to develop a new understand-ing of the rural as a de-spatialized concept (Gray, 2000). Here, theaim of research was to ‘disengage’ the rural from specific geo-graphical localities and associate it instead with “socio-culturalrepresentations of space” (Halfacree, 1995:2). This process notablyencompassed considering how both local users and outside agentsconceived ‘rural’, as well as how such conceptions fed through inshaping and ‘consuming’ rural spaces as ‘different ruralities’ (Gilg,1996; Pratt, 1996; Panelli, 2006). Protagonists define such ruralitieswith reference to diverse social, national and spatial myths as wellas symbols (Lawrence, 1996; Little and Austin, 1996). At the sametime, they can be differentiated according to such criteria as age,gender, class, race, social practices, type of income, environmentalattitude, food and other consumption behaviour, political outlookand power (Cloke et al., 2006 offer a very informative overviewhere).

In the context of such intellectual ferment, scholars in ruralstudies have often been unsure as to what to ‘do’ with the ques-tion of the rural population. Tracking the larger academic trendsnoted above, rural depopulation in early writing “was seen as theresult of economies of scale and cumulative advantage of the pro-cess of centralisation, whereas counter-urbanisation was explainedas the outcome of such laws as the maximisation of individualpreferences” (Phillips, 1996:32, 1998). Such writing was mainlyassociated with a quantitative approach based around general‘laws’ of migration (Gilg, 1985) that were linked to narratives ofsocio-economic and socio-spatial transformation (Palmer, 1988).While some sought to embrace a more complex understanding ofrural population change seeing it, for instance, as a “nebulous phe-nomenon” associated with a variety of processes (Clout, 1972:8;see also Woods, 2005), the decline of the ‘rural’ in rural studies(Hoggart, 1990) was mirrored in a corresponding decline in interestin the rural population question. Indeed, and in the recent contextof the cultural turn, that question has continued to lose relevancefor many scholars, especially in the UK and North America. This isreflected in one rough and ready but nonetheless revealing indi-cator: the amount of attention devoted to the phenomenon inkey rural textbooks. Thus, whereas one entire chapter was com-monly devoted to it over past decades (e.g. Clout, 1972), morerecently attention has declined with relatively little coverage pro-vided in Woods (2005) and no explicit mention at all in Cloke etal. (2006). True, the concept of counter-urbanisation retains somerelevance, as scholars track in-migration trends from urban to rural

areas and the variety of ensuing impacts (Spencer, 1997; Stockdale,2004; Smailes et al., 2002), in particular work by Halfacree (2001)on counterurbanisation and marginal rural settlement. Further,depopulation issues have retained relative prominence in someEuropean countries as well as in Australasia (e.g. Pinilla et al., 2008;Paniagua, 2009; Smailes et al., 2002). Nonetheless, this work doesnot represent a thorough exploration of in-between places markedby historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation – nor doesit attempt a wider conceptualisation, as essayed in this paper.

For most scholars of the cultural turn, the focus has shifted deci-sively away from the analysis of rural depopulation toward a moremultifaceted and largely qualitative engagement with what hasbeen described as ‘marginal cultures’ in rural areas (Cloke, 1997;Cloke and Little, 1997). Research under this heading is quite diversepulling the field in different and often exciting new directions.Among other things, that research seeks to ‘populate’ the notionof marginal cultures in terms of such issues as the differentiatedlifestyles of diverse rural social groups (Philo, 1992), the associ-ated complexity and fluidity of rural identities, the complicatedrole of communities in reshuffled spatial configurations of peopleand nature, the contested application of ‘culture’ to regional iden-tity construction, or the vicissitudes in understanding ‘nature’ (e.g.Shields, 1991; Little, 1999; Morris, 2004; Castree and Braun, 2006;Panelli, 2006; Lee, 2007; Phillips, 2007). In some cases, ‘changes oforthodoxies of counterurbanisation’ are raised insofar as there is areturn to migration issues in ‘the classic local-incomer dualism’ (NiLaorie, 2007:332). Narratives of mutating personal and collectiveidentities associated with politically and culturally resonant discur-sive representations are also common in this work, as are themes of‘otherness’ (e.g. Cloke, 2005; Williams, 2005; Brennan et al., 2009;Lopez-I-Gelats et al., 2009). In such a diversity of approaches, itis suggested that there is even potential for a fruitful associationof culturally turned rural studies and population positivism in thestudy of recent sociospatial transformations (Editorial, 2007).

Such work in a ‘culturally turned’ field of rural studies is impor-tant and we will have occasion to draw upon it below in moredetail. However, and with reference to that research that explicitlyfalls under the banner of ‘marginal cultures’, there is nonethelessa lingering sense that in-between places characterised by histori-cal depopulation and cultural marginalisation are still not tendingto receive the full treatment that they deserve. Here, individuallyimportant research does not tend to amount to a whole even asthese in-between places require a conceptualisation that is morethan the sum of their parts. It is to that task that we next turn aswe outline the concept of ‘shadow landscape’.

