Social Rebuilding of a Landscape: Monks’ Island (1900–2000)

Territories in Question: Routes in Territories
By Patrick Prado
English

Monks’ island in the department of Morbihan is marked by a new use of private and common spaces and therefore of the landscape. The population change of the past thirty years due to the quantitative preponderance of second homes is accompanied by a radical change in home building and by the imposition of a prevailing new model of landscape. The latter is based on territorial marking, privatization of the relation to space that is more and more sectorized and segmented, « intimization » of nature and withdrawal into the private field where the tree is the main material, social and symbolic marker. The closure of the landscape, as the most visible result, is hard to accept for old residents who could not imagine that one day they would not see the sea from their house. Some of them claim a « landscape chart » that would replace the exclusive values of appropriation and individuation.

Keywords

  • island
  • Monks’ island
  • closure
  • landscape
  • tree
  • neo-rurality
  • second home
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