The Routledge Companion To Landscape Studies

The Routledge Companion to
Landscape Studies
Landscape is a vital, synergistic concept which opens up ways of thinking about many of the problems
which beset our contemporary world, such as climate change, social alienation, environmental degra-
dation, loss of biodiversity and destruction of heritage. As a concept, landscape does not respect dis-
ciplinary boundaries. Indeed, many academic disciplines have found the concept so important that it has
been used as a qualifier which delineates whole sub-disciplines: landscape ecology, landscape planning,
landscape archaeology, and so forth. In other cases, landscape studies progress under a broader banner,
such as heritage studies or cultural geography. Yet it does not always mean the same thing in all of these
contexts. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies offers the first comprehensive attempt to explore
research directions into the many uses and meanings of ‘landscape’.
The Companion contains thirty-nine original contributions from leading scholars within the field,
which have been divided into four parts: Experiencing Landscape; Landscape Culture and Heritage;
Landscape, Society and Justice; and Design and Planning for Landscape. Topics covered range from
phenomenological approaches to landscape, to the consideration of landscape as a repository of human
culture; from ideas of identity and belonging, to issues of power and hegemony; and from discussions of
participatory planning and design to the call for new imaginaries in a time of global and environmental
crisis. Each contribution explores the future development of different conceptual and theoretical
approaches, as well as recent empirical contributions to knowledge and understanding. Collectively,
they encourage dialogue across disciplinary barriers and reflection upon the implications of research
findings for local, national and international policy in relation to landscape.
This Companion provides up-to-date critical reviews of state of the art perspectives across this multi-
faceted field, embracing disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, geography,
landscape planning, landscape architecture, countryside management, forestry, heritage studies, ecology,
and fine art. It serves as an invaluable point of reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students
alike, engaging in the field of landscape studies.
Professor Peter Howard is now Visiting Professor of Cultural Landscape at Bournemouth University.
Dr Ian Thompson is Reader in Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture, Planning and
Landscape at Newcastle University.
Dr Emma Waterton holds a Lectureship in Social Science at the University of Western Sydney,
Australia.
The Routledge Companion
to Landscape Studies
Edited by
Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Selection and editorial matter: Peter Howard, Ian Thompson and Emma Waterton;
individual chapters: the contributors
The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Howard, Peter, 1944-
The Routledge companion to landscape studies / Peter Howard, Ian Thompson and Emma
Waterton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Landscape assessment. 2. Cultural landscapes. 3. Geographical perception. 4. Landscape
archaeology. 5. Landscape design. 6. Human geography. I. Thompson, Ian, 1955- II.
Waterton, Emma. III. Title.
GF90.H7 2012
712–dc23
2012008703
ISBN: 978-0-415-68460-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-09692-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents
List of illustrations ix
Authors’ biographies xi
Introduction 1
Ian Thompson, Peter Howard and Emma Waterton
Fitting into country 8

Deborah Bird Rose
1 A brief history of landscape research 12

Marc Antrop
Experiencing landscape 23
2 Landscape perception and environmental psychology 25

Catharine Ward Thompson
3 Perceptual lenses 43
Peter Howard
4 Landscape and phenomenology 54

John Wylie
5 Landscape and non-representational theories 66

Emma Waterton
6 The anthropology of postenvironmental landscapes 76

Werner Krauss
7 Landscape and a sense of place: a creative tension 87

Brian Wattchow
8 Semiotics of landscape 97
Kati Lindström, Hannes Palang and Kalevi Kull
v
Contents
9 Aesthetic appreciation of landscape 108

Isis Brook
10 Landscape, performance and performativity 119

David Crouch
Landscape culture and heritage 129
11 Landscape archaeology 131

Sam Turner
12 Historic landscapes 143

Jonathan Finch
13 Emerging landscapes of heritage 152

David Harvey
14 Valuing the whole historic landscape 166

Peter Herring
15 Constructing spaces, representing places: the role of landscape in

open-air museum sites 179
Antonia Noussia
16 Picturing landscape 190

Harriet Hawkins
17 Art imagination and environment 199

Tim Collins
18 The field and the frame: landscape, film and popular culture 210
John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold
19 New directions in the literary representation of landscape 220

Richard Kerridge
20 Landscape, music and the cartography of sound 231

George Revill
Landscape, society and justice 241
21 Landscape and social justice 243

Gunhild Setten and Katrina Myrvang Brown
vi
Contents
22 The law of landscape and the landscape of law: the things that matter 253
Kenneth R. Olwig
23 Navigating the global, the regional and the local: researching

globalization and landscape 263
Jacky Bowring
24 Landscape and identity: beyond a geography of one place 272

Shelley Egoz
25 Landscape studies and tourism research 286

Daniel C. Knudsen, Michelle M. Metro-Roland and
Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd
26 Urban nature as a resource for public health 296

Helena Nordh, Caroline M. Hägerhäll and Terry Hartig
27 Researching the economics of landscape 308

Colin Price
28 Landscape and memory 322

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly
29 Landscape and participation 335

Maggie Roe
Design and planning for landscape 353
30 An ontology of landscape design 355

Susan Herrington
31 Landscape planning: reflections on the past, directions for the future 366
Sue Kidd
32 (Re)creating wilderness: rewilding and habitat restoration 383

Steve Carver
33 Landscape and ecology: the need for an holistic approach to the

conservation of habitats and biota 395
Louis F. Cassar
34 Post-industrial landscapes: evolving concepts 405

Wolfram Höfer and Vera Vicenzotti
vii
Contents
35 Visualizing landscapes 417

Lewis Gill and Eckart Lange
36 Peri-urban landscapes: from disorder to hybridity 427

Mattias Qviström
37 On landscape urbanism 438

Peggy Tully
38 Landscape and environmental ethics 450

Ian Thompson
39 Landscape and climate change 461

Catherine Leyshon and Hilary Geoghegan
Index 471
viii
List of illustrations
Figures
1.1 Development of Landscape Research 13

6.1 The border between nature and culture 83
7.1 Camping on Drum Island 88
7.2 The view south from the Gulf on the north side of Snake Island 94
11.1 Earthwork remains at Darras Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne, England 133
11.2 A landscape of braided terraces with drystone walls near Mikri Vighla, Naxos, Greece 136
11.3 Mapping the historic landscape of Aria, Naxos, Greece 137
12.1 Harewood House from the south-east by John Varley c.1805 147
13.1 Koli, Finland 157
13.2 Mousehole 158
13.3 The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, UK 160
14.1 View from Boconnoc House, Cornwall 167
14.2 Sheffield’s variably legible urban landscape 168
14.3 Cardinham’s signum triciput looking forward, out and back at place 171
14.4 Blackfriars’ cranes of ‘change and creation’ 176
15.1 Representation of a Victorian high street in the Black Country Living Museum 181
15.2 The canal and the industrial area in Blists Hill 184
15.3 Weald and Downland Open Air Museum 185
15.4 Examples of circulation patterns and movement in open air museums 187
18.1 ‘Popeye Village’, Anchor Bay, Malta 211
22.1 Cartoon by Peter Lautrop, Et landskab 256
24.1 By Abir Hamamda – age 14 278
24.2 By Suheib Ismail Gargawi – age 16 279
24.3 By Doa Abu Swheilem – age 14 280
24.4 By Naim Muhamad Gargawi – age 14 280
26.1 Water as a restorative natural component in the built environment 299
26.2 A grass lawn as a setting for restoration 300
26.3 The park as a meeting place 301
26.4 Biking and walking paths along the water 302
27.1 Not as nature intended: Stourhead, wrought with much labour and loss of
potential production 309
27.2 Landscape for sale 313
27.3 Time changes these things built with hands, in fact and in the pliant mind – stark
asbestos roof becomes ecosystem 316
ix
List of illustrations
27.4 Street hanging baskets 318

28.1 Nurturing Ecologies, Exhibition, Duke’s Theatre and Gallery, Lancaster 2006 328
29.1 The Athenian landscape: Looking towards the Acropolis from the location of
the Athenian democratic assembly on Pnika Hill 336
29.2 Diagram showing aspects of the two key areas of participation as featured and
discussed in this chapter 337
30.1 Typological classification of landscape types for designing with children by
Robert Dorgan for the 13-acres competition, 2002 358
30.2 Hip Hop garden by Susan Herrington at Les Jardins de Métis in Quebec
Canada, 2005 360
30.3 Villa Lante, Bagnaia, Italy, 2010 361
30.4 Rooftop landscape by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Vancouver, Canada, 2011 363
31.1 Theoretical and methodological traditions encompassed within landscape planning 371
31.2 Landscape as an integrative concept 372
31.3 Legal and administrative families of Europe 379
32.1 The cycle of nature–culture 384
32.2 Cores and corridors connectivity 386
32.3 The Dutch Ecologische Hoofdstructuur (EHS) 390
34.1 Uncommon aesthetics of the ‘urban industrial nature’ 408
34.2 Berne Park in Bottrop, Germany 409
34.3 Fenced in industrial relics at the Seattle Gas Works Park 411
34.4 Post-industrial landscape as point of convergence 412
35.1 Scale model, Yantai, China; note the size of the person in the door at the top left corner 418
35.2 Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, 1:1 scale model 418
35.3 Interactive landscape model providing the ability for stakeholders to take
control over the visualization 422
35.4 Interactive weir model in context within a larger existing landscape model 423
35.5 Tablet device displaying a planning proposal on site 424
36.1 The peri-urban landscape of Scania, Sweden. 429
36.2 The green belt of Sheffield 431
36.3 Lake Stoibermühle, a former gravel pit next to Munich airport 434
37.1 The High Line Park, New York, as built 446
Tables
31.1 Multi-functionality as an integrative concept 373

31.2 A framework for integration in landscape planning 373
31.3 Statutory purpose of national parks in the United Kingdom 375
31.4 Strategic objectives of the Cairngorm National Park plan 2007 376
Boxes
33.1 General principles of landscape ecology 399
x
Authors’ biographies
Marc Antrop PhD is Emeritus Professor and a geographer at the University of Ghent. His
approach to landscape is holistic and transdisciplinary, integrating aspects of historical geography,
landscape ecology, landscape architecture, perception and planning. He is vice-president of the
Royal Committee for Protection of Monuments and Landscapes in Flanders and member of the
Belgian Scientific Committee of ICOMOS-IFLA.
Jacky Bowring PhD is an Associate Professor and Head of the School of Landscape Archi-
tecture at Lincoln University and editor of Landscape Review, and has research interests in land-
scape architecture theory, memory and melancholy, as well as post-disaster landscapes including
her home city of Christchurch’s earthquake response. Author of A Field Guide to Melancholy
(Oldcastles, 2008). Successes in memorial and cemetery design competitions.
Isis Brook PhD is a philosopher based at Writtle College in Essex, UK. Her doctoral work was
on Goethean phenomenology and she has published on ‘a sense of place’, environmental aes-
thetics, and gardens. She has a particular interest in the aesthetics of landscapes and gardens and
their impact on wellbeing.
Katrina Myrvang Brown PhD researches how moral and legal dimensions entwine in the
enactment of rights to space at the James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen University. Her current
research focuses on normative practices of outdoor access and health, and developing mobile
and video methods for understanding how landscapes are reproduced through embodied, sen-
sory practices.
Steve Carver PhD is Director of the Wildland Research Institute and a Senior Lecturer in
Geography at the University of Leeds. He was a founder member of the UK Wildland
Network and has wide-ranging interests in wilderness, wildlands, landscape and environmental
modelling. He has special interests in the application of GIS to wilderness modelling and has
worked extensively on this and related topics.
Louis F. Cassar PhD, is Director of the Institute of Earth Systems of the University of Malta.
He is a landscape ecologist and environmental planner, involved in biodiversity conservation
since the mid-1970s. His experience in coastal management and conservation extends beyond
the Mediterranean, to Africa and Asia. He served as scientific advisor on coastal management to
UNIDO and on the board of the National Environmental Protection and Planning Agency.
Research interests include aspects of corridor ecology, ecological restoration and stakeholder
participation for conservation.
xi
Timothy Collins PhD is an artist, author and planner working in the public/environmental art
tradition interested in changing ideas about all aspects of environmental, nature and society.
He is a principal in the Collins & Goto Studio in Glasgow, providing public art and planning
services internationally. He is a director of Landscape Research Group.
David Crouch PhD is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Derby. His most
recent book, Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity (Ashgate, 2010), brings together a con-
ceptual and empirical engagement with the range of his work, on art practice, landscape,
everyday life and tourism in the notion of how it feels to encounter space. His writings on
heritage (2009) and vernacular spaces (2010), accompany a wide range of theoretical interests.
Shelley Egoz PhD is a landscape architect and academic affiliated with Lincoln University,
with research interests in the symbolic and ideological power of landscape, in particular related
to social justice, conflict resolution, and ethics associated with landscape, space and design.
She is principal editor of The Right to Landscape, Contesting Landscape and Human Right
(Ashgate, 2011).
Jonathan Finch PhD is senior lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at the University of
York. His research has covered many aspects of the historic landscape, particularly during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He co-edited and contributed to Estate Landscapes: Design,
Improvement and Power in the Post-medieval Landscape (Boydell and Brewer, 2007) and is currently
working on a project linking estate landscapes in the UK with slave plantations in the
Caribbean.
Hilary Geoghegan PhD is a cultural geographer with interests in geographies of knowledge

and enthusiasm. She is an associate research fellow at the University of Exeter in Cornwall
researching climate change and familiar landscapes through collaboration with Natural England
and the National Trust.
Lewis Gill is a PhD student in the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield with
a background in computer science and GIS. In his research he is examining the integration of
interactive landscape visualisation and data models.
John R. Gold PhD is Professor of Urban Historical Geography in the Department of Social
Sciences at Oxford Brookes University. A frequent radio and television broadcaster, he is the
author or editor of seventeen books, published and in press, on architectural and cultural subjects.
Margaret M. Gold MA is Senior Lecturer in Arts and Heritage Management at London

Metropolitan University and an Associate of the University’s Cities Institute. With John Gold,
she has published extensively on urban festivals and, in particular, on the urban impact of the
Olympic Games.
Caroline M. Hägerhäll PhD is a landscape architect and professor in the Department of Work
Science, Business Economics and Environmental Psychology at the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp. Her research covers perception and experience of outdoor spaces
and natural patterns and the connection to preference and wellbeing.
xii
Terry Hartig PhD is Professor of Applied Psychology at the Institute for Housing and Urban
Research, Uppsala University. He has studied health resource values of natural environments
since the early 1980s. He trained in environmental psychology, social ecology and public health
at the University of California.
David C. Harvey PhD is an Associate Professor in Historical Cultural Geography at the

University of Exeter. His research investigates the geographies of authority, landscape and
identity, mostly within a historical context, working between geography, landscape history,
archaeology, and heritage studies. He is also the Honorary Secretary of the Society for Landscape
Studies and on the editorial board for Landscape History.
Harriet Hawkins PhD is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway,

University of London. Her research interests centre on the geographies of art, and aesthetics
more broadly. Following her interdisciplinary doctoral research on the geographies of rubbish
and art, she held positions examining international art–science collaborations and the politics
and poetics of regional creative practices and industries. Her monograph, Creative Geographies,
will be published by Routledge in 2013.
Peter Herring MPhil was brought up in rural Cornwall. He is a Characterisation Inspector with
English Heritage, for over twenty years he was an officer with Cornwall County Council’s
Historic Environment Service, working mainly on projects recording, interpreting, characterising
and managing historic landscape. He is a director of Landscape Research Group.
Susan Herrington MLA is Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at University

of British Columbia, Canada. Her research concerns the history and theory of landscapes and
children’s landscapes. She is author of On Landscapes (Routledge, 2009) and Cornelia Hahn
Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
Wolfram Höfer PhD joined the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers in January
2006 as an Assistant Professor. His research and teaching focus is the cultural interpretation of
brownfields as potential elements of the public realm and how that interpretation effects planning
and design solutions for adaptive reuse of brownfields.
Peter Howard PhD is now Visiting Professor of Cultural Landscape at Bournemouth Uni-
versity. His career has been largely involved with the overlap between geography and art, and
he edited Landscape Research, and later founded and edited the International Journal of Heritage
Studies. His most recent work is An Introduction to Landscape (Ashgate, 2011). He is a director of
Landscape Research Group.
Richard Kerridge MA co-ordinates research for the School of Humanities and leads the MA
in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. He was co-editor of Writing the Environment (Zed,
1998), and one of the authors of The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture
(University of California Press, 2011). Beginning Ecocriticism, a general introduction to the field,
will be published by Manchester University Press in 2012. His nature writing has recently
appeared in Granta Online and Poetry Review. In 1990 and 1991 he received the BBC Wildlife
Award for Nature Writing
xiii
Sue Kidd MA, MRTPI is head of the Department of Civic Design in the University of
Liverpool’s School of Environmental Sciences. She is a chartered town planner and academic
with a particular interest in integrating landscape-planning perspectives into spatial planning
(and vice versa) and landscape planning at the regional scale.
Daniel C. Knudsen PhD is H.H. Remak Professor of West European Studies and Professor of
Geography at Indiana University. His research interests include cultural geography, tourism
geography and the geography of food. He is a co-editor of Landscape, Tourism and Meaning
(Ashgatem, 2008) and editor of The Transition to Flexibility (Kluwer, 1996).
Werner Krauss PhD is a cultural anthropologist in the Institute for Coastal Research at the
Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany. He has conducted fieldwork on environmental
conflicts, (coastal) landscapes, and climate change. His main interests are science studies, the
anthropology of landscapes, political ecology, and currently the ontological, epistemological and
real world effects of anthropogenic climate change.
Kalevi Kull PhD is Professor of Biosemiotics and head of Department of Semiotics, in the
University of Tartu, Estonia. His research deals with semiotic approach in biology, semiotic
mechanisms of biodiversity, and theory and history of semiotics. He has edited several books
and is co-editor of the journals Sign Systems Studies and Biosemiotics.
Eckart Lange Dr sc techn is Professor and head of the Department of Landscape at the University
of Sheffield. He is a Member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment
Agency (EEA), Copenhagen, Denmark and an elected Academic Fellow of the Landscape Insti-
tute. His research focuses on how landscape and environmental planning can influence and direct
anthropogenic landscape change, while developing innovative methodologies of how advanced
virtual landscape visualizations and modelling can be used to explore human reaction to these changes.
Catherine Leyshon PhD (formerly Brace) is Associate Professor of Historical and Cultural
Geography in the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, in Cornwall. She has
published widely on landscape and currently works on a project entitled From Climate to Landscape:
Imagining the Future. She is a director of Landscape Research Group.
Kati Lindström PhD is currently a researcher in the Department of Semiotics at the University
of Tartu (Estonia). Her current research focuses on the issues of meaning-generation processes
in landscape, landscape representations, the influence of national landscape ideal on protection
policies, and the landscape history of the East Asian inland seas area.
Michelle M. Metro-Roland PhD is Director of Faculty and Global Program Development at

the Haenicke Institute for Global Education at Western Michigan University. Her research
explores the connections of landscape, place, and material culture with questions of interpreta-
tion and embodied experience. She is the author of Tourists, Signs and the City: The Semiotics of
Culture in an Urban Landscape (Ashgate, 2011).
Helena Nordh PhD is a landscape architect and associate professor in the Department of
Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning, Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her
research interest is within landscape architecture, planning and environmental psychology.
xiv
Antonia Noussia PhD is an architect with special interest in the spatial expression of culture
on the landscape. She holds a MA in Conservation Studies from University of York and a PhD
in Geography from University College London. She teaches urban design, heritage and tourism
in London South Bank University. She is a director of Landscape Research Group.
Kenneth R. Olwig PhD is Professor in Landscape Planning, specializing in landscape theory and
history, in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Swedish University of Agricultural
Sciences, Alnarp. His writing has ranged from the effect of cultural perceptions of nature and
landscape in regional development to the role of ideas of law and justice in shaping the political
landscape and its physical manifestations. He is a director of Landscape Research Group. He is
the author of Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).
Hannes Palang PhD is Professor of Human Geography and head of the Centre of Landscape
and Culture at Tallinn University, Estonia, where he runs the research programme on Landscape
Practice and Heritage. He is also President of the PECSRL (Permanent European Conference
for the Study of the Rural Landscape). He is a director of Landscape Research Group.
Colin Price DPhil is a freelance academic. He was formerly Professor of Environmental and
Forestry Economics at Bangor University, and before that lectured at Oxford University and
Oxford Brookes University. He is becoming recognized as the ‘father of landscape economics’,
having long ago published the seminal book on the subject, Landscape Economics (Macmillan,
1978). He is also author of The Theory and Application of Forest Economics (Blackwell, 1989) and
Time, Discounting and Value (Blackwell, 1993).
Mattias Qviström PhD is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at Swedish Uni-

versity of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp. His doctoral thesis (2003) focused on landscape theory
and early twentieth-century road planning. Twentieth-century landscape and planning, land-
scape theory, mobility, relational space, post-industrial nature, hybrid landscapes, peri-urban
development and urban sprawl are key themes in his research.
George Revill PhD is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. His research
interests include music, landscape and environmental sound in twentieth-century Britain. He is
a past chair of Landscape Research Group.
Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Indiana

University. Her research focuses on tourism performance and landscape experience, notions of
authenticity, and the intersections of travel and identity processes.
Maggie Roe MDesS is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape,
Newcastle University. She is a Director of Landscape Research Group and the editor of
Landscape Research. Publications include Landscape and Sustainability (2007) and her main research
interest focus is generally on landscape planning and sustainability and human perception of the
landscape. Recent publications focus on participatory landscape planning, Green Infrastructure
as a landscape planning tool and coastal and marine landscape planning.
Deborah Bird Rose PhD is Professor of Social Inclusion at Macquarie University, Sydney,
and is the author of several prize-winning books including Dingo Makes Us Human (3rd print-
ing, 2009). Her research engages dialogically with Indigenous Australian and western
xv
philosophy; most recently Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (University of Virginia Press,
2011) addresses questions on extinctions and the moral imagination.
Gunhild Setten Dr Polit is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Norwegian

University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. She researches and teaches within the field
of landscape studies, with a particular interest in landscape practices, policies and moralities. Her
current research focuses on outdoor recreation, cultural heritage management and the cultural
nature of ‘ecosystem services’.
Ian Thompson PhD is Reader in Landscape Architecture at Newcastle University. He is

Consulting Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Landscape Research and a former chair of the
Landscape Research Group, a charity which fosters research and understanding in the broad
area of landscape studies. He is a landscape architect with a background in philosophy and has
written a number of books, including Ecology, Community and Delight (Spon Press, 1999), The
Sun King’s Garden (Bloomsbury, 2006), Rethinking Landscape (Routledge, 2009) and The English
Lakes: A History (Bloomsbury, 2010).
Divya P. Tolia-Kelly PhD is a Reader in Geography at the University of Durham. Her

published research is on visual cultures, material cultures, landscape and race-memory,
mapping postcolonial relationships with landscape, nature and citizenship with artists. She
is currently investigating and developing new postcolonial taxonomies of art and culture in
spaces of national culture such as the British Museum. She has a research monograph Landscape,
Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Home with Ashgate.
Peggy Tully MLA is trained as a landscape architect and urban designer, and is a research
fellow at Syracuse University School of Architecture, where she teaches seminars on landscape
criticism. She is editor of two books on urban design and architecture, From the Ground Up and
American Housing (Princeton Architectural Press, 2012, 2013).
Sam Turner PhD is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology in the School of Historical Studies,
Newcastle University. His main interests are early medieval archaeology and landscape history.
He is directing research projects on landscapes in the UK, western Europe and the Mediterranean.
Vera Vicenzotti, Dr.-Ing., is a visiting fellow at the School of Architecture, Planning and
Landscape, Newcastle University, funded by a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship from the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her research interests are landscape architecture theory
and history, especially the discourses on ‘new’ landscapes (peri-urban, post-industrial), wilderness,
and landscape urbanism.
Catharine Ward Thompson PhD is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of

OPENspace Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the
experience of landscape, inclusive access, environment-behaviour interactions, historic land-
scapes and salutogenic environments. Recent research focuses on the quality, quantity and
accessibility of green space and people’s wellbeing.
Emma Waterton PhD holds a lectureship in Social Science, at the University of Western
Sydney, Australia. Her research emphasizes community heritage, and the critical analysis of
public policies, especially those tackling social inclusion, multiculturalism and expressions of
Britishness. She is the author of Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (Palgrave
xvi
Macmillan, 2010) and co-author of Heritage, Communities and Archaeology with Laurajane Smith
(Duckworth, 2009). She is a director of Landscape Research Group.
Brian Wattchow PhD is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University.
He has published extensively on the themes of pedagogy, place and culture. He has written two
books: The Song of the Wounded River (Ginninderra Press, 2010) and A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor
Education for a Changing World (Monash Publishing, 2011).
John Wylie PhD is Associate Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter. He
has published numerous articles and chapters on landscape theory, and on landscape in literature
and performance, as well as a monograph, Landscape (Routledge, 2007). He is currently working
on landscape, distance and solitude, and on the embodied art of landscape drawing.
xvii
Introduction
Ian Thompson, Peter Howard and Emma Waterton
Landscape – a complicated idea

‘Landscape,’ writes Brian Wattchow in this volume, is ‘a classic trans-disciplinary concept’. The
word ‘landscape’ is even part of the title of some of the disciplines, or sub-disciplines, to which
the concept pertains; these include: landscape archaeology, landscape architecture, landscape
ecology, and landscape planning. ‘Landscape’ is also the name of important genres of painting
and photography and it is, of course, a central concept in geography. Considering this diversity,
it will surprise no one that there has been a plethora of definitions of landscape and that there is
no commonly agreed one, although many of the contributors to this book might be willing to
use the one written into the European Landscape Convention (2000) – ‘Landscape’ means an
area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of nat-
ural and/or human factors – but in order to amplify the variety of ideas which cluster around
landscape, here is a small selection of other propositions about landscape, all of which can be
found in this book:
Landscape is ‘multi-faceted, at once an object, an idea, a representation and an experience’

(Knudsen et al.)
‘Landscape is tension’ (Harvey, quoting Wylie)
Landscape is ‘process rather than object’ (Crouch)
Landscape is ‘a fluid impression, partly of our own creation and located within us’ (Herring)
Landscape is ‘a place that ought to support livelihood and wellbeing’ (Egoz)
‘Landscape is a vague concept and in reality has fuzzy edges. And yet we know what we
mean and can spot when the term is being stretched, used metaphorically, or misapplied’
(Brook)
Clearly we are dealing with something complicated, and we cannot even say that it is a com-
plicated object because, as many theorists have pointed out, landscape is something which is
mental as well as physical, subjective as well as objective. One of the most significant moments
in the study of landscapes was the ‘cultural turn’ in geography of the 1970s and 1980s, which
highlighted the roles of language, meaning and representation in the construction of social
1
Ian Thompson, Peter Howard, Emma Waterton
realities. Central to this was the idea, advanced by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, that
landscape, when considered from a humanist Marxist position, is not a neutral term but is an
ideologically charged ‘way of seeing’. In a sense, this was the moment at which landscape, as an
object of study, lost its innocence, and this was to have a strong influence upon cognate disciplines
such as art history, landscape archaeology and landscape architecture.
Translations of the word ‘landscape’ into different languages carry different baggage, but
there are even significant variations in usage within the Anglophone nations. The slipperiness
of the landscape concept, the multiplicity of disciplinary interpretations, and the sometimes
jarring lexicons employed in different fields, might prompt us to abandon any attempt at
trans-disciplinary work or understanding. As editors we believe that this would be a profound
mistake. We are all board members of the Landscape Research Group, a non-profit organisation
set up in the 1960s to encourage precisely this sort of cooperation across academic frontiers, as
well as to enhance the dialogue between researchers and practitioners, the latter being a group
which includes landscape architects, artists, curators, field archaeologists and indeed anyone who
has any interest in or involvement with landscapes. LRG also owns and produces the peer-
reviewed journal Landscape Research which is published by Routledge. Our own backgrounds
exemplify the diversity of the group as a whole. Peter is a geographer who for many years
taught in an art school, before becoming an authority on matters of heritage. Ian read philo-
sophy as an undergraduate and then became a landscape architect. Emma read anthropology,
became interested in cultural landscapes and now works in the areas of heritage studies, heritage
tourism and cultural policy.
When it was put to us by an anonymous referee that we might structure this book in sections
related to the principal disciplines with a stake in landscape, we immediately agreed that this ran
completely against the ethos of LRG, and counter to our own strong inclinations. Of course, it
is risky to assemble a book which melds so many different perspectives, but the journal Land-
scape Research has been putting together papers from disparate sources for more than thirty years
and all the indicators – growth in submissions, rejection rate, citation indexes, readership figures
and so on – indicate that there is a diverse and growing community of landscape scholars who
appreciate this eclecticism. If we may slip into a landscape metaphor for a moment, the terrain
this book covers may be complicated and even difficult in places, but our book is intended to
be the sort of companion who will not only help you find your way, but also explain and
enthuse, while assisting you to make your own discoveries and connections.
The structure of the book

In seeking an organizational structure which did not lock contributors into their academic silos,
we surveyed the range of papers which have been published in Landscape Research over the past
fifteen years. It proved relatively easy to attach topics to four broad themes. We do not wish to
waste words by slavishly summarizing every chapter that is to come, but some outline of the
structure might be useful. Thus the first section, responding to the extensive discussion of
landscapes as lived places, is called Experiencing Landscape and is anchored by a chapter which
considers the contribution to knowledge made by environmental psychologists (Ward
Thompson). Another anchoring chapter in this section is that by Wylie, which outlines the
phenomenological approaches to landscape which have gained currency over the past ten years,
not just in geography but also in archaeology, anthropology and performance studies. The
second broad section is labelled Landscape Culture and Heritage where the emphasis is upon
landscape as the ‘repository of human culture’ (Egoz). Several of the chapters in this section
have been contributed by archaeologists (Finch, Turner) or specialists in heritage studies
2
Introduction
(Harvey, Herring, Noussia) but others look at culture in the making (Collins, Crouch, Gold
and Gold). The third section, headed Landscape, Society and Justice, builds upon the insights of
the ‘new cultural geography’ which showed that landscape is inescapably ideological. Olwig
demonstrates that landscape is as much a social as a physical phenomenon, with social and
environmental practices governed by law and the established polity. Other authors consider the
tension between a positive sense of belonging to place and potentially exclusionary localisms or
nationalisms (Egoz, Setten, Tolia-Kelly). In the final section, Design and Planning for Landscape,
the focus is upon those disciplines/professions which are called upon to intervene in landscapes
for particular ends. This imperative presses upon landscape architects and landscape planners in
an immediate way – it is their raison d’être – and this sets them apart from purely scholarly
approaches to landscape, even critical and radical ones. Key chapters from Herrington and Kidd
consider the roles played respectively by landscape architects and planners, while Thompson
argues that such professions need to base their actions upon a firm grounding in environmental
ethics.
Cross-cutting themes
So much for the broad structure. We hope that we have broken down the walls of the aca-
demic silos without leaving readers in a complete puzzle about what to read next. Considering
the material as it has come in has only reinforced our view that landscape is a concept which
cuts right across a very wide range of disciplines and which thus ought to be able to facilitate
many productive and creative inter-disciplinary conversations. In terms of this book, there are
points of similarity and convergence right across the four sections. There are instances of direct
influence; as already mentioned, developments in cultural geography have rippled through a
number of adjacent disciplines. There are also instances of synchronous developments in dif-
ferent fields which seem to have a lot in common, yet come from different traditions. An
instance of this might be the interest which European landscape planners have shown in the
characteristics of peri-urban areas and the design movement known as Landscape Urbanism
which has its origins in North America (see chapters by Qviström and Tully respectively). They
share similar concerns and are interested in many of the same phenomena, yet they cite litera-
tures which for the most part do not overlap. Here, clearly, is a conversation that could, and
probably ought, to happen. We are going to devote the remainder of this Introduction to the
identification of some of these interweaving themes.
The critique of power and hegemony

As Turner observes in Chapter 11, there was a time when much empirical work in landscape
history (such as, for example, the work of W.G. Hoskins in Britain) was evocative and nostalgic,
with a tendency to overlook or downplay issues of power or exploitation, or simply to take
them for granted. Similarly the traditional art historical approach to the landscapes depicted on
gallery walls did not engage with the social, economic and political conditions which made such
places possible, although there has been a similar move in art history as in geography. As
Howard outlines in Chapter 3, the work of Cosgrove and Daniels applied theories of cultural
capital, hegemony and dominant ideology to the landscape in its representations in graphic and
pictorial form. Herrington (Chapter 30) observes that the celebrated designed landscapes of
history, usually the product of patronage, provided plenty of evidence for Marxist analysis of their
role in ‘maintaining, elaborating and concealing power.’ Hawkins (Chapter 16) reminds us that
John Constable’s paintings of peaceful rural scenes, such as The Haywain, were used to promote
3
a timeless ideal of beauty and social order which belied exploitative labour relations, rural
poverty and the political unrest that was sweeping the English countryside at the time they
were painted. Far from being the tranquil soil of our fondest urban imagination, the rural
landscape could be a ‘class battleground’. In Chapter 15, on open-air museums, Noussia draws
our attention to the way such places utilize pastoral landscapes to present a similarly idealized,
nostalgic and apolitical version of the past. Revill (Chapter 20) shows the ways in which classical
music, by imitating such natural sounds as birdsong, rain or wind, and by quoting snatches of
folk music, can evoke a powerful feeling of the pastoral, which is easily channelled as a vehicle
for nationalist sentiment.
Belonging and identity

Closely related to issues of power and hegemony, the discourses which circulate around notions
of belonging and identity frequently invoke the idea of attachment to landscape. This can have
a benign aspect. Wattchow (Chapter 7) expresses the difficulty he has in writing about land-
scape and place in the abstract – he finds that he has to approach them from the perspective of
the particular, this place, this landscape. Egoz (Chapter 24) explores the notion that every human
being has a Right to Landscape (RtL), a right that is assured in the European Landscape Con-
vention, from the same stable as the Human Rights Convention. This is based on the obser-
vation that human beings need to be able to relate to their surroundings and that landscapes
provide psychological sustenance as much as they support physical subsistence. Egoz cites the
anthropologist Barbara Bender who observed that landscape is ‘part of the way in which iden-
tities are created and disputed … ’. Tolia-Kelly (Chapter 28) untangles the role of memory in
the making of place-histories and people-histories, weaving notions of emotion and affect
seamlessly into our understandings of landscape in the process. Bowring (Chapter 23) references
the notion of ‘local distinctiveness’, a term coined by the British charity Common Ground, set
up to oppose the homogenization of place, a very real threat in this era of globalized flows.
While we may value locally distinctive landscapes, and recognize the welfare benefits to
people of a sense of identity and belonging, these positive values can turn particularly ugly if
they become hitched to a virulent tribalism or nationalism. Egoz notes that nomadic commu-
nities are stigmatized and excluded because of their ‘landless’ condition. Problems can also arise
when two separate communities feel a sense of attachment to the same tract of land, a not
uncommon situation in colonial and post-colonial societies, where the management of such
landscapes often remains bounded by the rationalities and practices of the earlier colonial state.
Even well-meaning attempts to promote affordable homes for local people also carry a clear
discriminatory message. The very notion of heritage landscape troubles Harvey (chapter 13)
because it carries the burden of colonizer and colonized. Lindström and her co-authors (Chapter 8)
observe that there are always several contesting semiotic realities linked to any one physical area
and that this presents a challenge to planners and managers who necessarily have to broker
between these contesting realities when dealing with visions of the past and the future.
Everyday life
The European Landscape Convention recognizes a sea-change in the way that landscapes are
regarded by academics, professionals and other interested parties. The shift is from the identifi-
cation, valorization and protection of ‘special’ landscapes towards an interest in the qualities of
quotidian places, the ordinary, the everyday, even the degraded or stigmatized. While Kidd
(Chapter 31) recognizes that protective designations have been a valuable way of resisting the
4
Introduction
homogenization and fragmentation of culturally and ecologically rich landscapes, she argues that
landscapes are fundamentally dynamic entities and any ‘island’ policy that only preserves the best
(however evaluated) is going to be judged a failure if it does not support policies in the wider
environment.
Inevitably much of the dialogue about everydayness turns upon the distinction between
‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, which is discussed and critiqued by Howard in Chapter 3. It is gen-
erally recognized that the views of experts and the perceptions of local people are likely to be
different, also that people become more ‘insider’ the longer they reside. Brook (Chapter 9)
observes that insiders may have different aesthetic views from outsiders, noting that farmers
(usually considered the archetypal insiders) have a level of discernment about, say, the quality of
a pasture, which can be equated with connoisseurship. Finch (Chapter 12) notes a shift in his-
torical landscape studies from ‘traditional, abstract, external, “etic” views of the landscape, to a
more embedded, experiential, or “emic” perspective.’ Gold and Gold (Chapter 18) notice that
when tourists come to view a landscape that has been valorized through popular culture (such as
the North York Moors via the TV series Heartbeat), it is the imaginary landscape they hope to
see, not the working, quotidian one, while Knudsen et al (Chapter 25) remark on the status of
the tourist as alienated modern man.
Knowing as a body
The ‘new cultural geography’, with its emphasis upon the analysis of representations, was initially
a strong influence upon landscape archaeologists, says Turner, but there was also an unease that
this emphasis took researchers away from the material landscape. In time cultural geographers
themselves came to worry about this. Wylie (Chapter 4) and Waterton (Chapter 5) outline
some of their responses, including a new interest in phenomenological methods, the develop-
ment of non-representational (or more-than-representational) approaches, and an engagement
with actor-network theory. A consistent theme is the attack on ocularcentrism and upon those
Picturesque aesthetic theories which privilege vision over other ways of knowing the world.
This shift from the dominance of vision, as found in the prospect poem, to eco-critical literature
where the distinction between self and landscape is eroded, is also marked by Kerridge (Chapter 19).
At around the same time that cultural geographers were dematerializing landscape studies,
researchers working within the paradigm of experimental psychology (examined by Ward
Thompson) were adding flesh to the bones of an evolutionary theory which suggested that the
landscape preferences of modern human beings were shaped, at least in part, by the prehistory
of the species, the hypothesis being that we would be hard-wired to prefer landscapes similar to
those in which we had successfully survived and evolved. Though environmental psychology
and phenomenology might seem miles apart, they share an interest in the visceral interaction
with landscape. Ward Thompson observes that responses to the landscape may be unmediated
by cognitive processes, which is close to the notion of ‘affect’ (a technical term in psychology
long before it was used by geographers). In discussing the notion of ‘felt sense of place’,
Wattchow remarks that this has both kinetic and kinaesthetic components. Waterton
finds that the common thread linking a wide range of non-representational research is the
acknowledgement that ‘our understandings of the world are lived, embodied and tangled up in
how we do things’ – which leads us to the next theme.
Process, practice and performance

For Crouch (Chapter 10), landscape is not an assemblage of physical features, but something
which is subjectively ‘in the making’. Across the humanities and social sciences landscape is
5
being conceptualized as process, as practice and as performance. Ward Thompson also notes that
perceiving and acting are intertwined, while Turner notes that landscape archaeologists have
become interested in ‘the entangled relationships between people and things, past and present,
and how they are mixed up and changed over time’. Performance, like maintenance, involves
repetition and many of the practices involved in the care of landscapes must be done over and
over. Some of Crouch’s own research has been on allotment holders and community gardeners,
but all sorts of other practices, from bee-keeping to hillwalking and reindeer-herding, have
been studied. To counter the suggestion that routine or ritualized performance is conservative
and stultifying, Crouch introduces Judith Butler’s notion of performativity (derived from John
Searle’s speech act theory), which introduces an element of openness and creativity into per-
formance. Not only do we make the world through our repeated performances, but in the
breaks and caesurae, we have opportunities to open up new ways of doing things. Even when
an activity is choreographed, each performance is unique.
Performance theory has implications for planners and designers, because closure in design
shuts down the possibilities for creative reinvention. As Tully shows in Chapter 37, this is an idea
which has found its way into the discourse of Landscape Urbanism. Landscape urbanist practi-
tioners eschew the fixed masterplan. Instead they see their role as preparing fields for action and
stages for performances. Among cultural geographers, this emphasis upon performance has given
new significance to the term ‘landscaping’. Wylie, for example, quotes Hayden Lorimer’s phrase
‘embodied acts of landscaping’. There is no irony intended, and Lorimer and Wylie cannot
have been aware that the term ‘landscaping’ has negative connotations for landscape architects,
for whom it has been associated with a trivialization of their calling. In landscape architectural
discourses, ‘landscaping’, whether used as verb or noun, has often been linked to shallow, cos-
metic practices. This clash of usage suggests to the editors a need for a greater engagement
between cultural geographers and landscape architects, though not those two groups alone.
Participatory futures
‘The trick … ’ says Waterton (Chapter 5) ‘is to continue to push at the boundaries of traditional
methods so that the body, our bodies, can somehow become more central to the processes
through which research is done’. But what is true of research is also true of landscape planning,
management and design, where all of the themes so far mentioned lead in the direction of a
more participatory future. Kidd emphasizes the importance of the link between public
engagement and effective implementation. We need to provide mechanisms for engagement
and re-engagement with landscapes. Chapter 29, by Roe, is devoted to the examination of
forms of participation and how these are related to wider social issues of justice, governance,
democracy and sustainability. The move towards greater participation, now written into the
European Landscape Convention, is not just a matter for landscape planners. In Chapter 11
Turner finds the same imperative in force in the field of archaeology where there is now a
willingness to engage not only with other academic specialists and environmental practitioners,
but also with interested groups such as farmers or politicians, and also with the general public
‘who live in, work with and pay visits to different landscapes at different times’.
The nature–culture hybrid