Shadow landscape: integrating marginality, scale,socio-nature and cultures of depopulation

The discussion so far has served to illustrate how in-betweenplaces characterised by historical depopulation and culturalmarginalisation have been addressed by work in political ecologyand rural studies usually only in a tangential or incidental manner.These two fields, formerly quite geographically distinct in focus,have tended to increasingly overlap in recent years as rural studiesscholars ‘branch out’ into Southern countries and political ecolo-gists begin to ‘colonise’ Northern settings (McCarthy, 2002; Kaika,2003; Korf and Oughton, 2006). At the same time, the ‘cultural turn’in the social sciences – arguably most apparent in rural studies butalso emerging in political ecology (Moore et al., 2003; Goodman etal., 2008; McCarthy, 2008) – provides an intellectual opportunityand justification for greater cross-fertilisation and concept buildingthan in the past.

This multifaceted process of growing overlap presents an oppor-tunity to reassess areas of apparent common interest – one of which



should be, in the view of the authors of this paper, those in-betweenplaces that have flitted in and out of research focus over the years.However, the outcome in both fields of study concerning theseareas has often tended to be punctuated knowledge with insightsprovided while writers are preoccupied with investigating otherareas (especially more populous rural and urban areas) or topics(such as counter-urbanisation or the ‘population bomb’).

We would argue that what is needed is a process of con-ceptual development that builds on the punctuated knowledgeproduced over the years about in-between places by scholarsworking in rural studies and political ecology, but in a waythat seeks to better capture the uniqueness and totality of suchplaces. To that end, we develop the concept of ‘shadow land-scape’ in order to describe the essential ‘otherness’ (here, referringto how they are spatially juxtaposed vis-à-vis other spatiallydefined areas) and seemingly distinctive properties of in-betweenrural places characterised by historical depopulation and culturalmarginalisation. We do so below with reference to a discussionof marginality, scale, socio-nature and ‘cultures of depopulation’– notions that have been used and debated in political ecologyand/or rural studies in general, and sometimes also even vis-à-vis in-between places characterised by historical depopulation andcultural marginalisation in particular. We thus hope to develop aconcept that builds on the many achievements of both fields ofstudy.

The concept of shadow landscape seeks to capture the elusive-ness of that which it describes in its very name. Thus, and eschewingwords like ‘rural’ and ‘marginal’ that have tended to presuppose– however subtly – certain dominant urban and/or capitalisticdynamics or concerns, we opt first of all for the much more obliqueand intentionally elusive word ‘shadow’.

In doing so, we are cognisant of, and in turn seek to build on,prior scholarly deliberations that have sought, directly or indirectly,to grapple with the sorts of elusive geographies of which we areinterested in this paper. Thus, there is a long-standing tradition ofdebate on rural and urban categories in geographical studies. How-ever, the urban–rural category usually has had a binary quality toit, with a rural area being implicitly or explicitly defined in relationto an urban category (Woods, 2005). Partly addressing this matter,Short (1991) proposed an archetypal classification based on threespheres – woodlands, country and town – that notably includedmythical qualities that might help to ‘define’ these spheres. Laterwork aimed to elaborate the often intangible aspects to our under-standing of these different areas, and in particular, the ‘rural’. Forexample, Halfacree (2003) proposed to approach ‘rurality’ throughan emphasis on social representation – the symbols, signs andimages that people associate with it. Here, how such representa-tion is related to the construction of specific discourses was seento be key (Woods, 2005).

Such work clearly built on the post-structural ‘turn’ in geogra-phy that gathered momentum in the late twentieth century. At thesame time, it tapped into other research that had long been inter-ested in one of the more common notions on rurality – namely, thatof the ‘rural idyll’. This latter concept underscored how rurality hascome to be regarded (in some quarters at least) as a grand mythassociated with an idealised representation of all that is said tobe rural. Thus, in a key work, Barrell (1980) examined ‘the darkside of the landscape’, suggesting therein the significance of anidealised historical vision of the countryside in the constructionof national identity, associated with a pastoral tradition (see alsobelow). Other research also sought to complicate our understand-ing of the ‘rural’ in diverse ways, but that usually sought to movebeyond a fixed binary contrast. For instance, research by Weinstock(2004) on the spectral turn (or ‘shadowy third’) sought to assimilatesocial representations about the ‘rural’ to the analysis of inter-

twined but spatially diffuse myths and identities. Here, one aimwas to uncover the ‘secret’ meanings and culturally distinctivegeographies of ‘magic’ landscapes (Matless, 2008).

Hence, and building on this sort of work, we see ‘shadow’ as auseful word to aid understanding for several reasons notably linkedto its metaphorical qualities. First, it evokes – but significantly with-out being at all prescriptive – the existence of external influencesthat condition in complicated ways social life and socio-naturalinteractions in these in-between areas. Hence, we can speak of ‘inthe shadows’ and even ‘shadowy existence’ while also acknowl-edging the shifting and variably opaque nature of what is thereby‘covered’. Shadows conceal but they never entirely obscure whatfalls below them. Second, life definitely goes on in a world of shad-ows and in a way that is mediated but not determined by them.Third, one can see that life in the shadows for what it is – in otherwords it can and indeed must be researched in and of its own right,even while acknowledging that external influences do indeed alsoshape that life. Finally, and evoking an aesthetic sensibility, shad-ows can evoke beauty and something that possesses intrinsic value– precisely because the areas thereby covered are set apart frommore conventionally illuminated locations.

