Abstract
Drawing on various scholarly works interested in the problem of how past and present intermingle in landscape as well as on my own fieldwork in the ideological-and-technological underground landscape of the Prague metro, I discuss the often used metaphor of landscape as a palimpsest. I argue that rather than a repository of the past, landscape, the way we see, experience and understand a geographical world surrounding us, is more a repository of stories, a challenge or a provocation into a creative narration.
Landscape, be it for example the Prague metro, is ambiguous and undecipherable, it is full of ghosts. It offers us starting points of the stories yet to be imagined and narrated.
Any scientific endeavour after understanding the landscape must at first come to terms with the ambiguous and unfinished nature of landscape. By telling four stories from and about the Prague metro, I argue that we, social scientists interested in landscape, should try less to explain and more to narrate.