Nature on the Move

Nature is the main attraction of the Icelandic tourism sector. The country’s diverse nature and extreme landscapes attract tourists who want to move across the vast spaces of a sparsely populated country, visiting one gem after another to collect unique experiences. Mobility is central to the rapidly growing experience-oriented tourism that has emerged in Iceland since 2010. The tourists must be transported between sites for attaining their experiences and consequently the roads become essential to the expanding tourism sector—driving being the primary mode of travel. A blooming car rental business makes sure that a good majority of over two million annual visitors are able to rent their own car and drive from one place to another. 60% actually opt to drive independently in rented cars to visit numerous sites that evoke their interest. The island is not small, and visitors tend to drive great distances to reach destinations—averaging up to 300 km per day or 2150 km per visit during the summer months (Guðmundsson 2018). It follows that a significant amount of time is spent on the roads and in most cases car renting tourists end up spending more time on the road than actually on site enjoying the marvellous sights they have picked as destinations. However, interestingly, little focus has been placed on this part of the travel experiences tourists have whilst in Iceland. It is as if the time between sites is somehow dead or constitutes a pause in the experience of the traveller. What matters is the site. The rest is just driving.

The extensive road network in Iceland passes through dramatic landscapes. The road itself gives access to the abundance of diverse natural attractions and urban settlements. Roads pass through space—but also through time (Lund and Jóhannesson 2014), opening vistas of areas that have been left out of modern development as well as going through deserted landscapes and wastelands that for centuries remained untravelled or that have been sources of mystery, superstition and fear to the local mind. The roads also tell stories of settlement and hope in agricultural and industrial development. They map earlier farming in the lower highlands where vegetation may now be gone and they mark the areas of industry and fishing, some of which still flourish whereas other have faded out or are mostly abandoned.

Whilst the road network connects different areas of the country together, it is more than a pragmatic network linking different places. The roads give meaning and context to how the landscape is understood and the way it has formed material culture (Cresswell 2001, 2006; Hvattum et al. 2016; Urry 2007). The roads themselves in fact are an important linkage between nature and culture. The roadscape dominates modes of interacting with the environment and thereby shapes the understanding of landscape through movement, which also determines how the land is seen and experienced. The movement and the serial views it generates are formative for narratives of relations of the natural and built environment, and movement along the road translates to a sensory experience of the terrain. But roadbuilding also transforms the landscape, physically altering the environment and shaping the terrain the roads run through. Thus roads enable and frame different relations with the environment, whether due to the motion of travelling along the route, manipulation of the terrain or by bringing traffic to new areas that then become open to new development. Those new developments then bring about transformation of the social or natural context that in turn leads to new interventions and new urban processes.

The ubiquitous nature may be what attracts visitors to the country. It is however the predefined location or destination marketed as a primary place of tourists’ cultural exchange that, as a rule, receives most attention in the development of the tourism sector, not the engagement with the landscape passed to get there (Áfangastaðaáætlun DMP á Suðurlandi, 2019). Whilst roads and roadside scenery have elsewhere been created specifically to be seen from a moving car constituting a carefully constructed world beyond the windshield, in Iceland roads largely appear as the blind spot of Icelandic tourism. There are only a few examples of the route being emphasised as a tourist experience in itself, as in the newly conceived Arctic Coast Way, but here the route fundamentally traces a journey along existing roads with indications of where might be interesting views to see. These roads lack the comprehensive envisioning of the route or parkway as presented by the likes of MacKaye in the early decades of the twentieth century (Bonnemaison and Macy 2011), roads that were strategically designed in order to project a vision of the rural, create economic prosperity in the countryside or reconcile the experience of the wilderness with social ideas. This raises questions regarding the role and place of the road and mobility for the growing tourism sector. How are relations with the landscape formed? Is the experience of nature primarily constructed through preconceived notions of the destination, the designed tourist pit stop, and if so, how does that destination provide interaction with the landscape before and beyond it?

