From Heroes' Groves to Parks of Peace:
landscapes of remembrance, protest and peace.
Abstract
The public space surrounding war memorials and military monuments has always been important in the iconography of remembrance. In the nineteenth century these spaces often took the form of garden cemeteries and memorial plantations; after the First World War large tracts of former battlefield were preserved as sacred spaces which were essential to the process of ritual pilgrimage.
After 1945 there was a considerable shift in the landscapes of war: memorial schemes more often took a pragmatic and utilitarian form, and desolated cities such as Hiroshima (and to a lesser extent Dresden and Coventry) became the cornerstone for anti-war movements in the late 1950s and 1960s. This period saw the emergence of a symbolic landscape of protest, which often co-existed uncomfortably as a place of tourism. Through a study of such sites the paper analyses the various types of 'peace landscape' from environmental schemes such as trans-border parks to political interventions in the form of peace gardens. In the final section a recent design competition for a peace park in Turkey is examined and compared with similar complex environments in the US and Northern Ireland.
Introduction
'A monumental effort' - memorials as loci of official memory and remembrance The decade after the First World War has been defined as the 'monumental phase' (Becker, 1994 in Clout, 1998). The definition is justified: thirty thousand French war memorials were raised between 1920 - 1925 (Dyer,1994, p.64). In 1923 the Imperial War Graves Commission was shipping 4,000 headstones a week to supply more than 500 British and Empire cemeteries in Flanders alone (CWGC Annual Report 1998, p.19). All over Britain thousands of plaques, statues, monuments, buildings and gardens were designed, erected and dedicated to the memory of those who had died on foreign soil (Boorman, 1988). In just three days, 400,000 people filed past the Cenotaph when it was unveiled in November 1920 (Greenberg, 1989, p.11).
Morgan (1998) reminds us that, historically, civic art has been used to contain and convey memory. It exists not merely as an aesthetic device but also as 'an apparatus of social memory' (Morgan, 1998, p.103), a phenomenon Boyer (1996) first described as 'rhetorical topoi' :
-
'those civic compositions that teach us about our national
heritage and our public responsibilities
and assume that the urban landscape itself is the emblematic embodiment of power and memory
(Boyer, 1996, p.32).
It may seem odd, continues King (1998, p.3), that such conventional objects should arouse such anxieties, that national icons of reverence and remembrance should have once seemed so complex and elusive. But this is to ignore the complex debates about the way in which memorials encapsulate and perpetuate memory. As Johnson (1995) tells us, such sites of memory are rarely arbitrary assignations: instead they are 'consciously situated to connect or compete with existing nodes of collective remembering' (p.55).
More recently in Britain, collective memory (as it relates to military conflict) has focused almost exclusively on remembrance and its attendant rituals. Over the past decade, there has been a spreading orthodoxy of ritual remembrance. As evidence we might cite the Royal British Legion campaign to impose a universal two-minute silence on November 11th (Sekuless and Rees, 1996), the pressure to wear poppies (led by public institutions such as the BBC), the burgeoning membership of remembrance societies, and growing participation in battlefield tourism (Lloyd, 1998).
The culture of remembrance has become the dominant motif in our common understanding of war memorials and their contextualising landscapes. As a result memorials have become inextricably linked with ideas of reverence, obedience, and mythic chivalry: 'the discourse of Big Words' as Hynes (1990, p.270) terms it. This, however, obscures the historic reality in which some war memorials and monuments have been foci of dissent, civilian protest and political agitation.
Memorials as a focus of dissent and protest
It has been argued that the belligerence and rampant nationalism of First World War propaganda helped fuel the revulsion against war that was widespread in Britain during the late 1920s and 1930s (Fussell, 1975, Hynes, 1990). The manifestation of anti-war feeling in fiction, memoir and theatre has been especially well documented (Fussell, 1975; Cecil, 1997 ; Ferguson, 1998). During this period it is also possible to detect a subtle shift in the political intentions of the customary rituals of remembrance. In 1921 the Armistice Day ceremonies were disrupted by groups of unemployed ex-servicemen with placards stating: 'The Dead are remembered but we are forgotten' (Dyer, 1994, p.51). At subsequent ceremonies white peace poppies were sold by the Peace Pledge Union; increasingly the anti-war lobby learned to infiltrate the sacred moments of ritual memory.