The word ‘landscape’ meanwhile seeks to underscore anotherdefining feature of these in-between areas – namely that they aredistinctively and irreducibly human creations (even as scholarlyunderstanding of the meanings and dynamics surrounding the cre-ation of landscape has changed over time, for a useful overview, seeWylie, 2007). The author Barrell (1980) captures only part of ourconcern here insofar as he identified ‘the dark side of landscape’ – ahighly specific landscape in which ideology and subjective identityprevails. Our focus on landscape is of course not to deny the roleand agency of biophysical processes there that condition, in com-plicated ways, the prospects and trajectories of social life. Nor is itto deny either the transformation wrought by the human hand inother non-urban settings including in so-called wilderness areas(Neumann, 1998). Yet there is nonetheless a human history ofendeavour in these in-between places – delineated by such thingsas buildings, terraces, irrigation channels, transport links, type anddensity of biota, etc. – that has left a decidedly emphatic if everambiguous mark. Landscape can also convey a sense of emotionalattachment (Wylie, 2009) – and more generally a sense of ‘culturein place’, thereby neatly echoing the influence of the cultural turnin the social sciences. At the same time, landscape can also pro-mote a kind of emotional detachment in the sense of (re)creatinga detached, if not distanced viewpoint. Above all, though, and asscholars have long noted, landscape focuses attention on ways ofseeing – the assemblage of things, processes, artefacts and repre-sentations – that shape how ‘objects’ (such as in-between placesmarked by historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation)come to be known and indeed controlled through processes ofinclusion and exclusion (Barnes and Duncan, 1992; Mitchell, 1994;Duncan and Duncan, 2004).

Taken together, ‘shadow landscape’ begins to suggest how thesein-between places can be understood, and perhaps even what itis that makes them distinctive entities. We now turn to a selec-tive and brief discussion of key conceptual tools or elements that,in our view, help to put flesh on the bone of this concept. Theseare marginality, scale, socio-nature and cultures of depopulation.These elements in their separate form can characterize differenttypes of rural places. However when used together as an accumu-lated form, they are crystallized in a ‘shadow landscape’.

Marginality

Marginality is one commonly cited indicator of in-betweenareas that crops up in both political ecology and rural studies (even



as it is used much more widely in describing social as well ashuman–environmental interaction). Its utility resides primarily indescribing some of the conditions that often – but not always –characterise these areas. Yet it must be emphasised that those con-ditions are contingent across time and space, as well as in manycases in the eyes of the beholder.

Marginality is a key element with which to build the conceptof shadow landscape. For our purposes, though, it is important tostress that marginality does not denote a fixed – let alone exclu-sively – spatial relationship with regard to a core area. Rather, thereis great suppleness to this notion insofar as it reflects, inter alia,moral sensibilities, individual and collective reflections, as well ascultural and political positionalities. Hence, there can be consid-erable complexity to marginality since it not only encompassescontingent and flexible spatial arrangements, but also encompassesan array of individual as well as collective perspectives.

Some of this complexity can be seen in the way that marginal-ity has been blazoned on the development of political ecology. Inwhat they called ‘regional’ political ecology, Blaikie and Brookfield(1987:19–23) provided the best-known treatment when theydescribed it in terms of economics (i.e. marginal unit of cropproduction), ecology (i.e. marginal unit of land in which ‘natu-ral’ conditions just enable plant survival), and political economy(i.e. marginal people to elite-driven political and economic pro-cesses). It was the interrelationship of these three dimensions thathas most interested scholars since this usually involves the pro-duction of complex political ecologies on the ground – including,in some cases, ‘depopulated areas’. Such multifaceted marginalityreflects and reinforces multiple inter-connected temporal rhythmsranging from the ‘everyday’ to the ‘episodic’ that shape how peo-ple come to understand and experience specific localities (Bryantand Bailey, 1997:30). The overall thrust in political ecology hasbeen that social marginalisation and environmental degradationgo hand-in-hand as the ‘desperate eco-cide’ of the poor (Blaikie,1985) unfurls, albeit not every time and in any case in empiricallyvariable ways (Robbins, 2004:142).

Still, the relationship between marginality and depopulationis not necessarily a straightforward one. Thus, the multifacetedmarginality that political ecologists describe can also equally bea feature of densely populated areas characterised by complexspatial geographies in which rich and poor live cheek and jowl.Conversely, in-between areas may not always contain sociallymarginal populations, but may reflect instead a political economyof wealthy living and calculated exclusivity. Further, where multi-faceted marginality does exist in an area, it is likely to affect somepeople and not others, even as this impact may shift over time dueto in/out migration, changing individual/family economic fortunes,and diverse exogenous processes. As such, marginality may indeedfigure in these in-between ‘depopulated’ areas, but invariably todayin complicated or even contradictory ways. In shadow landscapes,marginality does not therefore have a clear or linear presentation asindividual and community perspectives and strategies interminglein sometimes surprising ways.

