Experiencing the landscape: landscape agency in a multifunctional valley after dam removal on the Sélune River, France

Abstract

Here, we examine landscape as an actor of ecological restoration projects rather than as a resource. Based on relational thinking and the notion of agency, we aim to identify affordances recognized by local actors and to mobilize relational thinking to understand human-river relations. Although restoration projects have mainly been tackled from the point of view of contestation and landscape attachment, we question the capacity of these operations to produce multifunctional landscapes. We analyze the way in which the radical transformation of a landscape, resulting from the removal of two hydroelectric dams, led stakeholders to act. Our results not only reveal the limits of engineering approaches that struggle to overcome the nature-culture dualism, but also the value of integrating non-humans when we consider relationships rather than only objects. We analyze how the potential uses of a valley are revealed by the radical landscape transformations brought about by an ecological restoration project. We observe how the stakeholders project themselves into this new configuration, the resulting landscape visions it inspires in them, and how new functions emerge from the relationships woven between a new landscape and its stakeholders.