In May-June 1926 the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom organised a Peace Pilgrimage throughout Britain. By this date, pilgrimage had become an integral part of the perpetuation of martial memory. Indeed, over 10,000 pilgrims would make a 10th anniversary return to the Western Front in 1928 (Norval, 1936, p.48; Lloyd, 1998, p.33). The women's march, however, was not concerned with remembrance, it was aimed to force the government to move ahead on peace legislation and to demand a world disarmament conference. In 1929 the annual Armistice Service at the Cenotaph in London ran to the customary schedule but with markedly fewer troops on duty. When questioned in Parliament, the then Home Secretary replied that 'public feeling' demanded that 'these ceremonies should partake of a civilian aspect more and more' (Parliamentary Debates, 31 October 1929, in Hynes, 1990, p.466). Yet despite the marches, protests and interventions there are few physical manifestations of the pacifist feeling during the late 1920s and 1930s. Even onthe eve of the Second World War the accent was still on mass pilgrimage to revered battle sites: in 1936 6,000 Canadians took part in the 'Vimy Pilgrimage' to Artois for the unveiling of Allward's memorial on Hill 145. In the year that war was declared an estimated 160,000 pilgrims visited France and Belgium (Vance, 1997 ; Lloyd, 1998).
The impact of commemoration on the landscape during this same period has been well documented (Coombs, 1976; Mosse, 1990 ; Borg, 1991; Middlebrook, 1991; Heffernan, 1995 ; Winter, 1995 ; Gough, 1996). Collectively, these landscapes - encompassing military cemeteries, tracts of preserved battlefield, ornamental displays - have been treated generically as 'spaces, parks or gardens of remembrance'. Mosse (1990) has perhaps been the most discursive in identifying the various ways by which nature has been appropriated to celebrate the cult of the fallen soldier in the period before and immediately after the Great War. Using the collective term - parks of remembrance - he identifies the Heldenhaine or Heroes' Groves in Germany, the French jardins Funebres, the Parco della Rimembranza in Italy, and the military cemeteries built by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (Mosse, 1990, p 43 - 59). Mosse articulates the subtle iconographic and aboreal differences between the several landscapes of remembrance. He distinguishes the pantheistic symbolism of the Heroes' Grove (where Mother Nature is conterminous with the Fatherland) from the democratic layout of cemeteries designed for the dead of the British Empire. Here, order, tidiness and rationality are combined with indigenous planting schemes to evoke an archetypal English country churchyard.
Twenty years after the end of the First World War, the peace movement in Britain had instigated a re-appraisal of the symbolic function of sites of remembrance, even though it had left little physical mark on the commemorative landscape. The threat of nuclear proliferation in the post 1945 period also saw wholesale revisions in the iconography and symbolism of landscapes of remembrance. Before turning to address in detail the transition from parks of remembrance to parks for peace weshould first summarise the elements that comprise the topography of commemoration. Table One identifies the key types of commemorative, memorial and political sites.