One of the traditional roles of planning, according to Antrop (Chapter 1), Kidd (Chapter 31) and
Carver (Chapter 32) has been the protection of wild nature. Carver considers the controversial
topic of ‘rewilding’ (he prefers the term ‘wilding’) whereby humanized landscapes are returned
6
Introduction
to a more natural condition. However, as Krauss (Chapter 6) and Thompson (Chapter 38) both
suggest, the whole notion of the separateness of a natural and a humanized world is now
viewed with scepticism. In what some geologists now term the anthropocene age, says Krauss,
such a distinction no longer makes sense. It is human destiny to shape nature and create envir-
onment. Similarly Cassar (Chapter 33), writing from the standpoint of landscape ecology,
believes that it makes better sense to talk in terms of socio-ecological systems and sees the
potential of ecology as an inspiration to designers. Nordh and her co-authors (Chapter 26) draw
to our attention the benefits to humans of urban nature. Cassar and Carver both discuss the
concept of ecosystem services, while Kidd looks at the potential of green infrastructure planning,
landscape ecological urbanism, urban agriculture and greenways. Price (Chapter 27) sees the
landscape itself as a kind of ecosystem service which might be valued by economists.
This interest in nature-culture hybrids has focussed attention on brownfield sites (Höfer and
Vicenzotti, Chapter 34) and peri-urban areas (Qviström, Chapter 36). Qviström sees the peri-
urban as a kind of rural-urban battleground, but also as a new sort of wilderness, which requires
new interpretations and a re-evaluation of its messy multifunctionality. These ideas also come
together in the discourse of landscape urbanism, delineated by Peggy Tully in Chapter 37.
Landscape urbanists seek to turn urban design inside out by downplaying the role of archi-
tecture and foregrounding urban ecology. They are concerned more with the way that land-
scape functions than with the way that it looks and value the ‘performative beauty’ of
infrastructure, ecology and flux. Landscape urbanism also owes something to ecological art,
which, as Collins shows (Chapter 17), made a major shift from the depiction of visual landscape
to a principled involvement with the land itself.
A world in crisis
Suffusing all of these themes, and adding urgency to contemporary debates, is a prevailing sense
of crisis. Antrop (Chapter 1) uses the expression ‘landscape crisis’ to discuss the sense of dis-
comfort felt by many people because they cannot cope with the increasingly rapid changes they
experience in landscape. These changes would be disconcerting enough if they were just the
results of globalizing flows and the loss of familiar and comforting landscapes which these entail,
but the spectre of climate change now hangs over the whole discussion (Leyshon and Geohegan,
Chapter 39). To the sorts of urban dystopias portrayed in science fiction (see Gold and Gold,
Chapter 18) we are adding new imaginaries of an altered climate and a still recognizable, but
radically different world, where deserts have smothered once fertile fields, large cities are inun-
dated by rising sea levels and vast movements of population are under way. With increased
migration will come greater problems of identity and human rights, says Egoz. Climate change
will adversely affect air quality in cities, say Nordh et al. Landscape, says Leyshon and Geohegan,
is the plane upon which ordinary, everyday life is lived. No one is sure how it will cope with a
world in crisis. As Brook mentions, one of the most controversial landscape issues in many
countries is the siting of wind-farms, where the aesthetic concept of landscape bumps firmly
against the ecological. We seem to need new visions to help us adjust to this, as Collins suggests
in his chapter on environmental art. Producing, evaluating and articulating these visions seem to
be an enterprise in which the whole diverse community of landscape researchers should be
actively involved.
7
Fitting into country
Deborah Bird Rose
MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA
When Jessie Wirrpa went walkabout she would call out to her ancestors, ‘Give us fish, the kids
are hungry.’ Jessie’s country included the dead as well as the living, the Dreaming ancestors as
well as her own parents and grandparents. Everywhere she went she encountered signs of life.
A discarded stone spear point, some charred sticks from a camp fire, a Dreaming tree that got
knocked by lightning when her oldest father died. No distinction between history and pre-
history for Jessie: in her country the present rolled into the past on waves of generations of
living beings who had all worked to keep the place alive.
We walked and drove through much of the country where Jessie’s Dreaming ancestor the
Owlet Nightjar travelled. He had a main camp at the waterhole where Victoria River Downs
station is now located, and he travelled north in search of a particular hard wood for his spears
so that he could kill a big crocodile. Site visits at the homestead were a bit inhibited by all
the strangers there, but, once we got out into the open country to the north, Jessie called out to
Old Man Nightjar to let him know who she was and to tell him she had brought a new person.
The Old Man was Jessie’s countryman, a term that includes all the living beings who belong in
a given country and that applies equally to women and to men. As we walked she told the
stories. Here, Old Man Nightjar had stopped to cook some lily corms, and because he didn’t
crack them properly they exploded and burnt his whiskers. Further north he encountered the
Black-headed Python as she came travelling across the country out of the west. When he saw
her he took fright: ‘Ohhh,’ he worried, ‘that’s a really big snake and I’m only a little bird. I’m
getting out of here.’ And he flew home. Jessie chuckled over his mishaps, and somehow he
seemed even more like a member of the family.
Walking with Jessie I experienced an expanded awareness as my senses opened up. We
westerners are said to privilege the visual, so maybe for us learning about country starts with
learning to see. The track of the Black-headed Python is completely visible: Jasper Gorge snakes
its way through red cliffs of stunning beauty, and is to anyone’s eyes the track of a very, very
large snake. Other parts of the story are visible there too. There is a place where she set down
her coolamon, and the large stone is there; back there is a place where she split the rock with
her hair string – and the split rock is there.
As I learned more of the Black-headed Python story, the country came ever more alive. She
carried in her coolamon the seeds of many plants. In the hills she put the seeds for hill country
8
plants, and out on the flats she put the seeds for those plants. I began to see connection, asso-
ciation and differentiation, which I began to understand as organization and belonging. There
was a fit between creation and the world today.
Jessie fitted into the country like a fish in water, and I tagged along. She knew the soils,
creeks, ridges, springs, shelters, and other aspects of her country. Each such niche was a habitat:
this is where we go for conkerberries, this is where we go for lilies. When we get the lilies we’ll
crack them before we cook them, and we’ll chuckle about Old Man Nightjar who forgot to do
it right. If we were to see a nightjar, we’d see his funny looking whiskers. The stories were all
around us.
Every species of tree had a name, and every tree lived within relationships of beneficial
connections. This one provided shade for humans, and food for black cockatoos; that one
you could make medicine from; another one had bark that you would turn into ashes and roll
your chewing tobacco in. Many of the species of grass, and most of the shrubs and other plants,
had names, and so of course did the animals and insects. And they were connected, all of them
one way or another, by being enmeshed in overlapping relationships of benefit.
Some plants provide benefits that do not pertain directly to human beings at all. Others offer
benefits that are widely shared between humans and many other living things. The ‘black plum’
(pulkal, Vitex acuminata) is good firewood, and the fruits are edible for humans. In addition
dingoes, emus, and turkeys all eat the plums. Furthermore, the pollen provides food for bees
and thus contributes to native honey.
Knowledge of how living things fit by benefiting each other is not just a body of informa-
tion, it is a system of action. The river fig (Ficus coronulata) is good firewood (as riverside woods
go), and the fruits are edible. In fact they are very edible: the fruits are a major food for birds,
ants, fish and turtles. When you go fishing and the figs are ripe, you can eat some yourself, and
then throw some into the water to attract the attention of turtles. Why? Because the time when
the figs are fruiting is also the time when turtles are becoming fat and thus are really good to
eat, especially the livers.
Like ripples in the water, some benefits keep on expanding. When we went for con-
kerberries Jessie knew it was time to go because the fireflies had appeared. We saw the bushes
from a distance, and she pointed to where a turkey had been eating the berries. When it is
eaten up that high, it’s a turkey; higher again and it’s an emu. Then she hushed us, because
she saw marks of a goanna under the bush. With a few hand signs she organized the kids to
circle the conkerberry bushes, and told the young women to flush out, stun, and kill the
goanna. We cooked it later, and later again it became the subject of stories: there we saw the
goanna track; here he jumped out, and over there Margaret hit him. Debbie didn’t
know what to do, and we all had a good laugh. Here we cooked him – ‘good dinner camp,
that one’.
Jessie was a stern teacher. When I caught my first turtle I realized that I had no idea what to
do next, and I hollered for her. She came along the river bank and said in her grumpiest voice:
‘I’ll show you once. After that you’ll have to do it yourself.’
I like to imagine Jessie telling Simon Schama how wrong he was. Schama, as is well known
and frequently quoted in academic circles, claims that landscape is a product of seeing, and that
‘it is the shaping perceptions’ of humans ‘that makes the difference between raw matter and
landscape’ (Schama, 1995: 10). In my imagined conversation, Jessie brings her gruffest voice to
the fore and tells Schama that in her country there’s no such thing as raw matter. She would tell
him about country that flourishes through looped and tangled benefits. The world is alive, she
would be saying, and the living beings as well as the landforms and habitats have learned to fit
together.
9
Deborah Bird Rose
Another of my teachers, Daly Pulkara, compared his knowledge and way of being in the
world with that of Whitefellas (kartiya):
This kartiya got new way, just growing like this grass here. New one. Well, we are not that
kind. I bin grow like this one – I bin grow deep. Top bushes might be white man. Not
me. I’m right down to the roots, just stay there forever.
He talked about showing a white man some roots and saying to him: ‘That’s the beginning.
That’s where we bin start from.’
To have roots is to have a history of fit, and the knowledge of the on-going dynamics of fit.
These kinds of roots inform both ecological and philosophical knowledge, forming a philoso-
phical ecology of Life with a capital L, in Erazim Kohak’s (1998: 267) terms. Kohak uses this
term to demarcate Life (with a capital L) as a process from the individual lives in which it
configures itself. Dreaming stories tell us about Life, about its continuous coming forth into
country. Life is what is happening in the living world.
As Jessie and I walked she took notice of what was going on. When the march flies bit us,
we knew the crocs were laying their eggs, and Jessie began to think about going walkabout to
those places. When the jangarla tree (Sesbania formosa) started to flower, we knew, or Jessie
knew, that the barramundi would be biting. There was always something to pay attention to,
and the information told of what was happening in other places. So with the march flies: it was
not necessary to keep going to the crocodile places to check to see if they were laying their
eggs. It was enough to be bitten by the first march flies of the season, and that could happen
anywhere. A similar pattern concerns the river fig. The event that announces both ripe figs and
fat turtles is the cicada song. Cicadas sing turtle fat, people said.
To be honest, cicadas drive me mad. In fact I found much of the insect life of the tropics
very difficult to endure, and if I never again sit on a steamy river bank in 45 degree heat with
my head about to explode from the reverberations of the screaming cicadas, and with blood
running down my legs from the march flies, that will probably be okay with me. But once
I learned that they are ‘tellers’ – that they give us news of what is happening in the world, I
stopped feeling so hassled. And then one year a group of people came over from Western
Australia for young men’s business, and they had a cicada song that they sang for ceremony.
Cicadas are called nyirri, and in that song the women performed a cicada descant – a high shrill
cicada voice that rode across the men’s singing like the voice of the world. We had a great time,
dancing all night and calling up cicadas and turtle fat.
Dancing cicadas all night long is not the way my scientific colleagues at the university do
ecology, and I think that’s too bad. There is a lot be learned, along with getting the benefit of
all those fabulous turtle livers. The ecologists are studying the science of fitting in, and I want to
say a few words about that, but let us first consider an Indigenous perspective because here
we see so clearly that fit within country gives an ecologically inflected meaning to the concept
of survival of the fittest. Unlike Darwin’s theory of survival through competition, an Indigenous
concept of survival of the fittest denotes the continuity of the patterns and flows that enable
living things to fit into country. Those who are most fit are those who know most about how
to fit in. Jessie’s way both of fitting in and of understanding the wider patterns and flows shifts the
concept of fitness towards relationships of mutual benefits.1 It offers a dynamic and synergistic
account of life in which fitness is a project that is shared amongst living things rather than a scarce
good to be competed for.2 And it brings people into country as participants rather than as ‘winners’.
Ecologists are finding their way towards a similar account of Australian ecosystems, writing
that in Australia the greatest threats to species are fire and drought, and that species thus adapt
10
and survive through complementarity rather than through competition. Tim Flannery
(1994: 84), for example, writes that, because of a variety of stresses in Australian ecosystems,
living things do best by recycling nutrients rapidly, and they accomplish rapid recycling more
effectively by ‘various species developing intimate relationships’. Thus, those species ‘that
cooperate in large, complex systems’ have the best chances for continuing life.3 Life wants to
live, and we are learning that the way Life lives is by finding its fit and enmeshing itself in webs
of complementarity and mutuality. I veer into philosophical ecology here, and am inclined to
speak of creation, not because I am in search of a creator but because the term so clearly con-
veys the profundity of Life: it creates itself, organizes itself, seeks mutual benefits and connection.
Creation in this sense is the history and future of Life on Earth.
But to return to my travels with Jessie, I have to confess that it took time for the penny to
drop. It seemed like a very long time before I realized that all this ephemeral life of plants and
animals, including humans – this is the on-going story of Life creating itself. Creation is Life’s
desire to come forth and find its fit: not just a one-off event in the past, but the continuing work of
Life. Every tree that grows, every plant and animal, every person, is a contemporary efferves-
cence of creation. When the winds carry the fresh smell of spinifex and native honey, you breathe
creation, and when the cicadas sing out you can grab your fishing line and join the chorus.
Jessie often took me by the hand as she guided me and took care of me. Holding her
beautiful and capable hands taught me this: she walked in, and worked for, Life. She walked in
knowledge, in communication, in memory and in story. She fit perfectly.
Acknowledgements
This chapter was first published in the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 19 (3), 117–21, and
is reprinted with permission. My deep gratitude to Jessie Wirrpa increases with time, as I come
to understand more and more about the breadth of her teaching.
Notes
1 Gregory Bateson called such fit the patterns that connect. What holds fit in place is the flow of
benefits, as Life comes forth and lives in country.
2 Zygmunt Bauman (2000) points out the cultural construction of survival as a scarce resource in his
analysis ‘The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost’.
3 Complementarity versus competition is also part of a wider set of debates about the evolution of life
more generally. Lynn Margulis (1998), for example, presents the view that much of life on Earth has
come about through symbiosis rather than elimination. Margulis writes that the idea that new species
arise from symbiotic mergers among members of old ones ‘is still not even discussed in polite scientific
society’ (p. 6).
References
Bateson, Gregory (1980) Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, Glasgow, Fontana/Collins
Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) ‘The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost’, in Decoste, F.C. and Schwartz, B. (eds) The
Ghost of the Holocaust: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
pp. 3–15
Flannery, Tim (1994) The Future Eaters, Melbourne: Reed Books
Kohak, E. (1998) ‘Varieties of Ecological Experience’, in Cohen, R.S. and Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of
Nature: the Human Dimension, London: Kluwer, pp. 257–71
Margulis, L. (1998) Symbiotic Planet: a New Look at Evolution, New York: Basic Books
Schama, Simon (1995) Landscape and Memory, London: Fontana Press
11
1
A brief history of landscape
research
Marc Antrop
UNIVERSITY OF GHENT
The history of what we now call landscape research followed many different paths and several
important conceptual changes occurred. To understand this we must consider the multiple
meanings the word ‘landscape’ has, as well as the context of society and technology. As the
roots of the word ‘landscape’ are found in Western Europe, the perspective of this review will
start there.
First, I will discuss the etymology and meanings of the word ‘landscape’ related to the dif-
ferentiation of activities of studying and forming the landscape. Second, I shall consider the
consecutive phases of the history in more detail. Third, I shall discuss briefly some of the
changes in landscape research since the introduction of formal definitions of landscape, by
the World Heritage Convention and European Landscape Convention.
The multiple meanings of landscape

The origin of the word ‘landscape’ comes from the Germanic languages. One of the oldest
references in the Dutch language dates from the early thirteenth century when ‘lantscap’ (‘lantscep’,
‘landschap’) referred to a land region or environment. It is related to the word ‘land’, meaning a
bordered territory, but its suffix -scep refers to land reclamation and creation, as is also found in
the German ‘Landschaft’ – ‘schaffen’ = to make. Its meaning as ‘scenery’ is younger and comes
with Dutch painting from the seventeenth century, international renown of which introduced
the word into English but with an emphasis on ‘scenery’ instead of territory. When ‘land’ refers
to soil and territory, ‘landscape’ as ‘organized land’ is also characteristic of the people who made
it. Landscape expresses the (visual) manifestation of the territorial identity. The earliest realistic
representations of landscape date from the fifteenth century, in particular in Renaissance paint-
ing (Vos, 2000) and emphasize visual character and symbolic meanings. Landscape became also
an expression of human ideas, thoughts, beliefs and feelings.
Consequently, in common language, the word ‘landscape’ has multiple meanings and,
according to the focus one makes, different perspectives of research and actions are possible.
Also, different linguistic interpretations and translations resulted in a lot of confusion.
Researching the exact meaning of the word and its scientific definition dominated the early
start of landscape research (Zonneveld 1995; Olwig 1996; Claval 2004; Antrop 2005). To clarify
12
A brief history of landscape research
the meaning one is using, adjectives were added to the word ‘landscape’, such as natural or
cultural landscape, rural or urban landscape or designed landscape. Landscape does not only
refer to a complex phenomenon that can be described and analyzed using objective scientific
methods, it also refers to subjective observation and experience and thus has a perceptive, aes-
thetic, artistic and existential meaning (Lowenthal 1975; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). The term
‘landscape’ became also a metaphor, as in media landscape or political landscape. Unsurprisingly,
the approaches to landscape are very broad and not always clearly defined. Most interest groups
dealing with the same territory of land see different landscapes. The meaning of ‘landscape’
shifts by the context and by the background of the users.
Chronology
Figure 1.1 gives a graphic overview of the history of landscape research from the perspective of
Western culture where it originated. It places ideas, concepts, disciplines, methods and tech-
nology and exemplary key persons and networks on a time line. No geographical differentiation
is attempted to show regional differences. These different aspects are represented by different
typographies explained at the bottom of the figure. The different phases that are recognized are
indicated by bold numbers on the left and are discussed more in detail.
The early beginnings

Dealing with the landscape as an object of study started in Europe during the Renaissance and
the Age of Discovery. In the fifteenth century appeared the first pictorial representations of
landscapes, emphasizing its visual character and scenery and using the landscape as an expression
Figure 1.1 Development of landscape research
13
Marc Antrop
of human ideas, thoughts, beliefs and feelings. The creation of imaginary landscapes appeared
almost simultaneously with a new style of garden design and urban lifestyle. Garden architecture and
urban planning made a branch of practitioners from which contemporary (landscape)
architecture and town planning developed.
Simultaneously, the discovery of new worlds demanded new methods for describing and
depicting in a systematic ‘scientific’ way exotic landscapes and people. New techniques were
developed such as cartography.
Emerging scientific research: landscape as an object of study of geography

The scientific research of landscape started with the systematic descriptions during naturalistic
explorations, such as the ones made by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Charles
Darwin (1809–1882). A short and very concise definition of landscape was attributed, but not
proven, to von Humboldt: ‘Landschaft ist der Totalcharakter einer Erdgegend’ (Zonneveld 1995).
This definition implies that regional diversity is expressed by landscapes and that landscape is a
holistic phenomenon which is perceived by humans. Although von Humboldt was a pioneer
in biogeography, physical geography and climatology, he always stressed in his writings the
human and cultural aspects in the landscape and above all the aesthetic qualities, which he even
considered to be mentally healing (Nicholson 1995).
Alwin Oppel, a German geographer, introduced the term ‘Landschaftskunde’ (‘landscape science’)
in 1884 (Troll 1950). Theoretical concepts and mainly descriptive methods of this ‘Land-
schaftskunde’ were developed mainly in Central Europe and Scandinavia. Siegfried Passarge
wrote extensive manuals (Passarge 1919–21, 1921–30). The Finnish geographer Johannes Granö
made the distinction (Granö 1929) between the ‘Nahsicht’ and the ‘Fernsicht’ or ‘Landschaft’. The
‘Nahsicht’ (‘proximity’) is the surroundings that can be experienced by all senses, while the
‘Landschaft’ is the part that is mainly perceived visually. He developed descriptive methods for
the study of both. He was also a pioneer in photography and introduced this technique of
recording in natural sciences, mastering it as an artist (Jones 2003). Most of his work remained
unknown until the English translation of his book Reine Geographie as ‘Pure Geography’ in 1997
(Granö and Paasi 1997).
Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), a French geographer, had a more literary and historical
approach to landscape, although he used similar techniques of annotated sketches and his prose
was not so different from von Humboldt’s. The main difference was the recognition of the
importance of the local society and its life style (‘genre de vie’) in organizing the landscape, which
resulted in a regional differentiation not only based upon natural conditions but also upon cul-
ture, settlement patterns and social territories. He also considered the landscape as a holistic
unity, which was expressed in characteristic ‘pays’ (Claval 2004). The description of regions
became synthetic ‘tableaux’ of idealistic landscapes. Both von Humboldt and Vidal de la Blache
implicitly included the perception of landscape and its aesthetic qualities in their work.
Carl Sauer introduced (the German concept of) landscape in the USA and made it
the corner stone of cultural geography (Sauer 1925). However, Richard Hartshorne (1939)
considered landscape as a territorial concept to be confusing, and redundant, with concepts of
region and space being preferable alternatives (Muir 1999). However, Sauer’s vision resulted
later in the first important symposium on Man’s Role in the Changing Face of the Earth
(Thomas 1956).
The landscape thus became a core topic in geography and was seen as a unique synthesis
between the natural and cultural characteristics of a region. To study landscape, information was
gathered from field surveys, maps, literature, sketches and terrain photographs. Methods were
14
developed for detailed description of landscape elements and for making typologies. Theoretical
debates about the nature of landscape became important in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury, in particular in Germany. Different national schools developed, with different emphases on
natural or cultural landscape, on history and region.
These explorations also raised the interest of the broader public for nature, landscape and
geography. In 1830 the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) was founded in the UK and in
1888 the National Geographical Society (NGS) in the USA. Colonization and industrial revo-
lution, and many associated processes such as urban sprawl, the enclosure movement and the
‘agricultural invasion’ of new products, created new landscapes that erased existing ones. Land-
scape became popular also in the arts, in particular in painting and gardening. The American
Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) was founded as early as 1899. Scenic and symbolic
meanings became more important (Schama 1995; Olwig 2002). Around the beginning of the
twentieth century, the loss of nature and traditional rural landscapes initiated movements of
protection of monuments, sites, nature and landscapes in most Western countries. Landscape
became accepted as common heritage and laws for protecting it were enacted. Exemplary is the
foundation of the National Trust (NT) in 1895 in the UK.
Landscape from the air: aerial photography and historical geography

After the First World War, aerial photography gave a completely new approach to the study of
landscape. The bird’s-eye perspective revealed clearly its holistic character. Complex patterns
became visible reflecting hierarchies of spatial scales, suggesting that multiple processes were
involved. This made Carl Troll (1939) say that ‘Luftbildforschung ist zu einem sehr hohen Grade
Landschapsökologie’ (‘air photo interpretation is to a large extent landscape ecology’), thus intro-
ducing ‘landscape ecology’, which he also called an ‘Anschauungsweis’ (‘a way of seeing’). Aerial
photography also opened a new view on our past as many unknown archaeological and his-
torical features were detected, giving a boost to historical geography and initiating landscape
archaeology.
After the Second World War, landscape research was still mainly descriptive, resulting in
regional monographs, mainly the result of doctoral theses. The emphasis was on landscape
classification (chorology and typology) and landscape genesis, both natural and historical, and
landscape as the basis for regional identity. In this context, the Permanent European Conference
for the Study of the Rural Landscape (PECSRL) was created in 1957 and is the oldest orga-
nized group of landscape researchers in Europe (Helmfrid 2004). In the same period, landscape
architects organized themselves in an international, professional federation (IFLA).
In the UK and Ireland the focus was more on the archaeology and history in the landscape.
The interest in landscape grew faster and became more important for the general public than for
academic scholars (Taylor 2006). A milestone was W.G. Hoskins (1955) The Making of the
English Landscape.
Nature protectionists also developed an interest in landscape, and its protection became their
mission. Soon protected natural areas were embedded in larger environments, such as the Areas
of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in Britain (1956), the Naturparke in Germany (1957)
and the Parcs Naturels Régionaux in France (1967).
The loss of synthesis

Continual specialization in science and the introduction of quantitative techniques changed
research profoundly in the 1960s and 1970s. Most important was the ‘new orientation’ in
15
Marc Antrop
geography, aiming at more explanation based on theory and modelling. New techniques of
spatial analysis laid the foundation of geostatistics. Regional geography and landscape studies
became old-fashioned and Jan Zonneveld (1980) called it the ‘gap in geography’.
In West Germany, this led to a crisis in the ‘Landschaftskunde’ with endless theoretical
discussions about definitions, losing all societal significance (Paffen 1973). Meanwhile, the theoretical
basis for landscape science continued to develop in Eastern Europe (Neef 1967).
Soon the ‘gap in geography’ was filled and landscape research took off again from different
sources. In 1972 the Working Community Landscape Ecological Research (WLO) was foun-
ded in the Netherlands in an attempt to restore landscape as a concept of synthesis and to
promote interdisciplinary research. It launched the journal Landschap (Zonneveld 2000).
Another approach to landscape research came from historical geographers and archaeologists.
English work was important here, such as the series of The Domesday Geography edited by
Darby since 1962 (Darby and Campbell 1962). In 1967 the Landscape Research Group
(LRG) was founded, publishing the journal Landscape Research. In the framework of the
PECSRL, the first important syntheses at a European scale were realized, such as a common
terminology and an overview of field systems and settlement forms (Lebeau 1979). Simultan-
eously, a philosophical approach to landscape emerged from the Berkeley school in the USA
and from several British geographers. They emphasized the importance of landscape perception,
and landscape as a social construct with narratives and symbolic meanings (Tuan 1974;
Lowenthal 1975).
The general settings of the chorology, typology and genesis of traditional rural landscapes
were already in place before the 1970s when scientific interest shifted. From the 1970s on,
satellite remote sensing offered another new perspective which was – forced by the low reso-
lution of the first generation satellites – a small scale and more global view. Towards the end of
the 1970s, the rapid development of computers made applications of statistical modelling pos-
sible and pattern recognition and image classification remapped the landscapes mainly based
upon land cover.
The economic recession, consecutive energy crises and increasing environmental problems
made it clear that the problems became too complex to be handled by non-concerted actions of
different specialized disciplines (Moss 1999). Environmental impact assessment, first enacted in
the USA in 1969, stimulated the development of new methods for studying the landscape, such
as the Leopold matrix for qualitative expert assessment (Leopold et al. 1971). It lasted until 1985
before the EU introduced an Environmental Impact Assessment Directive, which included
‘landscape and the (visual) surroundings’ as one aspect to be studied.
The humanistic approach and the revival of landscape ecology

The impacts on the decline and efficiency of landscape research were multiple. In 1982, the
Dutch WLO organized an international ‘brainstorming’, revitalising landscape ecology as con-
ceived by Troll giving landscape research a new input coming from the East-European coun-
tries (Tsjallingii and de Veer 1982). This new approach was rapidly accepted by North
American ecologists (Forman 1990). In 1988, the International Association of Landscape Ecol-
ogy (IALE) was founded, promoting interdisciplinary landscape research, with a renewed
interest in holism, systems theory and dynamics (Forman and Godron 1986; Naveh and
Liebermann 1994). The journal Landscape Research became international and two new interna-
tional ones were published: Landscape and Urban Planning in 1986 and Landscape Ecology in 1987.
Simultaneously, the humanistic and historical approach to landscape continued to develop
(Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Groth and Bressi 1997; Rackham 1986).
16
Meanwhile, landscape architects and garden designers attempted to make their profession
more scientifically based. In 1991, different schools of landscape architecture in Europe jointly
created ECLAS, the European Conference of Landscape Architecture Schools, meeting
annually, followed by a thematic web-based network LE:NOTRE in 1996.
Summarizing, at the end of the twentieth century, different approaches in landscape research
could be recognized. Landscape ecologists focused on the relations between spatial patterns of
land use and ecological processes. Historical geographers and archaeologists focused on the
genesis of the landscape and its meaning as heritage. Humanistic and cultural geographers
focused upon the landscape as a mental and social construct with important symbolic meanings.
Separately, landscape architects and design practitioners focused on scenery. Each of these
approaches used their proper definitions, concepts and methods, but a full interdisciplinary
integration was still lacking.
The ‘landscape crisis’ and the shift towards applied and trans-disciplinary
landscape studies
The term ‘landscape crisis’ is used to denote the feeling of discomfort many people have
because they cannot cope with the increasingly rapid changes they experience in landscape
(Antrop 2005). Interest in the landscape grew again, in Europe particularly focussed on the cultural
landscape. The first call for a landscape convention was made at the conference ‘Landscapes in a
New Europe: Unity in Diversity’ in Blois, October 1992, sponsored jointly by LRG and Paysage
+Amenagement (Phillips, 1992). Also, the Council of Europe launched campaigns resulting in
new networks in which archaeologists took a particular interest (Clark et al. 2003). Concepts
such as ‘landscape archaeology’ and ‘geo-archaeology’ emerged.
An important momentum to put the landscape on the political agenda was the First Assessment
of Europe’s Environment (EEA 1995). The report manifestly links the diversity of the land-
scapes to the characterisation of European culture and identity, making it a political issue. No
explicit definition of landscape is given, but the report directly inspired the Council of Europe to
elaborate the European Landscape Convention, as shown in the preamble (Council of Europe 2000).
Although the main driving forces of landscape transformation were identified as urbanisation
and industrialization, increased mobility, mechanization, extensification of agriculture, all in a
global context, little was known how these really transformed the landscape at the local scale
(Swaffield and Primdahl 2006; Antrop and Van Eetvelde 2008). It gradually became clear that a
sole academic interdisciplinary approach was insufficient to cope with all issues related to landscape
in society. More stakeholders were involved. Insiders and lay-people needed to be included in
participatory processes for managing and planning landscapes (Opdam et al. 2001; Selman
2006). The need for a trans-disciplinary approach grew (Naveh 1991). Many Internet sites
emerged, as well as online open access journals such as Living Reviews in Landscape Research in
2007. New concepts and methods were introduced: sustainable landscapes (Haines-Young 2000),
multifunctional landscapes (Brandt and Vejre 2004), landscape character assessment (Swanwick
2004), historic landscape characterization (promoted by English Heritage, see Chapter 4), landscape
paths and trajectories (Käyhkö and Skånes 2006) and landscape economics (Oueslati 2011).
Landscape research since the coming of formal definitions
Formal definitions
The multiple meanings of landscape complicate inter- and trans-disciplinary co-operation and
make it difficult to implement the concept in legislation, in particular in a multilingual
17
Marc Antrop
international context. This resulted in new formal definitions, i.e. standardized definitions based
upon a consensus by all signatory parties of a convention. Concerning landscape, two formal
definitions are particularly important: the one by UNESCO World Heritage Convention and
the one by the European Landscape Convention (ELC).
Since 1992, cultural landscapes can be listed by UNESCO as World Heritage. They are
defined as the:
combined works of nature and of man [and which] are illustrative of the evolution of
human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints
and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social,
economic and cultural forces, both external and internal.
Three categories are recognized and their definitions include the qualities and values to
consider in their assessment.
(UNESCO 1996)
More important for research is the European Landscape Convention, which defines landscape as
‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural
and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe 2000). This definition contains many important
elements. First, landscape refers to an area, thus a well-defined territory that is organized and
managed. People perceive landscapes and thus their scenic and aesthetic qualities for humans should
be considered. Different landscapes exist because of their distinct character, which is the result of
the continuous interaction between natural processes and human activities. History, economy
and ecology are essential factors in the structuring and understanding of landscapes. No refer-
ence is made to ‘special’ landscapes such as ‘spectacular’ or ‘ordinary’ ones, to rural, industrial or
urban ones; all landscapes should be considered equally. This definition is a mix of two very
different perspectives, which Cosgrove (2003) describes as two different landscape discourses.
The ELC also formally defined other important concepts, such as landscape protection,
which is defined as ‘actions to conserve and maintain the significant or characteristic features of
a landscape’ and landscape planning as ‘strong forward-looking action to enhance, restore or
create landscapes’. The general measures the ELC proposes include ‘the recognition of land-
scapes in law as an essential component of people’s surroundings, as an expression of the
diversity of their shared cultural and natural heritage and a foundation of their identity’. Land-
scape is seen as a human right and its integration in all kinds of policies is proposed. The specific
measures include awareness-raising, training and education, identification and assessment of
landscapes and defining landscape quality objectives. The ELC was opened for signature on
10 October 2000 and in October 2011 35 countries of the 45 member states of the Council of
Europe ratified the convention. Although the convention has no legal power to enforce it, such
as EU directives do, its impact on policy is already important and still growing.
Shifting landscape research

The growing interest in Europe for landscape since the ELC is unequivocal. Although the value
of traditional, natural and rural landscapes as heritage and their meaning for quality of life
was already recognized in law in many countries, the application was restricted to rather small
classified areas considered highly valuable. There was no comprehensive policy for all land-
scapes. One of the first effects of the ELC on landscape research resulted from Article 6. ‘Special
measures/Identification and assessment’. This led to the making of new landscape inventories
and characterization, often resulting in ‘landscape atlases’ or ‘landscape catalogues’. Two types
18
can be recognized: (i) the GIS-based atlases giving a searchable collection of thematic map layers
and often web-based, and (ii) more monographic descriptions, well illustrated with maps and
iconographic material, also referred to as ‘landscape biographies’. Most of the atlases refer to the
regional and national scales, although some small scale pan-European classifications were made
as well.
A second important shift in landscape research comes from the emphasis the ELC puts on the
importance of landscape for the public (‘as perceived by people’, ‘the public’s aspirations’, etc.).
This stimulated research in landscape perception and preference as well as processes of partici-
pation. This research showed the difficulty and complexity in defining ‘the public’ and its
aspirations. Also, the information needed in participatory planning processes involving many
stakeholders with different interests, demands a more appropriate translation of scientific
knowledge allowing easy and clear communication, something many researchers find difficult
(Jones and Stenseke 2011).
Another effect of the ELC is the emergence of new networks dealing with the landscape;
Landscape Europe, Landscape Tomorrow, UNISCAPE, CIVILSCAPE, RECEP-ENELC and
many others exist. Most of them started between 2003 and 2006. In older associations, a new
European focus can be noticed as well: such as in the LRG and the French CEMAGREF, and
EFLA emerged within IFLA, EALE within IALE. Most of these networks aim to pool
interdisciplinary expertise and to develop partnerships. They focus on specific problems and
situations in Europe and offer applied research for planning and managing landscapes in a
more holistic and sustainable way. In addition, they often add education and training both at
international and local scale.
Today, many policy levels, interest groups and scientific disciplines are involved in the land-
scape, making it a complex multi-layered business, with inter- and trans-disciplinary processes
that sometimes interact, sometimes compete and still too rarely give consistent results. In this
complex ‘policy landscape’ the real landscape is often the only integrating concept. In general,
landscape research became more applied, more society oriented and less theoretical and aca-
demic. Landscape studies diversified with varying depth and quality, ranging from rigorous sci-
entific analysis to almost pseudoscientific papers aimed at a broad public. Many gaps in
knowledge still exist. More and more scientific disciplines borrow methods and techniques from
others, especially when they offer ‘innovation’ in their domain, even when applied in a more
amateurish way.
However, the unmistakable shifts that occurred in landscape research after 2000, cannot all be
related to the ELC. Other reasons are found in the landscape changes, which became unpre-
cedentedly devastating and happen at a still accelerating pace. Methods to study and monitor
these changes need to be fast and reliable. Solving specific, acute problems and strict deadlines
dictate this kind of applied and policy-oriented research. Commissioners of landscape studies are
asking for practical reports, which are often kept confidential as long as the legal procedures last
and no political decisions are taken. With this shifting focus in research goals, the funding
sources shift as well. Consequently, academic and applied landscape research are diverging. The
academic merit system, with a focus on pure research and producing PhDs, enforces this process
as well. Local and specific problem-solving is less suited to be published in international, peer-
reviewed journals. As administrations are rather reluctant to fund doctoral research, more
practical projects are commissioned to agencies, private companies and NGOs.
This divergence in landscape research is well illustrated by the rise and fall of landscape
metrics and a changing focus between Europe and the USA. The quantitative description of
landscape patterns using spatial analysis and modelling developed during the 1980s, stimulated
by the development of GIS and specialized software, such as Fragstats (McGarigal and Marks
19
Marc Antrop
1995). After a spectacular growth of the use of landscape metrics, since 2004 a decline can be
noticed (Uuemaa et al. 2009) and is explained by the very sophisticated methods involved, too
abstract and not transparent results of questionable utility for policymakers. Also the lack of
critical thresholds and absolute limits was important as it made these indicators rather useless to
evaluate effects of policies and impacts of decision making. Landscape metrics and modelling
remained only interesting in pure academic and theoretical research. The specific problems
that landscapes are facing in Europe are much more complex and a lot more stakeholders
are involved. Thus, in contrast to the USA, the use of landscape metrics in applied
landscape research declined in Europe. Heritage value, social and symbolic meanings demand a
more holistic approach. So, landscape characterization developed, supported by all kinds of
landscape representations and narratives.
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22
Experiencing landscape
2
Landscape perception and
environmental psychology
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
This chapter sets a context for understanding how we engage with the world around us,
particularly the outdoor and natural elements of the environment. It describes studies and
research approaches that explore how we experience the landscape, on a number of levels, and
the relevance of this to our attitudes, our behaviour, and indeed our wellbeing. A key element
relates to evidence on the process of landscape perception – how we make sense of the
environment and what it offers. It discusses theories and models which attempt to explain the
bases of aesthetic response, preference and behaviour. It gives an overview of methods that
have been effective in empirical research to help understand how people engage with the
landscape in everyday life and techniques, methodologies or principles that might fruitfully be
pursued in future to address gaps in our understanding. This is necessarily a brief overview and
many themes are the subject of a considerable body of research which can only be
touched upon here.
The nature of perception

The question of how our senses, mental processes and intellectual capacities allow us to
understand the world around us has intrigued philosophers throughout history. At the heart of
debates in the past 50 years or so lies the question of how we take data input received through
our senses (e.g. light falling on receptors in the eye’s retina) and transform this into the perception
and experience of everyday objects such as trees or buildings. A major theoretical divide lies
between those researchers who believe in a bottom-up approach, one that emphasizes the rich
array of stimulus information from the world out there, and the top down or constructivist
group of researchers who focus on cognitive activities of the brain (including the perceiver’s
expectations and previous information) in constructing the most likely account of what’s out
there. In simple terms, the issue is: how much of our perception is determined by information
in the world beyond us and how much is determined by our own mental concepts and inter-
pretations? While most theoretical models have a necessary role for both the external stimulus
and our own emotional and cognitive processes in explaining perception, the debate is around
questions of emphasis or priority.
25
In practice, there is a benefit in exploring approaches based on both theoretical stances. One
proponent of a bottom-up approach, James Gibson (1966), believed that perception begins with
the stimulus itself and focused on the complex array of information received, e.g. in vision, via
the retina, as a person moves within their environment (Bruce et al., 2003). By contrast, con-
structivist researchers such as Gregory (1970) have emphasized the importance of knowledge
and inference in perception, claiming the need for considerable cognitive input as we actively
construct, in our minds, our perception of reality.
Gibson’s work has been termed an ‘ecological approach’ in that it emphasizes the dynamic
and reciprocal relationship between perceiver and environment (J. Gibson, 1979). Gibson, along
with his wife Eleanor (E. Gibson, 2000), developed the term ‘affordances’ to describe cues in
the environment which aid perception and facilitate behaviour; they are ‘perceptual properties
of the environment that have functional significance for an individual’ (Heft, 2010, p. 18). This
concept of environmental affordance has played an important part in the subsequent develop-
ment of ideas around landscape perception and preference. Such an approach, by emphasizing
the information available in the environment as a key element of landscape perception and
response, is attractive to planners and designers because it opens up ways in which the physical
environment might be managed or manipulated to support different human experiences and
activities. The ‘top-down’ approach, by contrast, can be less helpful for environmental designers
in that it places emphasis on the mind and cognitive processes of the individual, rather than on
what the physical environment conveys per se.
Affordances, says Heft (2010), are not mental constructs that a perceiver subjectively imposes
on the world, nor are they interpretations of a physical world ‘in the head’ of a perceiver;
affordances are properties of the environment that are both objectively real and psychologically
significant. Such an approach emphasizes the importance to perception of being in the world
(physically engaged as organisms exploring our environment) rather than considering perception
as a distanced, abstracted process of the mind. This resonates with phenomenological theories of
landscape experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1962; see Chapter 4) that underline a body-centred
engagement with the world. Affordance and phenomenological approaches are discussed fur-
ther, later in this chapter. First, however, I will touch on a few examples of research around
perception and cognition.
Cognitive psychology and landscape perception

The expanding field of cognitive science deals with the underlying processes that form the
basis of environmental perception. Research by Purcell, drawing on the work of Rosch and
colleagues (1976), developed evidence of a hierarchically arranged knowledge structure, a
‘schema’, under which representations of the environment are stored in memory. According to
this, experience of a particular landscape represents a matching between sensory input from
that instance and relevant attributes of the prototypical example stored in a person’s
schema. The hierarchy works at different levels of abstraction, for example from the scale of ‘all
natural landscapes’ to ‘all woodlands’ to ‘the understorey of a beech woodland’. Purcell has
suggested that affective (emotional) responses reflect the discrepancy between a particular
experience and the prototypical representations stored in the memory, arousing our autonomic
nervous system and, depending on the degree of discrepancy, inducing pleasure or displeasure
(Purcell, 1987).
Grush’s (2004) ‘emulation theory of representation’, suggests that the brain constructs neural
circuits which act as models of the body and environment; environmental perception results
from the use of such models to form expectations of, and to interpret, sensory input. A key
26
Landscape perception, environmental psychology
element of the theory highlights the extent to which the outcome of the perceptual process is
tuned to sensorimotor requirements. ‘The emulator represents objects and the environment
as things engaged with [my italics] in certain ways as opposed to how they are considered apart
from their role in the organism’s environmental engagements’ (Grush, 2004, p. 393).
Farina and Belgrano (2006) take cognitive science into the study of landscapes as habitats in
developing what they call a ‘cognitive landscape ecology’. Their eco-field hypothesis is a way to
describe landscape processes from an organism-centred perspective. The eco-field is a spatial
configuration that carries a specific meaning. This meaning is perceived by an organism when a
specific living function is activated. Each species, it is claimed, has a specific cognitive landscape,
comprising all the eco-fields (spatial carriers of information) activated by all the living functions
of a particular organism. The authors propose the concept as bridge between different scales and
concepts (from niche, habitat and Umwelt (von Uexküll, 1992) to eco-field) in spatial ecology
and in environmental psychology. Their concept is sympathetic to other ecological under-
standings of environmental perception such as those proposed by J. Gibson (1979), and to
Appleton’s Prospect-Refuge theory (Appleton, 1975).
Landscape perception and landscape preference