Indeed, recent work in the ‘culturally turned’ field of rural stud-ies tends to emphasise precisely such contingency and mutabilityin an understanding of how marginality can shape rural culturalcontexts (Cloke, 1997; Little, 1999; Conradson and Pawson, 2009).This can be seen for example in the evocation of otherness as onedefining feature in marginal cultures in rural areas. In a context ofpopulation ‘churn’ in areas where out-migration and in-migrationis simultaneously occurring, marginality can appear in new andunsettling ways as social tensions are built up around new aspi-rations and transformed identities (Cloke, 2005; Halfacree, 2001).A good example here is the work of Cloke et al. (1998) on culturalchange and identities in rural Wales. That paper explored the com-

peting identities at different levels that have destabilized old formsof identification in this area. Social tensions may also be linkedto discourses that portray the past of a community in a new ordifferent light, thereby reconstructing its cultural history in novelif contested ways (Brennan et al., 2009). As explained notably byShort (1991) this process often encompasses an array of actors anddiscursive areas ranging from family biographies right through tonational social histories. Then, there are also those shifting rep-resentations generated in distant cities and capitals, often in themedia, that evoke a sense of otherness based on some special char-acteristics linked to a status of rural idyll or a place of nostalgia(Short, 1991). In these representations, marginal people are usu-ally cast in the (supporting) role of the ‘idyllic rural resident’ forurban consumption at regional and national levels (Cloke, 2005),thereby taken to represent national harmony, peace and stabilityin an often nostalgic (and myth based) version of national identity(Short, 1991) in an era of unsettling globalising change (McCarthy,2008). Commercials, TV shows, novels and a largely urban-basedpublic opinion links such marginal areas with an alleged ‘betterpast’ when societies were ‘closer to nature’ and shared closer andprimordial community bonds. Here, shadow landscapes come tobe expressed notably as an often fiercely held memory or sense ofnostalgia of a ‘golden’ past when a place featured a larger settledpopulation and/or set of major economic activities that some-how ‘mattered’ more on a wider political, economic or culturalscale.

In short, research in both rural studies and political ecologysuggest analytical possibilities in deploying marginality to par-tially describe the in-between places we call shadow landscapes.What is clear, however, is that such deployment requires nuanceand adjustment to the case study in question – precisely becausemarginality cannot simply be read off from such landscapes. At thesame time, though, marginality captures dynamics, however con-tingent, that gets to the heart of what we call shadow landscape.In that sense, marginality is not marginal to an understanding of aworld of shadow landscapes.

Scale

Part of the reason why shadow landscapes are contingentand fluid places (Paniagua, 2009) – and hence, can never betaken as fixed or self-evident entities – is related to the ways inwhich they are influenced by questions of scale and scalar politics(Swygnedouw, 1999; Di Mauro, 2009). Here, too, general advancesin knowledge in academe, reflected too to a greater or lesser extentin both political ecology and rural studies, play a hand in sharpeninghow we seek to understand these particular landscapes. Scale thusalso leaves a complex mark on in-between places characterised byhistorical depopulation and cultural marginalisation insofar as itopens these areas outwards to multiple and simultaneous influ-ence by more or less distant strangers (alongside that exerted bylocal residents both locally and reciprocally outwards to distantcentres of political and economic power) and underscores therebythe essentially political and mutable nature of this process (Bolinet al., 2008).

Recent advances in the conceptualisation of scale are importanthere in the construction of shadow landscape. Thus, geographershave moved away from traditional notions of scale that conceivedof it in static, fixed and hierarchical ways in order to embrace under-standings that emphasise fluidity, porosity and social constructionin the genesis of scale (Marston, 2000; Neumann, 2009). Aboveall, newer understandings stress the role of a multi-scalar poli-tics that involves multiple actors in an array of political, economicand ecological interventions that seek to affirm or contest exist-ing human–environmental relations (Swygnedouw, 1997a; Kurtz,



2003; Swyngedouw and Heynan, 2003). Thus, in political ecologyfor example, scholars note how the poor and otherwise marginalseek to boost livelihoods through multi-scalar political and eco-nomic alliances that seek to subvert the ‘Achilles heal of localism’that so often plagues these groups (Perreault, 2003; Bjureby, 2006).Others warn of the need to avoid ‘the local trap’: the unreflec-tive privileging of local scale struggles and narratives as inherentlymost desirable and efficacious (Brown and Purcell, 2005; see alsoGoodman and DuPuis, 2002). Integral to this process is a politics ofscale that involves understanding ‘how actors strategically engagescale-based discourse in order to frame an issue in a particular wayto effect change, whether to legitimise or to challenge existingpower asymmetries’ (Harrison, 2008:119; italics in original). Polit-ical ecologists have been part of this move away from static notionsof scale (especially Swygnedouw, 1997a,b, 2000; see also Zimmererand Bassett, 2003) towards ideas based on a strong sense of politicsand social construction (Robbins, 2004). Thus, for instance, someprobe ‘how scale plays a role in making ecological change “politi-cal”’ (Rangan and Kull, 2009:29), while others investigate how thelocal and the global intermingle in the production of environmental(in) justice as well as a possible multiscalar ethical politics (Bryantand Jarosz, 2004; Di Mauro, 2009).