Table 1
Battlefield Sites
Former battlefield - a preserved environment marked with memorials and monuments, the focus for ritual remembrance at designated anniversaries (Figure 1)
Military cemetery - a burial place near or on the site of former conflict, which often serves as the focus for remembrance ceremonies (Figure 2 )
Memorial Sites
Garden of remembrance - a public place designed and designated as a focal point for specific memory; some gardens have been located over the site of a particular tragedy
Monumental sites - a war memorial or building of remembrance, and the public space surrounding it, which may be laid out in a semi-formal design such as an avenue or square; may also include temporary installations of flowers, wreaths to accompany annual rituals of remembrance (Figure 3)
Parallel Sites
Trans-global site - "twinned"gardens or parks in different countries (often on different continents), established to promote peaceful causes between former adversaries
Trans-border site - cross-frontier site declared a de-militarised buffer zone to promote exchange and to diffuse political differences; often located within an ecologically sensitive area of unique bio-diversity
Political Sites
Peace garden - a designated public space that is planted, decorated and dedicated to the promotion of peace (Figure 4 & 5)
Peace route - a pilgrimage route or heritage trail that links a network of commemorative sites and memorials
Peace camp - an unofficial, often informal and transitory site located close to a militarised, politicised or commercial development site
Peace event - festivals, marches, and other gatherings campaigning for peace which may result in temporary installations and semi-permanent interventions
'A Terrible Warning' - peace parks as protest in the nuclear period
On 6th August 1945 the city of Hiroshima was virtually obliterated by a nuclear bomb. More than 85,600 houses were destroyed, over 80,000 people died. The population of the city was reduced from 419,182 to 136,518. Four years later, during a period of frenzied reconstruction, the Japanese government passed a 'Law for the Construction of the Hiroshima Peace Commemorating City' which designated the city as 'the symbol of the human ideal for eternal peace' (Hasegawa, 1952, p.96). Amongst the principle projects for the 'peace city' were:
the Peace Hall project, comprising a 12 hectare island located at the epicentre of the atomic bomb explosion which consisted of a conference hall, a Peace Square (for up to 20,000 persons), a Peace Arch with bells, a memorial chapel, and the preserved remains of the Industrial Promotion Dome building which was one of the few structures left remaining after the blast ;
the Peace Park project, on a 210 acre plot sharing part of the Peace Hall, comprising a children's centre (with libraries, playgrounds, camping lots, etc) and an International Culture centre.
Additional projects included a 100 metre wide Peace Boulevard running west to east, symbolising the road to peace and forming a greenbelt around the city. Hiroshima City is traversed by seven rivers requiring 52 spans of bridges. These were regarded as important symbols of the links uniting one culture with another and were designated 'peace bridges'.
The massive 15 year reconstruction project in Hiroshima became the model for other post-war rebuilding programmes in Asia and Europe. As a self-declared 'Mecca of Peace' the city also provided the template for the iconography of the anti-nuclear peace movement in subsequent decades. However, this was not achieved without some ideological disputes. Many Japanese were troubled at the Americanised designs of the memorial buildings; others were concerned that the memorial grounds would be profaned by the influx of tourists. Many citizens could not reconcile the city's status as the city of peace with profits earned from mass pilgrimage. Many of these anxieties focused on the plan to preserve the A-Bomb Dome monument. Once the city's Industrial Promotion Hall, it had been at the hypocentre of the bomb's blast in August 1945 and was one of the few buildings left standing. Many argued that it should be removed because its function as a prime tourist site defiled its near-sacred status; others wanted it to remain as a reminder of the horror of war, as a warning against complacency. The issue was resolved in the late 1960s when funds were raised to keep the Dome and preserve its charred, skeletal appearance. It stands today, resisting the decline into benign picturesqueness that often befalls European battle ruins.
As a peace city, Hiroshima functions simultaneously as a reliquary, a funerary site, a civilian battlefield, and as a locus of political and social debate. The Peace Park has become the cornerstone for the movement against nuclear warfare; August 6th has become an international day for peace demonstrations with Hiroshima as its symbolic centre. Satellite sites have appeared all over the world (Lifton, 1967). Invariably, these have taken the form of city, state and trans-national peace gardensand parks whose overarching concept is that they should be both 'a commemoration and a warning' (McKean, 1989, p.3).
This concept became a working reality in the United Kingdom during the early- and mid-1980s when a group of London-based architects, planners and environmentalists formed 'Architects for Peace' to work for 'the abolition of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass-destruction world-wide' (McKean, 1989, p.3). It was one of many groups established in the UK during the mid 1980s to promote the cause of world peace. Similar groups such as Avenues for Peace, Civil Engineers for Nuclear Disarmament, and the Nuclear Free Zones Steering Committee invited fellow professionals in the built and landscaped environment to support the aims of world peace and disarmament and to work towards designing physical spaces which conveyed that message. Beyond the anti-war message there was a political and social sub-text: namely that any planting scheme should also try to 'encourage and stimulate activity and interest, creativity and enjoyment among its community. Its focus should be on the positive, life-nurturing, life-seeking potential embodied in the concepts of peace, harmony and conviviality' (McKean, 1989, p.4).