This chapter discusses two roads in Þingvellir National Park as examples of how roads transform the physical environment and form new relations to space. The journey to Þingvellir National Park and the waterfall of Gullfoss and Geysir hot spring has been coined as the Golden Circle and is the most popular tourist route in South Iceland. The route covers about 300 km and attracts the majority of the approximately two million visitors coming to Iceland yearly. The chapter argues that roads are instrumental in shaping the environment and the relation to landscape, yet they appear as a blind spot when comes to the creating of a comprehensive cultural and physical landscape. Even if the roads are central to a mobility-based tourism in Iceland, they are marginal in regard to how attractions in the landscape are conceived. In relation to the two roads discussed, it is argued that they appear as autonomous elements of infrastructures in the landscape. It is this autonomy of the modern state road that Harvey and Knox have criticised (2012), in which the manifestation of infrastructural projects is born out of the external expertise of engineering as opposed to roads that contribute to the multifarious dialogue with the environment (Picon, 1992).

The roads discussed in this chapter are either relegated to the past, despite their critical and cultural value, or are made to appear as if from the past. Thus the element of the road itself seems disjointed from its context and falls short of being realised as an instrument that comprehensively activates engagement with the cultural and physical context.

With Roads Come New Spaces and Landscapes

The modern Icelandic road system is generated through the advent and enormous growth of motorised transport in the twentieth century. Through time societies have placed different importance and value on the design and physical construction of roads. The absolute dominance of the road in the modern period however is unique: modernity is the era of the road. The study of roads in shaping the larger environment and our understanding of it has attracted diverse research across the fields of cultural history, architecture, urbanism, geography and related disciplines (Appleyard et al. 1964; Cresswell 2001, 2006; Louter 2006; Merriman 2007; Urry 2007; Whisnant 2006; Christof and Zeller 2007). Two seminal volumes published in 1971 and 1972 were of critical importance in terms of shifting views of how to read and understand the urban or man-made environment. Both of these books argue that understanding the emerging urban sprawl or formless urban development that was proliferating at the time and defied modernist principles, made it necessary to shift views from the doctrine of form and order of the urban to the dynamics of movement. Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour analysed the urbanism of Las Vegas and presented a groundbreaking critical analysis of the emerging condition of urban sprawl in Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The study centred around the analysis of the main street of Las Vegas at a time when the US main street was a far cry from what urbanists and architects considered as worthy of investigation at the time of late modernism. But the study of the local vernacular and of the sprawling development of casinos, motels, gas stations, fast-food restaurants, signage and scattering of shops and cafes demonstrated how the road and the speed of motorised traffic articulated spatial order and urban development. It became clear from the study that Las Vegas was not understood by walking alone unlike the familiar historical urban centre; cultural values were shifting and instead the local vernacular was generated in relation to the speed and movement of the car. The book is a key reference of a new spatial order and how urbanism emerged when unrestrained by prevailing modernist planning principles of the times. Reyner Banham, an engineer and architectural historian, deciphers the urbanism of the amorphous city of Los Angeles as landscapes defined as different sets of ecologies; the beach, the flatlands, the foothills and the freeway, in his seminal work Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham 1971). Banham explores the phenomenon of the megalopolis that defied any reference to the historical city at the time, by way of movement by car through the city referring to the freeway as a particular element constituting the city’s fabric, referring to it as Autopia. The understanding of car travel as a new episteme is reflected in Banham’s remark that “like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I had to learn to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original” (Banham 1971, 5). The book unravels the seemingly disintegrated urban form as a comprehensible reading when viewed from the idea of moving fluently through its diffused urban texture.

These early post-modern readings of the emerging urban condition emphasise mobility as a principal element in understanding our relation to the built environment. This seemingly random and amorphous transformation of the urban particularly in the United States originated in changing cultural values and the increased use of the private car. Both books take mobility further and argue that movement becomes a catalyst or generator of new urban processes with the scattering and dispersal of various interventions in the landscape like motels, gas stations and malls. This urban world may not appear as constituting the city when regarded in a traditional manner, as in the nodal centre made of rigid geometries of urban planning but is a world reflecting new urbanisation processes that contribute to the making of an extended urban terrain without a centre or an edge. In this urban landscape, movement ceases to occupy the secondary role that the Athens Charter from 1933 had reserved for it, a charter produced as a result of the fourth International Congress of Modern Architecture focusing on urbanism and planning. Instead, movement becomes the protagonist of the emerging urban condition; a new urban condition that is not a compact city but a territory, a new landscape.

