The impact of economic, social and political factors on the landscape structure of the Vidzeme Uplands in Latvia
Abstract Changes in landscape structure in a typical part of the Vidzeme Uplands in central Latvia during the 20th century are analysed and anticipated changes in the 21st century are projected. Forest areas gradually increased in the Vidzeme Uplands over the course of the 20th century. This increase was associated with several factors: the economic policy in Latvia during the 1930s, the exile of farmers in 1940 and 1949 after the Soviet occupation of Latvia, the aggregation of land into collective farms, the amalgamation of small collective farms, the formation of large-scale Soviet collective farms, and widespread land melioration. Since land reform in the 1990s, following the restoration…
Place Attachment and Its Consequence for Landscape-Scale Management and Readiness to Participate: Social Network Complexity in the Post-Soviet Rural Context of Latvia and Estonia
This paper uses the tripartite place attachment framework to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/frameworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest wh…
Soviet era landscape change and the post-Soviet legacy in Latvia
The collectivisation of agriculture and the development and application of land improvement “melioration” programmes and technologies, as well as the construction of kolkhoz centres during the Soviet era in Latvia was extensive and has a legacy on the post-Soviet landscape and agricultural economy. A study of a number of rural municipalities in different landscape types, through the comparison of maps from the early 20th century with those from around 2000, and one example with maps from the 1960s and 1990s, together with field work, revealed the degree of change that had taken place. In particular, there was a significant increase in forest – despite the kolkhoz system being targeted at in…
Rural Society, Social Inclusion and Landscape Change in Central and Eastern Europe:A Case Study of Latvia
The countryside of Europe is undergoing many social, economic and environmental changes as a result of depopulation and agricultural land abandonment. This trend, driven in part by the wide disparity of income levels between rural and urban inhabitants, is particularly evident in the Central and Eastern European countries such as Latvia, which joined the EU in 2004 and in 2007. Research was undertaken in Latvia in 2003, the year before it joined the EU, to explore this trend, as manifested in the relationship of people to the countryside, using focus groups and a questionnaire survey. The results showed that, although Latvians retain a strong regard for their traditional countryside landsca…
The perception of abandoned farmland by local people and experts: Landscape value and perspectives on future land use
Abstract Abandonment of agricultural land is a common feature of areas undergoing a range of urbanisation and marginalisation processes across Europe and beyond. This is also the case in Latvia, particularly in the period since 1990, when after regaining independence from the Soviet Union land was restored to its previous owners or their descendants. Many of these people have moved to cities and lack the interest in or the necessary capital for starting farming enterprises. As a result, large areas of land were abandoned, leading to spontaneous afforestation and with associated changes in landscape structure, ecological function and aesthetic value. While there has been an increase in resea…
Management of Cultural Landscapes: What Does this Mean in the Former Soviet Union? A Case Study from Latvia
Concern about changing cultural landscapes has increased recently, with the advent of the European Landscape Convention placing signatory countries in a position of having to develop action for protecting and managing cultural landscapes. In countries of the former Soviet Union the landscape underwent many changes as a result of agricultural collectivisation and its aftermath. This situation has been analysed for six sample rural municipalities (pagasts) in Latvia, one of the three former Soviet countries to join the European Union (EU), using maps from the period 1901 to 1927 (to represent the ‘traditional landscape’) and 1997 orthophotographs updated to 2000 (to represent the ‘post-Soviet…