Sympathetic local authorities saw that a number of such sites were realised. Some were simple symbolic gestures (Figure 6) ; a two metre high Peace Pillar in Chapelfield, Norwich for example, which once symbolised the council's position on nuclear proliferation, is inscribed with a non-political message of reconciliation and contemplation - 'May Peace Prevail on Earth' (note 1). In London between 1982 and 1985, a network of peace gardens was funded, designed and built as part of the Greater London Council's (GLC) campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Gardens in Camden, Haringey, Hackney and Burgess Park drew their symbolic inspiration, design and iconography from the stock language of the peace movement - inscribed stone tablets, white peace doves carved into pergolas and woodwork, plants and trees drawn from a strict lexicon of appropriate 'peace vegetation'. These formalised settings were meant to inspire non-professional, local community groups to design informal gardens as a means of registering their protest against the arms race. Lobby groups such as 'Architects for Peace' argued that the act of planting and caring for a communal garden could help to unify and politicise a community. The fashion for peace gardens, flowerbeds, rocks, ponds and trees spread throughout Labour-held municipal authorities. Some, such as the dove-shaped floral design at Hebden Bridge (Yorkshire), did not survive changes in local politics; others, such as the Peace Pagoda in Battersea, London, or the Japanese Cherry grove in Castle Park, Bristol, remain even though their original intentions are now obscure (Figure 7).
The vestiges of this protest movement persist. A peace garden is currently being planned by various pressure groups at the site of the former United States tactical missiles squadron base at Greenham Common, Berkshire which was the focus of prolonged anti-nuclear protests and the site of a peace camp in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Initial designs suggested that the garden would take the form of a field of lavender or a 'peace avenue' which would run across the line of the main runway, symbolically negating its martial orientation (Treneman, 1998, p.1) However, the winning entry in a recent design competition suggested that the runways should be flooded to create a waterpark linked by canals (Buncombe, 1998).
'Promoting Friendship and understanding' - landscapes of co-operation
Most peace gardens are tiny in scale and reflective in character. By comparison, trans-national peace parks can span several continents and straddle lengthy national borders. Poland and Czechoslovakia pioneered the concept of international co-operation through cross-border parks with the signing of the Krakow Protokol in 1925 (McKean, 1989). The first cross-border park to be realised was dedicated in 1932 by the Canadian Parliament and the US Congress by symbolically joining the Glacier National Park in Montana with the Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada to create an international peace park celebrating the long relationship of peace and goodwill between the two countries (Syroteuk, 1998).
In the past 50 years a considerable number of peace parks have been established along international frontiers. Often such areas are thinly populated, and many follow the crest line of a mountain range. It has proved to be politically advantageous for some belligerent neighbours to devise protected areas as a demilitarized buffer-zone. In this respect a 'peace park' operates as a neutral zone with agreed lines of communication between conflicting parties. Brock has identified the interrelationship between peace and environmental issues arguing that:
-
environmental co-operation and networking on a transnational
level,including the communal level, may help
to develop a public awarenessof national, regional and global environmental problems in their specific
economic and social context ; this in turn could have a considerable influence on the formulation of
national or regional politics. (Brock, 1991, p.421)
The Costa Rican trans-border parks are dedicated both to peace between conflicting parties and to peace between humanity and the planet, the latter focused on attempts to preserve the rainforest. The Amistad (Friendship) International Park between Panama and Costa Rica, announced in 1979, has brought together two countries to protect and manage the highest diversity of plant species in Central America. Although such parks act also as buffer - and mediation-zones between two acrimonious neighbours, there is a risk that by confining 'peace' to designated spaces, they increase and condone commercial exploitation and environmental damage in adjacent territories (Du Saussay, 1980, Brock, 1991). This aside, trans-border peace parks offer 'alternative visions for the border regions that hitherto have been military staging grounds and fields of battle' (Renner, 1989, p.44).