The making and unmaking of ‘depopulated areas’ and ‘marginalcultures’ thus reflects an ongoing and often highly complex multi-scalar troupe of actors ‘dancing’ over the shadow landscape leavingmore or less permanent traces as they go. Work in rural stud-ies under the cultural turn also neatly demonstrates the abidinginfluence of scale and microscales (McCarthy, 2008). The processof depopulation itself changes scalar articulations and actor posi-tionalities (Paniagua, 2009). To take but one example, Buller (2008)provides a fascinating case study of the sanctioned reintroductionof wolves to the southern French Alps that sparked a ferocious bat-tle between competing philosophies of nature. As lines were drawnbetween wolf supporters and opponents, a multi-scalar politicsprompted fierce debate among local farmers, scientists, nationaland municipal government, tourism outfits, and nongovernmen-tal organisations that has raged for years over the ‘true’ identity ofthis in-between and ‘depopulated area’. Here, multiscalar dynam-ics can be seen to be an inherent part of the construction of ashadow landscape. Thus, scale may reinforce certain people’s feel-ings of marginality surrounding their living in a shadow landscape,as new scale-dependent political alliances shape how ‘local’ issuesor populations are portrayed and acted on.

Here too, then, there are rich analytical possibilities in usingscale to assess shadow landscapes. This involves primarily an effortto gauge how the impact of a wide array of actors operating at thelocal, national or global scale affects these landscapes, as well as theways in which different scales at different times attract a greateror lesser concentration of actors as flashpoints of a multi-scalarpolitics. Shifting juxtapositions of light and dark are thus partiallylinked to the specific ways in which some rural areas are locatedand relocated, presented and represented, in light of interventionsat multiple scales, and in keeping with broader issues and trendsin the world (e.g. ‘modernisation’, ‘globalisation’).

Socio-natures

Shadow landscapes also need to be understood in terms of theshifting meanings that attach to local socio-natures – the partlyhumanised and domesticated landscapes that reflect as well asaffect the multi-scalar politics and multiple marginalities notedabove. Socio-nature is thus an inherent part of a shadow landscapeand is the third element in its construction. It is not integratedas merely a secondary element, since its presence is important invital cultural-cum-political negotiations between actors, as well as

in how the daily lives of local people occur. Socio-natures indeedreflect the mutual construction of social and natural categories andpractices as they play out notably in relation to other processesconsidered in this paper.

Here, recent geographical research on human–environmentalrelations has transformed understanding based notably on post-structural insight (Demeritt, 2002; Castree and Braun, 2006;Hinchliffe, 2007). Crucial to this process has been the dissolution ofhuman–nature dualisms and the concomitant mingling or mutualconstitution of the social and the natural. This is reflected ‘out there’in material transformations as much as it is marked ‘in thought’via social and environmental discourses that render some mean-ings and practices ‘natural’ and others ‘unnatural’ to the (human)observer (Castree and Braun, 2001). This intellectual trend has beenreflected in political ecology, albeit also sparking fierce debateon constructivist claims (Robbins, 2004), as well as the role ofecology therein (Walker, 2005). Yet research into the ‘buried episte-mologies’ (Willems-Braun, 1997) of the socially powerful remainsan important avenue of inquiry in the field – indeed, it is oftenat the heart of the ‘contentious geographies’ that political ecolo-gists still like to describe today (Goodman et al., 2008; Escobar,2010).

In rural studies, too, post-structural understanding of commin-gled socio-natures is clearly to be seen. Indeed, and once againcommensurate with the cultural turn of rural studies (as well asreflection on prior policy experiences in these in-between places),debate has been re-ignited over what ‘nature’ is in these socio-environmental contexts (Whatmore, 2006; Bishop and Phillips,2004; Fish et al., 2003), as well as how its designation may even be aparadigm for understanding broader human relations between theenvironment, society and policies in the twenty-first century (Barr,2008). At the same time, what Morris (2004:249) calls a ‘culture ofnature’ can be fruitfully associated with what we call here shadowlandscapes in numerous eclectic ways including inter alia concern-ing the emergence of new ostensibly ‘sustainable’ communities(Essex et al., 2005) or energy schemes (Zografos and Martinez-Alier,2009), to describe new relationships between nature and agricul-ture in areas where the latter is declining (Woods, 2003; Marsden,2003), to better grasp new spatial and power configurations aboutthe place of farmers in the experts/policy makers/general pub-lic oriented and led debate on the meaning and the ‘value’ ofnature and the services farming provides to wider society (Wilson,2001; Losch, 2004), and to assess the material and discursive sig-nificance of a new generation of agri-environmental policies andschemes (Wilson, 1996; Onate et al., 2000; Kaljonen, 2006). Theclear and marked decline of farmers and farming – even in areaslinked to agri-environmental schemes – in some parts of rural Spaintoday are good examples of how mutating socio-natures underpinthe elaboration of shadow landscapes. In this particular context,depopulated areas prompt much opaqueness in how social and nat-ural worlds interrelate – thereby engendering a shadowy world oflaboratory like experiments in new forms of socio-ecological inter-action, as an array of actors from near and afar seek to put theirstamp on these areas.

