B 4.3 Multicultural societies, landscape and the building of identities

[TERCUD]

"The Swiss mountains offered another advantage: they are peopled by groups speaking German, French, Italian and Romanche, the four main languages of the country; a part of the mountaineers are Roman Catholic, another one Protestant. The image of the mountain could be shared by all the communities and provided a means to unite them into a nation.
Most developed societies have become multicultural for the last half century because of international migrations and the flow of political refugees. This form of multiculturalism is different from that which existed in the part of Europe where rural communities speaking different languages and practicing different religions were juxtaposed for centuries. By now, most of the minorities settle in urban areas, very often the major metropolises: many of them have landed there in their new country; it is there that they have the best possibilities to get a job.
In such a context, landscapes are not made of a patchwork of elements reflecting different communities. The landscapes, whether rural or urban, have been shaped by the oldest and generally still dominant community. They often served as founding stones for national identities. But what about the newcomers? They have no landscape of their own. In the past, they often refrained from developing settings shaped according to their own values and preferences: during the nineteenth century, European immigrants in the American Mid-West accepted the grid pattern as a common matrix, and built balloon frame houses just as the Americans in the next communities. The only touch of originality was the presence of churches of different denominations, and of cemeteries where the graves still spoke of the homelands of the migrants.
The situation is different now: the grid pattern was a loose framework, just conceived to provide a simple system of land division, road construction and creation of local communities. It was purely rational and did not involve religious or ideologic views – only some form of rationalism, as shown by John Brinckerhoff Jackson (Jackson, 1979). Migrants now live in cities which allow them less freedom for interpretation and adaptation. Religious and ideological monuments planned by the dominant community are present everywhere. Collective life is channeled through the streets and concentrated in the squares which have been planned by it. All these elements speak about the values of the dominant culture. In such a setting, newcomers often find it difficult to maintain a measure of self-consciousness. They feel overwhelmed by forms which are foreign to them. Hence, often, the need to imprint marks of their own culture and identity in the landscape – especially in the public spaces, since they are open to all communities: they can help to cement the identity of the migrant group, and show the others that it exists and has to be recognized as such."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)