Roadbuilding and a Rough Terrain

Until the twentieth century Iceland was a country without roads. With the extreme landscape and the northerly latitude Iceland has always been a sparsely populated country and the lack of transportation plagued Iceland since the early settlement period. Routes were marked by cairns or conical stone structures across the heathlands guiding people in poor weather, and wayfinding depended on the skill to read the elements and landscape to navigate the rough terrain, as discussed elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 9). Journeys on land were primarily made on horseback, if not by foot, and horse carriages only became more common in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In terms of roads, Iceland was pre-industrial until the early years of the twentieth century.

The modern road system in Iceland amounts to nothing less than a dramatic transformation and reinvention of landscape. The modern road system was not a modernisation of a pre-existing network of routes from one part of the country to another like happened in many other western countries. Rather, the modern roads broke new land and created new trajectories across the countryside. Largely inaccessible terrains and areas that presented major hurdles to people who needed to get from one place to another because of glaciers or uncrossable rivers now appear entirely harmless, and even to some extent placid formations of nature to be viewed through windscreens rather than battled and overcome. It is a transformation that engenders an altered mode of interaction with nature.

The modern construction of Icelandic national identity goes hand in hand with the road system: road and bridge building, overcoming obstacles and taming nature are all conspicuous features of how Icelanders see themselves. The collective victory over nature embodied in a system of roads on which everyone can move effortlessly has replaced the individual heroism necessary to move through an often unfriendly landscape and survive extreme weather conditions. Road construction was in its infancy in the last decades of the nineteenth century. National roads were a new category of roads stipulated in the Roads Act of 1894 and during the period of home rule in 1904–1918 road and bridge building increased greatly. By the end of the home rule, roads were estimated to be five hundred kilometres long. The longest road section was about 100 km, running from Reykjavík eastwards to Hvolsvöllur. With the dawn of the age of horse-drawn carriages, road construction was primarily considered for them as cars were few; the age of the automobile is considered to have only begun in 1913 with a slow increase in the number of cars in the years following. These roads were the primary transport routes as no railways were laid. There were ideas to build a railway from Reykjavík eastwards to the river Þjórsá, not least to facilitate the transport of agricultural products to the Reykjavík region, but the scale of the project proved too costly to be undertaken for a small nation. It would take most of the twentieth century for the road system to connect to the various regions and only in 1974 was a ring road encircling the island finally completed, a feat achieved on the 1100-year anniversary of settlement. This heralded a moment of pride and was celebrated as an engineering victory with the bridging across the rough terrain of glacial rivers in the south-east region.

A Paradox of Roads at Þingvellir Past and Present

Currently, the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration is responsible for 13,000 km of roads nationwide. These roads were designed and originally built to service regional transport and the growing agricultural and fisheries sector. Roads are a common infrastructure providing services to a vast range of needs and users, all comingling along this principal vascular system. The continued degrowth of historical agricultural farmlands across the country has seen drastic transformation to the historical countryside. Whilst the population of farmlands decreases, the geography of the countryside has been altered with new farming technologies, new industries and production processes, infrastructure and recreational landscapes for tourists and urbanites, and now the roads are increasingly occupied by visitors arriving from afar to experience the natural landscape. In this light, the road also provides different meanings at different times in history serving different needs and uses.