Elsewhere, cross-border peace parks have been constructed as a way of celebrating shared harmonious relations between two countries, such as the International Peace Garden in North America which straddles the US-Canadian border between Manitoba and North Dakota. They have also been devised to nurturebetter relations between indifferent neighbours; such is the case at the Evros River Park which runs along the border of Turkey and Greece (Thorsell, 1990).
There is a spreading recognition that transfrontier parks can be directly instrumental in a peace process. A recent (1998) conference organised by the World Conservation Union (IUCN) recommended that a Southern Africa working group be established to promote the conservation of biodiversity and sustainable development and therefore contribute to international co-operation and regional peace and stability (note 3). Trans-border spaces can fulfil a commemorative as well as an instrumental function. In August 1999 a Peace Chapel was opened on the Franco-German border between Sierck-les-Bains and Perl. Out of a desire for unity and reconciliation the local men of the adjacent French and German communes who died in the two world wars are listed in alphabetical order and without distinction of nationality (Holstein, 1999).
Not all peace parks occupy parallel or physically adjacent spaces. The Seattle-Tashkent Peace Park was devised as a trans-global twinned site on two continents. The idea for a twin-site park was developed by Ploughshares, an organisation of former Peace Corps volunteers, in the late 1980s. Their ambition was to design and build gardens in Seattle (USA) and Tashkent (former USSR) as a way of forging bonds between American and Soviet citizens. In addition to its peace-bridging concept, the scheme brought together enthusiastic and committed volunteers and professional design teams in both countries (Oakrock, 1988). The design for the Seattle garden used many of the iconographic forms of the anti-nuclear campaign: an orchard of flowering 'friendship' trees, a wildflower meadow, curved walkways that breach brick walls and a five metre-diameter topographical mosaic sculpture of the earth. It was intended that the Tashkent garden would have many similar features but with a greater emphasis on soil, plant and material exchange; 10,000 ceramic tiles, for example, were handpainted by Seattle schoolchildren to line a central pool and irrigation channels of a 'Friendship Grove'. To complement the symmetrical planting schema, an American and Soviet sculptor cast an identical aluminium sculpture on each site. (note 4)
The concept of a trans-global park is a variant on the anti-nuclear war peace gardens that have proliferated since 1945. They draw inspiration largely from the Hiroshima Peace Park which still provides the iconic language and the symbolic imagery of the anti-war landscape.
Landscapes of peace, remembrance and resolution :
Gallipoli, Hains Point and Northern Ireland
Having considered the peace gardens of the nuclear age and the proliferation of trans-frontier parks, we shall next examine three very different landscapes where attempts have been made to articulate concepts of peace. The first case study in Turkey explores a complex geo-political environment with many conflicting political and historical agendas. Our second example touches on the issues raised by a bold and emphatic design for a new site in Washington, DC. The third case study, set in Northern Ireland, provides an insight into the fluid processes at work in a nascent peace environment.
The Gallipoli Peninsula (western Turkey) stretches 80 kms from the Sea of Marmora in the north-east to Cape Helles in the south-west. Characterised by steep shelving beaches on its southern aspect and broader salt flats to the north, the terrain inland is a rolling plateau of pine forest and arable land, with poor scrubland along much of the coastal tip (Figure 8). In 1915 a British-Commonwealth alliance, joinedby French, Italian and Greek armed forces, staged a daring amphibious landing on the southernmost beaches of the peninsula. The Allies' aim was to seize the Dardanelles, advance on Istanbul and knock Turkey out of the war. The ambitious plan failed. Allied troops gained only a precarious hold on the beaches and were pinned to the coastal perimeter for eight months until evacuation in January 1916. Over 160,000 soldiers died during that time; most are buried on the peninsula, not all in marked graves. The campaign is regarded by many as the beginning of an Australian and New Zealand nationalism. For Turkey, the battle was the sole victory of five campaigns and a seminal moment in its development as a modern, secular nation.
