History’s Apparatus haas that the extension of a museological mentality into the city is such a dangerous thing. Museums are not places where things get frozen for all time; rather, they’re sites where things, and the contexts of things, become intensely and endlessly debated. Again, think of the Elgin Marbles. More to your point, there’s a suggestion in your questions that there might be something very dangerous in a curatorial, conservationist, or preservationist agenda being wielded in the city. There’s a risk of stagnation. And when you talk about the idea of a future landscape— of a landscape’s future, of landscape futures— you might immediately think of a landscape saturated with, or filtered through, technology, instead of a landscape seen through the mentality of historical preservation. But the idea of the future always implies a present and a past—and we need to think about what the role of the historical might be within some near or immediate concept of the future. What is the role of history in quote-unquote landscape futures? What is the historian’s relationship to the future?
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