Whilst tourists co-use the common utility roads, one particular earlier road was conceived and built with the primary objective of facilitating the exploration of landscape and enjoyment of the sights. This was an early road built for carriages to enable guests to travel and view the dramatic and spectacular landscapes of the historical area of Þingvellir and onward to the Geysir hot spring area. This road is known as the King’s Road (Kóngsvegurinn in Icelandic) and was built in 1907 for the occasion of King of Denmark Frederik VIII visiting Iceland. He was not the first king to travel this route, as his predecessor King Christian IX travelled to Þingvellir in 1874 to deliver Icelanders a constitution during festivities celebrating 1000 years of settlement. With the ‘golden waterfall’ (Gullfoss) in Hvítá glacial river at the edge of the uninhabited highlands and the Geysir hot spring hurling boiling water dozens of meters in the air, these places were renowned in Iceland and further afield with explorers coming to Iceland for a few centuries in order to see its magnificent nature, but no place in Iceland is as interwoven with the history of the nation as Þingvellir (Lund and Loftsdóttir 2016). Þingvellir (meaning literally assembly plains) were where a national assembly, Alþingi, was founded in the year 930 and open air assemblies took place annually until the late eighteenth century when Alþingi was moved to Reykjavík. It is a site of immense wonder and natural beauty; a rift valley that traditionally has been considered to mark the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, surrounded by mountain ranges and the largest natural lake in Iceland. It is a site of great historical, cultural and geological significance (Helgadóttir 2011).

For the visit of Frederik VIII, an entourage of 200 people were due to undertake a week-long journey across the southern region to experience the spectacular sites en route. With no road network to speak of, the parliament of Iceland launched a road building project allowing for horses and carriages to transport the king as far as Geysir. The whole tour continued to Gullfoss and Þjórsá before returning back to Reykjavík, but the main road building was the leg from Þingvellir to Geysir. Along this route were rivers to forge, and bridges were built over the rivers of Brúará and Tungufljót. The project on the whole is considered to be the largest construction project implemented in Iceland in relation to the annual national budget (14%) until the twenty-first century. The Kings’s Road was of great significance, as prior to this only a simple path reached Þingvellir. At a time when the majority of Icelanders still lived in vernacular turf buildings with thick earth walls and grass roofs, road building was an unfamiliar task. The enormous extent of the project and the technical challenge was unprecedented and required expertise. Iceland’s first educated engineer managed the project, and further training was received from abroad, from Norwegians who had the engineering experience and skills to harness the rough terrain. It would be considered a simple gravel road today, but it crossed a challenging topography including lava fields and was built with hand tools, pick-axes and shovels. The road was used well into the middle of the twentieth century and the first cars arriving in the country drove along this route to Þingvellir and onward to Geysir, but with time it fell into neglect when modern roads came to replace it (Sigurðsson 1978). Thus it originated as a road for a king, then became a road for cars, turning into a path for horse riding and leisure. The remains that can still be seen and have not been wiped out due to new roadbuilding and the consequent earthworks are overgrown and hard to find.

Since 1907 traffic to Þingvellir has only increased, and the road network expanded accordingly. The site was declared a National Park in 1928, two years prior to the 1930 millennial celebration of the first national assembly. With increased travel and car use the park, which is only about 40 km from Reykjavík, became increasingly popular amongst Icelanders and foreigners alike. The tour companies vie for tourists for bus tours along the route as the Golden Circle is still the most sought-after tour available. With increased numbers of visitors it was deemed necessary to widen and reconstruct a part of the road of Gjábakki in 2018 along the Þingvellir lake. The project posed an issue with how to enlarge a road in a national park. The lava fields and fauna are fragile, and for its unique ecology and historical significance the site had been declared a UNESCO heritage site in 2004. Due to it being a national park no foreign material could be introduced into the area, posing a challenge for the construction. Led by landscape architects and environmentalists, the turf and topsoil adjoining the road was removed prior to construction, and kept whilst roadbuilding was underway, keeping intact the entangled ecosystem of seeds, plants, moss, insects and soil (Aðalgeirsdóttir et al. 2008). On completion of the road building, the whole ground cover was relocated on the banks of the roads, providing the most resilient method of enabling local habitat to restore itself following large-scale earthworks. This was also done to fulfil the intent to make the road look as if it had been there forever and in harmony with the surrounding landscape, unlike most other cases of roadbuilding where foreign seeds are used to sow into the ecological wounds of road cutting after the construction work is finished. With the restitution of the top soil, a fertile ground for care played out for the environment. Thus, now the Þingvellir boasts Gjábakkavegur as one of the most progressive experiments for roadwork landscaping in Iceland in way of care for nature and ecology.