The peninsula is strewn with war memorials, battlefield museums, facsimile trench lines and cemeteries. The main period of cemetery planning and memorial building took place in the 1920s when the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (CWGC) assumed responsibility for siting and planning 31 cemeteries and five Allied memorials (Longworth, 1967). There was no comparable response from the Turkish authorities until the 1950s, and then again in the late 1960s when a number of imposing modernist structures were built at Cape Helles, the most southern point of the peninsula. In the past decade a number of traditional Islamic memorial sites have been built, and in the last five years several large statues have been located at Anzac and Helles. Although the war ended here in 1916, a battle for monumental supremacy has been waged ever since. Turkish and Commonwealth memorial sites are located close to each other on the cliffs over the once disputed beaches, and giant statues of Turkish heroes stand face-to-face with CWGC neo-classical obelisks, locked in 'parallel monologues' (Ayliffe et al, 1991). On the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings the Turkish authorities supplemented the martial statuary with an ambitious planting regime designed to dress the battlefield with appropriate symbolic floral designs (Gough, 1996).
On 19 May 1997 the Turkish government announced a competition for a park dedicated to peace at Gallipoli. Entries were invited for a new 330,000 hectare park that spanned the length of the peninsula and which would incorporate the existing Peninsula National Historical Park established in 1973. The competition also asked design teams to address the larger issues of global peace. Applicants, it was argued, should embrace 'the rich mix of historical, natural, archaeological, cultural and human values' which helped define the many aspects of the peninsula. Above all, teams should strive to create radical and ambitious schemes:
-
Fine tuning is simply not enough, the Park needs a supra-identity
whichtranscends and transforms.
Peace is the proposed supra-identity for the Park
(Gallipoli brief, 1997).
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The challenge of this ... competition is to devise the
big idea -the idea that cuts through the bewildering
amount of detail, the prescriptive rules, the multiple agendas, to reward the individual visitor, the local
community, the nation and the world. (To create a) prototypical Peace Park: the prototypical Peace Park
(Papadopoulos, 1997).
In the final analysis none of the shortlisted submissions claimed to have arrived at ‘the big idea’ to unify the disparate interests invested in the peninsula. Instead, the whining submission - from Norway (note 5) - proposed a network of footpaths that would be created and customised by the individual visitor (Kinzer, 1998). Modest and non-interventionist, the Norwegian submission was predicated on the idea of personal voyages leading to global reconciliation, an idea that would be realised largely through the competition web-site. (note 6) The design will give 'visitors a chance to think or speculate or reflect on what they are seeing and what it means for the idea of world peace' (Bademli, quoted in Kinzer, 1998). As such it offers a minimally invasive critique of existing memorial and preserved sites, raising through its website fundamental questions about reconciliation and commemoration rather than offering novel planning solutions.
The outcome of the Gallipoli competition might be compared with a similarly ambitious scheme for a national peace garden at Hains Point, a peninsula on the Potomac River at Washington DC, USA. Here, though, the design brief was simple and aspirational: the park's protagonist, Elizabeth Ratcliffe, calling for a design that would epitomise and celebrate ‘the hope of American Democracy’ (Dillingham, 1993, p.112). The winning entry (by architect Eduardo Catalano) took the bold form of a stylised olive branch created in parterre. This giant peace symbol was traversed by paths and broad walks, surrounded by a berm and double row of trees which led to an open air amphitheatre. The design, wrote Catalano, was meant as ‘a symbol of peace, an element of nature, resting upon nature itself. No invented patterns, pavings, walls, objects imposed upon the ground. Only the simplicity of green on green and the purity and virtuousness of the white flowers of the olive tree’ (Catalano in Landecker, 1990. p.73).
