ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some of the dilemmas associated with landscape and identity in the twenty-first century. In this 'century of the migrant', the discourse on landscape and identity merits more attention and reflection, in particular in landscape architecture, a discipline that is engaged in active production of landscape. The concept of the Right to Landscape is derived from an interpretation of landscape as a universal theoretical concept, similar to the concept of universal human rights. It stems from the notion that landscape is at once the relationship between humans and their surroundings, and the confluence of physical subsistence and psychological necessities. In contemporary nomadic cultures, there is an inherent tension between a right to self-determination underpinned by a particular cultural identity that embodies movement in the landscape, and the need to sustain livelihood. The identities of the nomad, the uprooted, the displaced, the migrant and the refugee will never be set in static geography.