Clearly, the role that socio-natures play in the description ofshadow landscapes is complex even as it is bound to shift overtime and space as new actors and philosophies seek a purchaseon these areas. Its utility is precisely in its tendency to encour-age us to acknowledge that boundaries between people, ideasand things are increasingly blurred – be they social, territorial,human–environmental, economic or political. Further, it is suchblurring, as and when combined with other elements relating toscale and marginal status (as well as cultures of depopulation dis-cussed next), that helps us to make sense of in-between places thatwe describe as shadow landscapes.



(Socio) cultures of depopulation

One of the things that makes in-between places characterisedby historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation distinctiveis not so much a net overall decline in the local population (which,after all, might be reversed at some point), but rather the ‘culturesof depopulation’ that are elaborated as part of the representationof these shadow landscapes. Whether population levels are still indecline, have stabilised, or may even be on the increase, is thus sec-ondary to the ways in which these landscapes are seen by a myriadof local and non-local actors. Cultures of depopulation thus tendto change more slowly than the population conditions to whichthey ostensibly refer – and indeed can cast a long shadow overthese in-between areas. An example here is the survival of ‘old’forms of depopulation in South Oxfordshire (Spencer, 1997), asso-ciated with the mentalities and strategies of landowners and localplanners.

(Socio) cultures of depopulation constitute the final elementin the creation of shadow landscapes. This element is designedto evoke a clear sense of social construction as problems (andopportunities) in the lives of people inhabiting areas affected byhistorical depopulation and cultural marginalisation unfold. Liv-ing in a shadow landscape can help to nurture a mentality thatforms an integral part of peoples’ lives. Such a way of thinking isnot necessarily something that need come across as negative (e.g.Blanket hostility to outsiders or new ways of doing things), but maybe manifest instead in calls (say) for better services and commu-nications that directly or indirectly build local identification withplace. After all, many people living in these areas express a wishto continue living there (Paniagua, 2009). That many of them mustseemingly tolerate sub-optimal living conditions (when comparedwith other areas in the region or country) as the ‘price’ of doing sois often a wellspring of local discontent.

The culminating element of shadow landscapes, ‘cultures ofdepopulation’ are, in some respects, the flipside of specific trans-formations in socio-natures. For political ecologists, and as notedabove, this link is probably most clear in the ‘coercive conservation’(Peluso, 1993) and ‘imposed wilderness’ (Neumann, 1998) that isassociated with the creation of a worldwide network of nationalparks and protected areas (Adams and Hutton, 2007). And yet, here,the dynamic is somewhat different insofar as dominant groups(state foresters, some environmental NGOs) seek to erase all mem-ory of prior human habitation from the official records in orderto propagate a ‘wilderness’ discourse. In this scenario, cultures ofdepopulation are de-placed to wherever ex-resident populationsare ‘decanted’ even as they constitute a potentially powerful sourceof resistance. In contrast, work on seasonal or permanent out-migration has cropped up from time to time in political ecology(e.g. Blaikie, 1985; Bassett, 1988), yet rarely as a major stand-aloneresearch topic in this field – evinced, for example, in its omissionfrom three recent major textbooks on political ecology (Peet andWatts, 2004; Robbins, 2004; Neumann, 2005). A legacy of past bat-tles over neo-Malthusian thinking (as discussed above), it has beensuggested nonetheless that ‘the aversion political ecologists feel forsome population theory must not keep them from understandingthe political ecology of demography’ (Robbins, 2004:215), let aloneassociated cultural articulations (Biersack, 2006).

Rural studies has faired better in this regard precisely, it couldbe argued, because there was less political and ideological baggagesurrounding ‘population’ at stake when compared with politicalecology movements (e.g. Kasimis et al., 2003; Pinilla et al., 2008).Scholars have thus built on the cultural turn in the field to assessdiverse aspects of cultures of depopulation. For some, these cul-tures seem to feature specific histories of ‘loss’ linked to acuteperiods of out migration notably crystallised in local history muse-

ums, pageants and festivals that commemorate earlier ‘golden eras’when the area was purportedly both more populated and oftenmore politically, economically and culturally prominent (Brennanet al., 2009). There is, too, linked to this an ongoing propensityto wed contemporary livelihoods to past practices via ‘heritagetourism’ and the like. Here, local cultural identity is seen as aforce for rural development (Kneafsey et al., 2001) in what Ray(1998) calls the ‘culture economy’ or the commingling of territo-rial identity, cultural expression and history and local resources(Fleskens et al., 2009). Highland clearance landscapes in Scotlandare an excellent example in this regard. As with this case fromone area of Scotland, a population that lives in a shadow land-scape for any period of time creates and recreates a specific wayof life, associated flexibly with the three previous elements notedabove – namely, marginality, scale, and socio-nature. In the pro-cess, though, and whilst there may be a depressing tone to manysocial representations of the area, local populations may be ableto turn such discourses to their advantage. Thus, they may be ableto ‘play on’ social representations in order to promote a distinc-tive cultural economy – for example, lifestyles in ‘remote’ parts ofScotland linked to ‘traditional’ crofting practices (Gauld, 2000).

