Unruly Landscapes: Mobility, Transience, and Transformation

For geographers (both “physical” and “human”), all landscapes—while notionally associated with stability and permanence in the popular imagination—are unruly. By adjusting the temporal viewfinder through which a tectonic plate, mountain range, coastline, or urban settlement is viewed and speeding up the “playback,” we see that all human and non-human life is perched on a heaving, groaning, folding crust of rock. Water and vegetation, too, are never still but in constant, reshaping motion, sometimes as the result of human intervention, sometimes of their own accord. Movement—and mobility—are thus essential considerations in any conceptualization of the landscape and both the source and effect of its unruliness.