Abstrakt
The North Bohemian Basin (Czech Republic) represents a landscape profoundly altered by opencast mining. While mining started to affect the landscape already at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, socialism intensified and industrialised it.
Attempts to reclaim the mined-out land and restore the landscape started under socialism. Hydric reclamation turning the region into an aquatic landscape of leisure and recreation was considered.
Large hydric reclamation projects then started to be implemented in the late 1990s. Thus, there seems to be continuity in thinking about, planning and treating the post-mining landscape from socialism up to the present.
In the paper, we explore narratives about landscape reclamation drawing on official visual and textual documents from both socialism and after, and interviews with experts in landscape reclamation. We identify key features and images/ideas of the landscape to be produced and show that ideas about reclamation and its form in post-socialism are rooted in ideas about the landscape similar to those from socialism.
We trace the continuity of imaginaries of the future landscape while acknowledging the shifts brought about by the transformation processes launched in 1989. We conclude that water has become a key feature of the imaginary future landscape.