HISTORICAL LANDSCAPES OF PRODUCTION. TENSIONS, CONTRADICTIONS AND CHALLENGES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In recent decades we have witnessed growing interest in documenting the material and immaterial traces of labor cultures, which some group together under the umbrella category of historical and/or cultural landscapes of production. These refer to the marks that the economic activities of societies leave on space.
Along these lines, we recognize François Jullien (2018) and his relational approach to landscape, which replaces static forms with experiential dynamics and integrates symbolic, affective, historical and cultural dimensions. In the Americanist field, the binary logics imposed by European expansion and the consolidation of industrial capitalist empires in the nineteenth century bequeathed models that transformed urban and rural systems and regional dynamics into laboratories of intervention, now subject to rigorous critical review. Landscapes, by definition, are evolving and dynamic: syntheses of activities, procedures and social relations that sustain people in a territory throughout historical processes marked by discontinuities and ruptures (Sobrino Simal, 2018). Although the notion tends to focus on the traces of human labor on nature, it is also worth recognizing the work of biotic and abiotic natures and their coevolution with societies; this entanglement — analyzed, among others, by Moore (2025) — deserves greater attention because it informs both our past and possible futures.
The discussion on productive cultural landscapes seeks to draw on novel perspectives and diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks: Don Mitchell (2003) provides tools for understanding the production of space and the territorial disputes that run through productive landscapes; Arturo Escobar (1995; 2018) offers post-development perspectives and values local knowledge in plural worlds; Emilio F. Moran, from the Amazon, discusses agricultural frontiers and integrated methodologies for mapping these transformations; Giuseppe Scandurra contributes ethnographic and visual approaches that link everyday practices, heritage and landscape; Manuel Sacristán provides an epistemological framework for questioning the scientific policies that guide interventions in productive territories. Together, these resources make it possible to combine a plurality of knowledges, empirical tools and relational approaches between landscape thinking (Berque, 2009) and calls for the defense, stewardship and management of local landscapes.
The renewed interest in documenting the historical landscapes of production also responds to the vitality of critical research and the intense wave of twenty-first-century transformations: expansion of capital, land grabbing and foreignization of land, urbanization and metropolization, intensification of extractivism, and worsening inequalities and social conflicts, all superimposed on global environmental change. Many of these processes are potentially irreversible within the framework of the Capitalocene (Moore; Haraway; Patel; Serratos) and put at risk both human and non-human natures, as well as the labor traces that converge in the production of landscapes.
We are interested in rethinking these landscapes at the territorial scale as palimpsests that interweave people and territories. The symposium proposes to discuss the role of science in these processes, the continuity of productive cultural landscapes (PCL) in the face of contemporary challenges, and the rethinking of the tools needed to sustain hope for alternative futures.