Research which supports the idea of an embodied, dynamic experience as fundamental to
landscape perception challenges attempts to understand human response to different landscapes
by using static, two-dimensional images alone (Heft and Nasar, 2000). Much previous research
in landscape perception and aesthetics has used static representations of the environment –
usually photographs – to examine people’s responses to, and preferences for, different scenes.
Empirical studies have shown that responses to colour photographic images can be similar to
responses obtained from participants when located at the actual site from which the image was
taken (Stamps, 1990). Yet experimental work by Heft and Nasar (2000) has shown that parti-
cipants presented with different versions of the same, mostly woodland, landscape – one based
on segments of a videotape showing slow movement through the landscape, the other a series
of still scenes taken from each video sequence – respond in different ways. Some of the highest
ratings in this study were for ‘turn’ segments in the landscape, where the greatest amount of
information change (things revealed and things occluded) occurred.
Such findings reinforce notions developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan (Kaplan and
Kaplan 1989) about variables in the structure of the environment that are associated with
landscape preference. Based on a series of studies into landscape perception, the Kaplans iden-
tified four key elements as predictors of preference: coherence, legibility, complexity and mys-
tery. The legibility and mystery variables both point to the potential importance of navigation
through the landscape (as opposed to simply viewing it as a static image) and mystery is particu-
larly pertinent to the study just described, being a quality that draws the perceiver into the scene
with the prospect of more information. A typical scene of high mystery might show a path
turning out of sight in the distance around a group of trees. This quality was identified in built-
environment contexts by urban designer Gordon Cullen (a ‘deflected vista’) and has been
consistently associated with positive preference ratings (Cullen, 1961; Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989;
Heft and Nasar, 2000).
A further theory developed by the Kaplans has been useful in exploring why people might
prefer some kinds of natural environments over more urban or built environments. Attention
Restoration Theory (ART) (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995) suggests that directed
attention, used in coping with complex patterns of daily life, including work, is a highly limited
resource, easily exhausted if there are no opportunities for recovery. A ‘restorative’ environment
27
is one that offers support for recovery and the Kaplans identify four properties that characterize
such an environment: ‘being away’, either physically or conceptually, from the everyday
environment; ‘fascination’ – the ability of the environment to hold one’s attention effortlessly;
‘extent’, where there is enough scope in the environment to keep one engaged; and ‘compat-
ibility’ with what one wants or is inclined to do. The Kaplans note that the natural environ-
ment can offer each of the four factors, and is particularly effective in supporting involuntary
attention or fascination, hence restoration. Recent work by Hartig and colleagues has built on
ART theory as well as Ulrich’s psycho-evolutionary model (Ulrich, 1983; Ulrich et al., 1991)
in exploring the evidence for independent psychological and physiological responses – positive
changes in a person’s brain and body – that are a direct impact of perceiving the natural
environments (Hartig 2007).
Such research may offer insights into evolutionary and biological processes that underlie
certain kinds of landscape preference. However, as in wider nature/nurture debates, it is
important to recognize that preference is unlikely to be based simply on a biological or innate
response to the environment. Bourassa’s model for this, based on Vygotsky’s pioneering early
twentieth-century work on childhood cognitive development (see Bourassa, 1991, pp. 55–7) is
a tripartite conceptualization – biological laws, cultural rules and personal preferences – as
components of human response to the landscape. A key element of Vygotsky’s work was the
contribution of social interaction to the development of cognition and Bourassa suggests that a
person’s behaviour may, therefore, reflect ‘composites of biological and cultural constraints and
personal idiosyncracies’ (Bourassa, 1991, p. 110).
Preference for particular landscape types

Researchers into landscape preference have drawn on evolutionary theory to speculate on
whether there is an optimum landscape for our species, linking this to the landscapes where
human beings are thought to have first developed (the Savannah Hypothesis) (Orians and
Heerwagen, 1992). While such approaches might suggest an innate preference for savannah-
type landscape characteristics (open grasslands with scattered groups of wide-canopied trees, for
example), Bourassa’s work suggests cultural influences and childhood experience are potential
moderators of any such response. Familiarity with certain landscapes might therefore be expec-
ted to play a role in preference. These different potential influences are well illustrated in a
cross-cultural study by Herzog et al. (2000), using images of Australian natural landscapes with
Australian and American participants belonging to different age and subcultural groups. The
study found well-correlated patterns of preference across the groups, despite cultural differences.
While there was a higher preference for familiar landscapes, both Australians and Americans
were found to like river scenes best and open landscapes lacking good-sized trees or bushes in
the near or middle distance, along with those showing remnants of human structures, the least.
Primary school students had the highest preference for natural landscapes, secondary school
students the lowest, with adults revealing the greatest variability in preference.
So do people prefer landscapes that are perceived as typical within a particular culture? In a
series of studies that included comparisons between Australian and Italian participants, Purcell
and colleagues (1994; 2001) found a much larger correlation between participants’ ratings of
landscape images for their restorative value and preference, supporting ART theory, than
between familiarity with the landscape and preference. Purcell’s earlier work (Purcell 1987)
suggested that discrepancy from the prototypical landscape might be associated with increased
preference, so long as the discrepancy was not too great. Hägerhäll (2001) looked at the rela-
tionship between landscape typicality and preference in the case of Swedish pastureland – a
28
traditional cultural landscape – and found a positive correlation between the two: the more
‘typical’ a pasture, the higher its preference rating. However, Herzog and Stark (2004) tested
Hägerhäll’s results in different types of settings: those of positive value (parks) and of negative
value (urban alleys). Preference was found to increase with typicality for positively valued
settings and to decrease with typicality for negatively valued settings.
Han (2007) studied landscape settings ranging across the six major terrestrial biomes, seeking
North American participants’ perceptions of beauty, preference and restoration. The findings
indicated a preference for forested landscapes instead of grasslands, challenging the Savannah
Hypothesis, but suggested that physical and structural landscape parameters (complexity, open-
ness, water features) weighed more heavily that overall habitat type in shaping people’s pre-
ferences. However, a cross-cultural study by Kohsaka and Flitner (2004), using prize-winning
forest photographs, found the perceptions of Japanese and German study participants to differ
markedly, reflecting views of forests as commodities in Japan and the association of forests with
mystery and romance in Germany.
A growing interest in landscapes that appear natural is partly driven by contemporary con-
cerns for biodiversity. One question is whether less managed and/or more native vegetation is
preferred in landscape scenes, as Herzog and colleagues’ (2000) study suggests. Kaplan and
Austin (2004) researched people living in new residential developments on the urban fringe in
the USA and found a perceived typology of manicured/landscaped areas, trees, gardens, mowed
areas, forest, open fields, and wetlands. Preference for forests was found to be overwhelming,
despite forests’ vulnerability to urban sprawl when new residential areas are developed. How-
ever, where people have direct experience of working on the land, their perceptions may be
more complex. Gomez-Limon and Fernandez (1999) documented the contrasting landscape
preferences among users of a formerly agricultural landscape in central Spain, where the aban-
donment of traditional agricultural uses has resulted in an ecological succession of trees and
bushes. Landscape preferences differed markedly between different groups: livestock farmers
preferred open landscapes, whereas managers and recreationists preferred landscapes with denser
vegetation cover. In the US context, Kaplan (2007) found that urban workers expressed a clear
preference for nearby natural vegetation, especially patches of less groomed areas with trees and
pathways that allow walking.
Fear and safety in the landscape

Many studies have explored perceptions of safety and fear in landscapes as part of attempts to
understand negative responses to certain landscapes. Appleton’s (1975) studies of landscape
paintings identified two key elements of landscape settings which he considered important to
aesthetics and human response: prospects, or vantage points from which one can see unhindered
into the distance, and refuges, which offer shelter but are also potential hiding places in a set-
ting. It has been suggested that these elements of the landscape may be particularly associated
not only with preference but also with feelings of safety. Herzog and Kutzli (2002) studied
perceived danger and fear using images of fields and forested landscapes with US students. They
found that visibility and locomotor access were the two principal determinants of preference
and fear. High visibility and good access made landscapes preferable, whereas poor visibility and
access generated perceptions of fear. Poor access was the paramount predictor of feelings of
danger and entrapment. However, fear is not simply the inverse of preference. After controlling
for other indicators of visibility, mystery has a positive relation to preference, as suggested by the
Kaplans (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989). In a non-threatening context, concealment may be com-
forting but, when perceptions of danger are present, concealment may generate thoughts of
29
entrapment, thus reinforcing fear. The authors suggest that opportunity for locomotor access as
well as visual access is important in locations where people may be anxious about safety.
Landscape perception and environmental aesthetics

Debates on the nature of aesthetics and aesthetic landscape appreciation are necessarily
informed by theories of landscape perception and preference. A corollary of the difference in
approaches to perception (‘bottom-up’ or ‘top-down’) is the disagreement among landscape
ecologists over the extent to which knowledge of the ecological significance of landscape pat-
terns enters into aesthetic experience. In the context of concerns about conservation, climate
change and sustainability, a key question is whether the theoretical mechanism is the same in all
aesthetic responses, or whether there is something special or different about environmental
aesthetics.
Fenner (2003), argues that aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, including land-
scapes, differs from the aesthetic appreciation of works of art as a result of some of the essential
properties of nature, including the necessary involvement in nature of the fourth dimension –
time – and therefore of change. The debate has important and far reaching repercussions not
only for how landscape aesthetics are theorized but also for approaches to understanding how
natural beauty is perceived: whether it is grounded in cognition (requiring intellectual processes
of understanding) or affect (requiring only a direct, emotion-based response) (set out in more
detail in Ward Thompson and Boyd, 1998). The debate in turn influences what methodologies
are appropriate for the research and documentation of popular notions of natural beauty (landscape
aesthetics per se are dealt with in more detail in Chapter 9).
However, a number of environmental aestheticians (e.g. Saito, 1998; Gobster, 1999) deni-
grate popular aesthetic preferences, commonly described as ‘scenic beauty,’ as superficial and
malleable socio-cultural constructions. Grounded in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
painting and nineteenth-century Romanticism, such aesthetics, they claim, result in landscapes
that are ‘naturalistic’ rather than natural, designed to be appreciated only visually. Gobster cri-
tiques methodological practices focused on visual evaluation of landscapes and the affective
(like/dislike) responses of disengaged viewers, most often assessed through simple scalar reactions
to photographs.
Heft and Nasar (2000) underline Gobster’s methodological critique, arguing that ‘the spec-
tator stance’ and the engaged, active perceiver stance are distinctive modes of experiencing the
environment. Emphasis on personal engagement with the environment is more sympathetic to
suggestions that environmental values are grounded in a sense of ‘connectivity’ with nature
(Dutcher et al., 2007), rather than in a distanced, and visually dominated, aesthetic response.
Dutcher describes such connectivity as ‘the dissolution of boundaries and a sense of shared or
common essence between the self, nature and others’ (p. 474). This chimes with other envir-
onmental aestheticians (Gobster included) who argue for an ‘ecological aesthetics’ informed by
the biocentric ethics of Aldo Leopold and his successors, including Naess’s (1973) ‘deep ecology’.
(These theories are discussed further in Chapter 38).
Drawing on the work of Parsons and Daniel (2002), Gobster et al. (2007) focus on the pos-
sibility of an ecological aesthetic and the contribution of aesthetics to managing environmental
change and people’s response to such change. They suggest that some contexts elicit aesthetic
experiences that have traditionally been called ‘scenic beauty,’ while other contexts elicit
different aesthetic experiences, such as perceived care, attachment and identity. Their argu-
ment – in terms of the ‘perceptible realm’, i.e, the scale at which humans as organisms perceive
landscapes, – reflects the Umwelt, the organism-centred view of the world discussed by Farina
30
and Belgrano (2006) in which signs, their meaning and interpretation are embedded
(biosemiotics). Gobster et al. (2007) suggest that future landscape planning should attempt to
align ecological goals with aesthetic experiences to achieve culturally and ecologically sustain-
able landscapes. Empirical work has shown that, alongside appreciation of urban green space for
the functional, ecosystem services it can provide, aesthetic appreciation can provide a pathway
to enhanced ecological awareness among urban citizens (Jim and Chen, 2006). Indeed, while
research has shown that what we know about a landscape influences appreciation of it, there is
also research to suggest that initial responses to real landscapes can be immediate, emotional, and
perhaps unmediated by cognitive processes (Parsons, 1991).
Nonetheless, radical researchers, such as Barrett et al. (2009) propose the abandonment of
‘aestheticism’, and the reconceptualization of aesthetics as an economy of survival across differ-
ent levels of ecological organization. They argue for the emergence of a new, integrative sci-
entific paradigm to wed the medical, ecological, and social sciences, including an interface with
the humanities. Godlovitch (1998) identifies the ‘external outlook of nature’, whereby nature is
externalized as a thing apart from humanity, as a problem at the heart of the discourse about
aesthetic valuation and abuse of nature. Ingold’s (2007) anthropological approach, and some
versions of Naess’s (1973) deep ecology, suggest a different metaphysics, in which humans and
the world are essentially part of one whole.
Related to the discussion of the ways in which environmental aesthetics determine attitudes
towards nature, there is a growing appreciation of the role of aesthetic values in the shaping of
ecological politics. Dunaway (2005) documents the ways in which images of nature (films and
photographs) have both shaped, and been shaped by, perceptions and politics of nature in
twentieth-century USA. Similarly Benediktsson (2007) illustrates the role of aesthetics in shap-
ing radical environmental values. Taking his cue from Berleant’s (2007) aesthetics of engage-
ment, the author argues forcibly for a rehabilitation of aesthetics, including emotion, in a
political geography of landscape.
Such debates are reflected in the difference between expert- and public perception-based
approaches to environmental management and conservation practice and research. As Daniel
(2001) notes, expert approaches are more prevalent in environmental management practice,
whereas public perception-based approaches are more frequent in research. He reviews the
ways both approaches have shaped systematic landscape quality assessment, and notes that both
are unequal to the ecological and ethical challenges of the twenty-first century and the con-
sequent emergence of biocentric philosophies. He advocates a merging of the two paradigms in
a psychophysical approach, which affirms that ‘landscape values result from the interaction
between biophysical features of the landscape and associated human perceptual/judgemental
processes’ Daniel (2001, p. 278).
Environment and behaviour

As the evidence so far suggests, every act of perception is made in the light of context and
experience. For each individual, the context includes whatever tasks they are currently engaged
in and expectations of the future as well as experience of the past. As Aspinall (2010) has
pointed out, if researchers asking participants questions about landscape preference do not give a
context, the respondents will provide their own and they may be quite divergent. In asking
whether people like or dislike certain scenes, for example, it is important to know whether
these landscapes are being considered as a place outside one’s front door, a place to visit only on
rare, holiday trips, a scene to view from a car window, a nature reserve rarely visited by anyone,
and so forth. As Purcell et al. (1994) have shown, responses will be different according to
31
context and will be coloured by motivational factors – what people want or hope to do – as
well as emotional attachments to certain places. These considerations inform a transactional
view of people’s relationship with the landscape, one that takes into consideration how well
individuals’ needs, desires and aspirations are supported by their environment and how people
respond to (and cope with) the environment in which they find themselves (Myers and Ward
Thompson, 2003; Little, 2010).
Such considerations offer a useful bridge to exploring the relationship between environment
and behaviour. Appleton has put it very succinctly: for any individual considering their land-
scape context, a key notion is ‘what’s in it for me?’ (Appleton, 1975). Researchers such as Tuan
(1974) and Norberg-Schultz (1980) have emphasized a phenomenological approach to land-
scape perception, responsive to place and context while emphasizing the body at the centre of
the experience: Merleau-Ponty’s ‘lived space’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) (see Chapter 4 for more
on phenomenology). An approach sympathetic to such notions is offered by the work of
George Kelly (1955), whose personal construct psychology offers a way of enabling pre-
conscious factors to be raised to the level of consciousness so that they can be recorded and
inform our understanding of response to place. This approach takes as its premise the idea that
we mediate reality through ‘constructions’ which influence how we perceive reality and how
we respond to it. The construct system is like a pair of spectacles that not only filters informa-
tion (e.g., what we see and how we see it) but also influences our future expectations.
Researchers who draw on this approach (e.g. Little, 1983) have emphasized the importance of
asking people for their views and responses, rather than simply observing them, in researching
engagement with the environment.
From a different disciplinary perspective, social anthropologists such as Ingold describe the
anthropological approach as seeking ‘a generous comparative … understanding of human being
and knowing in the one world we all inhabit’ (my italics; Ingold, 2007, p. 69). A key point for
Ingold is understanding commonalities as well as difference, and recognizing the value of
engagement with people and place. He is sympathetic to Gibson’s theories of perception and
affordance and some of his language reflects that of Heft (2003), who calls for a refocused
interest in immediate experience, approached through a phenomenological framework. Heft
points out that affordances are multidimensional and located within the flow of immediate
experience, development, and socio-cultural processes. The focus on how environments are
experienced dynamically by users in the course of action offers potentially valuable insight in
understanding behaviour. Perceiving and acting are intertwined, according to Heft (2010) as we
engage, in movement and in time, with the environment.
Wayfinding – navigating the landscape

The Heft and Nasar (2000) study demonstrated how environmental perception is contingent,
i.e. it evokes a conditional response plan made in preparation for various future circumstances,
including the unanticipated. Such research also points to the value of attempts to understand
how we navigate our way through the landscape, partly because it may help to explain more
fundamental processes of perception.
Wayfinding is concerned with the ability to identify one’s location and arrive at destinations
in the environment, both cognitively and behaviourally (Prestopnik and Roskos-Ewoldson,
2000) or, put more simply, spatial problem-solving (Passini, 1996). There appear to be two
principal strategies for wayfinding: the first assumes an understanding of the spatial structure of
the environment, where people rely on the spatial relationships between key locations to
navigate (such a mental map may, initially, be derived from having viewed a real map); the
32
second is based on comprehension of a sequence of particular places and the routes that connect
them, which are used to navigate. Users unfamiliar with an environment may start with one
strategy and switch to the other as they become familiar with a place.
Passini (1996) has suggested that the ‘expected image’ is an important concept in wayfinding:
we expect or anticipate what to look for and this affects what we are actually able to perceive
from the environment. Many studies have highlighted how landmarks can play a key role in
navigating both familiar and unfamiliar territory. Foo et al. (2005), looked at how humans
perceive known routes in the landscape. They studied whether people integrate known routes
into a cognitive map that includes measured, quantified representations of the landscape – a
metrically accurate spatial knowledge – or whether they rely on a geometrically weaker,
landmark navigation strategy. A key conclusion is that humans, like honeybees, depend
on landmarks when they are available, as the simplest, most reliable navigation strategy. Such
findings reinforce the value of concepts developed by urban designer Kevin Lynch in describing
how people navigate complex urban environments, and in particular his identification of
landmarks as a key element (Lynch, 1960).1
Research methodologies in landscape perception and experience

Empirical studies on the perception of landscape are overwhelmingly focused on visual
dimensions. There is, nonetheless, considerable diversity in the detailed methodology used,
reflecting different disciplinary traditions. For example, Sanesi et al. (2006) illustrate the differing
approaches and research methods applied by urban foresters and environmental psychologists to
landscapes in Italy.
Visual research methods

Most recent research in landscape perception and aesthetic valuation consists of gauging the
affective responses (usually expressed in terms of like/dislike, or equivalent) of participants
exposed to images of landscapes, usually in settings removed from the actual landscape under
evaluation. Although the use of static images is open to criticism, as outlined earlier, much
research continues to use them. This is partly because methods using images (rather than
immersion in the real landscape) are easier to administer with a large sample of participants, but
also because the opportunities offered by digital manipulation of landscape images (whether
based on photographs or computer-generated models) are increasingly sophisticated and amen-
able to a range of research questions and landscape scenarios (Karjalainen and Tyrväinen, 2002).
However, there is debate as to whether these different representations of landscape can be
considered as equal in their potential to elicit affective response in viewers. In a study comparing
preferences of people who rated the same scenes, reproduced by different visualization methods,
Daniel and Meitner (2001) found very low correlation between ratings of images produced
with different reproduction methods. This study raises important questions about the repre-
sentational validity of computer-generated landscape visualizations. However, digitally processed
images continue to be used in a wide range of projects (e.g. Ode et al., 2009).
A number of researchers have focused on the development of indicators that can be used for
assessing ‘landscape character’, as a way of including aspects of landscape experience in
categorizations to inform the fields of landscape management, planning and monitoring (e.g.
Countryside Agency and Scottish Natural Heritage, 2002). This has been given new impetus
by the Council of Europe’s 2000 European Landscape Convention (ELC), which was ratified
by the UK in 2006. Since the ELC requires the identification and assessment of landscapes with
33
the active participation of stakeholders, as well as the setting of objectives for landscape
quality with the involvement of the public, there is particular interest in methods that take into
account the role of landscape aesthetics and experience in determining people’s response to
conservation and change. Ode et al. (2008) provide a useful overview of the use of theories of
landscape perception and preference to develop indicators for capturing and assessing the visual
character of landscape. Their work draws on the Kaplans’ (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989) preference
theories, among others, and includes a wide array of indicators, reflecting landscape coherence,
stewardship, historicity, complexity, imageability, visual scale, disturbance and naturalness. In
this northern-European study, perceived naturalness seems to be an important indicator of
preference (Ode et al., 2009).
Non-visual methods: questionnaires, interviews and accompanied visits

An increasing number of studies document landscape preferences, values and uses through
questionnaires, interviews and a variety of ethnographic methods, which permit closer interac-
tion between researchers and research participants without relying on the kind of visual meth-
ods described above. Galindo and Hidalgo (2005), for example, explored preference for urban
parks and open spaces in Spain, in relation to attractiveness and mental restoration, using a self-
completed questionnaire. An exploration of landscape perceptions and preferences in rural
Scotland by Myers and Ward Thompson (2003), used semi-structured interviews based on
personal construct psychology (Kelly, 1955) to elicit a transactionalist understanding of the way
personal experience and socio-cultural context influence landscape perceptions and engagement
with place (Myers and Ward Thompson, 2003). Drawing on the same theories, other research
has used focus groups followed by a broader questionnaire survey to understand people’s
response to place, and to green or natural environments in particular (Bell et al., 2004; Ward
Thompson et al., 2004).
An approach developed by Little (1983) that draws on similar theoretical foundations
involves the concept of personal projects – a set of goal-oriented, self-generated activities a
person is doing or thinking of doing. They range from trivial, everyday routines to ambitious,
long-term endeavours. The idea of personal projects emphasizes the ecological aspects of
activity in context. Use of personal projects in a questionnaire offers a unique way of investi-
gating the transactional relationship between person and environment (Sugiyama and Ward
Thompson, 2007a; Little, 2010).
A different approach, strongly grounded in affordance theory, relies on behaviour observation
to analyze how people interact with the environment. ‘Behaviour settings’ were initially pro-
posed by Barker (1976) as environmental contexts in which a certain behaviour pattern can be
repeatedly observed, i.e. environments which support or elicit certain behaviour. Behaviour
settings provide a useful basis for subdividing a physical landscape under study so that environ-
ment and behaviour can be directly linked. Moore and Cosco (2007; 2010) have demonstrated
the value of a behaviour setting approach to behaviour mapping, providing a sound empirical
method for exploring how people engage with the world through direct observation. Such
an approach can be supported by interviews and other methods to explore the reasons and
perceptions behind certain behaviour patterns. Nonetheless it has value in its own right in
providing evidence for landscape preference expressed through bodily engagement rather
than words.
Extended interviews, accompanied walks and other kinds of participation-based methodolo-
gies offer the added benefit of contextualizing the research in situ. These can help the researcher
to understand the immediate and multi-sensory aspects of engagement with the landscape.
34
Ethnographic research attempts to elicit an understanding of people’s response to their envir-

onment by accompanying them in normal activities within that landscape and recording their
(ideally unprompted) comments, reactions and responses in as much detail as possible; however,
the observer attempts to remain ‘apart’ and not to influence the phenomena being described.
Such an approach is exemplified in Scott et al.’s (2009) participant-led research, using ethno-
graphic and phenomenological approaches to record different groups’ real-world experience of
landscape. They found that ‘allowing people to share their perceptions and experience in the
landscapes they are frequenting and talking about greatly enhances the analysis’ (p. 417).
However, Ingold (2007) has challenged such a dispassionate and distancing approach, recom-
mending instead anthropology as a practice of observation ‘grounded in participatory dialogue’
(p. 87). Given that much debate about landscape perception arises in the course of planning for
change, where different perspectives are nonetheless focused on the same landscape, the same
place inhabited by all involved, such an anthropological approach offers a useful conceptual way
forward.
Many researchers promote a multi-method approach to understanding landscape perception
(e.g. Ward Thompson et al., 2004; Thwaites and Simkins, 2007), recognizing that this may
offer a more rounded understanding of patterns and the reasons behind patterns in perception.
Regardless of the methodological stance, a range of information and communication technol-
ogy (ICT) tools have recently offered new opportunities for research techniques. Computer-
based questionnaires and other tests allow surveys to be undertaken online and participants to be
enlisted at a distance. Image manipulation and digital modelling, as mentioned earlier, allow
alternative landscape scenarios to be presented to participants for their response. Geographic
information systems (GIS) facilitate spatially based modes of recording and analyzing people’s
landscape perceptions, including the ‘softGIS’ methods promoted by Kyttä and colleagues
(Kyttä et al., 2004; 2011). Disposable and digital cameras, voice and video recorders have assis-
ted participant-led data collection, making it easier to employ research methods that combine
visual and non-visual approaches. In addition, analysis of comments and discussions recorded by
participants has been facilitated by computer software such as NVivo, that can assist in coding
text and in discourse analysis.
Landscape perceptions and experiences for different population groups

The empirical evidence on perceptions and experience of the landscape for different groups
within the population is based on a range of theoretical stances and methodologies. Space does
not permit more than the briefest of pointers to some relevant research.
Children and young people

The theory of affordances (J. Gibson, 1979) has informed much work to understand the
experience of, and intangible benefits from, particular environments, especially for children.
Kyttä (2002) has researched the affordances in children’s environments, comparing areas with
varying degrees of urbanization. Along with physical affordances, she proposed the identifica-
tion of social affordances, a concept particularly valuable in studying places preferred by teen-
agers. Said and Abu Bakar (2005) researched the affordances of streams and rivers as children’s
outdoor play spaces in Malaysia and identified physical, cognitive and social interactions as the
basis for perceived affordances. Roe (2009) expanded the theory of affordances to include the
emotional cues that a particular setting, in this case a forest, can afford for young people at risk.
Wells and Evans (2003) found that nearby nature can function as a buffer that moderates the
35
impact of stressful life events, such as family relocation, on children’s well-being. Bell at al.
(2003) and Ward Thompson et al. (2008) explored the uses and meanings of forests and
woodlands for children and teenagers in Central Scotland. These studies have underlined the
key role of childhood experience in people’s relationship with the environment in later life, as
has the work of Bixler et al. (2002).
Women
Many studies on the use of open public space have shown that women have different experi-
ences in the outdoors from men, particularly when they are alone (Burgess, 1998). Burgess
showed that the physical quality of enclosure characteristics of woods and forests was experi-
enced by women in a more negative way. However, she identified social factors (encounters
with strangers, the significance of verbal abuse and flashing) as key to perceptions of risk, and
the role of communication networks in disseminating and amplifying people’s anxieties about
personal safety. Krenichyn (2006) showed that family, friends and acquaintances could provide
support for feelings of safety and enjoyment in New York city parks and that aesthetic elements
of the park were highly valued.
People from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Groups

Interest in the different landscape perceptions and experience of BME groups is comparatively
recent in research but there is a growing literature (e.g. Woolley and Amin, 1999; Agyeman,
2001; Rishbeth, 2001). In the US, Gobster (2002) examined outdoor recreation use patterns
and preferences among racially and ethnically diverse users and found that BME park users
came from farther away, more often by car, used the park less frequently and were more likely
to visit in large, family-oriented groups. In the UK, Rishbeth (2004) found that Asian and
African minority ethnic groups were less likely to be attracted to ‘wildness’ compared to white
British participants. A study of deprived English urban communities found perceptions of urban
green space as a restorative place to retreat and relax, offering breathing space from the stresses
of everyday life, to be a common theme across all cultures and ages. However, green spaces
with attractive views and their use for relaxation appeared to be less relevant to BME
groups than to white British, while good maintenance was more important to BME groups
(CABE, 2010).
Tolia-Kelly (2004) identified the ability of landscape to trigger memories of something
familiar that can help facilitate a sense of belonging and locate minority ethnic groups in new
contexts, helping form some psychological continuity between old and new self-identity.
Powell and Rishbeth (2011) identified ‘being away’ as a particularly important concept, related
to the need for anonymity amongst first-generation migrants, where urban landscapes further
away from home offered opportunities to experiment or test out new life options.
Older people and disabled people

Much recent research with these groups utilizes the ‘social model of disability’: the under-
standing that disability is a construct of a disabling society (Blackman et al., 2003) which, instead
of accommodating the physical and mental difference of its constituents, bases expectations
(including how things are communicated, constructed and maintained) on the assumption that
all its members are similarly able-bodied and able-minded. Research has largely focused on
issues of use, access to, and inclusive design of green spaces rather than perception and
36
signification of these spaces by older people and people with disabilities (e.g. Kweon et al.,
1998). Drawing on a personal projects methodology, Sugiyama and Ward Thompson (2007b)
have introduced the concept of ‘environmental support’: a link between perception of envir-
onments that make it easy and enjoyable to go outdoors and older people’s quality of life. The
appeal of places such as local parks and tree-lined streets in offering aesthetic and multi-sensory
engagement with nature are an important component of environmental support.
Gaps in our understanding and opportunities for future research

Reviews of research on landscape perception and aesthetics (Ward Thompson and Boyd, 1998;
Ward Thompson and Travlou, 2009) identified a continuing reliance on evaluation of photo-
graphic or static images in empirical studies of environmental perception and an emphasis on
the visual aspects of the landscape experience, almost to the exclusion of other senses. The
dearth of non-visual aspects of landscape perception and engagement remains noticeable, despite
much interest in phenomenological theory and ethnographic methods. Empirical research on
the significance of sound is rare, and studies on the role of smell in landscape perception are
almost non-existent (Porteous, 1985; Porteous and Mastin, 1985; and Carles et al., 1999,
remain rare exceptions). Although recent participatory approaches to recording landscape
experience show considerable potential (e.g. as promoted by landscape designers Thwaites and
Simkins, 2007), there is a continuing need for the development of methodologies focusing on
as broad a sensory range as possible. Interviews and comparative methods will continue to play
an important role, supplemented by methods that elicit in-depth, participant-led observations.
Auditory aspects of landscape perception, for example, can potentially be researched with
only minor modification of current methodologies, using sound instead of image. Haptic and
multi-sensory responses to microclimate are another dimension of experience that are rarely
taken into account in empirical research and yet remain a powerful part of landscape perception
in the real world.
Another significant gap in research is the landscape perception of people with physical and
learning disabilities. Ethnographic and participant-led methods have contributed to a greater
understanding of patterns of access to and use of different landscapes by people with disabilities,
but we still know very little about what these landscapes signify for their users. People with
learning disabilities, in particular, remain a group virtually ignored from landscape perception
research, and this despite the copious literature on the therapeutic potential of green and other
open spaces.
Theories and methodologies that build on understandings of people’s transactional relation-
ship with place offer potential for the future. Personal construct theory (PCT) (Kelly, 1955),
personal projects (Little, 1983) and similar projective approaches offer ways to elicit an under-
standing the different perspectives that various sectors within society bring to their experience of
and response to the landscape. Life histories approaches can also offer valuable insights here
(Uzzell et al., 2010). New ICT methods also make it easier to relate individual experience to
place in a way that can subsequently be analyzed using quantitative methods. The use of softGIS
by Kyttä et al. (2011) is one such example that permits the recording of multiple interactions
between research participants and given landscapes, and then allows for interrogation of the data
in relation to other spatial phenomena, such as the location of green or natural space.
It is important that research designs, and the guidance and decision-making that stems from
the results, reflect the significant theoretical and methodological advances in landscape percep-
tion in recent years. It is noticeable that many practical landscape assessment tools and guides are
only poorly related to aesthetic and perception theory. The theory gap also reflects a failure to
37
join up the different strands of relevant research relating aesthetics, perception, experience,
behaviour and response to environment.
In the context of developing research, policy and practice, there is scope for a better align-
ment of theories on the visual, historical and cultural contributions to landscape experience with
aesthetic theory and environmental or ecological aesthetics. Ingold’s (2007) anthropological
approach also offers a valuable way forward, sympathetic and responsive to many of the theo-
retical issues raised by environmental aestheticians. In the context of global anxieties about
environment and the natural world, issues of ethics cannot be divorced from aesthetics and this
also merits greater attention in future research.
At a more practical level, some gaps in research relate to coverage of different dimensions in
the landscape. It is interesting to note how little discussion there is in the aesthetic literature on
seascapes and, where they are covered (e.g. Hill et al., 2001), they are dealt with separately from
other kinds of landscape assessment. Equally, there are many gaps in the coverage of urban
landscape perceptions. Attention has been paid to views of nearby nature and immersion in
natural environments as part of research on restorative environments, e.g. by Hartig (2007) and
Kaplan (2007). However, research where the context for the viewer is largely an everyday built
urban environment, with the natural or green landscape no more than part of a distant visual
scene at best, merits further research.
Finally, the growing interest in relationships between health and the landscape adds a vital
dimension to explorations of landscape perception. This is a burgeoning area for empirical
research and highlights opportunities for using objective, physiological measures as well as sub-
jective measures of landscape experience. Concepts such as affordance and personal construct
and life history approaches to methodology can be useful here too, pointing to the ways in
which the landscape might offer different, health-enhancing opportunities for engagement with
the environment for different people and at different stages in their lives.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my colleagues Peter Aspinall and Penny Travlou on whose advice and input
I have leant in preparing this chapter.
Note
1 Space does not permit a more detailed exploration of the considerable literature on wayfinding and
cognition, much of it focused on human navigation of buildings and the urban environment, but
Ward Thompson et al. (2005) illustrate how an understanding of wayfinding theory can be drawn
upon to improve navigation for visitors in a countryside context.
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3
Perceptual lenses
Peter Howard
BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY
The same landscape can mean different things to different people, and a great deal of research
into landscape is concerned with description, analysis and explanation of these differences.
Meinig (1979) described ten versions of the same scene, through the eyes of different profes-
sions, but there are many more than ten versions, and profession is not the only factor in the
differences. This chapter attempts to set out a framework for such studies of landscape percep-
tion and preference, and uses as a metaphor those types of spectacles used by opticians into
which a variety of lenses can be inserted, when carrying out an eye inspection. The metaphor
has its limitations; the intention of ‘correcting’ the vision implicit in the eye examination cannot
be applied where the intention is merely to explain a preference. Also, some may see an implied
presumption that landscape is only a visual phenomenon, whereas modern landscape research,
and indeed landscape practice, is quite clear that landscapes are also apprehended through
sound, smell, touch and even taste, a truth which will come as no surprise to landscape
poets and novelists. Despite these faults, the metaphor remains a useful classification of much
landscape research, also allowing the possibility (equivalent to the naked eye) for the work
that presumes there to be some degree of perception and preference that is common to all
humans – some universally accepted notions of landscape quality.
This division of landscape perception studies owes something to the work of Bourassa (1991),
who divided the field into three parts: studies that considered the universality of landscape ideas;
those that considered factors common to large groups, most obviously national differences; and
those that were very personal. In a landscape architect this latter could be part of the artistic style
of a practitioner. Here the final section is omitted, largely on the grounds that many of these
personal factors are the result of a particular combination of more widely applicable lenses, that
together result in a prescription for an individual. Although the work by Appleton (1994) examining
the way in which his own landscape preferences were moulded by his particular childhood and
experience is intensely personal, nevertheless age and experience are influential factors for all.
The naked eye – universal preference factors

Studies attempting to explain landscape preference at a universal level go back at least to the
eighteenth century, with the work of Burke (1970 [1759]) merely being the best known of
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Peter Howard
many hypotheses in the Age of Reason. Such theories make an interesting study of themselves,
and Appleton’s earlier work summarizes many of these, at least those of western origin
(Appleton 1975). His own theoretical ideas put forward in The Experience of Landscape, which
have been refined in several publications since, including in verse, stand as an attempt to focus
attention on human reaction to the landscape being, at least in part, biologically determined by
the need for suitable habitat for the human animal.
This work was mirrored from a different disciplinary perspective by Rachel and Steven
Kaplan (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989) in the 1980s and 1990s following extensive empirical data
with groups of students within the (then emerging) discipline of Environmental Psychology.
Their work has since followed the ideas of Attention Restoration Theory in demonstrating the
significance in overcoming stress. However, a great deal of Environmental Psychology work has
been concerned with urban environments, place attachment and place identity, and is reported
in the Journal of Environmental Psychology. A line of research and theory which to an extent lies
parallel with that of Appleton comes from Environmental Biology and especially the Savannah
theory of Gordian Orians (1986). This opines that preferred landscapes may derive in part from
human pre-historic evolution in the savannah landscapes of Africa.
Whatever the findings relating to universal preferences, however, there are many more
research lines which have investigated one or other of the ‘lenses’ that will differentiate one
group’s landscape preference from another’s. While in this chapter these ‘lenses’ are assumed to
be distinct and discrete, this may not hold in reality, as so many of the lenses are related to each
other. Culture, social status, profession, life experience and education are here discussed separately,
but they are unlikely to be so easily unravelled in reality.
Nationality
The lens of nationality may be the most obvious, and has certainly attracted academic attention
for many years. Lowenthal and Prince (1965) published two influential articles in the Geographical
Review during the 1960s which described some presumed preferences of English people’s land-
scape tastes, noting the preference for deciduous over conifers, for the façade, for camouflage.
Both they and many writers since, most obviously Matless (1998), have been careful to distin-
guish between English landscape preferences and those of other countries of the United Kingdom
and Ireland; landscape appears to be one of the most clear distinguishing features of Englishness,
a concept recorded by Bishop (1995).
Since Benedict Anderson (1983) and others redefined the concept of nationality in the 1980s,
describing national identity as an ‘imagined community’, there has been much research which
shows how landscape forms an integral feature of that imagination in many countries, including
the well-known work by Schama (1995), though it remains in doubt whether this is a universal
trait. For example, Terkenli (2011) writes about the lack of a landscape conscience in Greece,
despite that country’s remarkable and often distinctive landscapes. The opposite pole of ‘land-
scape caring’ may be represented by Germany. The deep concern especially for local places,
known as ‘heimat’, may have given rise to a national identification with certain kinds of land-
scape especially during the 1930s (Groening and Wolschke-Bulmahn 1992), though the depth
of this obsession has recently been questioned (Uekotter 2007).
The description of national preferences in landscape has frequently been undertaken by the
content analysis of a whole variety of material, literary and graphic, and even musical. Bowring
(2002) has investigated the telephone directories of New Zealand to tease out the nation’s
landscape oriented ideas. Brace (1999; see also Matless 1998) has focussed on the Cotswolds
within English identity, making use of the outpouring of a wealth of guidebooks and travel
44
Perceptual lenses
literature, most notably in the 1930s. The current author has analyzed landscape paintings to
demonstrate a national preference for both landscape types and for specific locales (Howard
1991). While the value of content analysis has been clearly demonstrated in unearthing pre-
ferences among nations and among regional and other groups, there is still a vast amount of
research needed to complete a picture, both many more countries and other kinds of symbolic
feature. National anthems and symbols, paintings and print collections, tourist guide-books,
poetry and novels, advertising and promotional material all demonstrate differences that can
point to national, and regional, tastes. In some cases this can show that many nations have
‘golden landscapes’ much as some have ‘golden ages’ in their history. Crang (1999) suggests that
Dalarna fulfils this role in Sweden, and Häyrynen (2004) selects Häme in Finland, though also
see Harvey (Chapter 13 this volume).
In some countries, and most particularly the United States, nature has been given a central
role in the development of national identity, and this has been given close attention both by
Olwig (2002), and Lowenthal (2003), and described historically by Worster (1994).
Direct comparison between adjoining countries and their views of landscape is an area still
awaiting serious attention. Fall (2005) has looked at different attitudes each side of the Franco-
German frontier in the Vosges/Pfälzerwald, but the differences of management that are there
discussed only marginally relate to landscape preference. Examples of such different manage-
ment techniques across many European countries have been documented by Scazzosi (undated)
in a multi-volume publication, but again landscape attitudes are only tangential. The opportunities
for such work are immense.
Culture and religion

