Page - 230 - in The Power of Urban Water - Studies in premodern urbanism

230 UlrichMüller against their environment. The port is an urban subspacewith a very unique face. It is a hub ofmultiple flowsofpeople,objectsand ideas thataremore than justanexpressionofeconomic relationships.Portsarehubs forglobalcommercialandsocio-cultural relationships– this isnot only true for our modern societies, but also for their pre-modern forebears.5 As intersections betweenwater and land– seas and rivers on the one hand, and cities, roads and hinterlands on the other – they have always facilitated local and long-distance transportation, as well as the trading andmovement of goods, knowledge, and people. ‘Harbourscapes’ are understood in the following text as spaces formed by action (‘doings’), perceptions and interpretations (‘sayings’).6Thematerial and immaterial ‘Designs’ resulting fromthisprocesscanbeexplained as theconsequencesofpracticalneedsandlifestyles, that for theirpartarebasedonbothhabits of perception and historical constellations.7 Haithabu, Schleswig, Lübeck are all three typical portsof their time.At thesame time, they representuniversaldimensionswhicharebest repre- sentedby the concept of ‘scapes’. ‘Scapes’ is anomnipresent term in cultural studies andmedieval history.8 Thus terms such as ‘urbanscapes’, ‘riskscapes’, ‘heritagescapes’ or ‘commodityscapes’ are common.9Despite all theirdifferences, theyshareacapacity toputour relationalviewsof,on,andconcerningatopic into perspective. ‘In analogy to the notion of landscape, the new terminology carries a spatial connotation that points to the ambiguity and fluidity of social phenomena. Against the back- drop of increasing global connectivity and flows, it conceives of space in terms of relations’.10 The concepts of the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai form a direct or indirect point of referenceforvarious ‘scapes’.Appaduraidescribesglobalisationintheformofdynamiccurrents of people, technologies, finances, media, and ideas (‘ethnoscapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘finance- scapes’, ‘ideoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’).11 At the same time, these five currents of globalisation are also components, just as individuals and groups of people construct a notion of their own movements in theglobal context: ‘worlds thatareconstitutedby thehistorically situated imagi- nationsofpersonsandgroupsspreadaroundtheglobe’.12AsconsistentlyasAppaduraiempha- sises these relationships in aglobal society, his concepts cannot simplybeappliedunmodified to pre-modern societies: it is especially difficult to find evidence of his postulated separation of the nominated fields.13 In archaeological scholarship, Appadurai’s approachhas beenmost significantly receivedwith aparticular focus onmethods of attribution, aswell as being taken up in thecourseofnetwork-turnsandmodified in theserviceofassemblage theory.14Adetailed discussion of Appadurai’s concept for archaeology is definitely still pending, but – and here lies its epistemological value – this concept can help us to emphasise the interconnectedness of global (cultural) landscapesand local (commercial) spaces in the senseof aglocalisation. In timesofmedieval globalizationandcomplex connectivities, habourscapes are anexample that 5 Cf.North 2016; Borgolte – Jaspert 2016; Blockmans et al. 2017; vonCarnap-Bornheimet al. 2018; Elvert –Elvert 2018. For a comparative approach, seeStanley et al. 2012. 6 Christophersen 2015, 125–128;Brugger et al. 2018. 7 In the following text, the term ‘harbourscapes’will be used to express themeaning of a harbour in away that reaches beyond its function as amooring place for ships, and into themultiplexity of the whole harbour area. Because of the commonly made, but only loosely defined differentiation between ‘harbour’ as the mooring grounds, and ‘port’ as thewiderarea, theprecise termusedshouldbe ‘portscapes’. ‘Harbourscapes’ isusedabove all as a concept in current city planning, cf. Russo 2016. 8 For example, Fouquet et al. 2018;Kooij 2018. 9 Forexample,Knox1995,6: ‘Commodityscapesproducedby flowsofmaterial culture thatencompasseverything fromarchitecture and interior design through to clothes and jewellery’. 10 Müller-Mahnet al. 2018, 195. 11 Cf. here Appadurai 1990, 329–331. For criticism of the concept, see for example Heymann – Campbell 2009, 134–139. 12 Appadurai 1996, 33. 13 Müller 2017a, 17–21. 14 Müller –Schurr 2016, 218–220.