Rural Remainders, Enveloping Urbanity, and Encroaching Wilderness
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2016-12-14

Retiro is an abandoned and dilapidated landscape garden and country estate located in the town of Molde on the northwestern coast of Norway. It should not be confused with the more famous namesake Parque del Retiro in Madrid. The estate with its garden and villa was built by the industrialist and Danish consul Christian Johnsen in the first half of the 1870s. Retiro was originally located in a rural landscape dotted with fields, humble farmsteads, stone fences, copses, and several other summer estates.
Currently both the garden and the accompanying buildings are in a state of disrepair. The gradual state of disrepair started already in the interwar years. The former rural landscape has been in time replaced by typical urban spaces. Retiro is now adjacent to a large cemetery, sports center, residential areas, and a newly constructed public park. At present, the property is divided between private and municipal ownership. Retiro is a site where conflicting interests collide, from CRM actors who want to restore the property to its original state, to interests in making it an up‐to‐date urban “green space”, or as a site for residential development.
In the process of being encapsulated by the growing urban landscape, has Retiro itself suddenly been transformed to something urban by a changed contextual relationship? In the long absence from the caring hands of gardeners, Retiro could be described as a post‐rural landscape. Can the present ruinlandscape of Retiro be described as an urban interstice, a rural remainder, or is it more closely connected to what one could think of as wilderness? The remnants of Retiro exemplify a site that challenges the usual dichotomies of the rural and urban, and nature and culture.
1 http://objectmatters.ruinmemories.org/

Stein Farstadvoll.
University of Tromso.

Session 2: Rural Heritage and Landscape (1)
CHAT Annual Conference: Orkney 2016