Although the distinction between a national lens and one that represents a particular set of
cultural values may, on occasion, be difficult to define, it is nonetheless a useful distinction to
make as some cultural values are spread across many more than a single nationality. For exam-
ple, recent work by Li et al. (2010) offers a particularly clear example of how an aesthetic tra-
dition in one civilization has influenced landscape perception in China. Likewise, the
application of the World Heritage Convention to cultural landscapes has highlighted the sig-
nificant differences between European attitudes to landscape, at least to their historic value, and
those prevalent in east Asia (where again there are many variations). Taylor (2009) in particular
shows the ways in which peoples of Southeast Asia value their historic landscapes compared
with the international western standard, and Yu (1995) has used the influx of western experts,
including landscape architects, into China to study these differences.
There have been surprisingly few studies of religion, or broader belief systems, as a
factor influencing landscape perceptions. Thomas (1984), from a cultural historical position,
highlighted the impact of changing religious beliefs and sensibilities on attitudes towards
nature, including landscape, but this has not been followed by a wide range of detailed inves-
tigation. Sinha (1995) has focussed attention on the problem of religious heritage sites in India
and the variety of perceptions thrown up by this process, and some attitudes more directly
related to religious and ethnic differences also emerge in her later edited work (Sinha and
Ruggles 2004).
Some work does suggest that there may be less variation in perception between different
ethnic groups when other factors are discounted. Two recent research projects concerning dif-
ferent ethnic groups’ attitudes to built heritage, one by black and multi-ethnic groups in
Gloucester (Shore 2007) and one by the various Surinamese groups in Paramaribo (van
Maanen, 2011), have both concluded that the variation in such perceptions is limited.
45
Peter Howard
Nevertheless the ethnic lens can be significant in certain situations as has been demonstrated
by Purcell et al. (1994) and Armstrong (2004) in Australia, the latter concentrating on
the process of migration itself, and by Harrison and Burgess (1994) and Tolia-Kelly (2004)
in the UK.
Language as a cultural element has been shown to be a significant issue even among the
European languages as they debated the European Landscape Convention, but the concept of
landscape is inevitably coloured by linguistics. Again there have been surprisingly few detailed
studies on this issue, but Gehring and Kohsaka (2007) consider the variety of words in Japanese,
fukei and keikan, and the flexure these impose on the concept.
Social status
In 1937 was published a collection of essays, largely from authors politically left of centre,
entitled Britain and the Beast (Williams-Ellis, 1937). In one of these essays, entitled ‘The People’s
Claim’, the Fabian philosopher C.E.M. Joad wrote:
… the people’s claim upon the English countryside is paramount, … [but]the people are
not as yet ready to take up their claim without destroying that to which the claim is laid …
[therefore it] must be kept inviolate as a trust until such time as they are ready.
(Williams-Ellis, 1937, p. 64)
The eponymous Beast was the British public, who could not be trusted to protect the
landscape. This forms a neat introduction to that most studied lens, that of ‘class’ or social status.
There is nothing new about class being a fundamental lens in regarding the landscape as well as
building it. Oliver Creighton (2009) shows how class was fundamental in the making of
the landscape of the Middle Ages, as does Liddiard (2005). Later landscapes were made for the
sports of the wealthy, and Dennis Cosgrove demonstrates in The Palladian Landscape how
the Venetian terra firma was made almost as stage in which the oligarchs could perform
(Cosgrove 1993).
Cosgrove (1984) also set the scene for the recent interest in the relationship of landscape to
theories of cultural capital (from Bourdieu), hegemony and dominant ideology in his work
Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. While working with Daniels in The Iconography of
Landscape (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988), these ideas were applied to the landscape in its graphic
and pictorial form. They were far from alone and further explorations of the role of social
position in landscape were expounded by the archaeologist Barbara Bender (1998), the art his-
torian W.J.T. Mitchell (1994), and the geographer W.J. Darby (2000), concentrating on the
particular meanings of the landscapes of the Lake District to its many visitors. Broadly this is
certainly an area that is fully theorized, and the variety of social differences and conflicts that
arise have been shown to exist in many places and at many times, though there are many gaps
in the detailed map of such conflictual and competitive landscapes. Research that demonstrates
that no such dissonance existed would indeed be novel.
However, there are some specific areas and ideas that add colour to the broad understanding
of ‘landscape as class battleground’, with all the implications for perception involved. Deusen
(2002) has analyzed the construction of an American public square as a space for class warfare,
which inevitably colours the perception of those involved, a theme taken up also by Nasar and
Jones (1997). Setten (2004), from a Scandinavian perspective, has looked at the competition
between different social groups for the moral high ground with respect to the conservation and
management of landscape. It is therefore now impossible rationally to argue that landscape,
46
Perceptual lenses
however rural, is innocent of class prejudice and social competition. Yet, as we were reminded
by Inglis (1987) many years ago, the countryside has still clung on to a perceived bucolic
simplicity and innocence, especially in the minds of many urbanites, and this perception is
reinforced regularly on the television screen.
Rurality
Whether rural people perceive rural landscapes differently from urbanites, and conversely for
townscapes, has not been much examined, although there may be a problem in distinguishing
such a ‘lens’ from that of ‘insideness’ or profession (but see Arnberger and Eder 2011 for a dis-
cussion of these differences in Austria). A great deal of work on rural landscape preferences
tends to equate rural dwellers with farmers, but Milburn et al. (2010) have examined attach-
ment to land of non-farm rural landowners, and a Dutch group have studied the acquisition of
rural identity (Haartsen et al. 2000). As this new rural group now wields very considerable
power in landscape management and planning, considerably more research is required.
Gender
Despite the major work by Massey (1994), a recent editorial was able to state ‘the study of
landscape, as it relates to gender, has been somewhat ignored’ (Dowler et al., 2005). Although
in western culture the earth, nature and landscape were for so long regarded as female, notably
by Burke and other eighteenth-century writers, there remains little direct research on differ-
ences in the perception between the genders. Of course, the presumed femininity of the earth
may not create different perceptions. Bondi (1992) has looked at gender in the urban landscape
and Strumse (1996) has recently looked at wider demographic perception differences in
Norway. The perception of dangers in woodland, especially urban woodland and parkland, by
women, has received some attention by practical landscape architects, and more academically by
Burgess (1998). From a more anthropological perspective, the significance of women sharing in
the making of a landscape and nation was the theme of Alon-Mozes (2007). There is clearly
work to be done, with landscape preferences as displayed by men and women garden designers
perhaps an obvious topic, especially given the substantial numbers of significant women
designers, something that is less obvious, historically, in painting for example, but also in many
other types of landscape.
Age and experience

Following his ideas concerning universal perceptions of landscape, Appleton (1994) went on to
attempt an analysis of those attributes of his own landscape preferences that could be attributed
to his life experience, at a very personal level. This draws attention to the questions of age
(including physical size) and experience, difficult though it is to separate this lens from that of
professional expertise.
Children’s place perceptions have had considerable attention, especially in play areas
specifically designed for them (see Jansson 2010; Malone 2002). Some years ago Tuan (1978)
devoted some attention to this, closely followed by both Ward (1978) (with an urban
interest) and Hart (1979). Simkins and Thwaites (2008) looked at the experience of primary
school-age children, whereas Tunstall et al. (2004) used the technique of children’s photographs
to look at their perceptions of river landscape, a technique also deployed by Aitken and
Wingate (1993).
47
Peter Howard
Both Tuan (1977) and Dearden (1984) demonstrated how past landscape experience,
especially of travel, present environment and recreational activities, together with familiarity all
have an influence on landscape preferences. So much may now be taken for granted, but
there has been a great deal of work more recently on the role of landscape in matters of
health. While much of this work on the health-giving benefits of landscape may not
directly impact perceptions of landscape (see Lau and Yang 2009). Ottoson and Grahn (2008)
make it clear that traumatic experiences do affect responses to nature. (See also Nordh et al.,
Chapter 26)
Insideness
The lens that is today a major factor of research and of academic concern is that of ‘insideness’,
the degree to which a respondent is part of the community which regard the landscape as ‘their
place’. The urgency of this research, and indeed the controversy that it generates, is due in part
to the legal requirement for participation enshrined in the European Landscape Convention.
This can very easily lead to a conflict between the views of experts and the very different per-
ceptions of ‘insiders’. In general, of course, this refers to local people, the longer term residents
being more ‘insider’. But there are many other insiders too, members of organizations for
example, but these may be covered by the lens of profession or activity. The most seminal work
in this field must be Relph (1976), who delineated several categories of ‘insideness’ though it
has been the local insider who has taken centre stage, to the extent that localism has now
become a major political dogma.
Work by the Sellgrens (Sellgren and Sellgren, 1990) in the wake of the devastating hurricane
of 1989 across south-east England demonstrated how different were the views of professional
foresters and landscape specialists from those of local people, who largely thought the dis-
appearance of trees was to be welcomed, opening up the views. The importance of the small
NGO Common Ground in this move to the local with their campaigns for parish maps,
orchards and for defending local preferences has been recognized by Crouch and Matless
(1996). A similar move in the cities was recognized, with D. Mitchell’s (2001) article under-
lining the significance. More recently, there has been a steady stream of research examining the
attitudes of local people in particular circumstances. Studies of the English national forest (Cloke
et al. 2003), of rural character in New England (Ryan 2006), of archaeological landscapes in
Devon (Riley and Harvey, 2005) and of forests in Vermont (O’Brien 2006) are examples.
Perhaps the most fruitful research, which overlaps very clearly with issues of participation, has
come from anthropologists using techniques of participant observation. Krauss is a good exam-
ple of this, using such techniques to examine the fierce debate about the future of the
Wattenmeer in Schleswig, and also the Portuguese context (Krauss 2006, 2010 and this volume,
Chapter 6). This is a firm reminder that most people have more than one set of preferences,
depending on what part they are playing at the time.
Profession
The professional lens is clearly related to the educational, but professions also often have a
distinctive way of seeing of their own, as well as a lens common to all experts. The latter is
particularly apparent in participation exercises with the general public. Among the former spe-
cific studies, there is work on architects, by Pennartz and Elsinga (1990), on foresters by Bradley
and Kearne (2007), and on farmers, by Primdahl et al. (2010) and Setten (2005). Perhaps the
major work of Andrews (1989) might also be put into this category, as an insight into the
48
Perceptual lenses
particular preferences of artists. Doubtless this list is not complete, but it suggests there are many
professional users of the landscape where an investigation into their perceptions might be
rewarding. One obvious case is the infantryman, another is the meteorologist, where the
evanescence of landscape will be more significant than usual.
At the other level – the clash between experts and locals – Syse (2010) has looked at debates
in Argyll concerning power generation and transmission, and the work of Krauss (2010) is
clearly relevant in this context, but this is another field where there is much to be done.
The level of education can best be regarded as a subsidiary lens within the broad remit of
‘profession’, but certainly there has been some work that looks at the variations between those
with different styles of education. Carlson’s (1995) work showed a significantly different appre-
ciation of certain aspects of nature with those who had greater aesthetic knowledge, and
Thompson and Barton (1994) looked at the difference between eco-centric and anthropo-centric
attitudes.
Activity
The aesthetic view of landscape might have seen that the making of pictures, whether in paint
or photography, would be the pre-eminent activity in deciding on landscape values, and cer-
tainly there has been much work within art history examining artists preferred places (Andrews
1989; Howard 1991). However, the work of Urry (1990) demonstrating that tourists have a
perception different to others has been followed by a continuous thread of interest in particular
activities and their ways of perceiving places, including visitors (De Lucio and Mugica 1994).
The most direct example is research by Jakobsson (2009) into the experience of walking, and
more strenuous walking is also critical to the research of Eiter (2010). Walkers also take a
prominent role, along with mushroom-pickers and beekeepers, in the work by Surova and
Pinto-Correira (2008) in Portugal.
Medium
However important the other senses (see Scott et al., 2009), there is no doubt that in landscape
perception research, if not in landscape perception, the visual is paramount. Lowenthal (2007)
reminds us that looking itself is an activity. Looking, however, is usually conducted to some
end. There is often a product; sometimes this has no more concrete form than as a memory
(and perhaps some landscapes are more memorable than others, irrespective of their significance
at the time of looking). At other times, the ‘look’ is committed to a tangible product, usually
a picture but perhaps a sound recording. In the former case there is no doubt that the
medium greatly influences the message, that different media concentrate on different landscapes,
water-colourists on water for example (Howard 1991).
Conclusion
There may be factors which are common to all human beings as they perceive places, but there
are certainly also many factors that create differences between us. This chapter has made no
claim to provide a filing space for every item of research into landscape perception. There may
be many more lenses than are here discussed, and the lenses may operate together rather than
singly. Clearly there are some lenses which are well-researched and others where new work is
sorely needed. Perhaps here is merely offered, in the words of Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘a useful box
to put things in’.
49
Peter Howard
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4
Landscape and phenomenology
John Wylie
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
What is the nature of the relationship between landscape and phenomenology? Phenomenol-
ogy is a branch of continental philosophy which aims to elucidate and express the meaning and
nature of things in the world – of phenomena – through a focus upon human lived experience,
perception, sensation and understanding. One element of this aim involves developing
an account of culture-nature relations that is radically different from an orthodox scientific
conception of ‘nature’ as an external realm, distinct from human thought and practice – a
conception which underwrites many contemporary Western attitudes to nature, both academic
and lay. Phenomenology is also a diverse and still-evolving tradition, but in terms of its influ-
ence upon landscape research, the ‘existential’ phenomenology of two mid-twentieth-century
thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, has been especially notable. And
landscape is … well, to offer an initial definition would be jumping the gun, especially in a
volume such as this one, teeming with competing definitions of the word. Instead of doing so, a
definition of landscape from a phenomenological perspective will emerge progressively through
the course of the chapter.
In this chapter, I will propose three answers to my initial question above concerning the
relation between landscape and phenomenology, and discussion of these answers will serve to
organize and structure the chapter. In turn, I will consider the following propositions:
that ‘landscape’ and ‘phenomenology’ share a common heritage in terms of romanticism, and
are thus deeply entwined together from the outset;
that, if the story of landscape research is really the story of ongoing debates over the defin-
ition of landscape, then phenomenology is a persistent questioning presence in such debates,
albeit one that researchers have often found difficult to place squarely at the heart of their
inquiries;
the pragmatic answer: phenomenology offers a particular approach to the study of landscapes,
shaping both what is studied under the heading of ‘landscape’, and how it is studied.
Landscape, phenomenology and romanticism

I will begin with what is perhaps the boldest possible proposition concerning the relation
between landscape and phenomenology. This is that our two putative objects of enquiry,
54
‘landscape’ and ‘phenomenology’, cannot be conceived of separately from each other. Without
phenomenological modes of thinking there can hardly be a concept of ‘landscape’ per se.
Equally, phenomenology, as a tradition of thinking and understanding, is centrally preoccupied
with questions regarding the multifarious relationships – distant or intimate, technical or emo-
tional – between human cultures and natural worlds—the questions of landscape, in other
words.
In preparing this chapter, I was initially offered a particular topic to address: ‘landscape and
phenomenology’. Now, I think, we are straight away invited by this phrasing to perceive two
distinct things. on the one hand, landscape; on the other, phenomenology. And the clear
implication is that the former (landscape) is the context, or ground, to which the latter (phe-
nomenology) shall be applied – thus, the chapter should set out to explain how phenomenol-
ogy, as a particular style of thinking, and a particular set of research concerns, can be applied to
the study of landscapes.
But taking such an approach, and only such an approach, would run the risk of occluding
deeper cultural and historical associations. Because it can be argued that landscape and phe-
nomenology share, to an extent, a common genesis. Specifically, they share one point of origin
insofar as both can be connected back to the inauguration and elaboration of romantic attitudes
to nature and humanity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this way, from
the start, landscape and phenomenology are conjoined.
A more concrete example may help to clarify this argument. Early on in her recent A Book of
Silence – a memoir and meditation on landscape, solitude and contemplation – the author Sara
Maitland finds herself walking, alone, on the hills and moors of the Isle of Skye, in north-west
Scotland. And there, she describes the following experience:
I sat on a rock and ate cheese sandwiches – and thought I was perfectly happy. It was so
huge. And so wild and so empty and so free.
And there, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, I slipped a gear, or something like that.
There was not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness: a connection as though my
skin had been blown off. More than that – as though the molecules and atoms I am made
of had reunited themselves with the molecules and atoms that the rest of the world is made of.
I felt absolutely connected to everything. It was very brief, but it was a total moment. …
… This ‘gift’ is experienced as both integrative – the whole self is engaged and known to
itself, to the subject, in quite a new way – and as connecting that self to something larger.
(Maitland, 2008, p.63, original emphasis)
‘Not me and the landscape, but a kind of oneness’. I believe Maitland’s experience is of interest
here precisely because it highlights the deeper, perhaps even ‘orginary’ connection between
landscape and phenomenology I have claimed above. Hers is very much an experience redolent
of a romantic sensibility – and she is, moreover, well aware of this. When I say ‘romantic sen-
sibility’ here, my reference points are the romantic movements in art, literature, music, science
and philosophy which flowered in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, and whose influences can still be seen clearly at work today in the Western world in
particular.1 Romanticism has undoubtedly profoundly influenced senses of landscape in several
different registers. While there are obviously dangers here in speaking too generally, it would be
hard to deny that romanticism has helped shape contemporary tastes for landscape and nature
‘wild and empty and free’ as Maitland puts it. A sense, today, that something beautiful, good
and true can be witnessed in ‘wild’ landscapes, and moreover that such landscapes offer aesthetic
and spiritual sustenance in a manner that transcends utilitarian and rational attitudes is a clear
55
John Wylie
romantic inheritance. A solitary ‘confrontation’ with landscape, and a subsequent epiphanic

sense of connection and oneness, is another. These inheritances, we can argue, give a degree
shape and definition to the entire idea of ‘landscape’ itself in the Western world today. More
pragmatically, therefore, we can also trace strong connections between romantic attitudes and
the rise of modern tourism and tastes for landscape in the scenic sense (see McNaughten and
Urry, 1998; Edensor, 2000). And connections also between romanticism and a sense that certain
landscapes merit designation and protection – as ‘National Parks’, for example, in the UK.
Romanticism, finally, also shapes the contours of ‘landscape science’ itself, of physical and
human geography as they emerge in the nineteenth century, in the German-speaking world in
particular (on this argument see Minca, 2007 and Tang, 2008), and this in turn goes on to shape
Anglo-American human geography in the twentieth century.
Turning to phenomenology, it would be too simplistic to say that romanticism has played a
shaping and defining role, as I would argue it has done with landscape. Nevertheless both
phenomenology and romanticism are part of a broader, ‘continental’ tradition in philosophy,
and it is quite possible to discern a series of romantic motifs and inheritances within the rise to
prominence of phenomenology that occurs the 1930s and 1940s. Phenomenology is a philo-
sophy that, above all, stresses the importance of lived experience, of the human subject’s
ongoing immersion in the world; and that thus seeks to move away from a description of sub-
jectivity in terms of rational, distanced observation, towards an alternate understanding of
human being – of what it is to be human – in terms of expressive engagement and involvement
with the world. This embedded, relational and fleshed-out conception of human existence
emerges from Heidegger’s (1962) foundational analyses of human being as a ‘dwelling’ in the
world, and from Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) conception of the lived body, entwined with
the world in everyday perception and movement. Herein we can see, as with romanticism, a
certain rejection of scientific or utilitarian approaches to understanding, and a desire to embrace
instead alternate, non-scientific or ‘pre-objective’ forms of knowing. In tandem a sense arises in
both romantic and phenomenological thinking that deeper truths about humanity and nature
are perhaps best accessed and expressed via artistic media – through art, poetry, music. More-
over, if romanticism is characterized by, and caricatured through, an extolling of the individual
as solitary, creative genius, then phenomenology, perhaps more than anything else, is an inves-
tigation of the nature of individual human subjectivity. And lastly, again more pragmatically, we
can note a sense that both romanticism and phenomenology seem to sometimes share a pre-
ference for non-urban, remote and unpeopled landscape, as both an ideal landscape form, and as
a testing-ground for enquiries into ‘knowing the self’ – into both ‘self-integration’, and ‘one-
ness’ with the world, to quote Maitland again.
This is my first proposition, then. If we want to understand landscape and phenomenology
together, we need to consider them as conjoined in the cultural and historical contexts of
romanticism, to which many of the key concerns of phenomenological thinking are linked, and
from which some of the most influential articulations of landscape derive. And today, when
those who are wary regarding the use of phenomenological approaches to landscape want to
pinpoint their objections, this is the word they most often use: ‘romantic’ (e.g. Nash, 2000;
Cresswell, 2003). Phenomenology, they often say, offers a ‘romantic’ or ‘romanticized’ account
of humans and landscapes.
Phenomenology and landscape theory

What is the nature of the relationship between landscape and phenomenology? I have sketched
one answer already: from the perspective of a certain philosophical and aesthetic history, they
56
emerge together, already intertwined, from the same, broad milieu of romantic thinking. In this
section I want to explore a second, perhaps more direct answer. If ‘landscape’ is understood as a
debatable term, which generations of scholars from various academic disciplines have sought to
theorize, define and understand, then ‘phenomenology’ is a key player in this landscape debate.
At times, including the present, phenomenological arguments have been clearly heard in
debates over the definition of landscape. But there have also been periods in which phenom-
enology has been at the margins of debate. If I were to chose a word to characterize phenom-
enology’s position within landscape theory, it would be: anxious. The tone in which
phenomenological arguments are debated is, it seems to me, very often an anxious tone –
whether this be an anxious voice claiming that, without phenomenology, the significance of the
lived experience of landscape, and of landscape’s materiality, will be overlooked; or conversely
an equally anxious voice suggesting that an emphasis on the phenomenology of landscape
downplays the role of politics and power in the shaping of landscapes.
Another way of expressing this thought would be to say that, like a ghost, phenomenology
refuses ever completely to go away, or be wholly exorcized from landscape studies. While in
one way it is true to say that phenomenological approaches to landscape have come notably to
the fore in the past ten to fifteen years, in disciplines such as cultural geography (e.g. Wylie
2005; Rose 2006), performance studies (e.g. Pearson 2006), interpretative archaeology (Tilley
2004), and cultural anthropology (e.g. Ingold 2001; Ingold and Vergunst 2008), it has also to be
recognized that this is only the latest in quite a long line of phenomenological incarnations. We
have already seen that the embryo of a phenomenological conception of human being is there
at the dawning of the selfsame romanticism which gives us both some of the most influential
‘popular’ understandings of Western landscape, and the grounds of landscape science. Equally, as
Duncan and Duncan (2010, p. 226) highlight, Carl Sauer’s foundational morphological account
of landscape in cultural geography, originally published in 1925, and heavily influenced by
Germanic notions of landscape and culture, was grounded in ‘the phenomenological study of
forms and relations as they … occur’.
Tracking forward through time, to the decades post-Second World War, the American
landscape writer J.B. Jackson’s conceptions were much more decisively imprinted with a phe-
nomenological sensibility; this is evident in both his credo that ‘far from being spectators of the
world, we are participants in it’ (Jackson, 1997, p. 2), and in the way his studies often focused
upon landscape practices and the feeling of specific landscapes (see Cresswell, 2003). In part
influenced by Jackson’s work (see Meinig, 1979), the 1970s thereafter represent something of a
high tide for phenomenological perspectives on landscape, with the flowering of humanistic
approaches in human geography, environmental psychology and landscape architecture, asso-
ciated with scholars such as David Seamon, Edward Relph and Yi-Fu Tuan (a standout
collection in this respect being Seamon and Mugerauer, 1985).
Then come the wilderness years. Through the 1980s and 1990s, phenomenology recedes,
almost to vanishing point, as research turns instead to focus upon how landscapes, and
especially landscape images and texts, express and sustain certain types of cultural and poli-
tical power relations. Landscape is thus conceived in ideological, symbolic and discursive
terms, rather than, and in some ways opposed to, phenomenological ones. It is also defined
as primarily visual in nature – landscape a particular ‘way of seeing’, framing and repre-
senting the world. There is not the space here to dwell in detail upon this process (see
Wylie, 2007, Chapters 3 and 4), but it must be noted that the turn to a critique of land-
scape as a visual ideology, expressing (variously) elitist, masculinist, racialized and eurocentric
discourses, involves, as a starting-point soon left behind, a negative characterization of phe-
nomenologically inspired humanistic landscape studies, as representing a kind of naivety.
57
John Wylie
They are seen as too individualistic, as opposed to social, in their conception of landscape;
and as too meditative, as opposed to critical, in their analytic practice (see Cosgrove, 1985;
Daniels, 1986).
The critical analyses of landscape that emerged through the 1980s and 1990s provide an
inescapable context for any discussion of phenomenology and landscape theory today. If, today,
there has been a resurgence of interest in phenomenological approaches to landscape – as
I noted at the start of this section, and will explore in more detail in the next – then this
has been accompanied, from the start, by a sense of anxiety about the cogency of such
approaches, about where they might lead and about what they might overlook. For example,
such an anxiety is a striking feature, indeed almost a structural principle, of one of the most
distinctive and interesting recent publications on landscape – Rachael Ziady DeLue and James
Elkin’s Landscape Theory (DeLue and Elkins, 2008). Much of Landscape Theory’s interest, and
relevance here, arises from its innovative organization and format. It begins by presenting a
number of previously published ‘key essays’ on landscape. The book’s centrepiece, however, is
an annotated transcription of a day-long round-table seminar discussion held at the Burren
College of Art in western Ireland, in June 2006. In addition to the editors, the seminar parti-
cipants comprised ten notable landscape scholars and writers, including Denis Cosgrove, Jessica
Dubow, Rebecca Solnit and Anne Whiston Spirn. The transcribed seminar discussion is then
followed, lastly, by eighteen ‘assessments’, solicited from authors to whom the transcription had
been sent. These assessments comprise a series of essays, variable in tone, length and approach,
with contributions again from several well-known landscape authors, including Kenneth Olwig,
Stephen Daniels, Malcolm Andrews and David Nye. This format has the notable effect of
encouraging and permitting a freedom of expression beyond that commonly found in most
edited collections or handbooks.
A tension between ‘ideological’ and ‘phenomenological’ understandings of landscape is a key
motif of Landscape Theory. This is introduced by the seminar moderator, James Elkins, in terms
which also develop an interesting definition of the aims and remit of landscape phenomenology:
Theorising on landscape, which was once avowedly an ideological matter, has been
increasingly replaced by a kind of de facto phenomenological understanding. Landscape is
taken to be the most diffuse and dispersed … but also the most optimal occasion for
meditating on the unity of the self … Landscape, in this way of thinking, is an exemplary
encounter with subjectivity.
(DeLue and Elkins, 2008, p.103)
Here, therefore, in ways that recall the quote from Sara Maitland in the previous section,
phenomenology is described in terms of an encounter – a lived, embodied and affective
experience – from which arises both a sense of self, and a sense of landscape. Whether this
encounter emerges as a sense of ‘oneness’ with the world, or perhaps as a sense of difference
and estrangement, the phenomenology of landscape involves above all thinking through the
constitution of subjectivity and landscape in lived experience. In the discussion that follows
in Landscape Theory, another participant, Jessica Dubow, supplies an eloquent summation of
these ideas:
What’s at issue in landscape is obviously a founding relation of self to object, a relation that
in phenomenological terms would be a reciprocity, a kind of mutual entwinement.
Landscape experience, then, is not just how a given view comes to be represented, but
how its viewer stakes a claim to perception and to presence. It’s not just about an optical
58
sight or symbolic mediation, but about all those more hidden sensory and affective pro-
cesses that allow a view to ‘come into being’ for the subject, all those embodied practices
which, prior to representation, allow for its realisation.
(DeLue and Elkins, 2008, p.104)
In other words, from a phenomenological standpoint, landscape is more-than-visual and more-

than-symbolic. To study landscape in this way involves attending instead to myriad everyday
embodied practices of interaction with and through landscape. It also involves ongoing reflec-
tion on more abstract and first-order questions regarding the nature of subjectivity, and human
relationships with the world. We will see in the next section that these are the issues which
occupy many contemporary landscape phenomenologies.
However, in Landscape Theory, the quite precise summations of landscape phenomenology
given in the two quotes above are not taken up and endorsed by the remainder of the seminar;
instead the discussion which follows is equivocal, at best, regarding both the potential and the
precise contribution of a phenomenological approach to landscape. Several of the ensuing
‘assessments’, however, take the issue up more directly, and critically. Maunu Hayrynen, for
example, argues that a turn to phenomenology ‘places the emphasis on the experience of
landscape, which, however defined, entails the risk of leaving the wider context of the politics
and economics of landscape in the background’ (ibid., p. 177). This has become something of a
standard critique in recent years. It is voiced further in Landscape Theory by Jennifer Jane
Marshall, who in an otherwise sympathetic engagement nonetheless observes that ‘as partici-
pants considered the phenomenological turn as perhaps a way to reinterpret landscape as an
intimate experience devoid of any semiotic, political or moral determination, one couldn’t help
but get a little uneasy. Was this not just politics all over again, but in the guise of neutrality?’
(ibid., p. 200). Marshall also cites the anthropologist Daniel Miller, for whom phenomenologists
are ‘the “romantics” of the field’ (ibid., p. 201). Lastly, Stephen Daniels pinpoints another
common criticism of landscape phenomenology – its seeming lack of attention to the historicity
of landscape – in stating that ‘it can never be a matter of isolating moments of “becoming” from
the matrix of a story. To do would be losing the plot’, (ibid, p. 241).
In sum, a series of anxieties continue to cluster around landscape phenomenology. It appears,
to some at least, to be at once too intimate and too abstract. Too intimate in that, by focusing
on lived encounters from which individualized subjects and landscapes emerge, it neglects, or
even neutralizes, broader critical questions concerning the cultural, political and economic
forces which shape landscapes, and shape perceptions of landscape also. And too abstract in the
sense of being overly preoccupied with philosophical considerations around subjectivity, per-
ception and so on, and thus insufficiently tethered to the historical and material specificities of
landscapes.
My wider proposition – that phenomenology has long been, and continues to be, a key
‘player’ in theoretical debates around landscape – has hopefully been demonstrated through the
course of this section. A supplementary clause stated that, despite this, phenomenological work
on landscape has seemingly always been regarded by some with a degree of concern and anxi-
ety. In fleshing out this contention, I have focused on current debates over ‘ideological’ versus
‘phenomenological’ approaches to landscape. As several contributors to Landscape Theory point
out, these are by no means the only ways in which one might approach landscape; nor are they
themselves internally homogenous. Nevertheless, the debate here has been particularly sharp in
recent years. In the next section, in the course of considering the positive contribution of recent
landscape phenomenologies, I will also point to ways in which this debate might be moved
forward.
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John Wylie
Current landscape phenomenologies

The aim of this third and final substantive section is to highlight and describe the kinds of
research projects and agendas that a phenomenological approach to landscape has inspired over
the past ten to fifteen years, in a variety of academic disciplines which include landscape
amongst their concerns. In doing so I will also point to ways in which critical concerns around
phenomenology – concerns about its ‘romantic’ nature, its subjectivism, and its lack of attention
to wider social, political and economic considerations – are being addressed by contemporary
writers.
An inaugurating moment for much current landscape phenomenology was the publication,
in 1993, of Tim Ingold’s essay ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ (Ingold, 1993, republished
in Ingold, 2000). Ingold’s timing was propitious, insofar as this essay caught and crystallized a
sense of dissatisfaction with some elements of the then-prevailing dispensation, in which, as was
noted above, landscape was understood as a ‘way of seeing’ and representing the world that
tended to express and reinforce elitist, gendered and Eurocentric world-views. For Ingold, and
for many others who subsequently followed up on his thinking, the difficulty with this under-
standing of landscape was most definitely not the critical politics of culture and identity it
advocated. I would argue that the vast majority of those using phenomenological approaches
would endorse and support the argument that landscape representations and practices need to
be understood in terms of cultural hierarchies and processes of exclusion, and symbolic and
material oppression. Rather, the difficulty lay with what the definition of landscape as a ‘cultural
image’ or way of seeing the world (Berger, 1972; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988) missed out, or
neglected to address. For Ingold, this missing element was a sense of landscape as a lived-in
world, as a material and sensuous world of everyday rhythms, patterns and performances in
which ‘landscape’ and ‘life’ reciprocally shape each other – and in which, in fact, ‘landscape’ and
‘life’ cannot be meaningfully separated out from one other as discrete entities. Underpinning
this sense of landscape is what Ingold calls ‘the dwelling perspective’, a phenomenological
understanding of human being derived from the work of Martin Heidegger. In this perspective,
Ingold (2000, p. 51) argues, human meaning and sense-marking arise from ‘the relational con-
texts of the perceiver’s involvement in the world’, and not from a separate exercise of mentally
reflecting upon one’s activities and practices. In other words, it is through our ongoing, lifelong
practices of dwelling in and with the world – including practices of picturing, writing etc. – that
our understandings of ourselves and the world are shaped. And the name given to such practices
of dwelling is: landscape.
Thus Ingold states that ‘it is through being inhabited that the world becomes a meaningful
environment (ibid., p. 173). And if the word ‘landscape’ describes ‘the everyday project of
dwelling in the world’ (ibid., p. 191), then it can also be defined as ‘the world as it is known to
those who dwell therein’. In summary, then:
Landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the
world in which we stand … And it is in the context of this attentive involvement in land-
scape that the human imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the land-
scape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as ‘the homeland
of our thoughts’.
(Ingold, 2000, p.207, emphasis in original)
Ingold’s work provides a conceptual platform from which landscape can be understood in terms
of phenomenological ideas of bodily practice, dwelling and inhabitation. In the fifteen years
60
since its publication, and especially over the past ten years, many landscape researchers
have sought to further investigate and explore this argument, most commonly through
‘grounded’ studies of landscape practices. In other words, the main focus of research has been
upon what geographer Hayden Lorimer (2005, p. 85) calls ‘embodied acts of landscaping’ – lived
practices which shape senses of self and world. A substantial literature has quite quickly sprung
up here. The practical application of phenomenological arguments to landscape issues has thus
produced a range of studies from disciplines including geography, archaeology, anthropology
and performance studies. These include studies of walking (Michaels, 2000; Lorimer and Lund,
2003; Wylie, 2005; Ingold and Vergunst, 2008; Sidaway, 2009), of looking and spectating (Wylie
2002, 2009; Edensor, 2010), of writing (Romanillos, 2008; Brace and Johns-Putra, 2010), of
gardening (Cloke and Jones, 2001; Crouch 2003) of touching and feeling (Macpherson, 2000;
Tilley, 2004), of spiritual or therapeutic retreat and contemplation, (Conradson, 2000; Dewsbury and
Cloke, 2009), of angling and watercraft, (Bull and Leyshon, 2010; Eden and Bear, 2011), of cycling
(Spinney, 2006), of climbing (Lewis, 2000) and of train travel (Watts, 2008; Bissell, 2009).
This is a long list of what can be called ‘landscape phenomenologies’, but it is by no means
exhaustive. Nor do these works take their inspiration exclusively from phenomenology. They
collectively testify to the successful ways in which phenomenological approaches can enable and
inform distinctive landscape studies, and also supplement other approaches. I offer these studies
here in order to indicate the breadth and depth of current work in this area, and to supply a
means of further reading and exploration beyond this chapter.
Moving towards a conclusion, however, I want to focus now upon two related areas in
which landscape research informed by phenomenology may develop interpretative practices and
frameworks though which some of the concerns and anxieties that have been voiced regarding
this approach may be addressed. The first of these is work dealing with issues of memory and
materiality, and the second of these focuses upon subjectivity, affectivity and presence.
Memory – in terms of practices of remembering and commemoration – has long been a core
concern of phenomenological philosophy (see Casey, 2000). And equally questions around
materiality have been a touchstone for analysis in this area, for example for much of the work
referenced above. Here, the materialities of specific landscapes – their solidities, liquidities and
atmospheres – can be understood as soliciting and inspiring senses of self (see Lingis, 1998;
Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Martin, 2011). Recent work, mostly by geographers, but also by
performance scholars, has worked from these premises to offer innovative accounts of life,
landscape and memory. For example, Caitlin DeSilvey (2007a, 2007b), Hayden Lorimer (2003,
2006) and Owain Jones (2007, 2008) set out to amplify the memorial and material qualities at
work in specific landscapes – for DeSilvey, a Montana homestead, for Jones the Severn estuary
in England, and for Lorimer the Scottish Highlands. Performance scholars Mike Pearson (2007)
and Carl Lavery (2009) similarly use phenomenological and performative approaches, including
walking, writing and in situ dramaturgy, to broach questions around the relationships between
landscape, identity and memory, both personal and collective. The points I would wish to
highlight from these kinds of studies are, firstly, that phenomenology offers possibilities for more
evocative and creative forms of academic writing, and secondly, that a focus upon individual
lives and landscapes can enable the forging of connections with wider cultural, historical and
political questions regarding the constitution of landscapes. What we see here are accounts in
which landscape’s political and historical resonance – its paradoxical function as both preserver
and eraser of memory – is accessed via the lens of corporeal and material practices.
If studies of landscape informed by phenomenology have begun to find ways in which to
shuttle between ‘embodied acts of landscaping’ and issues of power, memory and identity, other
recent work has also sought to address and examine what has often been seen as the
61
John Wylie
problematically ‘subjective’ nature of phenomenological research, and the associated tendency

to focus upon ‘romantic’ instances of ‘oneness’ and connection with landscape. One avenue of
inquiry here has involved drawing upon the post-phenomenological philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to focus upon ‘affectivity’ rather than ‘subjectivity’. A focus upon
‘affective atmospheres’ – that is, upon trans-personal and non-subjective circulations of moods,
materials and emotional charge – enables attention to be paid to how senses of selfhood, and of
landscape, are both equally emergent, rather than following what would be a ‘classically’ phe-
nomenological stance in which a pre-given and assumed self encounters landscape (see Wylie,
2005; Stewart, 2007; Martin, 2011; DeSilvey 2012). A slighter larger set of studies sets out from
a different set of propositions – the post-phenomenologies of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy
and Emmanuel Levinas – in order to counter the problematic notions of rootedness, belonging,
‘homeland’, and indeed senses of ‘oneness’ with landscape that have at times, it is argued, sur-
reptitiously accompanied studies of embodied acts of landscaping. This constitutes what Jessica
Dubow (2010) terms a ‘negative phenomenology’ of landscape, insofar as the focus falls upon
the dislocated, de-centred and precarious nature of subjective experience and perception.
Hence, while preserving the insight that a phenomenological focus on lived experience is cru-
cial to understanding landscape, a sense of landscape as composed as much of distances and
absences, as of presences and proximities, works to render obsolete any claim that landscape
phenomenology condones a romantic or naïve subjectivism. Such a sensibility is evident, for
instance, in Romanillos’ (2008) study of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s fictional landscapes, in Harrison’s
(2009) critical account of Ingold’s reading of landscape, in Rose’s (2006) analysis of landscape as
a ‘dream of presence’, and in my own study of landscape, absence and love (Wylie, 2009). If
landscape is reconfigured in terms of a subjectivity always in some sense distant and separate
from the world, and from itself, then it may be understood, as Robin Kelsey (2008, p. 207) puts
it in Landscape Theory, as a ‘space to define humanity as a species that does not belong’.
In a chapter of this length it is not possible to cover all of the work that might be grouped
under the heading of ‘landscape phenomenology’, But I do trust that this section of the chapter
has substantiated my third proposition: that phenomenology offers a means of both defining
landscape anew, and of conducting original research into the constitution and meaning of lived
landscapes.
Conclusion
It would be difficult to deny, today, the salience of phenomenological understandings within
landscape research. The editorial introductions to three recent collections of scholarly landscape
writing – Jeff Malpas’s (2011) The Place of Landscape, Karl Benediktsson and Katrin Lund’s
(2010) Conversations with Landscape and Catherine Brace and Adeline Johns-Putra’s (2010)
Process: Landscape and Text – would tend to confirm this statement. All three dwell at length
upon the contribution of phenomenological thinking to the definition of what landscape is, and
how it might be studied and understood.
To study landscape from a phenomenological perspective involves foregrounding
lived, embodied experience and perception. In part, this is a ‘practical’ question of examining
the varied practices and activities wherein people and landscape mutually interact. But it is
also a matter of continuing to use landscape as a venue for questioning categories such as
‘experience’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘perception’ in themselves. Landscape may be defined,
phenomenologically, as the creative tension of self and world. I hope to have shown, especially
in the final section of this chapter, that while phenomenology, like landscape itself, is connected
to romantic traditions of thinking, it does not necessarily presume, or idealize, any ‘romantic’
62
sense of belonging and connecting, or any naïve sense of stable and given selfhood. While
its seat at the table of landscape debate has at times provoked anxiety, and may continue to
do so, this chapter has hopefully demonstrated the strength and diversity of landscape
phenomenology today.
Notes
1 The literature on Romanticism is vast. For an up-to-date introduction, see Ferber (2010) Romanticism:
a very short introduction. More specifically, in terms of my arguments here, see Oerlemans (2004)
Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature; Bate (2000) The Song of the Earth; Tang (2008) The Geographic
Imagination of Modernity.
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65
5
Landscape and
non-representational theories
Emma Waterton
UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY
Landscape research has recently seen a burgeoning of interest around notions of ‘affect’,
‘emotion’, ‘embodiment’, ‘performance’ and ‘practice’. Although these notions can be parcelled
together in a variety of ways, in this chapter I want to situate them within the still developing
range of work dealing with what has come to be termed non-representational theory. As a style of
thinking, non-representational theory emerged in the mid-1990s. Though originally coined by
Nigel Thrift, it is today associated with Ben Anderson, John-David Dewsbury, Paul Harrison,
Hayden Lorimer, Derek McComack, Mitch Rose and John Wylie, all of whom, like Thrift, are
geographers based in the UK. The term ‘theory’ is perhaps a little disingenuous here as it
implies something in the singular; non-representational theories may be more useful a term (see
Anderson 2009), as it denotes something of a catchall rather than a strict or prescriptive theor-
etical framework. With this in mind, Hayden Lorimer (2005: 83) has proposed the phrase
‘more-than-representational’, which seems to adequately sum up attempts ‘ … to cope with our
self-evidently more-than-human, more-than-textual, multisensual worlds’.
Irrespective of the terminology used or the particular shading of non-representational theory
adopted, we can be sure of one thing: an impressive pedigree. Indeed, much of the recent
theorisations in this area were presaged within the work of an extensive list of critical thinkers
that includes Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and
Michel de Certeau. These scholars, along with their approaches to embodiment and practice,
are regularly referenced alongside the work of more recent thinkers such as Sara Ahmed, Judith
Butler, Elizabeth Grosz and Bruno Latour within the non-representational literature. Although
most often associated with the field of geography, non-representational theories have entered a
wide range of disciplines, including performance studies, feminist studies, anthropology, science
and technology studies, archaeology and tourism, where they have triggered richly varied attempts
to tap into issues of race, music, ethics, asylum seeking, gardening, walking, travelling and so
forth (McCormack 2003; Tolia-Kelly 2004; Waitt and Lane 2007; McHugh 2009; Nesbitt and
Tolia-Kelly 2009; Darling 2010; Simpson 2011. See also Chapters 4, 7, 10 and 25). In common
across this breadth of research is an acknowledgement that our understandings of the world are
lived, embodied and tangled up with how we do things, our doings and our enactments in
the moment (Carolan 2008: 410). In addition to revivifying an emphasis of everyday life, this
style of thinking has also drawn attention to the corporeality of our bodies, notions of affect and
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Landscape and non-representational theories
context, and an acknowledgement of the multi-sensuous landscapes in which we find

ourselves (Thrift and Dewsbury 2000; Larsen 2008). Researchers who align themselves with
non-representational theories thus simultaneously signal an intent to take very seriously the
ways in which our bodies participate in the world that surrounds us.
In order to mobilize an understanding of how this all figures within landscape studies, the
current chapter sketches out an overview of recent offerings from humanities and social sciences
literature that touch upon ‘non-representational theory’, before moving on to account for what
such an approach to landscape may involve. Following this, I offer some examples of how these
theoretical approaches have been applied, noting in particular innovative methods that have
emerged, before finishing with a nod to future directions.
Introducing the field

