Speeding towards the future through the past: landscape, movement and national identity

Recent theorising has emphasised the importance of movement in people’s
engagement with and understanding of landscape. We suggest that there is a need here to
problematise movement further. Rather than taking movement and the engagement with landscape
that it offers for granted, we need to pay attention to the different forms of engagement with
landscape that different forms of movement afford. This suggests, in turn, the importance of
looking at how different forms of movement are made possible, demanded or denied. In looking
at driving in Iceland we seek to draw attention to how different ways of moving are facilitated or
hindered. We point out how the experience of driving is embedded in a larger and always
complex political history so that the moving engagement with landscape is mediated by a larger
story of the ‘nation’ and its relationship with the land.