At the same time, a shadow landscape is seen to stand outprecisely because its golden era was cut off by the process of depop-ulation itself – a process often ‘mourned’ as the marker of a timewhen vital energy slipped out of the local area. In this respect, cul-tures of depopulation can spawn ‘melancholic’ sorts of places – orat least as far as some official and private sector discourses wouldhave it. For example, in certain places in Greece, many reportersgo to depopulated villages where today only some elderly live andcomment on the ‘empty’ and ‘deserted’ villages, the ‘empty’ land aswell as the memories of a more glorious past when villages were‘alive’ with more people. Further, there is too a ‘feral’ quality thatis often noted – evinced in remarks such as ‘the place has gonewild’ (Kizos et al., 2009). And yet, they are emphatically not staticplaces trapped in an earlier time and space – new interventionsand cultural meanings inform cultures of depopulation as popula-tion turnover occurs and in-migration sometimes takes place evenas locally generated representations and discourses are asserted(Lopez-I-Gelats et al., 2009).

As such, cultures of depopulation are thus often articulatedin complicated ways and with reference to location-specific cir-cumstances that can and indeed do change over time. Yet, oncein-between areas acquire a reputation based in part on these cul-tures, they are nonetheless slow to shift. The shadow cast on thelandscape may be porous but it is slow to move on from these areas.Such reputational ‘sluggishness’ occurs precisely because of themanner that (socio) cultures of depopulation combine with dynam-ics of marginality, scale and socio-natures to produce durable (ifnever fixed) sets of social representations and practices that cometo define an area.

Shadow landscape: more than the sum of its parts

This paper developed the concept of shadow landscape inorder to describe the essential otherness and seemingly distinctiveproperties of in-between rural places characterised by histori-cal depopulation and cultural marginalisation. It did so againstthe backdrop of a portrayal of how these areas have often beenDESCRIBED in the fields of political ecology and rural studies. Theargument there was that each field provided conceptual tools forthe analysis of in-between areas but has nonetheless tended to fallshort of providing the well-rounded framework that is needed. Thepaper thereafter outlined the concept itself as a means by which tounderstand these areas. In the process, some of the key material



and discursive issues that surround these ‘imagined communities’were brought into focus.

At the same time, we insisted in this paper that research aboutthese in-between places is most usefully situated in – even as itbuilds on – existing work in political ecology and rural studies viaelements found in one or both of these cognate literatures: namely,marginality, scale, socio-natures and (socio) cultures of depopula-tion. These elements are not fixed, though, but rather need to beseen as complex and shifting forms that, together, nonetheless addup to a rounded understanding of the sorts of rural areas of interestin this paper. Similarly, this paper’s deployment of the concept ofshadow landscape is designed to reinforce a general tendency inthe contemporary social sciences that would integrate sub disci-plines or approaches that seek to critically interrogate and explaininter-linked ecological and social facts. Social facts (as with ecolog-ical dynamics) are characterized by complexity, fluidity, spatiality,and hence not by simple patterns of cause and effect (Urry, 2003;Harrison et al., 2006). These characteristics appear in the combi-nation of the four elements that comprise the concept of shadowlandscape, as set out in this paper.

The elements of a shadow landscape considered here maythus be thought of as being accumulative in nature, starting withmarginality and ending with socio (cultures) of depopulation.Clearly, these four elements are not only themselves variable aswell as being open to differing perceptions, but they also mutu-ally condition each other in complicated and sometimes surprisingways.

The first element, marginality, is a common indicator of in-between areas in the traditions of political ecology and ruralstudies. It describes some conditions that characterise these areas,albeit in contingent ways. Indeed, not all people and places in ashadow landscape experience marginality in a similar manner –and that has profound consequences for how people live their livesin these areas. Perceptions of marginality may even be a basis fornew economic activities via heritage tourism and the like.

The second element is scale – which was understood hereinfrom a perspective of social construction and fluidity in line withrecent work that ‘re-thinks’ scale. for our purposes, it was impor-tant to recognise that shadow landscapes acquire some of theirdistinctive – and perhaps also durable – qualities precisely fromthe manner that complicated sets of relationships between actorscrisscross scale in the definition of an area. Such multi-scalar rela-tionships simultaneously reflect and promote particular visionsand practices about an area – linked say to themes of historicaldepopulation, ecological decline, or infrastructural decay.

The third element corresponds to socio-natures, which play acomplex role that also continuously changes across time and space.Here it is the partly humanised, partly domesticated biophysi-cal landscapes that are the focus. In particular, our interest is inunderstanding how the other conceptual elements discussed in thispaper combine to re-work specific sets of human–environmentalrelations. There is too the matter of how some socionatural dis-courses become prominent based on perceptions about ‘distinctive’local relationships – linked to such topics as ‘unique’ local flora andfauna (or their re-introduction as in the case of the French wolf),‘feral’ natural conditions, or ‘sustainable’ communities.

The conceptualisation of a shadow landscape culminates withthe fourth element, (socio) cultures of depopulation. Here, thematerial and discursive implications of situations whereby localcommunities are marked by historical conditions of depopulationare emphasised. Those implications can be quite complex. Thismay be evinced by issues such as recent population growth (newtemporary or permanent residents) that contrasts with a lingeringreputation for depopulation (a reputation itself often perpetuatedby outsider-dominated multi-scalar alliances) or even local liveli-

hoods based on ‘playing along’ with dominant perceptions of anarea’s ongoing depopulation or decline through a cultural economyattuned to shadow landscape living.