Non-representational theory was first defined by Nigel Thrift (1996) in the volume Spatial
Formations, which pieced together several concepts that had become central to his thinking at
the time: ‘time-space’, ‘practice’, the ‘subject’ and ‘agency’. By working these concepts toge-
ther, Thrift prompted a shift in thinking towards conceiving of the world in practical and pro-
cessual terms, or, in other words, as something that was in a perpetual state of becoming.
Linked to this was a dissatisfaction with the privileging of the visual (along with the attendant
failure properly to problematize representations), which Thrift (1996: 4) saw as taking
‘precedence over lived experience and materiality’. Thus, although his position can broadly be
seen to have emerged out of social constructivism, his suggestion is that we should think about
processes of meaning-making as occurring within action and interactions with other people and
the world around us, rather than solely within the representational dimensions of discourse and
structures of symbolic orders (Anderson and Harrison 2010: 2). It is, to be more precise, a way
of thinking; or, perhaps more accurately, a way of thought or a way of thinking about thinking
that brings together cognition with impulse, intuition and habit, with no easy way of cleaving
them apart.
Given the choice of words used to denote this style of thinking – ‘non-representational’,
Thrift’s re-theorisation is often characterized as a response to the deadening of geographical
thinking, or the draining ‘of life out of things’ as John Wylie has put it, triggered by too avid a
focus upon representations (Wylie 2007: 163; see also Thrift and Dewsbury 2000; Lorimer
2005; Wylie 2007; Simpson 2008). Indeed, as Tim Ingold (1995: 58) has eloquently argued,
‘[s]omething [ … ] must be wrong somewhere, if the only way to understand our own creative
involvement in the world is by taking ourselves out of it’ (Ingold 1995: 58). However, this
response to representationalism – an approach that Lorimer (2005: 84; see also Dewsbury et al.
2002; della Dora 2009) posits was the ‘signature theory of cultural geography’s landscape school’
(see for example Cosgrove 1984; Jackson 1989) – should not be read as an endorsement for
approaches that are against the representational (Anderson and Harrison 2010). To the contrary,
the research context that emerges is not characterized by an ‘either/or’ (representation versus
non-representation), rather, by an ‘and’; but in order to take representations seriously, we first
need to apprehend them ‘not as a code to be broken’ but as instances, events and practices that
are ‘performative in themselves; as doings’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002: 438). For Lorimer (2005: 84),
this means taking up a focus that:
… falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday rou-
tines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, practical skills,
affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions.
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Attention to these kinds of expressions, it is contended, offers an escape from the estab-
lished academic habit of striving to uncover meanings and values that apparently await our
discovery, interpretation, judgement and ultimate representation.
Given the stance taken towards the privileging of visuality, it is hardly surprising to see in
Thrift’s writings the foregrounding of all the senses, an emphasis on embodiment, encounters,
performances and practice, and an understanding of objects and contexts as active and con-
stitutive elements in all actions and interactions (Thrift 1996, 1999, 2003, 2008). When put
together, this style of thinking came to conceive of a messier world, and certainly a complex
one, that is in a continuous process of composition, dissimilar to that understood by many social
researchers at the time (Thrift 2003: 20–1). With its emphasis on everyday life and a turn to
practice, the body assumed a position of centrality, understood as in play with both sensations
and affect. Along with prioritising the body, this return to phenomenological styles of thinking
also triggered a foregrounding of the idea of ‘performance’ (della Dora 2009). However, while
it has clear antecedents in phenomenological thinking (Tuan 1979; Relph 1981; see Wylie this
volume), the way the body is positioned – as both produced by and a product of the world – is
a little different in non-representational terms, as it depends upon how our bodies participate
and/or are put to use, or, in other words, how they perform (MacPherson 2010: 4).
In taking account of the pre-cognitive, the intuitive and the habitual, those scholars attending
to this area of research were required to take the biological more seriously (Thrift 2009).
Here, a detour into neurobiology often seemed necessary in order to capture and explain that
‘half-second delay’ between action and conscious sensation (MacPherson 2010: 5), or as Thrift
(2008: 7) describes it, that ‘roiling mass of nerve volleys [that] prepare the body for action in
such a way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware of
them’. The pre-cognitive/pre-conscious is not, of course, something that we can easily put our
finger on, or even put into words, as Carolan (2008: 412; see also Pile 2010) has so eloquently
pointed out:
It is not that we cannot represent sensuous, corporeal, lived experience but that the
moment we do so we immediately lose something. Representations tell only part of the
story, yet they still have a story to tell, however incomplete.
It is within the pre-cognitive that the dynamic concept of ‘affect’ can be found, a term that has
considerable purchase within non-representational theories, where it has become something of
an exemplar or, as Steve Pile (2010: 8) points out, a key testing ground. Affect, in non-
representational terms, is considered transpersonal, fluid and mobile, and, importantly, always
‘inexpressible: unable to be brought into representation’ (Pile 2010: 8). Simply put, this is
because ‘the skin is faster than the word’ (Massumi 2002: 25, cited in McCormack 2003: 495),
or as Thrift (2003: 2020) points out:
this historically sedimented ‘unconscious’ ranges all the way from the simple facts of how
we measure out the world so as to ensure that we are in the right place at the right time to
the way that our bodies are fired up by body disciplines often learnt in childhood and
which push us in particular ways even before cognition begins to have its say.
This conceptualisation of affect is commonly aligned with the various readings of Spinoza and
Deleuze that have surfaced within Human Geography, which are usefully synthesized by Ben
Anderson (2006) and Steve Pile (2010). Anderson (2006: 735), for example, draws on both
68
scholars in order to sketch out his definition of affect as ‘a transpersonal capacity which a body
has to be affected (through an affection) and to affect (as the result of modifications)’ (emphasis
in original; see also McCormack 2003). Affect thus becomes something akin to atmosphere –
invisible but sensed within our bodies, as feelings, and understood and expressed, as emotions:
while the three (affect, feelings and emotion) are interrelated and all work together, they are
never quite the same (McCormack 2010: 643; see also Anderson 2006). The first, ‘affect’, to
follow from Anderson, is non-cognitive, the second, ‘feeling’ is pre-cognitive, with the third,
‘emotion’, envisaged as the only element that is both cognitive and consciously expressed (Pile
2010: 9). All three are important for understanding the interconnections between senses of self
and the world. But these are different ways of knowing, doing and making sense than those we
are used to; unsurprisingly, given our inabilities adequately to understand these concepts let
alone theorize them, they have become an area of social life that has for some time been
neglected.
Wrapped up in this manner, affect has become a key concept that cuts deeply into the
ontological and epistemological realignments central to non-representational thinking. Much
work has recently emerged that focuses upon this, including within the field of landscape research.
Here, affect and non-representational theories have started to animate new and creative
approaches, triggering research responses that attempt to access, understand and communicate
the ways in which people perform and embody the landscapes that surround them.
Landscaping non-representational theories

Despite the synergies between the ways we engage with ‘landscape’ and notions of practice,
embodiment and performance, the term has for some time been understood in terms of repre-
sentation, as a way of seeing (Wylie 2007: 14; see also Wylie this volume). Here, research
interests have, for example, coalesced around unpacking landscape construction and interpreta-
tion (cf. Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). More recently, a rich seam of landscape-focused research
has grown out of non-representational theories and can be mapped onto the wider engagement
with sensuous and embodied knowledge occurring across the social sciences. Most relevant here
would be the work of Michael Carolan, Tim Ingold, Mitch Rose, Gordon Waitt and John Wylie.
As with Thrift, this turn to ‘non-representation’ within specifically landscape-focussed research
seems to have been triggered by a growing tension towards the dominant – and somewhat
obdurate – notion that landscapes can somehow be captured and understood as things that are
seen and gazed upon. A corollary of this has often been the assumption that landscapes are
reflections or, as Rose (2006: 541–2) more convincingly puts it, they exist ‘as far as culture gives
[them] an existence, symbolising and expressing culture’s hidden essence’. In these renderings,
landscapes are not so much entities in themselves, capable of affecting, provoking, stimulating
and doing, but remain a sort of code or undercurrent. There is much to be gained, then, from
non-representational approaches that emphasize the ways in which people interact – routinely
and creatively – with landscapes in their everyday lives, along with associated embodied and
technologized practices (Lorimer 2005; Wylie 2007; Larsen 2008). This is because in these
approaches we find a landscape that involves a full range of sensory experiences: it is not only
visual, but textured to the touch and resonating with smells, touch, sounds and tastes, often
mundane in nature. It may be a moody landscape, dark, sharp and foreboding, or associated
with memory, light, breezing and sweet, or, perhaps still, wildly atmospheric. From here, it is
not just a matter of understanding how we think about the landscapes that surround us, but
how they in turn force us to think – through their contexts, prompts and familiarity (or not) (after
Dewsbury 2009; see also MacPherson 2010).
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Emma Waterton
Landscapes in this rendering are not static backdrops, but instead are imagined as fluid and
animating processes in a constant state of becoming. More importantly still, our precognitive
and embodied interactions with them draw us into equally fluid practices and performances.
This sense of motion has been captured by David Crouch (2003, 2010) and John Wylie (2007),
both of whom have tweaked the word ‘landscape’ into ‘landscaping’, or ‘spacing’, in an attempt
to foreground notions of practice and process (see also Merriman et al. 2008). For Wylie in
particular, this shift to ‘landscaping’, which turns the word from a noun into a more rhythmic
and mobile action verb, denotes our attempts to grasp and interact with the landscapes that
surround us, forcing us as researchers to move towards ‘ … the simultaneous and ongoing
shaping of self, body and landscape via practice and performance’ (Wylie 2007: 166; see also
Lorimer 2005; MacPherson 2010). Body and landscape thus become recursively intertwined,
both constitutive and constituting, and always in a process of (re)formation. Indeed, they
become, to borrow from Thrift and Dewsbury (2000: 415), extensions of the body and mind,
and vice versa.
There are strong reminiscences of Keith Basso’s (1996) Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and
Language among the Western Apache here, as well as hints to the rationale behind Barbara Bender’s
(2001) edited volume, Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. More explicitly, though,
this turn to non-representational theories has sparked a blurring of the line between that of
materiality and that of perception, or the ‘seen’ and the ‘seer’ (see della Dora 2009 for a fuller
exploration of this). From this standpoint, landscapes are no longer physical ‘somethings’ that
are simply viewed. Nor can they be understood as the ephemeral ‘way of seeing’ implied by
representational approaches. Rather, as Merriman et al. (2008: 203, emphasis in original; see also
Rose 2002) point out, we are now required to think of the term as ‘the materialities and sen-
sibilities with which we see’. The urging of non-representational theorists to give weight to
objects and the inanimate also means that, to borrow from Thrift (2008: 9), we as researchers
have to be prepared for the landscape to ‘answer back’. Practices of landscaping and experiences
of embodiment are not, then, comprised entirely of intentionality, rationality or conscious and
continuous deliberation – affects, feelings and emotions are also always invariably shaped in the
ways we move through landscapes and, in turn, allow them to flow through us. In order to
follow this through, I only need think of the landscape across the road from my grandmother’s
house and affective memories are triggered – with that, the landscape is put in motion and a
series of emotions begin to circulate my body. I know this landscape not just with my eyes or in
memory but as a body, too, as it affords me a sense of belonging and identity (after Carolan
2008). Thus, while landscapes are necessarily contingent upon our movements through them,
they also continue to shape our expressions, experiences and emotions.
This idea of knowing the landscape ‘as a body’ is particularly evident in Michael Carolan’s
(2008) explorations of the countryside, through which he argues for corporeal knowledge and
deeply sensuous engagements with place. Carolan’s project engaged with both farming and
non-farming residents in rural Iowa and a search for the significance of embodied interactions.
Here, participants hinted at a process of knowing their surroundings through their bodies and,
importantly for some, through their tractors. Their ‘being-in-the-world’, as Carolan (2008: 414)
points out, is deeply sensuous, habitual and corporeally enacted. Likewise, David Crouch (2000;
see also Crouch 2010) has taken a non-representational approach to place, leisure and tourism
in an attempt to understand the processes of ‘making knowledge’ through doing, not only
through human agency but by focussing upon how that agency interacts with non-human or
post-human elements, too. For him, it is a negotiated practice, with landscapes and place sub-
jectively produced, encountered and understood through action. In a similar vein, Paul Simp-
son (2008) has applied what he terms an ecological approach to street performances occurring
70
within the urban environment, paying particular attention to the affective powers of street
performances. Although only loosely applying his analysis to a landscape in the form of a
streetscape, Simpson (2008: 823) nevertheless draws attention to core issues of non-representational
theories, namely the interplay of affective intensities between everyday life and the non-human
forces of nature.
My own research into affective encounters within the urban landscape of Stoke-on-Trent
likewise threw up similar instances that are demonstrative of engagements between bodies and
material surroundings. Here, in an area affectionately known as The Potteries, small traces of
the past continue to haunt, with the area’s peculiar urban skyline, dotted with the distinct
shapes of pot-banks, their cobbled yards and fiery, smoking bottle ovens, serving as a reminder
of an industry now all but gone. One of the last remaining stands of bottle ovens can be found
at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, where one regular visitor made the following comment:
It feels almost a part, a part of us, it’s like if this was, if this was ever knocked down or
people were trying to destroy it I would have very strong viewings about it because we feel
it belongs to us. You … our ancestors made this place what it is so, you know, it belongs
to us really, we’ve all got a share in it if you like.
(GMA009, female, 18–29, teaching assistant, cited in Waterton 2011)
In this instance, it is possible to glimpse the ways in which the museumscape – and the wider
industrial landscape it represents – can become part of the living body, absorbed into an
embodied encounter. Indeed, the above quote serves as an illustration of how we feel the
world, such that we – our identity – and the world ‘ … become something through these
dynamics of embodiment and habituation’ (Russon 1994: 295, cited in Carolan 2008: 414,
emphasis in original). Although the data gathered were often filled with examples of mundane,
everyday encounters, they were nonetheless characterized by a bodily encounter, a sensuous
awareness and at least fleeting moments of belonging and identity, all of which were triggered
by acts of being and doing within the museum itself. Apposite here is a recent observation made
by Crouch (2010: 14), who argues that:
To ‘feel’ landscape in the expressive poetics of spacing is a way to imagine one’s place in
the world. The individual can feel so connected with space that s/he no longer is aware,
momentarily, of being (merely) human; we may become the event, become the landscape.
In this guise, all possibilities for engagement with landscape cannot help but be highly perfor-
mative; and they surge and pulse, always in movement and in the process of being formed or
becoming.
There is, inevitably, a note of caution that needs to be flagged up in this chapter. This cau-
tionary note is reminiscent of arguments made by Mitch Rose (2006) and Deborah Thien
(2005), both of whom challenge researchers to think more critically about dominant con-
ceptualisations of landscape and continue to ask politicized questions when attending to this
bent of work. For Rose, Thien and others, sewing up understandings of landscape as both
material and perceptual brings with it a risk that researchers may become so enraptured with the
freedom of performativity that they lose sight of the ways in which difference, power and
control also figure within the mix. In short, engagements with landscape may be negative,
constrained and marginalizing, too, but in the rush to get back to the precognitive we may miss
those steps where we think about such feelings and emotions. As Tolia-Kelly (2007: 337) has
argued, the intuitive and embodied encounters often imagined in the literature are at times a
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Emma Waterton
little too unproblematic in their conception. Moreover, as Lorimer (2008) has added, all too
often they appear to float free, with no allowances made for imposed subject-positions and
attendant capacities to affect and be affected. As a consequence, such approaches tend to assume
that the engaging body is that of a mobile citizen, ‘freed of fear and concerns over racial and/or
sexual attack, fear of the lack of “rightful encounter” with a particular moral geography gov-
erning access, and indeed, free of the chains of childcare, work and the economic constraints to
roam’ (Tolia-Kelly 2007: 337; see also Askins 2009). Moreover, these narratives may overlook
the fact that part of the purpose of performing with landscape is to communicate that a person
or given group exists, that they have an identity and that they matter, thus claiming status and
access to resources from others. As Tolia-Kelly (2007: 337) goes on to argue, in order to
combat this we need an ‘increased acknowledgement of the place of difference and power in
shaping the matrices within which “we” engage with landscapes’. The research agendas of those
engaging with non-representational theories thus also need to include a critical and reflective
account that attempts to make sense of any tensions between the politics of identity and
the politics of affect (Askins 2009; Waterton 2012).
Implications and future directions

As the reader will discern, a particular difficulty for this approach coalesces around issue of
method and data collection. Perhaps the thorniest issue in this regard lies with figuring out how
to access the unspeakable – the agency of landscapes, affect and sensuous experience. This, non-
representational theorists advise us, occurs too fast and, in the end, is too excessive and complex
for us adequately to theorize (Morton 2005). Indeed, as McCormack (2002: 470) points out,
‘ … how, when such movement is often below the cognitive threshold of representational
awareness that defines what is admitted into serious research, does one give a word to a
movement without seeking to represent it’? Methodologically, then, conducting research with a
non-representational bent – which inevitably means attempting to attend to the automatism of
affect – requires new approaches and vocabularies (MacPherson 2010: 3). This does not mean
that we have to abandon the traditional in-depth interview, social survey or focus group dis-
cussions, however. Indeed, as Latham (2003: 2000) has so eloquently argued, ‘[p]ushed in the
right direction there is no reason why these methods cannot be made to dance a little’ (Latham
2003: 2000). As such, there has been a swelling of work in this area recently, which has
attempted this ‘push’ by means of methodological experimentation (see Crang 2003; Latham
2003; Morton 2005; Simpson 2011).
Work by Wylie, Yusoff, Lorimer and MacPherson, for example, attempts to entangle land-
scapes with bodies, to meld landscapes and selves, via the lenses of non-representational the-
ories. Collectively, their examples include embodied accounts of coastal walking (Wylie 2002,
2005), forays into the Antarctic and that landscape’s ability inscribe itself onto the body (Yusoff
2007), Cairngorm reindeer herding (Lorimer 2006), and processes of intercorporeality as a
sighted guide in the Peak and Lake Districts (MacPherson 2010), all of which mark out the
possibilities for unpacking a more plentiful range of sensory experiences with landscape. In
terms of methodological tools, Wylie (2003) has attempted to access the non-representational
with use of experimental writing in conjunction with photography. Lorimer (2006) has incor-
porated ethnographic reflection into his research, along with detailed and expressive modes of
writing. Others, still, have turned to the use of video as a tool for studying embodiment and the
sensuousness of practice, thus evoking something of the non-representational via newer tech-
nological tools (see Laurier 2005; Simpson 2011; but see also Dewsbury 2009), while others
pursue a performative ethnography (see Morton 2005). Irrespective of the methods pursued,
72
what these examples share in common is a focus upon participative or practice-based methods
that move us forwards with regard to accessing the ‘now’ of experience as it edges into view
(Morton 2005; Dewsbury 2009). The trick, it seems, is to continue to push at the boundaries of
traditional methods so that the body, our bodies, can somehow become more central to the
processes through which research is done, while at the same time keeping mindful of ethical
and political implications (Crang 2003).
This chapter has attempted to make a handful of specific comments about how non-
representational theories impact upon landscape research. Overall, I have argued that this the-
oretical turn has firmed up and fleshed out a series of longer standing assumptions that had
already rendered landscapes affective, embodied, sensuous and material. To develop in this vein,
researchers within the field of landscape studies need to continue to shape this theoretical terrain
and experiment with methodological innovation, all the while emphasising the ways in which
people and landscapes co-produce events and experiences. Indeed, when pressed in these
directions, non-representational theories will help bring to the fore a fuller range of our sensate
engagements with the landscapes that flow in, around and through us.
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6
The anthropology of
postenvironmental landscapes
Werner Krauss
HELMHOLTZ ZENTRUM GEESTHACHT, GERMANY
Environmentalism is often identified with singling out stretches of land in order to protect them
from the ills of modernity. Since the 1970s, the number of protected areas has constantly been
on the rise, and they have significantly shaped our ‘way of seeing, understanding and (re)pro-
ducing the world’ (West et al. 2006: 252). This strategy has recently come under critique from a
newly formed movement or strategy called ‘postenvironmentalism’. Postenvironmentalism was
introduced by the American activists Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2004) in a manifesto called
‘The Death of Environmentalism’. They argued that creating just another nature reserve is not
enough to face the challenges posed by global climate change. Instead, the need for mitigation
of greenhouse gases and adaptation to the effects of a changing climate makes active manage-
ment of landscapes indispensable. In the anthropocene, they argue, the separation of nature
from culture and landscape from development does not make sense any more. The concept of
the anthropocene was introduced by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) as a consequence of the
increasing and irreversible influence of humanity on the earth system, with anthropogenic
climate change as the most prominent example.
In this chapter, I discuss the anthropology of landscapes in light of these recent developments
and in order to adjust its theoretical and methodological foundations accordingly. In the first
part, I introduce the current dilemma of environmentalism and show the relevance of the
concept of postenvironmentalism for landscape studies. In the second part, I apply this concept
to the anthropology of landscapes. From early on, cultural anthropology and related disciplines
such as cultural geography were critical of environmental concepts which tried to explain cul-
tural behavior exclusively as a result of natural constraints or to legitimize politics in the name of
nature. Instead, there is a long tradition of focusing ‘on the ways in which naturalized envir-
onments reverberate with cultural significance’ (Ogden 2011: 27) and on ‘the social, economic,
and political effects of environmental conversation projects’ mainly in protected areas (West
2006: 251). The question is how people actively shape, administer and inhabit landscapes
(Krauss 2005b); a question which is already addressed and reflected for example in the European
Landscape Convention (Olwig 2007). In the last part, I present some examples of my own
fieldwork at the German North Sea coast, which includes both a ‘classical’ national park and a
newly emerging wind energy landscape. In the conclusion, I will argue that the anthropology
of postenvironmental landscapes focuses on the dynamics of assemblages and networks that
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Anthropology of postenvironmental landscapes
bring the landscape into being. In doing so, landscape studies contribute to the adjusting of
environmental politics in the face of current and future global challenges.
Postenvironmentalism: defining the field

While it is true that global climate change in the United States does not have the public and
political attention it has in Europe, it is easily forgotten that the topic already leaves its traces
even on its most iconic landscapes. In 2011, two op-ed pieces in the New York Times attracted
my attention. From different perspectives, they perfectly illustrate the postenvironmental
dilemma for nature conservation.
In September 2011, the former commissioner of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department
argued against the erection of wind turbines on the mountain ridges of Vermont’s green
mountains (Wright 2011). His argumentation follows the agenda of traditional nature con-
servation and perfectly illustrates its limitations. For him, the bulldozers ‘crawling their way
through the forest to the ridgeline’ in order to pave the road for the erection of 21 wind tur-
bines are a ‘desecration, in the name of green energy’. Roads will replace current ‘travel
lanes … now made by bear, moose, bobcat and deer’; healthy forests will be cut down and
erosion of water streams will affect ‘wild and human’. In his opinion, the implementation of this
technology does not even contribute to the reduction of global carbon emissions; instead, it
brings profit to a few and destroys landscape values on a large scale. He argues that the existing
and intact landscape brings ‘$1.4 billion in tourism spending’, provides its inhabitants with an
identity and with ‘clean air and water and healthy wildlife populations’. He concludes:
The pursuit of large-scale, ridgeline wind power in Vermont represents a terrible error of
vision and planning and a misunderstanding of what a responsible society must do to slow
the warming of our planet. It also represents a profound failure to understand the value of
our landscape to our souls and our economic future in Vermont.
(Wright 2011)
The author presents here in a nutshell the basic arguments of environmentalism in opposing
nature and culture, sacredness and profit, (destructive) technology and (intact) landscape.
In another op-ed piece entitled ‘Hopes in the age of man’ (Marris et al. 2011), four conservation
scientists fully embrace the concept of the anthropocene, which is challenged by many of their
allies and stands in full contrast to the attitude of the Vermont wildlife commissioner:
Some environmentalists see the anthropocene as a disaster by definition, since they see all
human changes as degradation of a pristine Eden. If your definition demands that nature be
completely untouched by humans, there is indeed no nature left.
For these authors, the acidification of oceans, the changing of the climate, the regulation of
most river flows, or the replacement of plants and animals are a fact of human history. Contrary
to the wildlife commissioner, the authors argue that it is humanity’s mission to actively create
and shape the environment. They list a series of examples of what ‘we can do’, for example ‘moving
species at risk of extinction … , design ecosystems to maintain wildlife … , or restore once
magnificent ecosystems like Yellowstone and the Gulf of Mexico’. They self-confidently conclude:
The anthropocene does not represent the failure of environmentalism. … This is the Earth
we have created, and we have a duty, as species, to protect it and manage it with love and
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Werner Krauss
intelligence. It is not ruined. It is beautiful still, and can be even more beautiful, if we work
together and care for it.
(Marris et al. 2011)
The authors clearly mark the difference to traditional nature conservation and make an argu-
ment for postenvironmentalism as most prominently propagated by the activists Nordhaus and
Shellenberger, who had already circulated their 2004 manifesto ‘The Death of Envir-
onmentalism’ on the Internet. Their radical approach suggests a new environmentalism which
embraces the car industry, accepts the need for mobility, for cheap energy and progress in order
to maintain America’s leadership and standard of life. In their book ‘Breakthrough’ (Nordhaus
and Shellenberger 2007), they attack the politics of fear as for example presented by Al Gore
and argue that the apocalyptic discourses of guilt and limits have to be substituted by those
of aspirations and human possibilities:
Through their stories, institutions, and policies, environmentalists constantly reinforce the
sense that nature is something separate from, and victimized by, humans. This paradigm
defines ecological problems as the inevitable consequence of humans violating nature.
Think of the verbs associated with environmentalism and conservation: ‘stop,’ ‘restrict,’
‘reverse’, ‘prevent,’ ‘regulate,’ and ‘constrain.’ All of them direct our thinking to stopping
the bad, not creating the good.
(Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007: 7)
Recently, they published an edition with the programmatic title Love Your Monsters: Post-
environmentalism and the Anthropocene (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2011), in which authors from
a diverse field of disciplines support their argument. ‘Love your Monsters’ is the title of Bruno
Latour’s (2011) contribution, a sociologist who reinterprets Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; he
blames the creator of the monster for not being proud and taking care of his creation and
instead hiding in fear – the analogy to environmentalism is obvious. Dan Sarewitz (2011), a
political scientist, argues that the green movement on the one hand has an excessive belief in
scientific rationality in defining the problem of climate change, while on the other being
sceptical about technology in order to mitigate or adapt to its harmful effects.
A group of conservation scientists rides a fundamental attack on the hallmark of American
environmentalism, the national parks, and one of its founders, John Muir:
Muir has sympathized with the oppression of the Winnebago Indians in his home state, but
when it came time to empty Yosemite of all except the naturalists and the tourists, Muir
vigorously backed the expulsion of the Miwok. The Yosemite model spread to other national
parks, including Yellowstone, where the forced evictions killed 300 Shoshone in one day.
(Kareiva et al. 2011)
As an abundance of literature shows, this was no exception: ‘About half the land selected for
protection by the global conservation establishment over the past century was either occupied
or regularly used by indigenous peoples’.
These publications show that the concept of postenvironmentalism results from a detailed
critique of environmentalism as practice and ideology; the anthropocene is understood as a
fundamental ontological and epistemological change. Due to their manifesto character, the
definitions, criticisms and suggestions remain on a very general level; they do not really count
with diverse populations, cultures, beliefs or specific social interactions and situations. In
78
other words, they still have to be ethnographically grounded or rooted – time to change per-
spective, from the bird’s eye view of the political strategist to the grassroots perspective of
anthropology.
The anthropology of protected landscapes

On the one hand, landscape studies always had a more or less hidden environmental agenda.
When identifying, describing and classifying cultural and natural heritage, they contributed to
the demarcation of landscapes worth of protection and the creation of ever more national parks
or other conservation areas. On the other hand, there is a long tradition in critically debating
landscape not as something simply ‘out there’, but as an activity and a process. This is especially
true for cultural anthropology as well as cultural geography and their long tradition of analyzing
protected landscapes (West 2006, Olwig 2007).
The more ‘natural’ landscapes appear, the more carefully constructed they are – this is one of
the troubling insights of landscape studies. Book titles like The Culture of Nature by the late
Alexander Wilson (1991) or Uncommon Ground: Reinventing Nature, edited by the cultural geo-
grapher William Cronon (1996), early set the tone: nature no longer was innocent; instead, it
was something that had to be defined, to be singled out, to be domesticated, invented or con-
structed. In their reader National Parks and Resident Peoples, West and Brechin (1991) presented a
series of oftentimes shocking examples such as the deportation of entire human populations in
order to protect wildlife. Misreading African Landscapes by Fairhead and Leach (1996) became one
of the hallmarks of this kind of research; while scientists and policy-makers had regarded the
islands of forests in Guinea as remaining parts of originally huge forests, the anthropologists
found out that it was in turn the villagers who had grown and maintained these islands of forest
around their villages.
As these examples demonstrate, nature and environment are concepts with their own cultural
history, which is more often than not one with a European or ‘Western’ background. This
contrast between a generalized ‘Western’ notion of landscape and the meaning local people give
their natural surroundings and the use they make of it serve as the departure point in Hirsch and
O’Hanlon’s (1995) The Anthropology of Landscape. The ethnographic field and the anthro-
pologists’ argument unfold as a result of the inherent tension between the two concepts.
In Parks and People: The Social Impact of Protected Areas, West et al. (2006) give an excellent
overview of the anthropology of protected areas, whose number has considerably grown in the
last two decades (West et al. 2006: 251). The authors understand protected areas as ‘a way of
seeing, understanding, and producing nature (environment) and culture (society) and as a way
of attempting to manage and control the relationship between the two’ (West et al. 2006: 251).
The focus is on the ‘social, economic, scientific, and political changes in places’ in both the
protected areas and the centres that are in charge of them. National parks indeed can serve as
form of ‘virtualism’, as they have a profound effect on the overall perception of our surround-
ings: ‘Protected areas have increasingly become the means by which many people see, under-
stand, experience, and use the parts of the world that are often called nature and the
environment’ (West et al. 2006: 255). While there was and still is a strong focus on power and
conflict in anthropological landscape studies, West et al. (2006: 251) remind us that ‘anthro-
pology needs more to move beyond the current examinations of language and power to attend
to the ways in which protected areas produce space, place, and peoples’.
Once the focus is on the production of space, the whole network of people and things come
into sight. Almost as in a laboratory, in a national park the anthropologist can follow the
process of how a landscape comes into being, and how environmentalism changes ‘the social
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Werner Krauss
nature of people’s surroundings’ (West et al. 2006: 264) and thus people, too. This process
mostly includes what West et al. call a ‘simplification process’, when natural scientists start to
redefine for example flora and fauna and classify them according to transnational criteria such as
the list of endangered species. In doing so, they legitimize environmental or conservation projects
such as national parks and profoundly change the relationship between people and their envir-
onment. As a consequence, complicated social interactions between people and things are ‘con-
densed to a few easily conveyable and representable issues or topics’; the surroundings become
‘resources’, and people are labelled as ‘ecologically pristine native to fallen-from-grace native to
peasant’ (West et al. 2006: 265). In the end, local residents find themselves at best reduced to
mono-dimensional stakeholders. But West et al. do not end up in pessimism. In this mostly critical
perspective, new ways to conceptualize landscapes take shape. In order to refine the notion of
postenvironmentalism from the anthropological perspective, I will turn to individual case studies.
Case studies
Just like Nordhaus and Shellenberger, anthropological studies of protected landscapes are also
highly critical of environmentalism. But anthropologists have the advantage of mostly long
research stays, and most of them frequently return to their field sites again and again. In this
long-term perspective, conflicts come and go and allow to observe subtle changes in attitudes
and values; ethnographic fieldwork offers insights into processes of social differentiation and
globalization as a result of strange encounters between local people and scientists, conservationists,
activists, planners and practitioners.
‘Conservation is our government now’: environmental miscommunication

Paige West’s (2006) field study over a time span of seven years at the Crater Mountain Wildlife
Management Area in Papua New Guinea is called Conservation Is Our Government Now and
describes in detail the disconnect and mutual misunderstanding between those who run the
project and the indigenous Gimi people. The global dimension of this misunderstanding is
illustrated in the opening story of the book: the city journal New Yorker published an invitation
for an anthropological event in New York about New Guinea, entitled ‘The Gimi and the
birds of paradise’. The invitation tells the story of how the inviting anthropologist and the local
Gimi guide observed the mating display of a bird of paradise: ‘As they watch this splendid
creature, the Gimi envisions the spirit of his ancestor; the scientist one of the last of a spectacular
species’ (New Yorker 1985: 36, cited in West 2006: 1).
In a nutshell, this anecdote contains the central arguments of West’s analysis: the conservation
and development project in the Crater Mountain Wildlife area is part of a ‘transnational loop’,
with the Gimi existing inside of it, being part of it and causing it simultaneously. The imagery
of New Guinea and its people as untouched and exotic attracted scientists, environmentalists
and those who want to sell and explore it, and the same imagery is the one that drives the
conversation and development project today.
The different perspectives of the bird are reflected in the misunderstanding about this project.
For the Gimi, the environment exists in their engagement with it:
It generates Gimi, and Gimi generate it – through their life force and exchange as manifest
in procreation, hunting, and initiation – and there are times in which person and forest are
one, the moment a man becomes a bird of paradise during initiation, for example.
(West 2006: 218)
80
Furthermore, for the Gimi, the conservation for development deal is an offer to enter into a
long-lasting relationship. They have dreams of technology, medicine and development, and
they see the environmentalists as means to become those developed people; the Gimi interpret
the deal as a social relationship. For the environmentalists, in turn, conservation for develop-
ment means, ‘labor for money or be it not hunting in exchange for “income generation pro-
jects”’ (West 2006: 219). Paradoxically, it is wildlife management that turns the environment
into a commodity and connects Gimi to global capitalism.
One wishes that those international environmentalists would learn from West how the pro-
ject looks from the side of the Gimis. West presents many details as to how conservation
penetrates ever more niches of Gimi life. The closer she looks at the manifold implications of
the Crater Mountain Wildlife project, the more globally connected the social construction
of the Gimi environment becomes. West takes on a decidedly postenvironmentalist perspective
throughout her book; a perspective which she adopted by learning to see such conflicts through
the Gimis’ eyes.
‘Wild Sardinia’: postenvironmental dreamtimes

Tracey Heatherington (2010) conducted fieldwork in Sardinia, where local Sardinians fiercely
contested the implementation of the Gennargentu national park. Here, the WWF and the
nation state together seek access to this peripheral region via environmental protection. The
title of her book, Wild Sardinia, refers to both the natural landscape, as seen by nature lovers and
conservationists, as well as the ‘wild Sardinians’, who compare themselves in an ironic response
to the stereotypes of conservationists to people from the Wild West as known from the Spaghetti-
Western films. At the core of the conflict there is a simple constellation: non-governmental
environmentalists from the WWF suspect local shepherds of overusing the common ground and
want to declare it a national park; in turn, local residents feel themselves incorrectly blamed,
overruled and treated like Indians in a reservation. Heatherington (2010) calls this process
‘ecological alterity’; a process which is strikingly similar to the one West reports from New
Guinea. Environmentalism and nature conservation are permanently engaged into a form of
cultural production of alterity ‘precisely by failing to treat the people affected by conservation
initiatives as competent and valuable interlocutors, anytime they appear to reject the prevailing
models of scientific conservation’ (Heatherington 2010: 230).
This kind of discursive gridlock is common in conflicts surrounding protected landscapes and
can block communication and agreement in conflicts for many years. In my own fieldwork in
Portugal (Krauss 2001) or northern Germany (Krauss 2005b), I encountered exactly the same
problems. Locals bring the anthropologist into an uncomfortable situation: ‘You cannot be both
an anthropologist and an environmentalist’ (Heatherington 2010: 4). This quandary haunts her
throughout her research, and she finds a solution in her vision of postenvironmentalism.
Heatherington borrows the metaphor of ‘dreamtime’ from the Aboriginal Australians, where
‘the Dreamings are ancestral journeys that link people, place, and nature in Aboriginal deep
time, or transcendant time, called the Dreamtime’ (Heatherington 2010: 21). This metaphor
serves well to describe and analyze ‘the global dreamtime of environmentalism’, which itself can
never be free of ‘culture, history, class, religious sentiment, or realworld political contexts,
although they may tend to obscure or efface some of these connections’ (Heatherington
2010: 23). Anthropological fieldwork and scrutiny helps to rethink the practice of protected
areas and ‘to reinvent environmentalism through richer, more respectful dialogues with indigenous
and local cultures’ (Heatherington 2010: 27). Her understanding of ‘post-environmentalisms’ –
she uses the term in plural form – contrasts the often time naïve and implicitly hierarchical
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‘westernized’ multiculturalism embedded in global environmentalism. Her postenvironmentalism

sounds romantic, but is deeply rooted in anthropological experience:
Where … actors are self-critical of their positions within networks of power and privilege,
where they remain fundamentally in touch with culturally situated epistemologies and daily
lives of marginalized local groups, and where they are committed to principles of envir-
onmental justice, their collaborations support truly creative ways of thinking about culture
and ecology.
(Heatherington 2010: 236)
‘Frictions’, productive miscommunications and postenvironmentalism

In all of these studies, ‘frictions’ play a vital role – frictions between the local and the global, the
inside and the outside, conservation and development, conservationists and local people.
Frictions is the title of Anna Tsing’s (2005) study about wildfires in Indonesia, where interna-
tional environmentalists, scientists, North American investors, Japanese desires, advocates for
Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students
perform what she calls a ‘social drama’. This social drama develops in different settings along a
narrative, which shows many structural similarities and regional specifics. On the one hand, it is
the tale of modern environmentalism, which swept across the globe in order to protect the
beautiful from the evils of modernity. On the other hand, it is a story of many encounters
which produce new frictions and alliances, in oftentimes unforeseen ways. Even in messy
situations, there are possibilities for unexpected coalitions and events. This is the postenviron-
mental landscape, which is entailed in all of these strange encounters which anthropologists
witness. According to Tsing, it is not necessary that people think alike in order to help each
other. There are creative misunderstandings on both sides, and it is important that there is a
political dialogue at all about things environmental. The long-lasting conflicts, the endless
public hearings, complaints and protests finally make local epistemologies heard. Only then, the
postenvironmental vision of Nordhaus and Shellenberger is rooted in social relations, in the
reality of the everyday. Only then, post-environmentalism will not be another free-wheeling
dreamtime full of assumptions about the others and the world; instead, it will be a dreamtime
‘born from the institutional and philosophical failures of modernist schemes for conservation,
from the failures of participatory or traditional models for ecological management, and from the
disillusionment of apparent cultural loss’ (Heatherington 2010: 237).
In the following, I will sketch the challenges and opportunities of the postenvironmental
landscape concept with examples from my own fieldwork, which encompasses nature
conservation and climate protection in the anthropocene. I will show that sometimes it is
technology that opens up new ways to understand and to theorize landscapes. In doing so,
I will also introduce into actor-network theory as an additional approach to research
postenvironmental landscapes.
Ethnography of a postenvironmental landscape

At the outset of this chapter, I introduced postenvironmentalism via the conflict about wind
turbines on the mountain ridges of Vermont. I will end the article with examples from my own
fieldwork in northern Germany, which reflects this conflict constellation in a different way. In
the course of about one decade, I followed the conflicts surrounding a national park and the
emerging of an ‘energy landscape’ (Krauss 2005a; 2008; 2010). Thus, northern Friesland turns
82
out to be a landscape where nature and culture are dynamical concepts which come, as the
landscape itself, permanently into being through technological intervention.
In northern Germany, nature and culture were at the centre of conflicts surrounding the
implementation of a national park. They were semantic strategies, authoritative arguments or
scientific entities, but most of all they were brought into being in unanticipated ways. For
almost two decades, coastal inhabitants fought against the implementation of a National Park in
the tidal flat area, the so-called Wadden Sea. Local organizations questioned the status of the
Wadden Sea as ‘natural’ and argued that it is a cultural landscape, made by the interaction of
humans and the sea. Both sides argued in the name of an absolute nature or culture, and the
conflicts were only closed after each and every part of the border of the national park had been
weighed and discussed in terms of traditional use and access on the one hand and natural value
or endangered ecosystem on the other.
As an anthropologist interested in these conflicts, I travelled literally back and forth from the
National Park administration to local communities, and between the National Park territory
and the inland, desperately trying to make sense of the borders between nature and culture
which played such a crucial role in this conflict. As it turned out, I found the answer in the
movement itself, by driving in my car from one side to the other. One day, it came to me as a
shock that I had indeed literally crossed the border between culture and nature when trying to
get to a small Hallig – a miniscule island which was a leftover from the damage done by a
previous storm surge (see Figure 6.1). This Hallig was accessible via a dam across the tidal flat
area. Before entering this dam behind the dikeline, one had to stop at an electronic barrier. In
order to lift the bar and pass through, the driver has to pay five euros. And it was exactly here
where I realized one day that I had finally found the border between nature and culture: it was
Figure 6.1 The border between nature and culture is a quandary for philosophers, a result
of negotiations for anthropologists, and a 5 euro expense for citizens who want to
pass it.
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Werner Krauss
the barrier itself. The barrier not only separated nature from culture, but it actually brought
them into being. I learned accidentally that the border between nature and culture was nothing
but a compromise, gained in long and contested negotiations between the national park
administration and the local municipality.
The barrier turned out to be a mediator in the strict sense of actor-network theory as sug-
gested by science and technology studies. It connects and assembles the sea, the wind, endan-
gered ecosystems and the farmers, the mayors and the administrators, the environmentalists and
the scientists, the migratory birds and the tourists and the NGOs, or, to put it into the terms of
Bruno Latour (2005), it assembled people and things, human and non-human actors. And it
assembled them in a highly effective way: it demarcates exactly what is acceptable for both sides
of the conflict, for the coastal population and the national park administration. The barrier
does not give a philosophical answer; instead, it is pure sociology. Following the making of this
barrier is a long and complicated story, full of archived documents, bureaucracy and demon-
strations, public hearings and sometimes violent conflicts. It is also the story of how nature and
culture came into being. Of course, the barrier is only a temporary solution. Once there
are new actors in play, for example climate change, each agreement has to stand the test of
time again.
It appears almost to be an irony of history that the former enemies of nature conservation
today are among the world’s most successful wind farmers (and, consequently, protectors of
climate). From early on and often times at their own risk, they had started to invest into wind
energy. Based on a tradition of investing into modern technologies, they easily adopted gov-
ernmental test-programs for wind turbines and turned them into a completely unexpected
success, which in turn pressured the government to subsidize wind energy. While nature con-
servation still was completely fixed to protect ecosystems ‘on the ground’, coastal inhabitants
discovered the wind as part of their heritage and made it explicit as a new and renewable
commodity.
By way of technology – be it the barrier or wind turbines – the coastal landscape turns out to
be a truly postenvironmental landscape, including the national park. There is no better vocabulary
yet which fits this only seemingly paradoxical situation of having an almost over-protected area
side by side with a highly technological area, both united in one and the same coastal landscape.
Familiar conflict constellations such as natural versus cultural landscape, modernity versus
backwardness, development versus conservation and so on are obsolete, new ones emerge such
as those about ownership. But the coastal population is well prepared for the future; for coastal
inhabitants, landscape is a dynamic process, an arena for conflicts over matters of concern
such as coastal protection, ownership, senses of belonging, technological innovation or the
challenges posed by climate change. And there is little doubt that this will be any different in
the future.
Conclusion
Postenvironmentalism and anthropocene are two terms which mark a substantial change in both
conservation policies and landscape studies. The European Landscape Convention with its focus
on perception and people’s activities clearly reflects these changes and the political relevance of
landscape studies. The anthropology of postenvironmental landscapes is a step towards a greater
pragmatism. Each of the cases presented here has a history of its own; each landscape turns out
to consist of specific assemblages and conflict situations, and each one of them is connected in
its own ways to global challenges such as anthropogenic climate change. Nature conservation
and the history of environmentalism were always rife with fantasies about social hierarchies and
84
governance, which more often than not ended in conflicts with local populations. The concept
of postenvironmentalism helps to further reveal these hidden agendas. While Nordhaus and
Shellenberger’s vision of postenvironmentalism is developed from the bird’s-eye view, the cri-
tical anthropological approach systematically introduces the grassroot perspective. It is no
longer the big philosophies about nature and culture which inform the environmental agenda;
instead, the focus is on the ‘complex and permanently changing assemblages of relations that
dissolve and displace the boundaries of nature and culture’ (Ogden 2011: 29). While envir-
onmentalism restricted itself to singling out ever more landscapes from the whole of society,
postenvironmentalism brings landscapes back into society and democracy.
In the anthropocene, landscape studies are no longer obsessed with nature and culture;
instead, an ethnographic account of postenvironmental landscapes as a dynamic process con-
tributes to figure out which form of intervention is adequate for a specific problem, what is
acceptable for the public and feasible for politics.
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——, Igoe, J. and Brockington, D. (2006) ‘Parks and Peoples: The Social Impact of Protected Areas’,
Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 251–77
Wilson, A. (1991) The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez,
Cambridge, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers
Wright, S.E. (2011) ‘The Not-So-Green-Mountains’, New York Times, 28 September available at http://
www.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/opinion/the-age-of-man-is-not-a-disaster.html (accessed 22 October
2012)
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7
Landscape and a sense of place:
a creative tension
Brian Wattchow
MONASH UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE
In the opening pages of Tim Creswell’s (2004: 12) book Place: A Short Introduction, the author
states that ‘Space, landscape and place are clearly highly interrelated terms and each definition is
contested.’ This seemingly simple observation hovers like a compass needle, pointing the way
into difficult terrain. The brief journey I propose in this chapter is to visit and dwell awhile
upon the two important concepts of place and landscape, and to consider what might be gained
by examining the creative tension between them. Consideration of these themes is significant.
Landscapes, places and cultures are ineluctably linked. They work on and change each other
over time. It would be all too easy, in the age of virtual realities and globalization (Massey and
Jess 1995), to miss the fundamental role that landscapes and places play in the development and
sustenance of cultural identity.
I find it impossible to write about landscape and place only in the abstract. For me, landscapes
and places are best considered from the perspective of the particular. Every place is a result of an
ongoing interaction between natural and cultural phenomena. Human expectations and desires
for a location and the resulting way that humans live in a landscape shape and are shaped by that
location. This reciprocity between people and locations on the Earth’s surface provides the
reference point for all considerations of landscapes and places. As the American land historian
William Cronon (1996: 22) observed, ‘The material nature we inhabit and the ideal nature we
carry in our heads exist always in complex relationship with each other, and we will mis-
understand both ourselves and the world if we fail to explore that relationship in all its rich and
contradictory complexity.’
Therefore, I will write from the perspective of a place not far from where I live (see
Figure 7.1). The Nooramunga Marine and Coastal Reserve is located on the south-east coast of
mainland Australia. Nooramunga is a 30,000 hectare complex ecosystem of tidal waterways,
mudflats, mangroves and low-lying sand islands. It is a globally significant migratory bird feed-
ing and breeding area and its sea-grass beds are a vital habitat for local fisheries. I have been
visiting Nooramunga for twenty years and it provides a compelling example of some of the
differences and similarities between the concepts of landscape and a sense of place.
This chapter is divided into four parts. Part one provides a brief survey of some of the con-
tested ideas about landscape. This section is not meant to be exhaustive. There exists a well-
developed commentary on this subject (see, amongst others, Jackson 1984; Cosgrove and
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Brian Wattchow
Figure 7.1 Camping on Drum Island opposite the Port Albert Channel entrance. The Clonmel
Banks can be seen on the horizon.
Daniels 1988; Wylie 2007). Rather, it provides a prelude to later considerations of place. In part
two I consider the concept of place. Whereas landscape may be seen as something viewed by
the outsider from a vantage point – a landscape gaze if you like – a place is something experi-
enced through immersion by the insider. Places are phenomenal rather than fixed in character.
Part three considers the creative tension that arises when landscape and sense of place perspectives
and practices are combined. The combination is, I will argue, a synergistic one that takes us
‘Beyond duality, beyond the opposition of mind and matter, subject and object, thinker and
thing’ (Coupe 2000: 1). The last section of the chapter provides a brief conclusion that suggests
some signposts for inquiry and education practices that venture into the terrain of this creative
tension.
Shifting the landscape gaze

