Deconsecration of burial grounds has gone on for centuries in urban areas. Indeed, in urban centers where land use demand is greatest the number of unmarked human burials yet to be uncovered during subsurface construction may exceed the living population. Land designated as a place for burying the dead has an internationally shared history of yielding to new settlement patterns of transportation, industrial and suburban land use demands. Globally, and in spite of perpetual care plans that guarantee the eternal inviolability of graves, cemeteries continue to be deconsecrated and appropriated for new land uses. For instance, due to a chronic housing shortage, Cairo’s sprawling cemetery, also known as the “City of the Dead,” houses more than a million squatters – families are living in tombs for the dead. Similarly in China, burial places are built over as land use demands increase, a result of population and industrial expansion. With changing settlement patterns and changing land use demands comes changes to the laws pertaining to cemeteries; the social ties that bind the present to the past, weaken and finally break. The continued use, care, and contextual significance of cemeteries are dependent on stability, continuity and perpetuity of local families, communities, and religious ceremonies.
Traditional cemeteries are places for the dead that were situated within a spatial (location) and temporal (time) pattern of life and death. They are integral to communities as visible reminders of death’s presence implicating the necessity of moral and ethical values during life. As such, they are typically situated at highly visible locations in town centers or at easily reachable crossroads and so are associated with contemporary modes of transportation (waterways, railroads and rural highways). Thus, traditional cemeteries are visible reminders of our past and future; they coexist with daily activities and are easily accessed. Upright grave markers in family plots visually display through patterned arrangements and over time accrual the significance of each person within a familial, community, and religious network. Traditional cemeteries are easily recognized with their highly visible upright monuments, of various styles and heights that memorialize individuals to anyone who happens to pass by (Figure 5).
Figure 5. This traditional community cemetery is typical of burial places along the Mississippi River in Southeastern Louisiana – high profile grave markers are in the foreground with a separate section for black burials at the back.
More and more traditional cemeteries are being replaced with the newer version of burial more reminiscent of a corporate structure than a family structure. In contrast to traditional cemeteries, the flat, open expanses of American Memorial Parks are devoid of individual expression (Figure 6). Other than holidays such as Memorial Day, Veterans Day or Easter when flowers are placed on graves, the landscapes of Memorial Parks are uninterrupted by grave markers. Family plots and iconographic displays memorializing individuals are prohibited. An accrual of burials over time and space is not apparent on the lawn-like horizon of Memorial Parks. Memorial Parks effectively displace visible signs of death and relationships with the dead effectively destroying the time between family groupings, communities, and religious organizations. They limit mourning activities to business hours and flat plaques conform to mass-marketed styles that accommodate lawn machinery. Memorial Parks sanitize and disguise the messiness of death and displace grief through distance. Moral and ethical values passed on through families and perpetuated by memories of the heritage of those that have gone before are lost. In contrast to traditional cemeteries, Memorial Parks have low visibility, are commonly established beyond city limits, a distance from the nexus of everyday activities, and are frequently unrelated to commonly used crossroads or primary byways.
Figure 6. Flat plaques in Memorial Parks minimize individual displays except for holidays when flowers are placed on graves – a columbarium for receiving cremated remains is in the background of Bellevue Memorial Park, Southeastern Louisiana. (Bellevue.jpg).
In America, burial places are evolving from traditional cemeteries that were highly visible and well-integrated within a local community to Memorial Parks that are a distance from daily interaction with the living. Socio-economic development tends to tear asunder former associations displayed within traditional cemetery landscapes. Traditional burial places are being displaced as settlement patterns and infrastructural relationships evolve spatially across the land and temporally through time. Spatial relationships that were formerly established by waterway, railroad or highway, and the social practices built around these space-time systems are eroding. Travel by airplanes and interstates introduce a radical reorganization to the space and time family relationships and, consequently, perceptions of a traditional proper place for the dead is being lost.
Until recently, cemeteries represented death’s place amongst the living. As representations of a perceived netherworld, cultural concern for the soul, everlasting life, and transcendence after death were visibly expressed in cemeteries. Cemeteries are frequently used to serve as a reminder of the extension of life beyond death. They represent the finality of life and everyone’s ultimate demise. Cemeteries are contradictory places, where cultural practice performed by the living disguises death with mourning ceremonies; death is commemorated within the bounds of the living material culture. Over time, changes in preferred burial place location including the surrounding landscape contexts and landscape conditions reveal changing attitudes about a proper place for the dead within a society.
The manner in which the dead are disposed of, and the role of a place for the dead is subject to changes in fashion, and thus illustrative of changing cultural dynamics through time. Over centuries, cultures leave their imprint in the environment and no place is the imprint more evident than in the places of the disposal of the dead. Cemeteries are imprints and visual expressions of a cultures perceptions pertaining to life and death, and as such cemeteries fashions are a spatial and temporal demonstration of changing cultural beliefs. As landscapes transform today, places of tradition (such as cemeteries) become places on the margin. And therefore spatial and temporal changes to settlement patterns that contribute to Traditional cemetery abandonment are indicative of today’s changing cultural attitudes toward a place for the dead.
The social implication for changes to the role of a place for the dead is revealing of who we are becoming. The transportation infrastructure that organizes our experience of “place”, such as a “place for the dead”, is maintained through the process of exclusion. The process of creating one place — Memorial Parks — inevitably excludes another place — Traditional cemeteries. Placed in the role of being “excluded”, “beyond”, “outside”, or “on the margins”, Traditional cemeteries in various stages of abandonment are “other” places that become blighted landscapes. By circumstance rather than design, a few traditional cemeteries that meet the conditions of a changing world view are refashioned as Memorial Parks while others are eventually razed from the surface. In the meantime, Memorial Parks transfer the ownership and control of places for the dead to corporations rather than communities. New Memorial Parks locations are established along interstate highways near or beyond urban centers, thus effectively removing them from the purview of families and communities. Death, traditions, and the ethical values that accompany them are thus effectively removed from the daily observation of the modern urban dweller.
Cemetery landscapes are sensitive to cultural and historic change displaying and recording a cultures outlook through time, and thus cemeteries are good indicators of changing social roles. Changes in the “role of place”, such as attitudes toward “a place for the dead”, indicates our changing perceptions of space, time and distance, as well as our changing family and community sense of being, becoming and belonging.