6 Power and Change in Cultural Landscapes

Cultural landscapes and power

A cultural landscape is shaped by interactions among people, society, and the natural environment. It includes visible features, such as buildings, roads, farms, monuments, and place names, alongside less visible meanings, including memories, beliefs, and claims to belonging.

Landscapes can preserve evidence of earlier societies while also reflecting present-day struggles. As political and economic power shifts, the features and meanings of places can change.

Colonialism and its continuing legacy

Colonial powers transformed landscapes to assert authority and exploit land and labor. They built administrative centers, transport routes, plantations, and extractive infrastructure. Maps, property boundaries, and renamed places could make territories more legible to colonial governments.

These changes could marginalize Indigenous land relationships and languages, even where Indigenous communities and place-based practices endured. Colonial landscapes are not simply remnants of the past: monuments, land ownership, and official place names can continue to privilege colonial histories.

Renaming places, restoring Indigenous names, and supporting Indigenous stewardship can challenge that legacy. Decolonizing a landscape involves more than changing its appearance; it also raises questions about who has authority over land and whose knowledge and history are recognized.

Nationalism and public memory

Nationalism links a population to a shared national identity and territory. Governments and movements can make that identity visible through flags, monuments, museums, official languages, public holidays, and street names. These features bring particular accounts of national history into everyday spaces.

Renaming streets after national figures, for example, can replace colonial symbols while promoting a new national story. However, national landscapes are selective: they may recognize some groups and histories while making others less visible. Disputes over monuments, language signs, and place names are therefore also disputes over memory and belonging.

Migration and remaking places

Migration changes cultural landscapes as people bring languages, religious practices, foodways, businesses, and social networks to new places. A neighborhood may acquire multilingual signs, new shops, community centers, or places of worship. These changes can create spaces of connection and support while reshaping how residents understand local identity.

Migrants do not simply reproduce a homeland unchanged. They adapt buildings, practices, and traditions to new social settings, producing new local forms. Research on Cuban migration in Miami describes communities adapting architectural spaces to sustain social customs and collective memory within an American urban environment. Such landscapes can express both attachment to a place of origin and participation in a new home.

Globalization and local adaptation

Globalization intensifies connections through trade, media, travel, migration, and communication technologies. Its effects can be seen in international retail chains, tourism development, new transport infrastructure, and the spread of popular cultural forms. These changes can make places look more alike and put pressure on local businesses, languages, or land uses.

Globalization does not simply replace one culture with another. Global influences are often adapted to local conditions, while local traditions may be revived, shared, or reshaped through wider networks. Linguistically, globalization can encourage dominant languages and standardized forms while also supporting localization and renewed regional identities. A landscape may show both common global features and locally distinctive ones.

Reading change in a landscape

Analyze a changing landscape by asking what has changed in its buildings, land use, infrastructure, signs, place names, and monuments. Consider who shaped those changes, including governments, businesses, residents, migrants, and Indigenous communities.

Then examine whose identity or history is represented. Notice which languages, religions, and memories are prominent or absent. Consider who benefits and who may lose access or influence, including through land control, displacement, conservation, or economic change. Finally, ask how people respond: communities may preserve, adapt, contest, or reclaim places and their meanings.

The same feature can mean different things to different groups. A monument might symbolize national independence to some residents and exclusion to others; a place name may preserve local memory or mark colonial authority. Landscapes are both material settings and arenas in which power and identity are negotiated.