Landscape, as a word, has evolved from its old Germanic language origins into a classic trans-
disciplinary concept. It is a central concern in architecture, cultural and human geography, some
branches of philosophy, art and design, and should be in education. In his wonderful essay titled
The Word Itself, Jackson (1984: 5) traces the origins of landscape back to the ‘ancient Indo-European
idiom, brought out of Asia by migrating peoples thousands of years ago, that became the basis
of almost all modern European languages’. The roots of the word, he suggests, were introduced
into Britain not long after the fifth century AD.
Modern day usage of landscape, according to the American art historian Lucy Lippard (1997:
8) can be traced to the German fifteenth-century term landschaft – ‘a shaped land, a cluster of
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Landscape, sense of place: creative tension
temporary dwellings and more permanent houses, the antithesis of the wilderness surrounding
it’ and ‘in the Dutch seventeenth-century word landschap or landskip – a painting of such a
place, perceived as a scope, or expanse’. Thus landscape has become a projection, a site of layered
meanings, a receptacle for human values and experiences. As Simon Schama (1995: 6–7) com-
ments in Landscape and Memory: ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the
work of the mind. It is scenery built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of
rock.’ For Edward Relph (1985: 23) landscapes ‘cannot be embraced, nor touched, nor walked
around. As we move, so the landscape moves, always there, in sight but out of reach.’ Or, as
Lucy Lippard (1997: 9) succinctly says, ‘The scene is seen.’
As far as scenery goes Nooramunga is not much to look at from the nearest vantage point on
the mainland; that is, from the outside. At first it seems to fail to conform to our expectations of
the pictorial. The islands seem little more than a dark green smear of low coastal vegetation that
mark a demarcation between sea and sky. The wind blasting out of the nearby Bass Strait lifts
the sand and brings scudding rain. Mercifully, the wind blows the biting sandflies away. Parting
clouds allow shafts of sunlight to add a sparkle to the white-capped waves. Though it may
initially fail the viewer in its postcard value it is possible to gain a sense of sublime wildness from
the scene. No doubt this is the heritage we draw from the Romantic artists and poets who
introduced us to this modern way of interpreting the land and the sea in Western Europe in the
second half of the eighteenth century. Their return to nature (Bate 2000) inspired ‘the ecolo-
gical impulse’ (Hay 2002: 1) that has powered the establishment of environmental reserves
throughout the Western world, as much for the preservation of their natural landscapes and
scenery as for their ecological conservation (Nash 1967). Despite this, or perhaps because of it,
our landscape gaze masks as much as it reveals. It casts a veil across the land.
Sublime experience is predicated upon an initial fracture that places observer and observed
on either side of an abyss. And just as the sublime beholder dissolves in dreadful delight, so
he or she simultaneously undergoes an energizing apotheosis: the event of vision begins
and ends with a cleaving apart of subject and world.
(Wylie 2005: 242)
Landscape has become, perhaps, the quintessential appropriation of space by Western culture that
stands in the way of experiencing and knowing the particularities of local places. The landscape
of Nooramunga would have appealed to the American cultural geographer Carl Sauer and
the English historian W.G. Hoskins. Both held predilections for the ‘rural, rustic and the
remote’ (Wylie 2007). Their fieldwork would have quickly revealed the marks of humanity’s
6,000 year engagement with this landscape (through ancient shell middens left behind by
countless generations of Brataualung clan members of the Kurnai tribe) or later evidence of the
European colonizers (through old ports and pilot stations, ship wrecks such as the Clonmell
which foundered on the outer islands in 1841, or the rough huts and fence lines of the cattlemen,
who brought their island cattle grazing techniques with them from the ‘old’ country). But there
are no permanent human dwellings or residents in Nooramunga anymore. Instead it seems to
have become a place of transience. Migratory birds such as curlews and sandpipers arrive each
year from Siberia, Mongolia and China. When they leave to breed in the northern summer,
they are replaced by other species flying in from the south to seek shelter from the Antarctic
winter. Stands of large coastal banksia trees collapse and whole chunks of land disappear beneath
the sea during winter storms. It is all too easy to construct the landscape of Nooramunga as a
kind of primeval land before time, rather than an ‘everyday’ or ‘vernacular’ landscape (the
preferred terrains of later geographers Donald Meinig and John Brinkerhoff Jackson).
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Brian Wattchow
There are several dangers in this view of landscape. Yes, a material earth is acknowledged as
existing, but it is always and everywhere valued as secondary to human interpretation of the
scene. This potentially leads to the belief that nature, wilderness, landscape, even place are just more
examples of a vast range of intellectual constructions that can readily be reinvented, reimagined
and reprojected to fill or modify the empty space before us. Such an approach makes places
available for our expropriation (Seddon 1997). In the process the sensing body of the viewer
is always sidelined and particular historical–cultural interpretations are considered to precede
their experience. And so we reach an impasse in our travels through the Nooramunga Marine
and Coastal Reserve. Perhaps it is hubris that has led us to believe that we can make a landscape
from the raw materials of nature. As Carl Sauer (1963: 343) concluded, ‘the cultural landscape is
fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is
the medium, the cultural landscape the result.’
Sensing places
What, then, distinguishes a place from a landscape? ‘The word “place” is best applied to those
fragments of human environments where meanings, activities, and a specific landscape are all
implicated and enfolded by each other’ (Relph cited in Cameron 2003a: 173). How the
members of a cultural group see a landscape is only one ingredient of the complex mix that
comes together to make a place. Places are ever changing. They are always in a state of becoming.
Many of our contemporary ideas about place come to us from the work of cultural
geographers such as Tuan (1974, 1977), Relph (1976, 1992) and Seamon (1979, 1992, 2004),
and philosophers like Edward Casey (1993, 1996, 1997). Collectively this scholarship marked a
phenomenological shift that highlighted the centrality of lived-experience and embodiment in
the experience of place and its role in the development and sustenance of individual and
cultural identity.
Many of their ideas drew from the philosophical writings of Edmund Husserl, Martin
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Early in the twentieth century Husserl developed a
transcendental phenomenology of the everyday, a series of investigations into the experience of
life as it is lived. Arguably Husserl’s most significant legacy was his conceptualization of the
lifeworld. According to Abram (1996: 40) the lifeworld, ‘is the world of our immediately lived
experience’ in its ‘enigmatic multiplicity and open-endedness, prior to conceptually freezing it
into a static space of “facts”’. From Heidegger came a way of considering what it meant to
dwell in a place, to make a home, and the critical role played by interpretation and language in
this process. Merleau-Ponty’s writings yielded insights into the role of perception and embodi-
ment in sensing the web of relationships that make up the world, a world made up of places of
which people are an integral part.
The Australian social ecologist John Cameron (2003a: 173) writes, ‘the word “sense” does
not refer simply to the physical senses, but to the felt sense of a place and the intuitive and
imaginative sensing that is active when one is attuned to, and receptive towards, one’s sur-
roundings.’ As Lucy Lippard (1997: 34) argues ‘the sense of place, as the phrase suggests, does
indeed emerge from the senses. The land, and even the spirit of the place, can be experienced
kinetically, or kinesthetically.’ We engage with places through the medium of our bodies. We
become a part of a place by giving up the outsider’s high vantage point so that we can partici-
pate with the ‘more-than-human-world’ (Abram 1996: 95). Now, together, people and landscape
become the phenomenon that is a place.
The distinctive characteristic of how a place is experienced is that of insideness (Relph 1976).
To be inside a place is to feel the bonds of attachment and to sense that you are welcomed
90
home. It is not too difficult to hypothesise that the scholarly interest in place is most acute in
New World settler cultures, such as North America, Australia and New Zealand, precisely
because the process of reconciling an identity with both indigenous cultures and the land
remains an everyday reality for many.
The work of the late Australian polymath George Seddon (1972, 1994, 1997, 2005), the
Australian land historian Peter Read (1996, 2000, 2003) and the late New Zealand ecological
historian Geoff Park (1995, 2006) provide valuable insights into the study of place-identity.
European colonizers perceived Australian and New Zealand landscapes very differently. The
former was seen as a ‘prison-scape’, the latter a garden or a pasture (Park: 1995). Neither gaze
has spared these lands, their places and indigenous peoples, from significant ecological and social
damage and disruption. As a result scholars such as Seddon, Read and Park have had to ask
questions and seek answers in new ways, as they searched for a way to explain their landscapes
and places.
Peter Read’s three books Returning to Nothing (Read 1996), Belonging (Read 2000) and
Haunted Earth (Read 2003) represent a sustained investigation into place attachment and the
significance of place experiences in Australia. Read has explored the attachment to place and
the grief that results when people become displaced through modern developments, such as
dams that flood valleys, highways that split suburbs and even the declaration of national parks
that remove locals. He also wrote of the complexities of indigenous and settler attachments to
the same places, and the possibility that a spirit of place, a genius loci, resides in the land
independent of humans.
This latter concept is most confronting to those steeped in European traditions of enlightened
rationality. To accept a local spirit-of-place means that we believe a location has inherent
meaning in its animals, rocks, trees and waters. In this view places are already brim full of
meaning independent of the new set of cultural projections that settlers (or tourists) thrust upon
them. Yet Relph (1976: 15) sees an irreconcilable gulf between ‘the existential space of a cul-
ture like that of the Aborigines and most technological and industrial cultures – the former is
“sacred” and symbolic, while the latter are “geographical” and significant mainly for functional
and utilitarian purposes.’ It is just such a gulf that the Jungian scholar David Tacey (1995, 2000)
suggests settler Australians must cross if they are to have any hope of reconciliation with both
indigenous Australians and the land itself. He warns that the ‘“spirit of place” is by now a cliché
of journalism and a cash-cow of tourism, but “spirit place” is altogether different, a powerful
visionary claim that smashes almost everything we know’ (Tacey 2003: 243).
This, then, is the challenge that place poses. For it to be a useful concept requires new settlers
to suspend their belief in several cultural ideas and ideals that they hold dear. First, they must
remove the veil over the land cast by the landscape gaze of the picturesque and the sublime. It
is an important part of Western history, but we must move on. Second, developing reciprocal
relationships with places requires active sensory participation with a place that we believe to be
already inherently meaningful. The bonds between people and places that arise from such
place-responsive experiences are rich and powerful. This approach requires us to consider a
place like Nooramunga quite differently. Rather than the tourist who brings their gaze
with them like a pair of wrap-around sunglasses filtering everything they see, the empathetic
insider (Relph 1976) must relearn their way into a place, and this process begins with their
active body.
Empathetic insideness demands a willingness to be open to significances of a place, to feel

it, to know and respect its symbols. … This involves not merely looking at a place, but
seeing into and appreciating the essential elements of its identity. … To be inside a
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Brian Wattchow
place empathetically is to understand that place as rich in meaning, and hence to identify
with it.
(Relph 1976: 54)
Productive tensions between landscapes and places

It seems that my preference is clear for place as a way of experiencing over landscape as a way of
seeing. But it is not that simple. For some years John Cameron, while working at the University
of Western Sydney, conducted a ‘sense of place’ curriculum that required students to engage in
place-based projects. As a result, he cautioned,
I have observed a tendency amongst some students to take refuge in their chosen places, to
derive personal comfort and significance from these visits, to revel in their newfound
place attachment, and not to relate to the larger questions of sustainability, or cultural
change, or control of economic power. It is a risk for educators that experiential learning
can lead students so deeply into their internal experience that they are reluctant to emerge
from it.
(Cameron 2003a: 188)
How might we engage with a place through our senses so that we may experience an ‘embodied
emplacement’ (Casey 1993: xvi) but not dismiss our own layered enculturation and the cultural
forces which inevitably bring change to that place? The answer is surely to explore a creative
tension between the interpretative traditions of landscape studies and the experiential pedago-
gies from place-based and place-responsive approaches. The practices of the late New Zealand
ecological historian Geoff Park (1995), evident in his book Nga- Uruora (The Groves of Life):
Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape, provides a compelling example.
In Nga- Uruora Park details his search to uncover what had been lost to New Zealand culture
with the near total clearance of its lowland forests. These clearances were as much about sour-
cing timber and agricultural land as they were about the colonizers establishing supremacy over
the indigenous Ma-ori and attempting to recreate a vision of the bucolic English landscape that
they had left behind. Park’s search took him to the few remaining intact wet lowland forests as
well as into dusty historical archives and into direct contact with the local peoples. He explored
each remnant forest through the medium of his body, on foot and in canoe, developing his
perceptual acuity to the utmost, and described these discoveries for the reader. But he also
detailed the location’s land-use history from a rich array of sources and corroborated his findings
through his fieldwork. Finally, he used only Ma-ori words for indigenous entities (such as the
names of trees, birds, Ma-ori practices and so on). The effect is a weaving of landscape history
and a sense of place, and a reminder that people and places are inevitably linked in a reciprocal
relationship.
As I found what still lay hidden in the ground, tracked my way into archives and had
Ma-ori memories revealed to me, I came to know the lost forests of the plains. I found that
the ecology of a stretch of country and its history are far from unrelated. They work on
one another. They shape one another. If you go in search of one, you are led to the other.
(Park 1995: 16)
Park’s place studies are more than only a combination of interdisciplinary study and personal
narrative. Park’s storytelling is a ‘polyphonic account’, writes Seddon (1996: 397). To
92
comprehend Park’s text the reader must strive to return to an understanding of the place itself.
The result is a writing that is ‘for New Zealanders about becoming New Zealanders’ (Seddon
1996: 405).
Interestingly, a recent movement in landscape studies seems to be revisiting many of the
place-oriented ideas and approaches of Tuan, Relph, Seamon and Casey. Like Park, its propo-
nents seem intent upon dissolving the barriers that once separated the knower from the known.
They reject the Cartesian dualisms between object and subject and the intellectual from the
embodied. This relatively recent development of a landscape phenomenology in cultural geo-
graphy ‘eschews notions of landscape as an image, representation or gaze composed of specific
cultural values and meanings’ (Wylie 2007: 14). The philosophical orientation of this new
movement within landscape studies has been clearly articulated by Wylie (2007: 149, and
Chapter 4 in this volume):
Divested of assumptions regarding observation, distance and spectatorship, the landscape

ceases to define a way of seeing, an epistemological standpoint, and instead becomes
potentially expressive of being-in-the-world itself: landscape as a milieu of engagement and
involvement. Landscape as ‘lifeworld’, as a world to live in, not a scene to view.
Cultural geographers have long been interested in the value of fieldwork (perhaps none more so
than in Carl Sauer’s ‘Berkeley School’ of cultural geography). The difference in a place-
responsive or landscape phenomenology approach is that the lived experience of a landscape is
fundamental. We have to experience the ‘invisible threads’ of the relationships that come together
to constitute the phenomenon that is a place. The cultural landscapes we project (through art,
history, politics, economics, ecology and so on) must still be studied to understand the human-
land relationship fully, but they are secondary to how we come to live in and experience a reci-
procal relationship with a place. Perhaps the next significant challenge for scholars, teachers and
students in landscape studies is to refine a pedagogic approach that offers the greatest potential
to experience and study landscapes in this way.
A pedagogy of landscape and place

How then do we learn a landscape and a place? Let us return to Nooramunga to answer this
question through a lived example (see Figure 7.2). In a recent book entitled A Pedagogy of Place:
Outdoor Education for Changing World (Wattchow and Brown 2011), Mike Brown and I pro-
posed four signposts that point the way towards a place-responsive pedagogic approach. The
first of these involves being present in and with a place.
To be present in and with Nooramunga requires developing our perceptual acuity towards its
natural phenomena; tides, weather, climate, landform, sea conditions and ecology. Initially, this
requires a concerted effort. A traveller won’t get very far here unless they develop a keen sense
for the intricate relationships that exist between wind, tide and land. We need to become
attentive to our surrounds and how they influence every decision that we make; where and
how we travel, where we pause, to what we direct our attention. Over time some of this
becomes ‘second nature’ and we begin to move and dwell with a sense of comfort and
assuredness in the land and on the sea.
The second signpost is the power of place-based stories and narratives. Nooramunga, like all
landscapes and places, is full of stories. Listening to these stories we would discover that Snake
Island, the largest of the sand islands in the Nooramunga reserve, has special cultural sig-
nificance. It was once a nuptial island reserved for young Brataualung couples who would
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Brian Wattchow
Figure 7.2 The view south from the Gulf on the north side of Snake Island. The peaks of Wilson’s
Promontory appear in the distance.
paddle over to it in their bark canoes after their wedding ceremonies. We become attentive to
the more recent land history of the early European explorers and settlers who first charted the
coastline and others who forged overland tracks and established the ports and towns of the
region. We follow these human narratives of conflict, settlement and of ways of living with, or
against, the land to trace a larger land use history. The North American nature writer Barry
Lopez clearly articulates why story is such a powerful way to learn about landscapes. For Lopez,
story begins to make those ‘invisible threads’ that connect people to places visible:
A story draws on relationships in the exterior landscape and projects them onto the interior
landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes,
to use all the elements of story – syntax, mood, and figures of speech – in a harmonious
way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story is
the power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive
truth of those relationships we call ‘the land’.
(Lopez 1988: 67–8)
An authentic story telling will reveal the ecological and cultural forces and events that have
shaped the land over time and that continue to influence its ongoing evolution. Collectively,
being present in and with a place and learning the stories of a landscape is a way of apprenticing
ourselves to that place. In our journey into learning a landscape like Nooramunga we have
knowingly to blend these two approaches, sensory immersion and narrative. Neither alone is
enough. This approach can be effectively modelled by the fieldwork guide or educator:
94
open attentiveness, the willingness to suspend judgment and ‘listen’ to a place, the capacity
to reflect on both affective and intellectual responses. These are abilities which are best
communicated by the presence and attitudes of the educators themselves – by how they
are rather than what they say when they are outdoors with the students. It sets the …
educators on just as much a journey as the students; always broadening and deepening their
relationships with places.
(Cameron 2001: 32)
Finally, how we then represent our experiences in art or text (or even in landscape design,
architecture, film and so on) will tell us a great deal about how much we have learned. The act
of representation, as we have seen modelled by Park, is a process of cultural meaning making. It
will be a never-ending task. As we change the place and it changes us, so too will our
representations of our experiences in the landscape continue to evolve through time.
These four ways of learning our way into a landscape are parts of a continuous cycle. Being
attentive, listening and telling culturally and ecologically significant stories, apprenticing our-
selves to a place and exploring our relationship to landscape through the act of representing our
experiences there, becomes a way of being-in-the-world. No doubt each landscape and every
individual will require a slightly different response. There is no formula for this kind of
approach. Place-based and place-responsive approaches are unlikely to be easy work. They will
require long time frames and collaboration with and between local peoples. They will breach
disciplinary boundaries and be respectful of local knowledge and ways of being. At times silence
may be the best response where the sacredness of local stories and practices might be endan-
gered by the public gaze. At other times the artist or writer who begins as an outsider, but one
who is committed to the journey towards empathetic insidedness (Relph, 1976), may reveal a
unique insight into a place that surprises even the locals, because it rings true. It won’t be easy,
but we won’t go too far wrong if we begin to think of the landscapes and places we encounter
in our day to day lives as already brim full of meaning and significance. They become our
teachers when we combine the best of the landscape and place traditions.
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NJ: Prentice Hall
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8
Semiotics of landscape
Kati Lindström
UNIVERSITY OF TARTU, ESTONIA
Hannes Palang
TALLINN UNIVERSITY, ESTONIA
Kalevi Kull
UNIVERSITY OF TARTU, ESTONIA
Denis Cosgrove (2003) has stated that there are two distinct discourses in landscape studies,
ecological and semiotic:
A semiotic approach to landscape is sceptical of scientific claims to represent mimetically

real processes shaping the world around us. It lays scholarly emphasis more on the context
and processes through which cultural meanings are invested into and shape a world whose
‘nature’ is known only through human cognition and representation, and is thus always
symbolically mediated.
(Cosgrove 2003: 15)
He explicitly calls for cooperation and mutual respect and understanding between these two
discourses, maintaining that no ecologic interpretation or policy can ignore the effect of cultural
meaning-making processes, whereas it must be recognized too ‘that meaning is always rooted in
the material processes of life’ (ibid.)
A semiotic approach in landscape studies would mean the inclusion of these meaning-making
mechanisms, the aspects and roles of symbolization and sign processes. In the current chapter,
we give a review of existing work in the semiotics of landscape.
Further, we use a distinction between semiotics, defined as the general study of sign processes
in the living world (which includes the temporal dimension and individuality of sign use), and
semiology that studies sign relations mainly in their synchronic and social (structuralist) aspects.
Thus semiology can be seen as a part of semiotics. The different approaches as we distinguish
them below can be seen as complementary to each other.
The beginning of ‘landscape semiotics’ as such is difficult to pinpoint, since there has been
little explicit usage of semiotic terminology in landscape studies, although a wealth of
97
Kati Lindström, Hannes Palang, Kalevi Kull
inherently, albeit implicitly, semiotic scholarship has been produced on topics such as landscape
representations and preferences, the manifestations of power relations and the embodiment of
social structures and memory in landscapes. There are many works that could potentially belong
to landscape semiotics but which do not identify themselves as such. Mostly it is not yet a
subject that enjoys an independent status in university curricula. Most landscape scholars
understand ‘semiotics’ much more narrowly than semiotics as a discipline sees itself, equalling it
mostly to linguistics and Saussurean influenced semiology. Scholars of semiotics, on the other
hand, still tend to prefer the ‘social space’ as their concept of choice, with a special emphasis on
urban semiotics (like Lagopoulos and Boklund-Lagopoulou 1992; Gottdiener 1995; Randviir
2008). In many cases, the terms ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘landscape’ are used interchangeably, with-
out much terminological rigour or distinction (that is not rare in human geography either).
Often there is an overlap with neighbouring disciplines such as the semiotics of tourism or
architecture. Departing from animal communication studies, Almo Farina (2010) has actively
worked on the semiotic understanding of landscape ecology, but a more comprehensive
synthesis between the ecological and cultural semiotic branches in landscape research, which
Cosgrove called for, is yet to be developed. Between the semiological/structuralist and
ecological currents we can see a growing body of work that seeks to materialize the semiotic
study of landscapes with the help of phenomenology, Peircean semiotics or the semiotics of
culture, and that in future years could contribute to the new emerging synthesis.
Semiological approaches
For many scholars from a background other than semiotics, ‘semiotics’ is loosely equated with
the analysis of meaning and signification in linguistics. Semiotics, ‘semiology’ and ‘linguistics’
often appear as near synonyms, whereas in several handbooks of geography a distinction is
made, for example between the iconography and semiotics of landscapes (Crang 1998), which
are both seen as integral parts of semiotics by the semioticians. Landscape semiotics grounded on
the semiological and/or structuralist approaches and post-structuralist antithesis is by far the most
common among the explicit attempts to develop landscape semiotics. Structuralism in all its
different developments from Saussure and Barthes to Greimas (see Nöth 2000), is also the most
preferred approach in applied landscape semiotics (Monnai et al. 1981–90; Haiyama 1985,
Monnai 1991, 2005; Lukken and Searle 1993; Son et al. 2006) and is most popular among
those scholars whose main field of research is outside semiotics, including geographers, architects
and others (Lindsey et al. 1988; Nash 1997; Møhl 1997; Knox and Marston 2001; Claval 2004,
2005; Imazato 2007; Czepczyński 2008).
The methodology of semiological analysis consists mostly of applying different linguistic
concepts to the study of landscape elements. Landscapes are seen as sign systems, that is, diverse
landscape phenomena are thought to form a coherent systemic whole where each of the ele-
ments is related to each other and where individual signs can be combined into sequences
according to certain codes. The semiological approaches find their inspiration in the works of
Saussure, Eco, Barthes and Greimas (see Krampen et al. 1987; Nöth 2000; Cobley 2010) and
tend to base their discussion on the following assumptions:
Landscapes are to a certain extent analogous to languages.

Landscapes, like languages, consist of signs, that is, independent identifiable meaningful units.
Landscape signs like language signs can be described by the Saussurean sign model that
consists of the signifier and signified, the relation between which is arbitrary and unmotivated
by any observed features (the relation between a horse-riding statue and the concept of
98
power, for example, or a big porch and wealth, is equally arbitrary as the connection
between the word ‘horse’ and a big animal we refer to by this word).
The meanings of the arbitrary signs are understood through their similarity and difference to
other signs in the sign systems.
Each single real-life landscape element (sign) is parole, that is, a local manifestation of some
deeper language, the langue, or a deep structure (a notion borrowed from the generative
grammar).
Landscape elements/signs are combined into ‘utterances’ according to some (social)
codes. These utterances are normally analyzed from the point of view of the receiver’s social
codes.
Landscapes can be analyzed with the same methodological devices as language, discourse
or text.
Landscape as text
The work of a landscape analyst in ‘reading’ the landscape is therefore to identify signs and
meanings in a landscape environment and deduce codes according to which these meanings
have been grouped. Such an approach is shared by many geographers who do not explicitly
align themselves with semiotics, but nevertheless speak of landscapes as ‘texts’ that need to be
‘read’ and that act as communicative systems. Duncan (1990: 20ff ), for example, indicates a
whole set of textual devices, such as tropes (synecdoche, metonymy and others) that allow
landscapes to convey their messages and reproduce social order. This approach frequently
emphasizes the fact that these landscape signs are not as innocent as they look, being wittingly
or unwittingly in the discourses of power, race, gender, or nationality (Duncan and Duncan
2004, 1988, 2010). Lagopoulos and Boklund-Lagopoulou (1992: 209–17), for example, depart
from Greimas and distinguish 32 different social codes according to which our conception of
regional space can be structured, divided into subsets of economic, social, functional, ecological,
topographical, personal codes and codes of built environment and history.
The notion of text itself has undergone several changes in the second half of the twentieth
century, allowing for a larger plurality of voices in the text and giving more power to the
interpreter and less power to the author. Nevertheless, the methodological approach remains
similar: to identify individual signs, codes and messages among apparently neutral physical forms.
In that, the emphasis is almost always on the side of the interpreter rather than the sender.
Despite the developments, the text-metaphor remains relatively rigid and hierarchic. It is char-
acterized by very little fluidity, leaving little space for creativity and spontaneous irregular pro-
cesses, unlike the notion of ‘text’ that is used in the cultural semiotics of the Tartu–Moscow
school where the text is considerably more dynamic, including both creativity (that is, non-
regulated future possibilities and unpredictable processes) and memory, that is individualized
past (as opposed to crystallized universal codes).
Representational approach
From the 1970s, a new interest in the more subjective human landscape experience gained
momentum with the works of phenomenologists such as Tuan (1974; 2005) and Relph (1976),
and the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in geography brought a ‘heightened reflexivity toward the role
of language, meaning, and representations in the constitution of “reality” and knowledge of
reality’, attention to economic and political aspects, identity and consumption, as well as to the
impact of cultural constructions of race, gender and class on landscapes (Barnett 1998: 380). The
99
peak of the confrontation with the quantitative physical landscape concept was probably
reached in the completely ideational definitions, such as Daniels and Cosgrove’s famous obser-
vation that ‘landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or sym-
bolising surroundings’ (Daniels and Cosgrove 2007: 1) that leaves the landscape idea with almost
no physical reference to the external world. While this extreme definition was later modified by
Daniels and Cosgrove themselves, the present mainstream definition of landscape is still very
conscious of culture and its role in shaping the environment, including in its definition physical
land forms, as well as its cultural image and representation and the influence of the foregoing on
physical landscape processes. Developed through several hallmark publications such Cosgrove
1984, Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, Barnes and Duncan 1992, Duncan and Ley 1993, repre-
sentation of landscape, its political and practical implications has become one of the most per-
vasive topics in humanistic landscape research. The criticism of the representational approach is
directed against the naïve conception that a representation can be entirely mimetic and
landscape paintings in particular have been an on-going source of examples about the
discrepancy of semiotic and physical reality. The semiotic constructedness of photographs, lit-
erary texts, maps and other geographical methodologies has also been brought to attention. This
current is no doubt one of the most influential ones in late 20th-century landscape
studies and enjoys continuing popularity; therefore it is no wonder that Cosgrove’s under-
standing of ‘semiotic discourse’ is in fact roughly equal to representation studies and their later
developments.
Other semiological approaches

Semiotics in its narrowest sense of decoding written linguistic signs is prevalent in linguistically
oriented notions of geosemiotics and linguascape. Scollon and Wong Scollon (2003) used the
term geosemiotics to describe ‘the study of the social meaning of the material placement of signs
and discourses and of our action in the material world’ (p. 2) and argued that there are three
main systems in geosemiotics: the interaction order, visual semiotics, and ‘place’ semiotics.
Geosemiotics, in their approach, is largely dedicated to the study of road signs, product logos
etc. in their relation to the spatial. Baker (1999), in a paper titled Geosemiosis, called geologists to
benefit ‘from a branch of philosophy called semiotics’. In his argument, ‘signs are not mere
objects of thought or language, but rather are vital entities comprising a web of signification
that is continuous from outcrops to reasoning about outcrops’. For Baker, geosemiotics is a
study of signs as a part of a system of thought that is continuous with aspects of Earth’s so-called
‘material world’ (Baker 2009). This is parallel to the sociolinguist’s concept of ‘linguascape’ or
‘the linguistic landscape’ (especially the works of Adam Jaworski) which deals with the
most narrow and material sense of the word ‘sign’ in the framework of a classical Marxist eco-
nomic understanding of landscape as the locus of power struggles and consumption. For
example, a recent book in sociolinguistics edited by Jaworski and Thurlow (2010) with a
promising title Semiotic Landscapes is a study very well informed on landscape studies in art
and geography, but the ‘semiotic landscape’ here refers solely to linguistic landscapes and the
role of texts (in a narrower sense of written linguistic representations) in landscapes and their
creation.
From the semiotic side, a call for developing the field of landscape semiotics can be found in
the book Existential Semiotics, by Eero Tarasti, who envisions landscape semiotics as a ‘study [of]
the landscape as a kind of sign language’ (Tarasti 2000: 154). The departure point of Tarasti is
landscape aesthetics, on the basis of which he then strives to develop a vision of Greimasian
landscape semiotics. His book is by no means a systematic development of landscape semiotics,
100
but rather a conceptual paper envisioning possible approaches and his definition of landscape
remains anthropocentric, heavily oriented towards the study of representations.
Massimo Leone (2009) is another semiotician who has made an explicit mention of semiotic
landscapes, in proposing the notion of ‘semio-geography’, which is a neologism for ‘a sub-discipline
that studies patterns and processes that shape human interaction with various environments,
within the theoretical framework of semiotics’ (Leone 2009: 217). In the course of his analysis,
he adopts the term ‘semiotic landscapes’ to mean ‘a pattern of perceptible elements that indi-
viduals come across in public space’ (ibid.), aligning himself very clearly with the semiological
tradition that seeks to identify individual units of meaning in landscapes.
Monnai Teruyuki and his colleagues (Monnai et al. 1981–90, Moriyama and Monnai 2010;
Monnai 1991, 2005; Moriyama et al. 2006–10 among others) have developed a complex
landscape semiotics for practical analysis and planning purposes in architecture. Unlike the tex-
tual research paradigm that is implicitly or explicitly semiological, the foundations of Monnai’s
approach are Peircean. He uses a variety of Peircean notions, notably semiosis and Peirce’s
triadic sign concept, but then combines it with several other rather binary notions like frames,
and carries out a formalized analysis of buildings and the built environment which (probably
due to the nature of building structures as a subject matter and the analysing software) is more
reminiscent of structural linguistics and generative grammar. For example, in the first of his
article series on Japanese traditional townscapes, he differentiates between the syntactic, semantic
and pragmatic dimensions of semiosis, but then goes on to analyze only the first two in a con-
stituent analysis that resembles Saussurean approaches (Monnai et al. 1981–90: 1). They also use
extensively Saussurean ideas of similarity and difference between the signs as the clue to their
meaning. Despite the methodological mixture, Monnai and his colleagues have unarguably
managed to create a functional framework for a semiotic analysis of the built environment that
serves not only intellectual purposes but also for real-life planning. However, this landscape
semiotics includes landscape only in its narrowest sense, that is, landscape as a built environ-
ment. There are other semiotic applications on architecture in Japan that are classical structur-
alist and analyze landscape structures according to binary features, mostly because it is the easiest
way to quantify the analysis (see, for example, Haiyama 1985).
Semiotic approaches: towards processualization
Phenomenological landscapes
Phenomenological approaches to landscape deal with a very fundamental aspect of semiotics,
that is, how the meanings are generated in the phenomenal world and in respect to the cor-
poreality of the person who dwells in a landscape. This is in stark contrast with the ‘arbitrary
sign’ understanding of semiological interpretations, where landscape meanings were necessarily
inscribed on them from outside and had no experiential motivation to them other than dictated
by external social codes (especially power structures). Ingold (2009: 153) has stated that ‘the
world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on
significance through their incorporation into regular pattern of life activity’.
This stance has been expressed in the works of phenomenological authors such as Relph
(1976), Tuan (1974, 2005), Tilley (1994), Ingold (2000) and Abram (1996), to mention some
outstanding works. Inspired by classics of phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger,
Husserl – see, e.g., Wylie 2007; Macann 1993), landscape is seen more as a holistic phenom-
enon perceived with all senses and the whole body (hearing, smells, etc.). Perceptive processes
and intellectual mechanisms (i.e. mind and body) are not separated; we are our body who lives
101
the landscape, taking in its cues and being in inter-action with all its semiosic processes (semiosic
means ‘related to semiosis’ or sign process). Meaningful units in landscapes are created through
interaction with other entities (both organic and inorganic) in the landscape and through one’s
everyday bodily action, through routines and practices (e.g. ‘taskscape’ – see Ingold 2000:
189–208).
A collection of articles Symbolic Landscapes edited by Backhaus and Murungi (2009) seeks to
overcome the Saussurean/structuralist understanding of symbol as something purely ideational
and replenish the theory of symbolic landscapes with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, seeing
symbol as something that ‘arises between the lived-body and its milieu in gesture that freely
enters virtual space’ (p. 26) and rejecting the division line between perception and conception.
On the other hand, a radical step into understanding the participation of the corporeality in
the meaning generation and design of landscapes is represented by the British non-representational
and mobility studies. Animal geography with its emphasis on other living beings and their
meaningful landscapes is a transfer zone between classical landscape studies, phenomenological
approach and ecosemiotic understanding of landscapes as developed by Almo Farina and his
colleagues.
Peircean approaches
Recent years have seen the influence of Peircean semiotics growing internationally and
quite expectedly this semiotic paradigm has also started to appear in landscape semiotics.
According to Metro-Roland, Peirce’s understanding of sign processes (that is, semiosis) offers a
good theoretical model about how mind and world, or thoughts and objects relate to
each other (Metro-Roland 2009, 2010), since Peircean sign relation consists not only of arbi-
trarily combined signifier and signified, but includes a relation to non-semiotic (and semiotic)
reality.
Another attempt to write Peircean landscape semiotics was published by Tor Arnesen (1998,
2011). He concludes that landscape as a whole is a sign that stands in triadic relations with the
object (physical land) and the interpretant (the community). Arnesen makes an attempt to apply
a Peircean sign concept that is most famously represented in a triangular diagram as a relation
between (1) representamen or a sign vehicle, that is, ‘the concrete subject that represents’ (CP
1.540: see Peirce 1931–58 in the References); (2) the object or ‘the thing for which it stands’
(CP 1.564), and (3) the interpretant. The least intuitive of the terms is interpretant, that is, ‘the
idea to which it [the sign vehicle] gives rise’ (CP 1.339). However, Arnesen’s application is
based on a very principal deviation from the Peircean and post-Peircean definition of the terms
‘object’ and ‘interpretant’ (cf. also CP 1. 542; 1.564).
Arnesen’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the main Peircean concepts does not curb the
validity of his main argument that surges from the Peircean definition of sign: ‘a sign is some-
thing, A, which denotes some fact or object, B, to some interpretant thought, C’ (CP 1.346).
Differently from the text- or discourse-based approaches to landscapes as a semiotic reality, the
physical area is always included in Arnesen’s landscapes as one of the consistent factors. In short,
the Peircean approach allows for an analysis of the interrelations between the consistent physical
and mental elements in respect to the sign user and contextual information.
The Peircean sign model allows for a separation of mental (or symbolic) landscapes and
material ones and permits one to follow separately the dynamic changes of a landscape as a
symbolic resource and as a material resource. Both of these dimensions can change together, but
they can also change separately and changes in material landscapes do not necessarily imply
changes in the perceived landscapes that have been ‘processed’ through the symbolic thinking.
102
Depending on the community’s perceptions of these changes (‘conceivable practical effect’ –

Arnesen 2011: 366; 1998: 42) we can speak of landscapes that are lost in battle (material change
is the result of a dispute), faded out (material change remains unnoticed in the dominant sym-
bolic discourse), but also gained (Abrahamsson 1999), since a new material landscape opens up
new symbolic possibilities and will sooner or later be ‘appropriated’.
Similar concerns are reflected in the works of what has been called ‘material semiotics’
(Latour, Haraway – see Hinchliffe 2002: 217ff ), which has taken to restore materiality to the
meaning, emphasizing that ‘landscapes are socio-material processes that, due to the action of
both people and nature, continuously undergo morphological change (in the most material
change) and revision (in the sense that landscapes are viewed by people). Landscapes are the
contested networks of material-semiotic relationships, provisional alliances between people and
things, and contested representations viewed from a necessarily situated perspective’ (Mercer
2002: 42). Although several authors in this tradition resort to Greimasian rather than Peircean
models, the important theoretical implication of the re-materialization of semiotic landscapes is
the understanding that there are always several contesting semiotic realities concerning one
physical area and that planning and management necessarily has to accommodate several
different and often conflicting semiotic realities and visions of future and past.
Tartu–Moscow school: semiotics of culture

The Tartu–Moscow school of semiotics and especially the works of Juri Lotman have
provided a set of concepts that have a high potential for integrative landscape studies, ranging
from the analysis of representation, to a novel understanding of communication (esp. auto-
communication), text, semiotic space and models of change. Only some of these seminal ideas
have been fully developed in respect to landscape studies (for example, St Petersburg’s ‘text’ or
autocommunication – see Lotman 1990) in their original context, while some have been
developed later by younger colleagues in Tartu, and some still wait for their potential to be fully
realized.
A model that might help in studying landscape change has been proposed by J. Lotman
(2009) in his book Culture and Explosion. While most other semioticians focus on studying
translation between (usually two) separate sign systems, Lotman pays attention to borders within
one system, and the translation possibilities that the border creates, that is, the continuity or
persistence and the change of the system. One of the central aspects of landscape, from the
semiotic point of view, is the existence of boundaries, communicative borders, within the
landscape, which can be seen as the main factor and mechanism of the internal diversity of
landscape and the main mechanism in generating new landscapes. Changes in systems are not
always gradual: Lotman distinguishes between gradual and explosive changes. During the
former, the transition from periphery to centre and vice versa takes place in a gradual way and
existing hegemonic structures are replaced in a slow transition. During epochs of explosive
changes, all the existing semiotic structures get shattered and there follows an explosive growth
of semiotic processes. Many competing new scenarios of development emerge at this point of
disruption, only one of which finally consolidates and achieves the central position. In the same
way, we can distinguish periods of gradual and explosive changes in landscapes, where in the
epochs of explosive change a disruption with previous landscapes is produced. In such a way,
the semiotic model of change allows for a description of dynamic non-equilibrium change
processes, the outcome of which is not always dependent on ecological necessity or practical
needs, but can be a result of religious, irrational, aesthetic semiotic values that hard science
models cannot normally take into account (see also Palang et al. 2011).
103
Ecosemiotic approach
An author who has contributed most significantly to a systematic study of landscape processes
from an ecosemiotic perspective, is Almo Farina (2006, 2010; Farina and Napoletano 2010).
Taking a broader definition of ecosemiotics and broader definition of landscape that goes
beyond the anthropocentric approach of human geography, and exceeds the narrow landscape
ecological definition of landscape as a mosaic or organized space, he aspires to create a new
framework that would take into account the multiplicity of agencies of different species in a
living environment and would reduce the gap between human values and ecological processes.
Relating landscape to the notion of umwelt by Jakob von Uexküll (2010), he emphasizes the fact
that landscapes are individually perceived and later puts forth the notion of a ‘private landscape’
(Farina and Napoletano 2010; ‘eco-field’ in Farina 2006): ‘the configuration of objects around
an organism that are perceived in the context of space, time, and history (including memory,
experience, culture, etc.)’ (Farina and Napoletano 2010: 181). Thus, his semiotics of landscape is
subject-centred, taking into account the species-specific lifeworld and the cognitive capacities of
the species, but also the experiential context (memory, and also history – if the species has a
long-term memory) and even aesthetics. Farina’s ‘private landscape’ is essentially a concept that
belongs to the field of ecosemiotics (Kull 1998; Nöth 1998, 2001; Kull and Nöth 2001).
Future perspectives
No doubt the studies of representation of and through landscapes and the issues of discourse and
power connected to representation will be a source of continuous inspiration for landscape
scholars for many years to come. Nevertheless, in the light of general tendencies of ‘remater-
ialization’ and ‘corporealization’ of human geography and semiotics, it is unlikely that these
studies would remain confined to a Saussurean paradigm of arbitrary sign relations and idea-
tional worlds of discourse. Instead, we will probably see attempts to tackle the intricate
mutuality of material and mental processes, both in signification, communication and inter-
pretative bodily action, as well as their consequences for the material and life processes of other
living organisms. As Metro-Roland (2009: 271) points out, the Peircean model is ‘more fruitful
for the interpretation of signs outside of texts and language’, since his semiotics ‘treats explicitly
the relation between the world and our understanding of it’ by way of including in his sign
relation the object, our understanding of it and the physical sign vehicle, and offering a thor-
ough typology of their mutual interrelations, of which the Saussurean model covers only one,
the symbolic sign use (Lindström 2011).
Some advantages of the semiotic study of landscapes are the following:
Landscape is a holistic phenomenon that does not make unnecessary divisions into culture/
nature, human/non-human, individual/collective, perceived/physical and so on beforehand.
Such divisions can be used as analytical tools in each particular case at hand but are not
projected onto the ontological state of the material through terminological preconceptions.
Therefore ‘landscape’ is a suitable concept for overcoming rigid dualities of modernist
discourse.
Landscape is an inherently dialogical phenomenon and communication lies at the core of
semiotic processes in landscapes. Thus, semiotics can provide adequate tools for analyzing
processes of landscape formation, because they are always a result of multi-party commu-
nication. The potential for the semiotic ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1982, 1986) and Juri
Lotman (1990, 2009) cannot be underestimated in this respect.
104
Semiotic studies of landscape can be very useful for practical planning and management
policies, as they help to understand the dialogicity and generation of meaning in everyday
landscapes, and comprehend how value is created in non-material terms. Peircean sign
models also give a good methodological basis for discussing the different relations that the
symbolic and material aspects of landscapes may have for different communities. It also
provides a solid descriptive framework for understanding how different communities (and
organisms of different umwelten) may live in different landscapes on the same physical
grounds. Semiotics of culture, and especially the notions of ‘explosion’ and ‘future histories’
could prove to be very useful in mapping the dynamics of landscape change, understanding
the becoming of past landscapes as a realization of one of the many possible futures, and
consequently in improving planning and management capacities.
Acknowledgements
This paper has been supported by the Estonian Ministry of Education target-financed projects
no. SF0130033s07 and SF0182748s06, ETF grant No. 8403 and from the European Union
through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT).
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9
Aesthetic appreciation
of landscape
Isis Brook
WRITTLE COLLEGE
What is the aesthetic?