Compared with the diverse topography and complex socio-politics of the Gallipoli peninsula, Hains Point was meant to be a single, bold scheme exemplifyingthe ‘big idea’ of national and global peace. Yet the very boldness of its design led to disapproval. Despite congressional support, public and private funding, a prestigious selection committee and a large application (note 7) the design was eventually rejected as ‘contrived and even boring' (Dillingham, 1993, p.112). Perhaps this failure indicates that the era of autonomous peace parks has passed; landscapes of peace have now to be enmeshed within a complex layer of environmental, ecological and regional geo-politics to have any chance of completion. Perhaps also, any new peace landscape must first fulfil a specific commemorative function in addition to its advocacy of peace and reconciliation. This was certainly the rationale, for instance, behind the proposed Garden of Remembrance in central London, which was intended to commemorate the life of Princess Diana while spreading more general notions of peace (Strong, 1998; Phelps, 1999). In the end, faced with local opposition and national indifference, the proposed garden came to nothing. (note 8).
In Northern Ireland, a national memorial to peace was suggested within days of the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) cease-fire in August 1994. Five months later the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation in Dublin considered the need for utilitarian memorials rather than symbolic monuments (Leonard, 1997, p.26). Since that time, a wide range of sculptures, installations, environmental schemes and other commemorative interventions have been conceived and commissioned in the province. Many of the successful environmental schemes follow familiar formats: for example, a planting scheme in a riverside park in Coleraine when eleven Catholic and eleven Protestant school children planted eleven trees in memory of those killed in the Enniskillen bombing. Similarly, outside Northern Ireland, a part of the new National Arboretum in Staffordshire will be planted to commemorate those who have died during the Troubles. Other environmental interventions suggest a more subtle commemorative approach: a crosscommunity group, Women Together, have commissioned and erected park benches in Belfast school playgrounds to promote communication and trust. The need to designate neutral meeting places in Belfast city centre was one of the recommendations of the Opsahl Commission at its concluding conference in May 1994 who felt it was vital that
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‘conferences, workshops and cultural events could
occur in a venue free from historical associations that deterred access’
(in Leonard, 1997, p 28).
The transitory nature of many of the peace motifs in Northern Ireland is evidence of the fragile state of the current peace agreement. This is particularly well reflected in the winning design for a building to host the peace talks of 1994. The design brief stipulated that the structure should aim to defuse confrontation between negotiators; accordingly the winning design team chose to locate the building on an artificial island precariously overhanging the River Lagan. To further diffuse tension and remind negotiators of their responsibilities, the approach road comprised twenty-five unevenly sized walls, reminiscent of border check-points, with each wall built in proportion to the number of people killed in each year of the Troubles.
Conclusion
The generic label ‘peace landscape’ is often applied unthinkingly to very different symbolic and political spaces. During 1998, for example, the term was applied equally to a ‘nature reserve’ on the Israeli West Bank (albeit one patrolled by security forces) and to the Lady Diana memorial garden intended for Kensington Gardens, London. It has been argued in this paper that gardens, parks and other formal schemes can fulfil a variety of political and symbolic functions, from contemplation, through protest, to recreation.
The theme of contemplation is especially significant for those landscapes that have been preserved in their original traumatised condition. The village of Oradour-Sur-Glane, near Limoges in central France (site of a notorious Nazi reprisal massacre in June 1944) has been entirely retained in its semi-desolated state. Mayo (1988) describes it graphically as a ‘total war memorial’ which verges on the theatrical; the monuments serve as stages, the visitor-pilgrim. become actors recapturing the scene of the tragedy. The desolation is punctuated by large notices requiring ‘SILENCE’ or invoking ‘REMEMBER’. ‘The signs may seem unnecessary’, writes Mayo ‘but the visitor’s role of silence is ensured and legitimised by these symbolic cue cards’ (p.233). Other preserved sites may not work as effectively; as Jackson (1984) has pointed out, many military cemeteries and battle parks are used as recreational space as well as places of contemplation. For instance, in the Vimy Memorial Park (near Arras, northern France), joggers and racing cyclists are as numerous as the Canadian tourists visiting the preserved trenchlines and tunnels. Many loci of remembrance, such as Verdun and the Newfoundland Memorial Park (Somme, France) have recently had to erect signage requesting visitors to observe behaviour and decorum appropriate to a sacred site, not a theme park (note 9).
