Landscape as History: Environmental Discourses, Transformations, and Their Legacies

Date: 21 Mar 2025

Time: 9:30 AM –10:30 AM

Venue: SDE3 Level 4 LT 427

Landscape as History: Environmental Discourses, Transformations, and Their Legacies

Landscapes are not passive backdrops or merely results of human actions but are historical agents that shape and are shaped by social, political, and environmental forces. Landscape narratives—whether of wilderness, degradation, or improvement—have been used to decry or justify environmental transformations, from conquest and resource extraction to urban development and ecological conservation. This talk explores how environmental transformations intersect with cultural, political, and economic discourses that justify, shape, or reinterpret them.

To illustrate these dynamics, I examine two case studies: nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong and twentieth-century postcolonial Singapore. In Hong Kong, British colonizers framed the island as a “barren rock,” a powerful myth that erased precolonial landscapes and justified drastic environmental interventions such as afforestation and land reclamation. These projects not only reshaped the physical environment but also reinforced colonial ideologies of progress and control. In contrast, Singapore’s urban greening efforts since 1965 became a tool for postcolonial state-building, national identity formation, and global branding offering a new perspective on the definition and management of urban heritage.

By integrating research, teaching, and curatorial work, this talk brings together insights from environmental history, landscape studies, and heritage conservation. Recognizing landscapes as historical actors allows us to rethink conservation strategies and the role of history in shaping the discipline of landscape architecture.

Dr Maxime Decaudin is a Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the National University of Singapore. Situated at the intersection of landscape studies and environmental history, his research examines the historical agency of nature in Asian contexts. Before completing a PhD in Art History at Sorbonne Université titled ‘A Barren Rock’: An Environmental History of Hong Kong Landscapes under British Colonization, 1794-1898, Maxime Decaudin was emerging curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in 2018-2019 and a doctoral fellow at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in 2016-2017. Maxime is a licensed French architect who graduated from École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and has been teaching landscape architecture for more than ten years.