The relationship between war and landscape has long been acknowledged but has only recently been explored. Environmental historians, geographers, and heritage scholars have studied what they call “militarized landscapes” and the “environmental impact of war,” while battlefield archaeologists and memory scholars have examined World War sites as memory-scapes.
Yet the specific contribution of the landscape project, as a practice that engages with time, vegetation, topography, communities (directly or indirectly affected), public accessibility, and the slow recovery of damaged ecosystems and social ties, to the landscapes that war leaves behind, remains comparatively underexamined. This is the gap this issue aims to address.
Wars do not end when the fighting stops. They settle into the ground as unexploded weapons, contaminated soils, mined fields, scarred forests, and ruined villages and social relationships; they persist as memory, absence, and a transformed relationship between communities and the places they inhabit. A century after World War I, seventy years after the partition of Korea, fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, and a few decades after the Kosovo War, while new conflicts continue to devastate landscapes, the question of how the landscape project engages with war-affected places appears more urgent than ever.
The working hypothesis for this issue is that the landscape project is particularly well suited to engage with the long temporality of war’s aftermath. War-affected territories are, in many ways, extreme cases of the kinds of sites the discipline has learned to address: invisible archaeologies, socially fragile territories, post-disaster reconstructions, and places to be regenerated.
These places pose difficult questions. What design responsibilities do we hold toward generations who lived, died, and will live on these grounds? How do we mediate between commemoration and consumption, between walking through and staying within a landscape of grief? When is non-intervention the most responsible design act? And what utopian charge is required to imagine peace where there was destruction?
We welcome contributions, including theoretical essays, design research, project descriptions, and critical case studies, that address one or more of the following lines of inquiry: battlefields as palimpsests; demilitarized zones and accidental ecologies; demining, remediation, and the return of the land; conversions of military landscapes and infrastructures; memorial landscapes and the ethics of accessibility; and contemporary conflicts and the design vision.
The issue brings together contributions on landscapes that have been or continue to be affected by armed conflict and that have been the focus of projects for protection, ecological recovery, or renewed public access.
Keywords: warscapes; landscape design; ecological recovery; memory.
The call is open until 30th November 2026
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