As memories erode it will become increasingly difficult to regard such spaces as designated places of peace or pilgrimage. This is not a new dilemma: mass tourism has long threatened the avowed sanctity of such ‘sacred places’. Such ethical issues are especially complex in globally symbolic sites.In Hiroshima the tensions over the preservation of the A-Bomb Dome are, according to Mayo (1988) part of a difficult question which strikes at the very roots of our ability to provide sacred memorials that both honour the past and its dead, while still offering visions towards a peaceful future. In comparison with the complex semiotics of environments associated with atrocity or warfare, transfrontier ‘peace parks’ in areas of shared ecological or landscape value avoid the ethical dilemmas inherent in preservation and remembrance, and as such may be considered more effective forms of ‘landscapes for peace’. As the examples in this paper show, however, there is little guarantee that mere designation will result in long-term good relations between antipathetic neighbours.
Nevertheless, the outcome of the Gallipoli Peninsula National Historical Park competition points, perhaps, to some ways in which more ‘difficult’ sites might be approached. The winning proposal argued for a more abstract understanding of peace, rather than one dominated by commemoration of specific acts of warfare. Many of the short-listed entrants were minimally invasive, with an almost non-existent impact on the landscape. Instead of objectifying memory by siting memorials and building museums, the winning design argued that only subjectivised and self-negotiated journeys can be relevant in such spaces.
In Gallipoli, it was hoped that the notion of a ‘peace landscape’ might become a virtual. as well as a physical reality. Although this has yet to be realised it is an interesting innovation. In Belfast, too, the first markers set down in the margins of the peace process have eschewed plinth-bound thinking for interventions that are often fleeting and temporary. Carefully sited public artworks have been used to critique and develop a visual language of peace through remembrance, while still possessing the power to move. In such places, perhaps, a genuine collaboration between artist, designer, planner and community will extend the discourse of peace and help generate positive political solutions.
Notes
1 Peace Pillars were erected in many places across the world as gifts from a Japanese religious group. In London they can be found in Dulwich Park and Tavistock Square.
2 A further pragmatic function of a park was to act as a cordon sanitaire. This was part of the rationale, for instance, behind the Parque Nacionale Fronterizo Darien in the isthmus of Panama, where it was intended to control the spread of foot-and-mouth disease into Central America.
3 On the 100th anniversary of the Kruger National Park, South Africa (March1998) President Nelson Mandela disclosed that negotiations were underway to establish a ‘peace park’ that will transverse the borders of South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Kruger National Park is renowned for its bio- diversity.
See www.saep.org/subject/natcon/peaceparks.html (16 January
2000).
4 An active exchange programme continues between the cities of Seattle (USA) and Tashkent (Uzbekistan). The programme has involved school children and teachers, mountain climbers, chefs, lawyers, broadcasters and folk dancers. The programme is publicised on the internet: www.ci.seattle.wa.us/oir/Tashkent.htmI (16 January 2000).
5 The Norwegian team were Lasse Brogger and AnneStine Reine.
6 Internet address www.vitruvius.arch.metu.edu.tr/gallipolienglish.html (last date available, 11 October 1999) The competition was administered from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. There were over 110 entrants tothe competition. Of the 25 prize winners, 11 originated from Turkey, 2 each from the Netherlands, Germany, New Zealand and Australia, and one each from Spain, France, Italy, and Israel. The single UK team to be listed in the prizewinners (honourable mention) was from BDG McColl, London.
See also www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/parks.htm (16 January 2000). The web-site proposed by the winning team seems not to have been created. The competition website is now unavailable (January 2000).
7 Hains Point competition attracted 930 entries. The project received congressional approval for the use of a federal site in 1986, the project raised $300,000, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Dillingham, 1993).
8. Following national apathy and local protest the memorial garden was quietly shelved in late 1998.
9 At the new Canadian war memorial in Green Park, London, signs had to be placed asking visitors to observe the fountain as a monument to the dead of two world wars, not as a place to dip one's feet.
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