With a more-than human approach to design, the new road traversing the park embraces ecological reclamation. Yet, despite the care for the inevitable rupture and the effort put into maintaining the rhizomatic network of habitat, the road has no relation to another layer of entanglement in the soil, the layer of the forgotten King’s Road lying beneath the road of Gjábakki. The King’s Road remains largely lost due to neglect with only a few remains that are not hidden from view. The road was built to go through Almannagjá in Þingvellir along the path of Gjábakki on to Laugarvatn, across the hills onwards to Geysir and Gullfoss avoiding the lowland marshes where the national road passes today. All the counties of Iceland partook in this enormous venture with the provision of manual labour, funding and the supply of goods as well as lending horses and carriages for the travels of the king’s entourage. Although the road was built to carry the royals in a horse-drawn carriage, the king chose to ride a horse. It is somehow incongruous when the tourist numbers have reached a figure that supersedes six times the population of Iceland that the first tourist road in Iceland has virtually been lost, and that such an enormous project was based on a misconception of need and purpose with the king riding across the landscape instead of sitting in a carriage.

These roads are paradoxical. One which was the first tourist road in Iceland and a great engineering and transport feat of its time is forgotten, whilst the other, catering for the escalating rise culminating in over two million tourists yearly, is meant to look as if it causes no disruption to the biosystem, both within a national park which according to its regulation has as its aim to protect the landscape, the cultural as well as its natural environment (Reglugerð um Þjóðgarðinn á Þingvöllum 2005). No signage or reference is made to the King’s Road in the park, to its location or significance to the history of the site, even despite more recent discoveries of the forgotten road being made—incidentally the discovery of a segment of the old road was made whilst roadbuilding of a new road was underway and resulted with the old road being covered up again (Viðgerð á Þingvöllum afhjúpar Konungsveg (2014). In the policy statement of the national park, a reference is made to the preservation of the cultural landscape but only the remains and ruins adhering to the assembly gathering of earlier times are mentioned (Stefnumótun 2019). These mundane material structures register histories and expectations of state presence and state neglect. The blanking of the historical structure, embedded in social practice and historical references, masks how the road is in its multifarious way fundamental in the making of the modern landscape. Both these roads are detached from the context, emerging from an engineering practice of autonomy as discussed by Harvey and Knox (2012).

The landscape of Þingvellir has been altered and transformed since the time of settlement. Thus, there is an anomaly in relegating elements of historically instrumental man-made landscape to the past and concurrently aiming for making traces of current intervention disappear. Denis E. Cosgrove writes about landscapes as a cultural concept and a way of seeing. A landscape way of seeing is about our relation to the world and the productive human relations. The system of production and exchange is a phenomenon of central historical importance in making sense of our own world. “The unifying principle of a landscape derives from the active engagement of a human subject with the material object” (Cosgrove 1998, 13). Landscapes are mediated through human experience, not just the physical construction of the world but a way of seeing the world.

Routes, Landscape and Destinations—And Being in the Landscape

The ecological care with which Gjábakkavegur is constructed is laudable and exemplary for new approaches to road-making. It also, however, tacitly emphasises another perspective—namely that the movement of tourists from one place to another is a necessary evil, environmentally suspect and, in terms of the travel experience itself, insignificant. But inevitably, roads transform the environment and generate new landscapes. This attention to the road cut and design in the landscape has replaced a former way of building roads when heavy equipment was used to push and shove the ground to form the earth banks necessary. The road cut was often excessive and due to lack of harvesting of seeds of indigenous plants; foreign seeds were used for sowing and healing the scars. Only recently has emphasis been placed on minimising interruptive earthworks with heavy machinery but recent research has still concluded that the visual impact of roads in Iceland is greater than in neighbouring countries (Orion and Storð 2006). Now, a greater emphasis is placed by the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration (IRCA) on how roads appear in the landscape and of how they are designed to sit in the topography—the IRCA being responsible for planning, designing, construction, maintenance and services of the majority of roads in Iceland. A primary concern in road building is the economy and safety of the roads but in recent years the question of how they are perceived in the landscape has become more important with the intent to minimise how the road cuts jar with the landscape.