In effect, this paper has sought to develop a novel approach tohow we might understand such ‘shadow landscape living’ – that is,those in-between places that have been generally ill-served by theliterature. Thus, that approach certainly draws on diverse insightsin rural studies and political ecology, but does so in order develop amore rounded and multi-faceted appreciation of the subject mat-ter. mindful of such ambitions, it is thus appropriate finally andbriefly to consider selected research possibilities that may arise inlight of the understanding of in-between sorts of places, encom-passed by the concept of shadow landscape, that we have set outabove in the main body of the paper.

A first area of inquiry could address the specific circumstancesand modalities that surround both ‘entrance to’ and ‘exit from’the shadows – in other words, what are the interrelated political,economic and cultural conditions that underpin the creation anddissolution of a shadow landscape? It would of course be tempt-ing to simply generate a list of key quantitative indicators (e.g.population change, level and type of economic activity, educationstandards) as one might have done when scholars notably in ruralstudies investigated these areas in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet such anapproach would be decidedly simplistic and indeed would ignorethe many insights that the recent cultural turn has generated onsuch things as multiple and flexible identities, cultural representa-tions of in-between places, and so on. Better, then, is an approachthat would combine an array of types of evidence and which, aboveall, would be based on recognition of the role that fluidity and con-tingency play in the (de) construction of shadow landscapes. Suchevidence would be as likely to examine how an area is portrayedover time in film, TV, travel books or novels, as it would assessshifting economic and population levels and compositions.

A related area of investigation could also try and gauge ina panoptic and comparative sense whether shadow landscapesare expanding or contracting over space, where they are expand-ing or contracting, why they are doing so in the way that theyare, and what all of this means for our understanding of muchbroader trends such as economic and cultural globalisation or cli-mate change. For example, how does the spread of neo-liberalthinking and globalisation practices (McCarthy, 2008) impinge onthe process of shadow landscape creation and dissolution? It can-not be assumed that the relationships here are straightforwardand unambiguous. To what extent, too, is the exceedingly complexbut nonetheless ‘real’ phenomenon of climate change transform-ing the bases of shadow landscapes? In ‘remote’ mountainous areasin Europe, for instance, how might current and projected droughtas well as glacier retreat (Orlove et al., 2008), impact on finely cali-brated socio-natures in these in-between places? Here too, though,lessons learned from the cultural turn are vital in seeking to appre-ciate that these sorts of ‘mega trends’ not only find highly locationspecific expression but also that their meaning is refracted througha cultural lens and thereby assume sometimes surprising or unex-pected meaning.

A final area of inquiry to note here concerns the ways inwhich shadow landscapes may relate to other types of landscape,and indeed may even one day morph into them. For example,what might be the possible connection between shadow land-scapes and (for want of a better word) ‘forbidden’ landscapes?We are thinking here of those landscapes at geopolitical rupturepoints that are sometimes designated ‘no man’s lands’ (e.g. Cyprus,Kosovo/Serbia)? Can forbidden landscapes become shadow land-scapes (and vice versa), and if so, what conditions must occur(beyond the simple onset of peace) before it can occur? To takea different pairing, how and when do shadow landscapes become



‘resistant’ landscapes or zones of concentrated resistance andcounter-hegemonic struggle to powerful political, economic andcultural groups (Zapatista-controlled southern Mexico, or indige-nous/black Columbian rainforest areas – see Escobar, 2008)? Dosome of the conditions to be found in shadow landscapes increasethe likelihood that they might one day become resistant land-scapes – or does the opposite hold true? Finally, how do shadowlandscapes interrelate with (let’s call them) ‘illuminated’ land-scapes – those centres of relative power and influence which oftenhave a hand in shaping shadow landscapes via multi-scalar poli-tics and the like? Indeed, what are the reciprocal impacts (if any)of shadow landscapes on illuminated landscapes? Do they servemainly an economic function – hinterlands from which food andother resources emerge as well as to which outsiders go for restand recreation? And/or is it more a cultural and discursive func-tion insofar as shadow landscapes serve as a warning about how‘civilised’ life can crumble in the ‘absence’ of discipline and hardwork? In short, what is the dialectic at play here in the mutualconstruction of different types of landscape?

These various avenues of inquiry positively cry out for compara-tive and multi-scalar research that is nonetheless based firmly on asound and in-depth empirical grasp of specific areas in question. Itis hoped that the present paper has offered some conceptual ideasand tools that might aid in such a journey. In the process, it hassought to ‘bring into the light’ one particular type of ‘in-between’landscape that has tended to remain in the intellectual shadows.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Prof. K. Hoggart and Dr. M. Goodmanfor their helpful suggestions to a prior version of this paper, to Dr.Karen Lawrence for editorial assistance, and to the Spanish Ministryof Science and Innovation for supporting this research (researchproject code CSO2008-00953). We also thank two anonymous ref-erees for their constructive comments.

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