To study aesthetics is to explore, examine closely, and interrogate our experiences of feelings
such as beauty or ugliness and the value we ascribe to them.
Aesthetics as a discipline has been entangled with philosophy of art for many centuries. If we
are exploring the nature of the experience of an artwork such as a symphony, play, or painting,
then our aesthetic response to it is an important component. However, that entanglement has
meant that aesthetic appreciation of the natural world, the everyday world, and of our cultural
landscapes came to be either ignored (Hepburn 1966) or examined through the framework of
the arts. In this chapter on the aesthetic appreciation of landscapes I will focus primarily on the
landscape as place and the aesthetic, taking its Greek root in aesthesis, as concerned with our
sensory engagement and enjoyment, or otherwise, of place.
Whether the aesthetic resides mainly in the response of the experiencer or mainly in the
qualities of that which is experienced is a complex question within aesthetics. Historically the
shift has been from thing to person with an important turn taking place during the late seven-
teenth to early eighteenth century. The emphasis on the thing reached its culmination in
Hogarth’s 1752 objective ‘line of beauty’, which represented a rather formalized consolidation
of Francis Hutchinson’s ideas about the pleasingness of unity in variety. If there were a perfect
serpentine line with the right degree of unity and variety it could dictate exactly how a land-
scape feature (or anything else) should be designed or how a landscape feature would be cor-
rectly judged against that objective measure such that persons of taste could be in agreement
(Moore 2008). Around the same period, though, the aesthetic is coming to mean the inner
response or affect of that which is experienced. The internalisation of the aesthetic can be
identified by a number of theoretical developments and changes in worldview including the
coining of the term ‘aesthetics’ by Baumgarten in 1735 and the rise of the role of imagination,
first advanced by Addison in 1712 (Moore 2008). The development of most interest for us is
the appreciation of the sublime in landscape. This, as we shall see, most clearly relied on an
internal response to particular types of landscapes that had previously been seen as holding no
positive aesthetic value. Internalisation could be seen as opening the way for an extreme sub-
jectivity in which all views on aesthetic quality are equally valid, but this is not what is usually
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meant. The aesthetic experience is one that is felt personally and relies on both our normal
experiencing of life and particular qualities of attention, but it also claims some normative force
such that it makes sense for one person to try to bring another to their way of seeing, to point
out why they feel the way they do, and to get them to share that experience.
What is a landscape?
Definitions of landscape vary and some play on the relationship to landscape painting or the
scene for a painting, from the Dutch landschap, which became anglicized as landskip. However,
the root word for both the Dutch and English is the German Landschaft which is more directly
translated as region, rural jurisdiction, or system of rural spaces (Muir 1999:3). Thus it carries the
sense of a vaguely bounded whole that includes the landform and the inhabitants’ particular way
of organizing and interacting with the landform. (This concept of the landscape as ‘lived in’
rather than simply as ‘viewed’ becomes important in understanding contemporary landscape
aesthetics.) The rural conception of landscape remains the norm, as evidenced by the coining of
other, contrasting ‘scapes’: cityscape, townscape, streetscape, and even parkscape. A difference
exists between the North American application of landscape to unmodified wilderness areas and
the European application to what are its various rural countryside forms, thus necessitating the
late nineteenth/early twentieth century term ‘cultural landscape’ (Arntzen and Brady 2008: 9).
All that can be established with any certainty is that, like place, landscape is a vague concept and
in reality has fuzzy edges. And yet we know what we mean and can spot when the term is
being stretched, used metaphorically, or misapplied.
An example
It is easy to call to mind an archetypically pleasing landscape; there will be some cultural
variation in the detail, but let us try.
Imagine turning the corner on a path one morning and seeing laid out before us a patchwork
of fields rich in various crops or grazing animals and demarcated with hedges, stone walls, or
trees. There is a small area of woodland over to one side, rolling hills in the distance and
beyond them a craggy mountain peak around which are gathered a few white clouds against a
blue sky. In the valley before us, amongst the fields, is a collection of dwellings diverse in shape
and size but similar in building material and colours. These cluster along a sparkling river and
encircle a small bustling market square. There is birdsong in the fields and a subtle smell of
herbs and flowers rises from the vegetation as the sun warms the day. We might stop to take in
the view – even take a photograph – in an attempt to capture the moment as there is something
appealing about it. We find it pleasing to look at but also want to enter it: to experience it, to
be environed by it, and take part in its various affordances.
How can such an experience be brought to you so easily and shared, both in terms of you
understanding what is described and me predicting that you would also find it pleasing? Some
might want to resist its charm as rural nostalgia or its proximity to twee populist taste and
hanker for something more stimulating or fast moving as offered by a cityscape. In landscape
terms though, what I have described, if charitably imagined, could never be ugly. (I add
the charitable proviso because we might add to the imagining that this is a gated community
on the edge of a deprived area, or that the viewer is an eighteenth-century peasant for whom
enclosed fields were a political, economic and personal disaster.)
To see why our pleasing landscape is not just a case of personal preference we need to
examine some aesthetic theory and even the very notion of aesthetic experience.
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Experiences, responses and judgements

Our experiences, our immediate likes and dislikes, and our preferences or snap judgements are
obviously related to the aesthetic, but the aesthetic is also about our deeper consideration and
refinement of those judgements. To move into the realm of the aesthetic is to begin to question
and experiment with those immediate responses. Even our food tastes – perhaps the most
immediately judgemental sense – change and develop over time; we try new tastes and textures
and come to enjoy the unfamiliar and are able to discern qualities previously unnoticed.
Thus the process of arriving at considered aesthetic judgements of landscapes begins with
experience of moving through places, including memory and attendant cognitive elements, but
then proceeds also to question it and introduce more complex cognitive processes. For example,
we could ask: is it rugged, inviting, austere?; how do its parts relate to each other?; what impact
does today’s weather have on my experience?; and so on. Only then might we arrive at an
evaluative aesthetic judgement guided not by our immediate personal likes and dislikes but by
the aesthetic qualities of the landscape itself as they open up to us.
What sets aesthetic experience, response and judgement apart from, for example, moving
through a landscape discussing last night’s TV or whether the acreage could yield more profit if
it were turned over to potatoes, is a particular kind of attention. We have to be wholly there
and attend to the qualities of the landscape in a distinctive way. In aesthetic theory a part of that
special quality of attention is called disinterestedness, which classically means avoiding the kind
of thought processes that might stand in the way of aesthetic, as opposed to other forms of,
appreciation such as thoughts of ownership, profit, or that it was designed by a close friend.
However, extreme forms of disinterestedness, in which any practical interest is forbidden, are
not appropriate for landscapes, particularly those that involve practical human engagement
(Bourassa 1991:21). For example, the aesthetic pleasure in seeing plump ears of barley is inten-
sified by the cognitive component of imagining them providing sustenance as part of the cycle
of the agricultural year. Taken too far this imagining can distract us from the aesthetic qualities
of the golden rippling waves and shimmer of rising heat, but it is part of the satisfaction
experienced in the scene as one of bounteous fullness.
Aesthetic landscape categories

Part of the cognitive component that I said featured in our initial experience is the historical
tradition of landscape appreciation that is our cultural inheritance. In the West our past means
that we currently tend to appreciate landscape under three distinct aesthetic categories: the
beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque.
Beauty as a distinct category (rather than its commonplace usage for anything pleasing) can be
thought of as the quality of those things that please due to their regularity, smoothness,
tranquillity and unity, as well as a certain smallness of scope. In landscape terms the pastoral
equates with the beautiful. A traditional pastoral landscape is one that has close cropped grass,
calm water, some variety of plants and trees but nothing abrupt, chaotic or demanding. His-
torically such landscapes were imagined as inhabited by figures from classical myths or allegory.
Parkland created in a pastoral style often included small classical buildings – follies that looked
like temples in the distance. The landscapes of William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown
are pastoral in style.
The sublime in landscape is more challenging and appears as a positive aesthetic category in
the eighteenth century (Nicolson 1963) The sublime relies on an emotional response to the
grandeur of features such as rugged mountains, the tumultuous water of thundering rapids or
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huge cascades, vertiginous cliffs and the atmospheric effects of thunder and lightning or swirling
fog. The term sublime can also be accurately used for other landscapes that are challenging in
terms of human flourishing, for example, deserts or arctic ice floes (Tuan 1993). Sublime land-
scapes are typically vast and irregular; they create a sense of awe in the person experiencing
them. The sublime as an aesthetic response was initially understood as a pleasurable feeling that
arose from being close to danger but in a place of safety (Burke 1757). The frisson of danger
adds to our pleasure in the landscape experience. If the feeling moves into real danger, then the
sublime retreats. For example, we might enjoy the slight disorientation of swirling mist des-
cending when on a mountain path but as the fog thickens, the path is lost, and night descends,
real fear takes over. In Kant’s 1790 interpretation of the sublime, the pleasure arises from our
awe of nature being tempered by the power of our reason to rise above the vastness or power
of the sublime landscape or entity (Kant 1952:114). (It could be argued that this move is designed
more to fit with the architectonic of Kant’s metaphysics than accurately to reflect our actual
aesthetic experience, but I leave this to the reader to test for themselves.) For some Romantics
the awe felt in such places connects to the power of God as a creator, for others to the power of
Nature. With industrialisation came a new dimension to the possibilities of sublime experience.
Vast industrial machines of great power and noise could be pleasingly fearful in a similar way.
The picturesque as a specific aesthetic category arises out of a blending of the pastoral and the
sublime. It takes the craggy irregularity of the sublime into the smaller more intimate compass
of the pastoral. Or, as an early proponent, Gilpin (1984:22), said, it is: ‘Beauty lying in the lap
of horrour’. Distinct elements of the picturesque are its endorsement of variety, intricacy,
wildness, and decay (Brook 2008:112). In eighteenth-century park design the picturesque
rejected both the order of formal symmetry and the quasi-natural of the designed Brownian
pastoral (Price 1842:187). In the picturesque landscape aesthetic pleasure comes from the wild-
ness of such things as overgrown walls, gnarled roots, and rustic paths. The smaller human scale
is also reinforced by the inclusion of small scale agriculture (Watelet 2003 [1774]).
These three aesthetic categories inform our contemporary pleasure in landscapes that reflect
aspects of any or even combinations of the pastoral, picturesque or sublime; hence my con-
fidence in the example I gave that included elements of all three but was predominantly pic-
turesque. All three categories have also undergone political critiques, largely due to their
development out of the preoccupations of an aristocracy. The very real impoverishment that
came out of the system of enclosures could cast an ethical shadow on the later visual appeal of a
patchwork of fields. Likewise the building of ‘picturesque’ hovels, to be lived in by suitably
rustic peasants, or the building of ruins where none existed in order to create a pleasing prospect
are features of what Ruskin would call the ‘lower’ as opposed to the ‘noble’ picturesque
(Ruskin 2010 [1856]: vol.4, p.7).
All three categories are also regularly criticized for driving a scenic conception of landscape
and indeed of nature. However, although trends in landscape painting accompany all three
categories these aesthetic sensibilities, particularly the sublime and picturesque were enriched by
walking through such landscapes and encouraged ever increasing numbers of people to engage
in these embodied experiences of landscape. Given this cultural inheritance I knew my descri-
bed landscape was assured a positive response from most readers. However, we also have reason
to think this response is not merely culturally bound but has deeper roots in human evolution.
Landscape preference as evolutionarily driven

The ‘why’ of our landscape preferences has been explored by many biologists, aestheticians and
psychologists and many theories point to our liking for, or feeling at home in, certain landscapes
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as an evolutionary adaptation. For example, in landscape preference studies people of all ages
and all cultures seem to prefer those landscape forms that simulate a hospitable landscape for
hunter-gathering survival. The ‘savannah hypothesis’ (Orians 1986) or ‘prospect refuge theory’
(Appleton 1990) both point to an inbuilt preference for that which would have sustained our
primeval ancestors. Thus a landscape form that affords somewhere to hide and look out from is
the kind of landscape in which we feel safe. The sublime tests our limits and introduces some
excitement, the pastoral feels safe but can be boring and the picturesque strikes a balance
between the two. Moreover, current research in human wellbeing also emphasizes the role of
nature or at least some living plants in urban environments (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989).
On the evolutionary model it thus seems that we will, at the very least, feel more comfor-
table with the kinds of structural features that typically pleasing landscapes exhibit (prospect and
refuge) and that feature natural materials, particularly living plants. Whether or not this evolu-
tionary picture correctly identifies the deeper roots of our aesthetic responses these responses are
well recorded in landscape preference studies (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989). However, a common
criticism of such studies and the kinds of graded landscape evaluations that they support is that
the studies record responses to pictures of landscapes not the more rounded experiences of the
landscapes in question (Fenton and Reser 1988). Moreover, even if they were accurate, they
would record only what is preferred, not necessarily what, in aesthetic terms, should be
preferred (more on this controversial point later).
Landscape as embodied experience

The work of Arnold Berleant is important in making the experiential turn in landscape appre-
ciation through his radical rejection of the scenic conception of landscape. This rejection goes
deeper than just the observation that we miss some of the qualities of a landscape if we focus on
the visual. He noted that as we move through landscapes, we hear, feel, and smell:
The physical senses play an active part, not as passive channels for receiving data from
external stimuli but as an integrated sensorium, which equally accepts and shapes sense
qualities as part of the matrix of perceptual awareness. This is not just a neural or psycho-
logical phenomenon but a direct engagement of the conscious body as part of an environmental
complex. It is the experiential locus of environmental aesthetics.
(Berleant 1992:14)
For Berleant, this direct engagement with the landscape is ‘not just a visual act but a somatic
engagement in the aesthetic field’ (1992: 166). The use of the term ‘field’ indicates a move not
just to the senses but to their integration with the landscape itself. As Berleant says elsewhere:
The environment is understood as a field of forces continuous with the organism, a field in
which there is a reciprocal action of organism on environment and environment on
organism, and in which there is no sharp demarcation between them. Such a pattern may
be thought a participatory model of experience.
(Berleant 2005:9)
Thus, for the visitor, the archetypical landscape experience is probably the walk (or possibly the
cycle). Here we are at close quarters with the land we move through: we feel the wind, smell
the mown hay, are drawn by a curve in the road to take this path rather than that one, and we
feel the demands of a steep incline as our muscles respond to the landform. Just as in the art
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world we wouldn’t normally watch dance without music, so the fact that the landscape speaks
to all our senses, and particularly the kinaesthetic sense, means that just to view it would be not
only to miss the richness of the landscape experience but also to fail to become part of that
aesthetic field.
For those continuously inhabiting a landscape – for whom it is home – this participation can
be deeper. For example, those who farm the landscape described earlier will have a very inti-
mate knowledge of particular fields, the landscape through the seasons, and possibly across
generations of activity and change. The context of the landscape includes them and their
activity in a very real sense of being co-creative of each other. We might think that if their
intimate knowledge is entirely practically directed – how to earn a living, or a better living, out
of this land – then this would leave no scope for the aesthetic, given the disinterested nature of
the aesthetic. However, this would misconstrue both disinterestedness and traditional farming.
As hinted earlier, the bounteousness of a productive field can be an aesthetic quality even
though it speaks to a use value. A farmer’s relationship to their fields is not only more directly
connected to its use value but also richer and deeper in other meanings. As Pauline von Bonsdorf
carefully sets out, the body of the farmer and the land share more than a use relationship, the
interest of the farmer is also the interest of care:
Enjoying the growth of the crops is more than enjoying merely the thought of future
income; it is also enjoying the fertility of the land, the good climate that year or even the
careful work one has done. None of these goods can be reduced to mere personal benefit:
the last belongs to the moral realm and the other two articulate attitudes of the human-
nature relationship. … Aesthetic elements, attention, even aesthetic appreciation can be
present in a situation even if it is not totally aesthetic.
(von Bonsdorf 2005: section 5)
Von Bonsdorf also argues that the practical knowledge of the land relies on ‘a sensitivity akin to
the aesthetic’ (ibid., section 3). The kind of fine judgements a farmer must make cannot come
entirely from theory or manuals since they involve judgements of qualities that we think of in
aesthetic terms (e.g. odour, sound, colour, patterns, vitality, overall feel). The farmer must tune
into these qualities in order to know, for example, what to plant, when to harvest, when
something is not quite right with an animal and so on. The quality of attention and the levels of
discernment are what, in some other realms, we would refer to as connoisseurship.
The model of participatory aesthetics leads us away from aesthetics as concerned with a dis-
tanced and wholly disinterested perspective and into something embodied and connected to a
realm of meaning and relationships that are part of the lived world. This would seem to prior-
itize the perceptions of those engaged in that deeper relationship, but there might still be good
reason to want to interrogate those lived responses and identify the aesthetic within them.
Who should make aesthetic judgements about landscapes?

The project of aesthetics is, like ethics, axiological – it’s a study about values – and is not fully
captured with descriptions of what is valued; it also attempts to argue about what should be
valued. Just as the blockbuster film or bestselling novel is not necessarily thought to be the best
film or novel by informed appreciators of those forms, the popular landscape form might not be
the one that has the strongest aesthetic potential. The qualities revealed by a considered and
careful engagement with a landscape could produce rich aesthetic experiences beyond those that
an initially appealing landscape can create. As with art criticism this can make landscape
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appreciation sound elitist, requiring special faculties beyond those of the normal inhabitants of a
place. This is not so, but it would be misguided and wrong to suggest that aesthetic qualities are
down to individual subjective judgement without any sense of the need for time and con-
sideration to arrive at them. This is fortunate because landscapes are lived in and are public in
the sense of being unavoidable for those who live in, visit, or pass through them. If informed
evaluations of their aesthetic quality can be made that do not just amount to individual
preferences, then it starts to make sense to introduce aesthetic reasons to defend, promote,
and conserve landscapes as a public good because they will reliably offer those aesthetic
experiences.
Landscapes are not just practical and cultural resources for humans; they also create ecological
and morphological value. A helpful way of grasping where aesthetic value resides is to think of
the aesthetic in terms of supervenient qualities that are created out of the way those resources,
stories, and objective properties intermingle in a characteristic way in a place. Our capacity to
feel those qualities and express them in aesthetic descriptions and judgements requires our
subjective reflection on our response to them. However, this subjective element does not
mean that such judgements are a ‘free for all’ and that anyone’s response is as valid as
anyone else’s. Some responses are superficial or idiosyncratic. For example, someone might find
open moorland boring because they have never really explored its particular thrilling expan-
siveness and shifting marriage of land and sky or they might dislike the rich pungency of leaf
mulch in an autumn woodland because school bullies once made them eat some. Positive aes-
thetic value is sensed and appreciated subjectively – it can’t be done by a machine – but the
qualities appreciated are based on properties of the landform, vegetation, structures, climate and
so on and their characteristic way of working together to create a whole. These qualities are
open to discussion and debate between subjects and to deeper experiencing with more
engagement.
The relationship between aesthetic qualities and the properties that facilitate them is helpfully
discussed in a classic paper by Frank Sibley (1959). We can see that to become an informed
judge of a landscape requires that one attend to its aesthetic qualities by attending to and tuning
into the specifics of a place, not by how it matches up to or falls short of some imagined ideal or
other place. We might bring our understanding of historical and cultural developments as well
as geological and ecological processes into the evaluation to enrich our understanding and
response. However, the aesthetic appreciation and evaluation of a landscape must ultimately be
informed by our considered aesthetic response, not solely our scientific or cultural under-
standing. This means that particular landscapes with great biodiversity or rarity value or histor-
ical cultural significance, if they are to be defended, need to be defended for those reasons.
These aspects can increase their aesthetic value but do not necessarily do so. Conversely, a
landscape feature can have great beauty, for example, a spinney of beech trees, with smooth
bark, iridescent green spring leaves and a uniform golden brown carpet of fallen leaves lit here
and there by shafts of sunlight breaking through the emerald canopy. All of the properties
mentioned come together to create this magical atmosphere in the spinney. However, note that
they are also all features that prevent greater biodiversity than could be delivered by other
tree species, yet this fact does not impact on their aesthetic quality. Other types of woodland
have their own aesthetic qualities and may also provide great biodiversity. One could therefore
argue on ecological grounds that beech spinneys should be less numerous, but their aesthetic
value is not directly commensurable with an ecological value such as biodiversity.
That said, ecological value can lead us into reconsideration of a previously aesthetically
ignored or disparaged landscape type. For example, we might bring knowledge of the long
historical development and teeming insect life and plant diversity of a peat bog to bear on our
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consideration of the bog’s aesthetic qualities. When we look again and consider the peat bog in
the light of this knowledge new qualities emerge such that we see and feel about it differently.
Indeed, some aestheticians regard such knowledge as essential to arrive at ‘correct’ aesthetic
appreciation of a landscape (Carlson, 2010). However, the role of science, or at least natural
history, in arriving at ‘correct’ aesthetic judgements is controversial in environmental aesthetics
(Brady, 2003). Allen Carlson maintains that just as in the art world an understanding of cate-
gories of art is important in arriving at correct judgements of aesthetic quality, so in nature an
understanding of its categories and processes is important in arriving at correct aesthetic judge-
ments. Although this approach has some merits it does question the legitimacy of the aesthetic
experiences of the non-scientifically informed in a way that seems unjust. Moreover, other
types of aesthetic experience such as being moved by nature (Carroll 1993) or becoming part of
an aesthetic field (Berleant 1992) are left out. Scientific knowledge can enhance our apprecia-
tion and press us to experience more, but it can also drive out the aesthetic by introducing
other claims on our attention such as the botanist who misses the beauty of dew sparkling moss
or the ‘twitcher’ who doesn’t dwell on the intricacy of tessellated duck plumage, due to anxieties
about species identification.
For landscape aesthetics, geomorphology, ecology, cultural history, agriculture, silviculture,
design, meteorology and so on are all relevant disciplines that feed into our ability to read the
landscape, but familiarity and emotional connection can bring a different perceptiveness as can
unfamiliarity. People who live in an area can be blind to its aesthetic qualities or they can be
deeply aware of and appreciate them in a way that an outsider cannot experience, as with our
farmer above. Similarly, experts can be insightful, bringing a wealth of experience and sensi-
tivity to bear on the consideration of landscapes, or they can be blinded by attempts to measure
landscape as a scenic resource using pre-set criteria, inventories, indices, uniqueness ratios and so
on (Porteous 1996:195).
Many of the attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to objectify and make measurable judgements
of aesthetic value were flawed because they put specific, usually art inspired, values in at the
beginning so that, for example, mountains were always better than lowlands, thus furnishing the
evaluator with a checklist of things good landscapes contain (Linton 1968). This will inevitably
prioritize certain types of landscape rather than evaluate landscapes for their quality as the
kind of landscape they are. Other methods were less prescriptive in terms of properties but just
reiterated positive aesthetic qualities such as unity or variety (Litton 1982). On balance the
second approach which amounts to saying ‘here are some aesthetic terms you might like to
consider while experiencing landscapes’ is closer to useful guidance than suggesting that land-
scapes with big mountains or fast flowing rivers always have the greatest aesthetic value. An
attempt to arrive at a landscape character assessment that is alive to aesthetic qualities prevents
the potential denigration of some cultural or natural landscapes because they lack prescribed
scenic resources.
Aesthetics as always a work in progress

As individuals our aesthetic sensibilities are mutable: they can be enhanced or degraded. We can
be open to new aesthetic experiences and explore them before making considered judgements
or we can close ourselves off from them. Each new experience of landscape helps us to imagine
and explore even familiar landscapes from a fresh perspective.
Aesthetics is also mutable at the social level. Although our evolutionary preferences will
always be a background, culturally we can move from older aesthetic ideals to new ones. We
have seen this historically with the rise of the sublime as a new aesthetic category in which
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rugged landscape forms were felt to hold a new kind of stirring pleasure, which then became a
shared cultural norm.
Today the new challenges and debates for cultural landscape aesthetics are often around new
technologies and changing land use. I will consider two examples in order to revisit issues from
the previous sections and explore how progress is made.
Wind turbines on fell sides, coastlines and open moorland can be presented as desecrating the
landform and ruining the aesthetic quality of particular landscapes. Alternatively, by focusing on
the aesthetic qualities of the turbines, such as the clean lines, the pristine white, the elegant
structure with its slim tower and vast blades, we can try out a different perspective. Perhaps
instead of spoiling the landscape they draw its elements together and help to express the char-
acter of the place by making the wind more evident and bringing out the majesty of the ele-
ments in a wild environment. We can try to experience them in this light and see what
happens. This is how aesthetics works: in some places the feeling of desecration remains and in
others a new element is introduced that somehow completes and brings an exciting dynamism
to the landscape. That said, the aesthetic perception of the traveller passing through the land-
scape or looking at illustrations in planning documents will be very different from those living
in proximity to turbines with their asynchronous strobing of the light and sonic pulsing. Impacts
on the aesthetics of our everyday experience can slip into the background, but, like constant
traffic noise, they do impact on us in a way that is clearly revealed when they stop. A cognitive
element to the wind farm experience is sometimes invoked as an aesthetic component. Here
our perception of this as a clean technology that will replace environmentally detrimental means
of energy production plays into and enhances our positive aesthetic perception (Saito 2004). As
with the bountiful crop example above this quasi-use value could have some place, but note
that it depends on our perception of wind energy as clean, efficient, and environmentally
friendly. If we later find there are problems such as cradle-to-grave production pollution,
impacts on migratory birds, or general inefficiency (Boone 2005), then, logically, our aesthetic
perception must change in line with this new information.
Drawing on a second contemporary example I want to show how the aesthetic response can
also resist the new from a sense of disquiet that shades into the ethical. In a defence of new
agricultural landscapes, Carlson explores their aesthetic qualities:
Here intensity of color and boldness of line combine with scale and scope to produce
landscapes of breathtaking formal beauty: great checkerboard squares of green and gold,
vast rectangles of infinitesimally different shades of grey … When viewed from high land
or a low flying plane such landscapes match the best of geometrical painting in power and
drama.
(Carlson 2002:185–6)
Carlson finds a new kind of beauty in these landscapes by not looking for the traditional farm-
stead with its human scale. He revels in the size and power of the machines that now work this
industrial landscape. He regrets in some ways the passing of the small towns that the older
farming methods supported but feels that this new agriculture in a global context is here to stay
and we can grow to appreciate it. However, an alternative response might be to see the land
flattened to provide the uniform blank slate necessary for the vast machinery and automated
irrigation systems and not as landscapes at all since they have lost the integration of humans and
land that traditional agricultural systems had retained. The impression of human domination of
the land rather than a sensitive working with the land can create an ethical/aesthetic dissonance.
The absence of animals – now warehoused in intensive feedlots – might add to that sense of
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disquiet. The land and animals have become parts of an industrial machine. A gut feeling of
resistance to this could be explored and revealed as just a fear of the new, but it could also be an
aesthetic response that triggers an ethical questioning. Adding the cognitive element that sees
this production method as heavily oil dependent and thus endangered and likely to result in
leaving soils incapable of supporting crops by more traditional methods (a new dust bowl)
adds to that sense of dislocation. Here agriculture is no longer a human use of the landform that
creates aesthetically engaging and satisfying landscapes through a process of accommodation
and working with its affordances. Our gut reaction to this new landscape form and the
difficulty of rousing any positive aesthetic response is a germinal ethical response. That
Carlson needs to shift to an art analogy to find pleasure in the land, as if it were an abstract
painting, could in itself suggest that something is wrong since it runs counter to all the work
accomplished in environmental aesthetics to shift from the scenic as the only means of
appreciating landscape.
Conclusion
Landscape is about wholes and the aesthetic experience of landscapes requires that we consider
the place – that vaguely bounded area – as a whole. We might be attracted to detail or parti-
cular features but the feeling of the whole is our focus. Our thoughts can reach further to the
context of that landscape in history and in the wider environment through many channels of
information. Our thoughts can also sift the emotions, responses, impressions, and intuitions that
arise in order to arrive at considered aesthetic judgements, which can then be discussed and
debated. However, none of this can begin before the experience itself; experience is the bed-
rock of the aesthetic and without it we just recycle the thoughts of others and never enter the
aesthetic field.
Further reading
Bourassa, S. C. (1991) The Aesthetics of Landscape London: Belhaven. (A short and very accessible book on
landscape aesthetics. This would be a useful starting point for anyone new to the area.)
Brady, E. (2003) Aesthetics of the Natural Environment Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (A detailed
examination of environmental aesthetics and particularly useful for its examination of the cognitive vs.
non-cognitive debate.)
Brook, I. (ed.) (2010) ‘Environmental Aesthetics’, special issue of Environmental Values 19:3. (This special
issue contains papers by many of the key theorists in the area including Allen Carlson, Ronald Hepburn,
Arnold Berleant, and Yuriko Saito. It covers the last 50 years and anticipates new directions.)
Moore, R. (2008) Natural Beauty: a theory of aesthetics beyond the arts, Toronto: Broadview Press. (Useful on
the aesthetics of nature and the history of aesthetics, and, like Brady, proposes a combining of the
cognitive and non-cognitive approach.)
Nasar, J. (ed.) (1998) Environmental Aesthetics: theory, research and applications, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press. (Though becoming rather dated, this is a useful textbook with papers on everything from
architectural interiors to natural and rural scenes. It brings together the theories, methods and applications
in a single text.)
Thompson, I. (1999) Ecology, Community and Delight: sources of value in landscape architecture, London:
Routledge. (A helpful book that brings together landscape with design and ecological concerns.)
References
Appleton, J. (1990) The Symbolism of Habitat, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press
Arntzen, S. and Brady, E. (eds.) (2008) Humans in the Land: the ethics and aesthetics of the cultural landscape,
Oslo: Unipub
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Berleant, A. (1992) The Aesthetics of Environment, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
——(2005) Aesthetics and Environment, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing
von Bonsdorf, P. (2005) ‘Architecture, Aesthetic Appreciation and the Worlds of Nature’, Contemporary
Aesthetics 3, available at http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=325&
searchstr=bonsdorf (accessed 11 September 2012)
Boone, J. (2005) ‘The Aesthetic Dissonance of Industrial Wind Machines’, Contemporary Aesthetics 3, available
at http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=319&searchstr=Boone
(accessed 11 September 2012)
Bourassa, S. C. (1991) The Aesthetics of Landscape, London: Belhaven
Brady, E. (2003) Aesthetics of the Natural Environment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Brook, I. (2008) ‘Wildness in the English Garden Tradition: a reassessment of the picturesque from
environmental philosophy’, Ethics and the Environment, 13:1, 105–20
Burke, E, (1997 [1757]) ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful’, abridged in Feagin, S. and Maynard, P. (eds) Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 324–8
Carlson, A. (2002) Aesthetics and the Environment, London: Routledge.
——(2010) ‘Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Requirements of Environmentalism’,
Environmental Values, 19:3, 289–314
Carroll, N. (1993) ‘On Being Moved By Nature: between religion and natural history’ in Kemel, S.
and Gaskell, I. (eds) Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 244–66
Fenton, D.M. and Reser, J. (1988) ‘The Assessment of Landscape Quality: an integrative approach’ in
Nasar, J. (ed.) Environmental Aesthetics: theory, research and applications, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 108–19
Gilpin, W. (1984 [1786]) Northern Tour to the Lakes, etc. Made in 1772, 3rd edn (quoted in Hussey, C.
(1983 [1927]) The Picturesque), London: Frank Cass and Co.
Hepburn, R. (1966) ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty’ in Williams, B. and
Montefiore, A. (eds) British Analytic Philosophy London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Kaplan, R. and Kaplan, S. (1989) The Experience of Nature, New York: Cambridge University Press
Kant, I. (1952 [1790]) The Critique of Judgement, Meredith, J.C. (trans.) Oxford: Oxford University Press
Linton, D.L. (1968) ‘The Assessment of Scenery as a Natural Resource’, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 84,
218–38
Litton, R.B. (1982) ‘Visual Assessment of Natural Landscape’, in Sadler, B. and Carlson, A. (eds) Environmental
Aesthetics: Essays on Interpretation, Victoria, BC: Geographical Series, 97–115
Moore, R. (2008) Natural Beauty: a theory of aesthetics beyond the arts, Toronto: Broadview Press
Muir, R. (1999) Approaches to Landscape, Basingstoke: Macmillan
Nicolson, M. H. (1963 [1959]) Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc
Orians, G. (1986) ‘An Ecological and Evolutionary Approach to Landscape Aesthetics’, in Penning-Roswell,
E. and Lowenthal, D. (eds) Landscape Meaning and Values, London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 3–25
Price, U. (1842 [1794]) On the Picturesque, Edinburgh: Caldwell, Lloyd & Co
Porteous, J. D. (1996) Environmental Aesthetics: ideas, politics, and planning, London: Routledge
Ruskin, J. (2010 [1856]) Modern Painters, Vol. 4, Gutenberg EBook #31623, available at http://www.
gutenberg.org/ebooks/31623 (accessed 11 September 2012)
Saito, Y. (2004) ‘Machines in the Ocean: the aesthetics of wind farms’, Contemporary Aesthetics, 2,
available at http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=247 (accessed
11 September 2012)
Sibley, F. (1959) ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, Philosophical Review, 68:4, 421–50
Tuan, Y. (1993) ‘Desert and Ice: ambivalent aesthetics’ in Kemel, S. and Gaskell, I. (eds) Landscape, Natural
Beauty and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 139–57
Watelet, Claude-Henri (2003 [1774]) Essay on Gardens: a chapter in the French Picturesque, S. Danon (trans.),
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press
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10
Landscape, performance
and performativity
David Crouch
UNIVERSITY OF DERBY
Through the last decade there has been a critical engagement with notions of landscape – as
process, as practice – within the social sciences and humanities. This work problematizes the
ways in which, since the 1980s and in part for much longer, landscape had been conceptualized.
This adjustment raises new challenges and potential for the practice of landscape-related
research. Similarly, it raises issues concerning the relationship between institutional notions of
landscape and this wave of re-conceptualization. At the centre of these challenges and oppor-
tunities is the rethinking of landscape as process rather than object; subjectively ‘in the making’
rather than as an assemblage of physical features.
This chapter presents the key themes in this re-grounding of landscape and outlines its con-
sequences for landscape research. At its centre lies a consideration of matters of performance and
performativity. It is argued that these emergent concepts mobilize new approaches to both
discussions that surround the matter of landscape and fresh ways of professionally engaging with
it in adjusting, conserving and changing the material with which professional landscaping is
handled. Despite the apparent complexity and awkwardness of the terms considered in this
chapter, they address very practical, real-life and place matters. The chapter commences with an
articulation of the arguments surrounding what performance and performativity are, and their
critical orientations of theory. From this discussion emerge directions for further investigation,
understanding and thus application in work related with landscape. The chapter then
unpacks the emergence and key approaches in performance and performativity, and related
terms, and directs explanation towards making sense of landscape. This discussion, as perfor-
mance itself, attends to a very individual, human level and the importance of its feeling, away
from representational closure. This positioning of performance–performativity in matters of
understanding landscape is articulated through recent debates concerning space and the idea of
flirting with space.
Awkwardly, the understandings so far are taken next to matters professional – practitioners,
academic and otherwise. It is argued that an engagement with performance–performativity is
valuable, crucial and, moreover, practical in progressing the professional affect on the sites that
individuals encounter in their lives. In the final section, an emergent case for further under-
standing what landscape is and how it works, and the orientations of research and professional
practice conclude the chapter.
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David Crouch
Performance, performativity and traditions of representation