Thus in current practice greater emphasis is paid to the aesthetic experience of roads in the landscape. However, it is not moving along the road that is considered of importance, but rather the experience of seeing the road objectively in the landscape. This is somewhat unlike the roadbuilding in Norway, which is often referred to by the IRCA, where more extensive aesthetic guidelines emphasise a multi-layered approach, including how materials are used in relation to site and the experience of movement and sight lines viewed when in motion (Elvebakk 2016).

Despite this apparent disjuncture between movement and location, there is a long history of designing travel routes for the appreciation of nature. Earlier in the twentieth century several roads in different countries were built as places themselves with avenues for scenic explorations. In the United States professionals across the disciplines of landscape architecture and civil engineering presented parkways as a means to bridge the rupture between country and city, enabling journeys taken by car across the countryside for the enjoyment of experiencing views of nature (Appleyard et al. 1964). These roads made the natural environment accessible, presenting a distinct view of nature. By attracting urbanites to the countryside for leisurely drives the parkways also rendered the scenery a consumable landscape. Observing landscapes through the windshield became an important part of the tourism industry (Mauch and Zeller 2008). A prominent project is The Blue Ridge Parkway, where the relationship between nature and culture was carefully structured, managed and maintained, constructed in 1934 spanning 750 km in the southeastern Appalachians. The parkway introduces drivers to breathtaking views interlinking roadscape with countryside, hiking trails and visitor centres (Bonnemaison and Macy 2011). As a project decidedly orchestrated to increase car tourism and connect with an area that could benefit economically, this early project accepted the triad of relationship of cars, roads and landscapes.

The parkways were popular in the northeast of the United States but scenic roads were also built in Europe. Directly inspired by the US parkways was the Deutsche Alpenstrasse, an alpine road built in the 1930s, now extending 450 kilometres. The Alpenstrasse traces earlier paths passing mountain villages and castles, a route that had become popular amongst young royals during the romantic period of late nineteenth century. Later projects in Europe include the Norwegian Scenic Routes (Larsen 2012), with a selection of eighteen stretches of roads dispersed over the entire country that run through mountainous landscapes in diverse natural settings, a project by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) that has been ongoing for thirty years. The aim of the project is to encourage tourists to drive to distant regions in order to increase tourism for the economic viability of those communities. It is a project that has placed the role of contemporary Norwegian architecture at the centre, acknowledging how we design and frame our environment and relations and thus it has also become a project for exhibiting contemporary architecture, infrastructure and landscape (Berre and Lysholm 2010). Along the eighteen routes the look-out platforms, lay-bys, servicing facilities and other rest stops are designed after having been commissioned or are results of architectural and design competitions. The project was instigated by the Norwegian parliament asking the NPRA how roads and landscapes could be used to strengthen Norwegian tourism (Berre and Lysholm 2010). The project is unique in integrating the design of services in the rural landscape, making a comprehensive whole of the journey and the rest stops. It is equally known for the installations and the architecture punctuating the route as for the panoramic landscapes it is directed at. Whilst the attraction of the nature is at its centre, it is also a strategic and political project for realising a wider social and economic aim (Ellefsen 2015).

Even if the above examples of designed routes in the landscape from the United States, the Alps and Norway all centre around the triad of car, road and landscapes, they frame different relationships with the landscape beyond, whether in terms of economic relations by bridging different regions, references to politics and history or by how designed interventions frame nature, the viewer and designed installations and landscapes. On approaching the different predefined sites of interest along the Golden Circle by car, it is the area of car parks and buses that meets the travellers and must be navigated to approach the designated lookout point for taking in the desired vistas. The proliferation of car parks and viewing platforms with the auxiliary perfunctory basic services also signify relations, all interventions emit a meaning and say something about how places are valued or controlled, of how connections are made or not.

Unlike the Norwegian Scenic Routes where the road administration manages both the road and the interval and viewing platforms, in Iceland the IRCA manages the roads and rest stops but the landowners or stakeholders at different sites manage the individual ‘destination’ or viewing loci which can lead to a disjointed condition lacking coherence. Whilst car parks dominate the arrival at a ‘destination’, followed with the necessity to navigate cars and crowds with a throng of people queuing to approach the panoramic and framed viewing position on the platforms, the interrelationship of the landscape of transit and specific locations of interest remain controversial: the landscape of transit is a necessary evil, the place of vista is a celebrated locus.

The Road: An Interwoven Entanglement

The Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration makes an analogy of the road network to a fluid system that services the various parts it reaches: “The road system is sometimes compared to the vascular system of the human body, which maintains its function by ensuring normal blood flow throughout the various parts of the body. In the same way, a solid road system and good transport are prerequisite for human life and businesses to grow and prosper in urban and rural areas” (Vegakerfið, n.d.). Yet the vascular road system is not only a means of transportation for tourists providing an essential link between points of origin to its destination areas. Merriman presents the motorway as a topological and relational space that creates new relations and geographies, constantly forming and emerging through the flow of bodies, vehicles and materials (Merriman 2007). Cresswell takes this further, defining mobility as an entanglement of movement, representation and practice (Cresswell 2001). Thus, the route becomes an entanglement of relations with the road being a complex interweaving of social, political and aesthetic concerns. The route can be an aesthetic orchestration and a political tool, but also a meeting place and arena for different social practices.

In one way or another tourism centres around destinations and the uniqueness that attracts people to them. However, destinations are not a fixed entity bound to a specific geographical location but grow out of a series of relations. Jóhannesson and Lund (2021) reject the conundrum of perceiving the destination as a bounded place in a physical location and instead describe places as dynamic and constantly evolving in a mobile world where new relationships are forming and are being framed by different actors. Places as well as destinations are never fixed but evolve in connection with an array of agencies where an entangled web of relations cannot be extracted from a particular preconceived idea of a fixed destination. Whilst authorities and the tourism sector often heavily depend on the marketing, planning and design of the singular destination for scenic qualities and vistas, this chapter has argued for an expanded view of the understanding of route and destination, to include examining the landscape from the point of view of mobility and of designing mobility that builds relations with the landscape. Whilst focusing primarily on destination as an objective and independent entity in the landscape, a relation with the landscape more akin to the romantic western aesthetic landscape tradition is pursued, where the primary focus is only on the view, and the observer is located outside the observed landscape (Larsen 2012).

Pasgaard, Hemmersam and Nielsen instead argue for allowing for a design process that cultivates a more heterogeneous assemblage of attractions and a more comprehensive consideration of the environment when designing for tourism. They argue for a more embodied landscape gaze going beyond nature as represented by practices emphasising primarily the visual, relating instead to the multifaceted aspects of the environment based on the understanding of landscapes and the potential for multiple readings and experiences (Pasgaard et al. 2021). The road is an eminently social and cultural phenomenon crossing disciplines and boundaries, a kind of palimpsest of forces, and may be considered the single most important factor in generating the landscape. Customarily interventions in the landscape have been defined by the different scales of operation; architecture has been conceived in relation to the site or a given location; urbanism and landscape architecture are defined by context; and infrastructure and ecology understood at the scale of territory. In contrast to this focus on the scale of the task, it is apt to refer to Sheppard’s words on the multitudinal dynamics at play in any singular site or location: “as we accept the notion that we have entered an Anthropocene era, one in which no region of the globe is left untouched, whether directly or indirectly, by humankind’s impact, every site must be understood as the palimpsest of forces” (Sheppard 2013, 179).