Performance is a term often associated with particular procedure, repetition and certainty. In her
writing, Judith Butler (1997) discusses the ways in which our practice and behaviour are shaped
by, for example, gender. Exemplified in dance, particular patterns and intensities of movement
are proscribed (Nash 2000). Each ‘performance’ is done, enacted, the same; each time reaf-
firming its content, character and value. Likewise with the former grasp of performance, what
we identify in or as landscape may be explained through the power of structures, in particular
those of representations: contexts through which landscape is experienced. Those contexts have
been identified as aesthetic, often historically given or channelled; particularly affected, even
shaped and determined, through literature, painting and other arts and designs. Thus, landscape
is contextualized in particular exercises of power and ideology (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988).
Such explanations privilege context and imply a linear and structural way in which landscape is
given meaning and value.
The idea that landscape, as, for example, dance, is contextualized in the way it is grasped
epitomizes a representational way of thinking about landscape or understanding how it works.
Moreover, in the case of landscape, this representational ‘perspective’ privileges landscape as
experienced visually – concerns ways of seeing; features composed in perspective and particular
aesthetics. Individuals ‘see’ sites they visit through a ‘gaze’, marked by detachment and overseership
(Rose 1993). Representations act as the referent and channel for knowing landscape.
Repetition does not fulfil the whole character of performance: performance varies, and may
bear the traces of the individual performer’s gesture (Ness and Noland 2008). Practice, doing
things, may occur through untaught ways of action, as Iris Marion Young (1991) acknowledged
of her daughter’s growing up and how she threw a ball. Dance has been articulated as a bodily
practice of endless individual variation (Thrift 1997). Just as dance has been unscrambled from
merely its contextual determination, so has landscape. In the past decade and more, a serious
rethinking of landscape has emerged. One key influence on this revision has been work influenced
by performance studies and in particular awkwardly named work on performativity.
Performance understands the manner, the complex character of the ways in which we
engage in doing, acting, getting a grasp on how and where we are. Performance is a component
of the active and felt way in which we do things and feel about them. Performativity happens
in performance. This way of thinking about how we encounter space or landscape emerges in a
webbed collection of theories unfortunately labelled ‘non-representational theory’, significant
across a wide range of disciplines and influential discussions in humanities, social sciences and art
theory (Thrift 2008; Crouch 2010b). This new arena of theory gives emphasis away from the
affect and power of representations, and their familiarly senior partner, the visual, in forming
and shaping the way the individual understands and values the world and things they and others
do. Instead of examining the work of representations it examines moments of occurrence;
things as they happen; connections between things that happen and how they feel and are
understood and valued. The emphasis of the performative in performance is a significant com-
ponent of this collection of new theoretical work, and perhaps of particular insight for studies of
landscape. Unfortunately, the label’s epithet ‘non-’ here implies the exclusion of representa-
tional approaches, in this case for landscape; rather, our thinking can, and needs, to be inclusive
in considering how representations and performativity relate.
Particular aspects of performativity come in relation to its potential to reconstitute life (Grosz
1999). Butler’s emphasis on performance and performativity is in terms of: being ritualized
practice, working to pre-given codes, habitually repeated, and conservative (Carlsen 1996).
However, she acknowledges the possibility whereby relations with contexts may be
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Landscape, performance, performativity
reconfigured, broken, adjusted, or negotiated (Lloyd 1996; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000)
thus affecting, as well as being the affect of, context. Performativity – in the opportunities,
breaks, unexpected occurrences and happenings in life, in doing, feeling and thinking, the
unexpected – means that change is an open book. Things are not constrained by contexts and
their communication in representations. Things can happen ‘anew’; in the moments of
being alive.
Being somewhere, for example, can feel different from the way that ‘where’ was expected to
feel; even in the feel of somewhere different from when we may last have been there. Fur-
thermore, the performativity in ‘performing’ a site, an experience, emerges in part in things we
do and the way we do them; and in relation to where we are. One fascinating component of
performativity – in terms of the unexpected, half-expected and the intended – is that all these
factors work and commingle; they can be useful in how we negotiate our lives in relation to
situations in which we find ourselves, for example our surroundings. Elizabeth Grosz’s and
others’ discussions of how we can find ourselves doing things, using and visiting particular sites,
places, through the time of our living, involve multiple and relational tendencies towards
‘holding on’ and ‘going further’ (Grosz 1999; Thrift and Dewsbury 2000; Crouch 2003).
Moreover, performance and performativity work, not as poles of opposites, in bi-linear succes-
sion, but in flows, oppositions and conjunctions; the predictable and the unexpected commin-
gling in sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic ways. Performance and performativity are lively,
active and uncertain.
Although performance can emphasize the framework of everyday protocols, the performative
errs towards the potential of openness. The reconfiguring, or reconstitutive, potential of per-
formance is increasingly cited in terms of performativity; as modulating life and discovering the
new, the unexpected, in ways that may reconfigure the self, in a process of ‘what life (duration,
memory, consciousness) brings to the world: the new, the movement of actualisation of the
virtual, expansiveness, opening up’ – enabling the unexpected (Grosz 1999: 25). Thus, the
borders between ‘being’ – as a state reached – and ‘becoming’ are indistinct and constantly in
flow (Grosz 1999).
Performance and performativity are not distinct areas of theory. Crucial to their explanatory
value is the understanding of things acting in relation with one another. A focal point in non-
representational theory, as emerges in the following section, concerns the ways in which mat-
ters, including matter, are no longer understood in separate channels or spheres of action and
category. The ways things happen, are felt, carry meaning and may be given value relate to one
another; things happen ‘in relation’. Performativity and its consequences in our lives may adjust
the affect of representations; and vice versa. They commingle.
The ideas surrounding performance’s performativity demonstrate and explain how we, in our
actions, intended and in the gaps of uncertainty between the intended and what and how things
actually happen affect, lend character, to our surroundings in the broadest sense. The compo-
nents of landscape, and the ways in which landscape works, are no exception. The materiality
of our surroundings and the way in and through which we relate to them, with them, can be
active in our ‘holding on’ and ‘going further’. In the next paragraphs, the ways in which this
process happens are articulated.
Landscape in flirting with space

Positioning performativity and performance in relation to landscape is to be achieved through a
short detour through the notion of space. Here, I consider the way we encounter what is
around us through a curious notion of ‘flirting’. The idea of flirting is to suggest a nuanced,
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contingent, uncertain, fluid character of the ways in which in our lives we encounter and
engage the materiality around us. In this chapter I am not going to engage particular theory
surrounding this notion of flirting with space in depth, but merely to acknowledge influences
(see Crouch 2010a, 2010b). The energies that flirting with space generates emerges from, for
example, the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004), who have helped unravel and unwind
familiar philosophies of the vitality of things, the multiplicities of influences and the way they
work in a world of much more than the result of human construction. They offer a means to
rethink the dynamics of space. Their term spacing introduces a fresh way of conceptualizing the
process-dynamics of the unstable relationality of space/life and space/time. Spacing occurs in
the gaps of energies amongst and between things; in their commingling.
Space becomes highly contingent, emergent in the cracks of everyday life, affected by and
affecting energies both human and beyond human limits. Spacing has the potential, or in their
language potentiality, to be constantly open to change; becoming, rather than settled (Doel 1999;
Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Buchanan and Lambert 2005). In these respects there is resonance
with Massey’s conceptualization of space as unfixed; always in construction and relational –
taken to a more human character in everyday life. These cracks and gaps are the sites and
moments of performativity in our performing space; often intimate and momentary, but with
the potential of much larger significance in doing, feeling and thinking. They relate to the
tactics of de Certeau (1984), although he tended to emphasize their intentionality with Bachelard’s
(1994) feeling of intimacy. New encounters, however seemingly familiar, have the potential to
open up new relations. Just as performativity has the character of holding on and going further:
security of feeling and identity, and adventure, trying, or discovering the new, these may
be characterized as and in being and becoming; both passive and dynamic (Crouch 2003,
2010a, 2010b).
Sight is felt, but in a mingling of senses, feeling and thought. Ness and Noland (2008: xiv)
observe that gesture ‘cannot be reduced to a purely semiotic (meaning–making) activity but
realizes instead – both temporally and spatially – a cathexis deprived of semantic content …
gesture can … simultaneously convey an energy charge’. Phenomenology connects a ‘fleshiness’
in the way our performativity works. For the space-philosopher Casey, meaning is framed in a
kind of expectation (Casey 2005); and place is best understood as experimental living within a
changing culture (Casey 1993).
How do these adjustments affect how landscape is felt, or the character of its expressivity in
representation? J.B. Jackson (1984) argued the importance of mobility in understanding landscape,
for conceptions of landscape as lived in and also moved amongst. Cosgrove’s most powerful
engagement with practised landscape is where he shifts dramatically from considerations of
renaissance and other grand design to the character of walking in British hills and is brought to
confront a very different landscape of everyday encounter (Cosgrove 1984: 267–9).
Landscape would seem to emerge in the poetics and expressivity of engaging space in com-
plex, uncertain and widely affected ways. The art theorist Griselda Pollock refers to paintings of
landscape as the poetics of experience, ‘a poetic means to imagine our place in the world’
(Pollock 2004: 25). The register of landscape in this way would seem to extend well beyond
artwork that provides a mutually vibrant depth, of mutual accessibility. A poetics of space, in
and as landscape, emerges performatively in the making of representations and in life more generally.
Through considering landscape beyond its earlier frameworks, representations emerge as part
of a much wider relational field in which action and reflection can be grasped in a broader
process of making space in spacing. Spacing offers a way to rethink how and where landscape
relates in life. This more explorative, uncertain and tentative way in which spacing can occur
suggests a character of flirting: opening up, trying out, unexpected, multiply affected and
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embodied. Representations can be fluid and ‘real’ beyond their character as objects. Expressive
poetics can emerge in spacing. Spacing offers a way of thinking through how space is given
meaning and how landscape may relate in this process. In varying degrees of permanence and
emotion and across different situatedness, individuals negotiate life. The emergent landscape
evoked in any one location may bear traces of other, earlier experiences there and elsewhere,
merging the ways in which landscape happens, relationally.
Cultural resonance emerges as one way in which landscape is informed. Landscape erupts in
this process as an expressive and poetic act of which artwork is unexceptional. Representations
are borne of the performativity of living, Matless (1992) noted. The liveliness of performativity
is available to individuals who encounter these representations. Thus in no sense are repre-
sentations fixed or closed to change. They are open to further interpretation and feeling.
Representations and their projected cultural significance remain open too, ‘available’ for further
work. The certainty of representations can be disrupted in this complex/multiple process of
spacing: available, open and flexible. They can underscore processes of identity (Edmonds 2006;
Tilley 2006). Rather than hold on too closely to the familiar debates concerning institutional
power, space and its ideologies of landscape, often those tenors of landscape design, there is
potential of diverse constitutions of identity through the performative emergence of landscape.
Ideas of ‘land’ and feelings of identity through belonging and tensions relate with the con-
tingent constitution of attitudes, values and meanings that become affective through practice
and subjectivity.
The materiality of surroundings can collide with something else that resonates a sense of our
own lives and has the power to reassemble it. Such intensities of significance, or merely calm
moments of reassurance, happen across the range of performativities and their circulation in
representations. Landscape resonates a capacity of belonging, disorientation and disruption.
Landscape is not perspective and horizon, or lines, but felt smudges, smears, kaleidoscope, a
multi-sensual expressive poetics of potentiality, becoming and poetics.
Landscape as encounters’ expression

Landscape is a word that has considerable popular purchase. The ‘stuff’ that is often substituted
for what is meant by landscape tends to be more in terms of countryside, but it can also include,
broadly, the assemblage of landforms, concrete shapes, fields, gutters, designed spaces and ser-
endipitous collections of things. Implicitly included are our own bodies that are now enlivened
into the ‘landscape’. Cresswell (2003) persistently points to a problem with the (merely) com-
monsensical character of ‘landscape’, yet prefers the even more prevailingly popular word place
as a relevant geographical category, as do Massey (2005) and Tuan (2001). Moreover, reflecting
on the tradition of understanding landscape, particularly in human geography, Cresswell (2003)
claims the tendency in the conceptual grounding of landscape into the early twenty-first cen-
tury as an ‘obliteration of practice’. In this section, I attend to practices’ performativity: first, by
examining art practice, then everyday lives and their flexible landscapes in construction.
In wandering around parts of England, the Cornish and International Movement artist Peter
Lanyon wanted to express in words as well as paintings and constructions his affective emersion
in what he called ‘environments’, as a means to break with traditions of ‘landscape’. These
environments or spaces provoked responses, feelings and ideas in his process of painting (Crouch
and Toogood 1999; Crouch 2010a, 2010b). His paintings sought to express movement, and the
tensions he felt in wandering, turning, and so on. Of course, the immediacy of these encounters
combines with other durations of feeling and encounter at longer trajectories. Contexts of
representation and memory affected his art practice. Repairing damaged planes in wartime, he
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had heard – and continued to hear – stories of the hardness and insecurity of labour in his
craggy corner of the world, in deep mines under the sea. His tuition with more traditional
artists gave him the ability to see and to structure. His conversations with the Norwegian con-
structivist sculptor Naum Gabo’s fascination for both immanence of possibility, almost infinite
manual and emotional performativity with space in making constructions. Their conversations
contributed to the ‘contexts’ developed with his phenomenological and performative encounters
and a feeling of going further, and holding on.
There is an embodied character of his encounters that were evidently profoundly performa-
tive. As Lanyon walked he felt surrounded by space but also, implicitly, he was feeling varying
intensities of different moments and memories. Varying sensualities, movements and stillness
merge and flow through his work, commingle inter-subjectively and with expressive character.
The work involved walking in the areas he sought to paint and, later, gliding. In doing his
artwork he would walk an area, return to his studio, paint, return to the area, and so on,
reworking his art (Crouch and Toogood 1999). Painting and making constructions were
mutually enfolded in the way he worked.
He noted acute momentary awareness: ‘flowers moving’, ‘gates uneasy’ with themselves; at
one moment the cliff and sea being on one side at one angle; the next, at the other. Taking
these moments to the studio, he worked bodily in intimate and large movements against the
canvas, inscribing, scraping, turning his body in expression of his ways of moving and of
experiencing space. He likened the rhythms of painting to those of gardening, but acted also in
urgency and anxiety with the tortured histories and lives in what he painted.
Art theorist Barbara Bolt argues that:
it is not an easy matter to produce an intense series (of artwork) that is transformative; to
do so is likely, to say the least, to rely on openness and becoming in performance; indeed
much the same may apply to the practice of everyday life.
(Bolt 2004: 184)
Bolt emphasizes the performativity of landscape. Taking the idea of performativity in and of
artwork further, representations continue to participate in flows of poetic possibilities in their
public encounter. Art practice comes through these connected observations as happening way
beyond the ‘borders’ of easel, studio and gallery, and works from life, everyday feelings and
performativities, as Lanyon spoke, familiar sites habitually visited one day just come across with
utterly new feeling, ‘unawares’. I have investigated the ‘landscape’ of the community gardener,
allotment holder. The following paragraphs engage their performativity and/of landscape.
Community gardener Carole Youngson describes gardening in the following way:
[W]orking outdoors feels much better for your body somehow … more vigorous than day
to day housework, much more variety and stimulus. The air is always different and alerts
the skin, unexpected scents are brought by breezes. Only when on your hands and knees
do you notice insects and other small wonders. My [community garden] is of central importance
in my life. I feel strongly that everyone should have access to land, to establish a close
relationship with the earth … essential as our surroundings become more artificial.
(Crouch 2003: 1956)
As a community gardener, Youngson articulates an emergent feeling about space that is also a
way of making sense of her life: an ethics of rented land and ecology, a sense of touch and body
movement, the affect of nature in loosely articulated fragments. An active feeling of calm ten-
sion between holding onto particular identities, values and gentle poetics is explored and
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deepened in fresh ways through what she does and where she does it. In the negotiation of
meaning and relationships, attitudes can adjust. She makes an ‘art’ of this, relationally patterning
the ground and her feeling of it through what she does and how she does it; a situated practice
and performance that builds and reassures and agitates. In Youngson’s expression of her feeling,
there is a curious combination of intense engagement and the self almost lost in a wider
intensity of events through which landscape is detonated.
Spending time in unfamiliar spaces ‘away from routine’ (in sense both of distance and feeling)
offers an experience that involves a space of performance that can be acutely open and sensitive
to the affects outside the self; sites, in the most gentle encounter of flirting with space, can
be transformed in our expressive poetics. Norwegian geographer Inger Birkeland narrates a visit
to the Arctic Circle at midsummer in Scandinavia:
In the evening I was waiting for the deep red midnight sun. I was alone but didn’t feel lonely.
We were many who shared the act of waiting for the midnight sun. … Even if we were
strangers to each other, there was a mutual feeling of waiting for the midnight sun … as
more and more visitors arrived at the cliffs, I felt like I was walking in a multicultural, multi-
coloured city. … The words uttered were uncomplicated, the kind of words that sound
trivial outside the there and then. But they were not trivial, rather they represented another
way of creating meaning out of the meaningless, Order out of Chaos, light out of darkness.
(Birkeland 1999: 17)
Yet in habitual practice, such as periodically spending time at one familiar site can offer similar
experience. A feeling of being detached yet full of emotion emerges in the example of regular
short distance recreational vehicle travelling (caravanning) in England:
it all makes me smile inside. I mean, everyone just comes down to the ford and just stands
there and watches life go by. It’s amazing how you can have pleasure from something like
that. I just sit down and look and I get so much enjoyment out of sitting and looking and
doing nothing. We wake up in the morning, open the bedroom door and you’re like
breathing air into your living.
(Crouch 2003: 1955)
Just like the allotment cultivator, the site and its materiality, weather and air, crumbly soil and
other things, become conjured up through the uncalled moments of performativity. The
feeling of oneself, others and materiality around us can take on new significance in a process of
flirting with space; it becomes landscape. What they say appears to exceed the prefigured and emerges
from doing. In these two brief narratives we can identify the ‘conjuring up’, the occurrence of
landscape; sometimes temporary, sometimes more lasting, and returned to in our feeling.
Participation in landscape and pointers for more investigation

Landscape professionals and practitioners can be involved in constituting something of the
meaning and feeling of landscape in individuals’ lives. However, there is a need to embrace the
feeling and expressive potentialities of that living; perhaps to suggest and to leave opportunities;
not to confine or to limit expressions. In working through these observations on landscape, it
becomes evident that closure in design-ing, or landscape-ing, is problematic. It is possible,
eminently, to shape a site; to include colour, register and intensity in different ways such that it
may affect or ‘colour’ feeling. Crucially, the encounter with and register of materiality in our
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performance is bodily, not merely visual. Landscape is not the assemblage, however fore-
thought, of materials, living and non-living. Those are the materials that may be engaged
performatively in the performance of space in a manner of flirting.
Landscape as production of design, conservation and restoration practices and so on can affect
feeling, meaning, values and attitudes. Performativity offers a rich and exciting challenge and
opportunity. Work on allotments and community gardens in design and sensitivity and open
aesthetics is exemplary (Crouch and Wiltshire 2005). The notion of providing permanent or
total landscape opportunity in pre-figured ‘landscapes’ is usually mistaken. It is acknowledged
that there is an affect of context and that includes intended professional work, yet of course
landscape is more than that. Performativity challenges the intervention of the designer and her
creativity. Everyone participates in the creativity available anywhere. Whilst necessarily sensitive
and responsive to non-human life, in such as conservation, openness and sensitivity is crucial.
Design can close the potential of performativity. Design must be participatory, and yielded
through appropriate investigative methods.
One line of travel for landscape as constructed affect on a poetics of landscape concerns how
its doing can be informed through researchers’ investigations. The character of its research
needs, in order to assist individuals’ performance–performativity, is one that is generous, enga-
ging, empowering, that acknowledges the importance of individuals’ lives in doing and feeling;
flirting and encountering. Too frequently ‘research’ into what individuals like is reductively
posed in largely predetermined sites of answers to questionnaires, and, more reductively, in
‘look-checks’ on given, selected visual material. These, especially the latter, bear no resemblance
whatsoever to the performative–performance character in the occurrence of landscape; indeed,
they can occlude rather than include what is happening. They can present flows of power
rather than giving of power.
In-depth discussions, conversations and open interviews offer means to break from the
constraints of familiar landscape-related investigation. Landscape or, rather, the opportunity of
the expressive-poetics landscape can be, can enrich human (as well as non-human) lives. Landscape
is enmeshed with feelings of belonging, disorientation; belonging-disorientation-belonging
being an active performative cycle (Crouch 2010b). Landscape emerges in the memory amongst
individuals, probably more than in its pre-figuring (Crouch 2009). Investigations – with individuals
and clusters of individuals – requires a participatory approach, as with design itself.
From thinking through the occurrence of landscape in and through performance and its per-
formativity, it becomes evident that familiar evaluations of ‘landscape’ can become enormously
problematic in the nuanced, human complexity of what landscape is and how it happens.
Finally, there is a rich terrain ready for understanding, in situ as in ideas, the ways in which
representations and other contexts through which landscape may be felt, experienced and
understood merge with, contest, rebound and flow in relation with processes like performance
and performativity.
It is in doing and feeling that individuals, we, you and me – through our performativity –
constitute, if momentary, our landscapes. These may be influenced by representations, or, per-
haps more so, our own memories and the relation between this site and its materiality and our
doing, and somewhere else; between our feeling and expressive poetics of this site now, and at
other times. Landscape occurs.
References
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Birkeland, I. (1999) ‘The Mytho-poetic in Northern Travel’, in Crouch, D. (ed.) Leisure/Tourism Geographies.
London: Routledge, pp. 17–33
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Bolt, B. (2004) Art Beyond Representation. London: I.B. Tauris

Buchanan, I. and Lambert, G. (eds)(2005) Deleuze and Space, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance, London: Routledge
Carlsen, M. (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge
Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-world, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press
——(2005) Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape, Wisconsin, MI: University of Minnesota Press
Cosgrove, D. (1984) Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, Beckenham: Croom Helm
——and Daniels, S. (eds)(1988) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design
and Use of Past Environments, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Cresswell, T. (2003) ‘Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice’, in Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S.
and Thrift, N. (eds) Handbook of Cultural Geography, London: Sage, pp. 269–81
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Planning A 35: 1945–60
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Lanyon’, Ecumene 6(1): 72–89
——and Wiltshire, R.J. (2005) ‘Designs on the Plot: The Future for Allotments in Urban Landscapes’, in
Viljoen, A. (ed.) Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes, London: Architectural Press, pp. 124–31
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California Press
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum
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in Time, Memory and Futures, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 5–28
Jackson, J.B. (1984) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Lloyd, M. (1996) ‘Performativity, Parody and Politics’, in Bell, V. (ed.) Performativity and Belonging,
London: Sage, 195–214
Massey, D. (2005) For Space, London: Sage
Matless, D. (1992) ‘An Occasion for Geography: Landscape, Representation and Foucault’s Corpus’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 10: 41–56
Nash, C. (2000) ‘Performativity in Practice: Some Recent Work in Cultural Geography’, Progress in
Human Geography, 24: 653–64
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Pollock, G. (2004) ‘The Homeland of Pictures: Reflections on Van Gogh’s Place Memories’, in Tucker, J.
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M. (eds) Geographies of Resistance, London: Routledge, pp. 124–54
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Landscape culture and heritage
11
Landscape archaeology
Sam Turner
NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
Landscape has come to be of central importance for archaeologists. Introductory textbooks

make this point clearly:
Archaeology is basically about three things: objects, landscapes and what we make of them.
It is quite simply the study of the past through material remains.
(Gamble 2001: 15)
Despite the fact that the term ‘landscape archaeology’ has only come into common usage in the
last twenty years or so (David and Thomas 2008a: 29), the whole discipline is now informed by
approaches that move beyond individual finds or sites to consider relationships between people,
places, animals and things at much broader scales. The importance of landscape for archaeology
is demonstrated through recent books such as Bruno David and Julian Thomas’s 2008 Handbook
of Landscape Archaeology, a volume that runs to 65 chapters and over 700 pages, including a great
range of theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives (David and Thomas 2008b).
In the past few years archaeologists have increasingly come to appreciate that the material
things they study are important elements in networks of relationships that can be analyzed to
understand and explain people’s experience of the world. New possibilities are opening for
landscape archaeologists to place their subject at the heart of analyses and debates about society,
the environment and the world in general. In many countries, archaeologists’ work is now used
to inform conservation strategies, landscape management and spatial planning, so archaeologists
are contributing in a practical way. With their exclusive focus on the past, earlier definitions of
landscape archaeology (even broad-ranging ones such as Clive Gamble’s, cited above) have
begun to seem rather narrow. Relationships between people, places and things can be traced
and explained not only in past landscapes, but also from the past to the present, and on into the
future. The focus of most archaeological work will certainly remain on the analysis of past
landscapes, but archaeologists also believe they have something valuable to contribute to
managing and improving the landscapes of the present and future (Turner and Fairclough 2007;
Fairclough and Møller 2009).
The developing focus in archaeological theory on understanding the relationships that shape
landscapes marks something of a change of emphasis compared to recent decades. In the 1980s
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Sam Turner
and 1990s, much theoretical writing in archaeology was focussed on interpreting representa-
tions, textual metaphors and cultural perceptions. Archaeologists have been strongly influenced
by cultural geography, where the dominant paradigm at the time concentrated more on ana-
lyzing representations than on studies of physical landscapes. Archaeologists engaged usefully
with these approaches, but they were often troubled by what appeared to be a retreat from
empirical work, since even the most theoretically minded of them like to deal with material
things. Nevertheless, there was a widespread feeling that these new theoretical approaches pre-
sented more satisfying ways to understand social life than earlier ways of working. From the
1950s to the 1970s, archaeologists and historians concerned with landscapes were either writing
in rather a romantic mode, without much theoretical self-criticism, or turning to scientific
analytical methods that focussed on economic and environmental drivers but seemed to neglect
the relationships between people. In this chapter I will outline some of the principal develop-
ments in landscape archaeology and consider how emerging perspectives relate to archaeological
research more generally. This article can only present a short outline, and interested readers will
find longer historiographical discussions in other recent publications (e.g. Johnson 2007a;
Chouquer and Watteaux 2012).
Landscape archaeologies
In his recent review Matthew Johnson has explained how landscape archaeologists’ interpreta-
tions are deeply affected by their theoretical positions, interests and knowledge (Johnson 2007a).
This has not always been fully appreciated or acknowledged. Landscape archaeology is by
definition an interdisciplinary field, but the nature and strength of influences from the humanities
(particularly history and studies of the ancient world), the biological and physical sciences, and
the social sciences (particularly anthropology and geography) have significantly shaped different
approaches.
In the early twentieth century, little or no training was available specifically in archaeology,
so archaeologists who studied landscapes usually had backgrounds in other disciplines. One
of the most influential landscape archaeologists of the early twentieth century was
O.G.S. Crawford. His training was as a geographer, but he had realized during active service as
an airman in the 1914–18 war that archaeological sites could be identified from the air and
recorded using air photography (Figure 11.1). He spent much of his career surveying features in
archaeological landscapes as Archaeological Officer for the UK national mapping agency, the
Ordnance Survey. Crawford made a famous and powerful analogy between the landscape and a
‘palimpsest’ – a piece of vellum used many times for different texts. According to Crawford, the
landscape is like:
… a document that has been written on and erased over and over again; and it is the
business of the field archaeologist to decipher it. The features concerned are of course the
field boundaries, the woods, the farms and other habitations, and all the other products of
human labour; these are the letters and words inscribed on the land. But it is not always
easy to read them because, whereas the vellum document was seldom wiped clean more
than once or twice, the land has been subject to continual change throughout the ages.
(Crawford 1953: 51)
At the time Crawford was writing, this comparison between the landscape and a historical
document would have been immediately understandable to his academic contemporaries, since
many of them had trained as historians. Indeed, it was from about this time that English
132
Figure 11.1 Darras Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, looking north. Vestiges of medieval and
later agriculture remain as earthworks in the fields at the bottom of the picture,
whereas later ploughing has destroyed visible features in the field beyond. Never-
theless, curving field boundaries of likely medieval date still define these fields, and
have also shaped the layout of the twentieth-century housing estate across the road
to the north-west (Photo: S. Turner, November 2005).
landscape historians such as W.G. Hoskins, H.P.R. Finberg, M.W. Beresford and J.G. Hurst
increasingly took account of the physical evidence for what remained from the past. Never-
theless, the research of Hoskins and his colleagues in the ‘Leicester School’ of local and land-
scape history was firmly rooted in traditional historical methods which entailed the detailed
study of documentary sources from particular localities. In this respect their approach was similar
to many European historical geographers in the mid-twentieth century (e.g. Flatrès 1957).
The importance of the ‘historic landscape’ was well established for archaeologists by the
1980s and 1990s. Thanks to the success of scholars such as Hoskins in communicating the
results of research to a wide audience (e.g. Hoskins 1955), such studies had also begun to
influence wider agendas. There was an increasing general awareness of the value of features such
as hedgerows or old farm buildings as ‘historic’ features. Research programmes such as Stephen
Rippon’s Gwent Levels Project were able to show that historic landscape archaeology could be
used to inform and influence large-scale planning of major infrastructure projects, in this
particular case a new motorway (Rippon 1996).
Archaeologists working in this tradition of landscape study began to develop various methods
that are still widely used today. Crawford’s air photography laid foundations for modern aerial
survey. Historical archaeologists have developed new approaches to integrating different sources
about the past including documentary sources, place-names, maps and landscapes (Hicks and
Beaudry 2006). Surveyors recorded earthworks and other features visible on the surface, and
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Sam Turner
developed ways to present and map them (Bowden 1999). In some ways, modern innovations
facilitated by new technologies such as the use of LiDAR data1 to identify archaeological sites
build directly on this earlier work (Bewley et al. 2005).
Some landscape historians (and archaeologists) continue to work in a largely empiricist para-
digm, gathering historical and archaeological information from the landscape and allowing it to
‘speak for itself’ about the modifications and adaptations made by past societies. In a recent
critical review Matthew Johnson has argued that in general work in this tradition does not
engage profitably with theory and is not sufficiently self-reflexive. Johnson identifies a strong
strand of romanticism (Johnson 2007a: 34–69; 2007b), and discusses how Hoskins in particular
wrote evocative, nostalgic (English) histories but failed to engage with important issues such as
colonialism or the exercise of power (Johnson 2005: 114–19). The relationships between the
archaeologists, the nature of the data they were collecting, and their interpretation of those data
remained poorly explained.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the development of a new type of landscape archaeology very
much influenced by earlier developments in geographical theory and practice. It was particularly
concerned with explaining the past with scientific theory and systems thinking (Clarke 1968). It
used the ‘hypothetico-deductive-nomological’ method, which is to say it developed and tested
hypotheses with the aim of building better models and finding laws (Greene and Moore 2010:
264–72). This ‘new’ or ‘processual’ archaeology had several key impacts on landscape archae-
ology. Firstly, there was an emphasis on quantitative spatial methods. These are particularly
associated with techniques such as intensive field survey, where teams of archaeologists metho-
dically collect and plot surface finds (such as ceramics and stone tools) to identify sites and areas
that were the focus of past activity. Such methods provided new ways to create and analyze
maps of ancient settlement patterns (Hodder and Orton 1976). The development of GIS, which
archaeologists now use as a standard tool, has made it much simpler to analyze this kind of
information alongside other archaeological, historical and environmental datasets (Connolly
2008). Secondly, there was much more interest in developing scientific techniques such as
palaeo-environmental and geo-archaeological survey which could help reconstruct models of
earlier landscapes and environments (see e.g. Rapp and Hill 1998; Denham 2008). Archaeo-
logical science remains one of the most vibrant and essential parts of the discipline (Greene and
Moore 2010: 190–241). Thirdly, archaeological excavation itself was used to investigate very
large areas. The techniques developed ranged from excavations designed to reveal archaeo-
logical features over extended, continuous areas (e.g. Hamerow 1993), to very small trenches or
‘test pits’ scattered across landscapes whose aim was to analyze the extent and chronology of past
activity by identifying artefacts deposited in the soil through settlement or agricultural activity
(e.g. Jones and Page 2006). Many of the methods that began to be developed in this period
have continued to be used and refined to the present day (for succinct and up-to-date reviews,
see Carver 2009; Greene and Moore 2010).
The impetus for theoretical change in landscape archaeology came once again from the social
sciences, and particularly from geography. From the early 1970s scholars developed new, post-
modern critiques of what they regarded as positivist, data-driven interpretations that were trying
to create single ‘truths’ about what happened in past landscapes. They were critical of the
apparent lack of interest in social processes and social theory, and a general failure to appreciate
that landscapes were not neutral ‘containers’ but contested spaces (Tilley 1994: 9; Olwig 2004).
‘New’ cultural geographers began to develop new ways to understand landscapes. They argued
that it is landscapes as they are perceived that are most important for how people relate to the
world, and that landscapes are best understood as ways of seeing through a cultural lens: land-
scapes are material, but they only really exist when they are apprehended by a viewer (Widgren
134
2004: 457–8; Cosgrove 2006: 50). For cultural geographers such as Denis Cosgrove and
Stephen Daniels (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988) landscape was always changing, constantly
negotiated and culturally constituted. There is no longer any possibility of discovering single
‘authentic’ meanings in landscapes. As Ken Olwig has argued, their work presented a ‘direct
challenge to what many landscape researchers have seen to be their scholarly mission’ (Olwig
2004: 48). In practical terms, the growing emphasis on landscapes as representations has led
many geographers’ studies away from detailed empirical research towards more general,
theoretical work.
As in geography and many other social science and humanities disciplines, archaeological
theory also went through a period of post-modern revision in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Hodder
1986; Shanks and Tilley 1987). Positivist agendas which concentrated on understanding adap-
tive processes and the economics of subsistence systems were criticized on the grounds that they
failed adequately to engage with social and cultural aspects of life, and particularly the reasons
why societies changed. The new ‘post-processual’ archaeology emphasized interpretative
approaches to social life in the past based on a wide range of theoretical perspectives including
post-structuralism, postcolonialism, hermeneutics and phenomenology. Influenced by Pierre
Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens they highlighted how people shaped social life by developing
archaeologies that interpreted agency, structure and practice (Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984;
Hodder 1986; Barrett 1994; Thomas 1996). They attempted to understand how people
experienced the past by adapting phenomenological perspectives to archaeological landscapes
(Tilley 1994; 2004; Bender et al. 2007). One of the key differences between much writing in
‘new’ cultural geography compared to the post-processual and interpretative archaeologies
practised over the last two decades is that archaeologists have continued to engage with material
culture (for a detailed discussion, see Hicks 2010). Thus Daniel Miller’s anthropology of con-
sumption focussed on the ways material things were used in social relationships (Miller 1987),
and Ian Hodder’s contextual archaeology made the analogy between objects and texts: material
culture could be ‘read’ or interpreted as reflecting elements of social life (Hodder 1986; 1990).
The emphasis on context, combined with the great time-depth of the archaeological record, has
led many archaeologists to share the annaliste historians’ concern for analyzing trajectories of
change over the long term (Gosden 1994; Morris 2000).
Some commentators have criticized landscape archaeologists for creating static scientific
‘knowledge’ about the past that cannot accommodate differing viewpoints on historic monu-
ments from the present (or other times in the past) (Riley and Harvey 2005). In the wake of the
‘post-processual’ archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s this is no longer really valid as a criticism
of archaeology as a whole, which has recognized that material culture in general and landscapes
in particular are given meanings in different ways by different people. However, by highlighting
changing interpretations of the same monuments and landscapes over time, Mark Riley and
David Harvey illustrate two key points: firstly, that knowledge and perception are fundamental
to interpreting landscape; and secondly, that landscapes change (Lavigne 2003; Antrop 2005;
Turner and Fairclough 2007).
The trend towards interpretative perspectives, the importance of perception and a real
interest in the ‘ordinary’ as opposed to the ‘special’ has been reinforced by recent developments
in policy, such as the European Landscape Convention (ELC) Although the ‘natural’ is present
in its definition, the Convention describes ‘landscape’ in human terms:
an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction
of natural and/or human factors.
(Council of Europe 2000, Article 1)
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Sam Turner
The framework provided by cultural geography, post-processual archaeology and the changing
policy context have encouraged landscape archaeologists to respond by developing methods that
accommodate these ideas in practice.
An example of one such method is known in the UK as Historic Landscape Characterization
(HLC). HLC is an archaeological method that aims to present landscapes with particular reference
to their historical development over the long term (Fairclough 2003; Turner and Fairclough
2007, and Herring, this volume). In line with the ELC, the method recognizes that landscape is
ubiquitous and that it can be perceived in different ways. However, the interpretations of
landscape it presents are rooted in (or constrained by) the recognition that landscape has a
physical dimension: landscape as material culture (see Figure 11.2). Thus landscape archaeology
in general and the HLC method in particular might be used to bring together the perceptual
and the material for a better understanding of landscapes. One of the problems has been that as
cultural geographers’ representational understandings have drifted further and further away from
landscape historians’ empirical ones, it has become increasingly difficult to see how this might be
done. A relational understanding of landscapes such as the one promoted in recent geographical
and archaeological approaches might provide a practical way of achieving this aim.
Rather than creating a ‘definitive’ map of landscape features with particular set values, an
HLC sets out to present an interpretation of more generalized historic character within which
different sorts of value could be negotiated based on differing viewpoints (see Olwig 2004: 42).
Figure 11.2 Landscapes often comprise thousands of related historic, cultural features. The photo
shows a typical landscape of braided terraces and fields with drystone walls near
Mikri Vighla, Naxos, Greece (Photo: S. Turner, August 2009)
136
Figure 11.3 A GIS-based map showing selected archaeological features (terraces, field walls,
Byzantine churches) against a simple HLC of the Aria area, Naxos, Greece. The ana-
lysis is based on sources including satellite imagery and historic air photographs (see
Turner and Crow 2010) (Includes IKONOS material ©2006, Space Imaging LLC. All
rights reserved).
HLC is also a flexible method: in different regions, different HLC types are appropriate because
of differing landscape histories (see e.g. Turner 2007; Crow and Turner 2009; Crow et al. 2011;
Dingwall and Gaffney 2007 present an unusual North American example; see Figure 11.3).
HLCs are created using GIS, and because GIS allows any number of different attributes to be
linked to any given area through a database, HLCs could accommodate a range of different
viewpoints on the same landscapes. Even conflicting interpretations could be mapped and
considered in the same presentation: this might be extended to include not only how landscape
historians (for example) disagree about how to interpret the development of an area in different
ways, but also how people with a range of other points of view might value them. HLCs do
not inevitably create ‘closed’ perspectives that only relate to ‘authentic’ or ‘official’ histories.
Instead they can be open to claims and counter-claims (see e.g. Hall 2006; cf. Williamson 2006:
57–9). One potential application of HLC could be to provide a forum for debate about the
value of the landscapes and how we should shape trajectories of change for the future. How-
ever, one of the main difficulties has been to establish how such debate might be achieved.
Explicitly recognizing and exploring the roles and relationships of networks of actors and
referents could provide an effective way to do so (see also Tuddenham 2010).
Material and cultural landscapes

Although the ‘interpretative’ or ‘representational’ paradigm was dominant in cultural geography
and other fields during the 1980s and 1990s, there were geographers who felt that the move to
explain landscapes (and other aspects of culture) as perceptions failed adequately to engage with
important aspects of human experience, particularly material engagement. In particular, scholars
137
Sam Turner
such as Nigel Thrift and Sarah Whatmore have focussed on developing practical geographies that
engage with the material world (Whatmore 2006; Thrift 2007). Their work seeks to overcome
the structural divide between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (or ‘subject’ and ‘object’, or ‘mental’ and
‘material’) that has been present in much research working within the interpretative tradition
(Wylie 2007: 153–66).
In many ways the impetus for this new work comes from the urgency of engaging with real-
world issues such as the state of the environment (now commonly presented in a dynamic sense
as ‘climate change’). Thrift, Whatmore and others build directly on research in philosophy
(Bonta and Protevi 2004) and in science and technology studies, in particular discussions of the
relationships between actants (actor-network theory, e.g. Law 2004; Latour 2005). Incorporat-
ing the material does not necessarily constitute a revolutionary ‘turn’ of the type familiar from
later twentieth-century theoretical writing (the ‘literary’ turn; the ‘cultural’ turn, etc.) but
instead a ‘return’ and refashioning, working a wide range of perspectives into a broadly
conceived but repositioned type of analysis (Whatmore 2006: 601).
This research is also linked to an increasing focus on the significance of material things as
things rather than representations in anthropology. Tim Ingold has called for a deeper appre-
ciation of the thingly qualities of things, which for him result from their inherent qualities
(Ingold 2007; see also Latour 2007). For archaeologists, the appeal of treating material things
seriously is clear, since the principal medium for their work is the fragments and remains of past
material culture (Witcher et al. 2010: 120–3). If a ‘more-than-human’ world is the field of
investigation where things, animals and other entities have important roles in communities of
actants just as people do (Latour 1994; Whatmore 2006), then archaeologists should be well-
placed to contribute to our understandings and explanations of it. New approaches to a ‘more-
than-human’ world have been developed by archaeologists as ‘symmetrical archaeology’, which
is concerned with the entangled relationships between people and things, past and present, and
how they are mixed and changed over time (González-Ruibal 2007; Witmore 2007; Webmoor
and Witmore 2008)
Archaeologists have begun to consider how to explain the relationships between actants in
such networks (or ‘meshworks’: Ingold 2007: 80–2). Once again they have used ideas generated
and developed in other social sciences, particularly geography, for example ‘affect’ (Clough
2007: 2). ‘Affect’ is used as a way to help understand people’s embodied engagements with the
world and their experience of being entangled with it (Tolia-Kelly 2006, 2007; Whatmore and
Hinchcliffe 2010; for a recent archaeological example, see Harris and Sørensen 2010: 150).
For archaeologists, the dynamic nature of the relationships between actants is of central
importance. Change is a central aspect of archaeology, particularly landscape archaeology. We
are continually concerned with understanding how the landscapes we live in today have chan-
ged, and we are now developing better methods for explaining and presenting the chains of
relationships that have created the landscapes we live in. To do this, we need a theoretical
framework that can accommodate methods and perspectives that have been developed across a
wide range of scientific disciplines from the physical sciences through social sciences to philo-
sophy and the humanities. If we are successful, landscape archaeology and its spatial approaches
should be able to provide us with an engaging view not only of the landscapes of the past, but
also of the ones we are creating for the future (Turner and Fairclough 2007).
I have briefly described how the development of landscape archaeology in Britain and else-
where has been deeply influenced by many other disciplines. Self-reflexive, theoretically
informed research must be at the forefront of efforts to create interdisciplinary landscape
archaeologies that draw in theories and methods from many areas of research (Chouquer 2007:
246–9). The relationship with geography has been fundamental, but many sciences, social
138
sciences and humanities have contributed to the development of theory and practical methods.
There is explicit recognition of the importance of tracing the relationships that have influenced
and shaped landscape change over the long term; we now understand that the ancient land-
scapes we study today are the result of hundreds or thousands of years of practice, not fossils
stranded in time from Antiquity (Figure 11.1; Watteaux 2005). Related to this, there is the
recognition that archaeologists can contribute to the management and creation of future land-
scapes. Over the past 10–15 years there has been a sort of theoretical détente in landscape
archaeology that has facilitated the development of integrative, multi-layered approaches to
landscapes. Communication, collaboration and co-investigation at all scales will be made easier
by breaking down the boundaries within and between disciplines in this way.
For landscape archaeologists, finding ways to broaden the field of people we engage with is
crucial. We need to work effectively with other academic disciplines such as landscape archi-
tecture, planning, sociology, psychology, environmental science, ecology and geology. If we
widen our view to include society in general, we find many public and professional groups –
farmers, for example, industrialists or politicians – not to mention the general public who live
in, work with, and pay visits to different landscapes at different times. Because the conceptual
divisions can be so huge, communication and understanding is often fraught with difficulties.
Nevertheless, emerging approaches that emphasize the value of analyzing the many relationships
linking past, present and future landscapes could provide practical ways to bring people together
as partners in landscape work.
Note
1 LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technique that uses pulses of laser light to
detect the distance to a target. Detailed models of surfaces (such as the surface of the ground) can be
created from scans made using ground-based or airborne LiDAR.
Further reading
Carver, M. (2009) Archaeological Investigation. London: Routledge. (An approachable and comprehensive
guide to practical techniques.)
Chouquer, G. (2007) Quels scénarios pour l’histoire du paysage? Orientations de récherche pour l’archéogéographie.
Coimbra/Porto: Centro de Estudos Arqueológicos das Universidades de Coimbra e Porto. (A theoretically
informed European perspective.)
Connolly, J. and Lake, M. (2006) Geographical Information Systems in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. (Detailed guide to GIS in archaeology.)
David, B. and Thomas, J. (2008) Handbook of Landscape Archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
(A wide-ranging collection of recent papers.)
Hicks, D., Fairclough, G. and McAtackney, L. (eds) (2007) Envisioning Landscapes: Situations and Standpoints
in Archaeology and Heritage. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. (Approaches to landscape heritage
informed by archaeology.)
Johnson, M. (2007) Ideas of Landscape. Oxford: Blackwell. (Engaging critique of some traditional approaches
and review of the current position.)
Ucko, R. and Layton, R. (eds) (1999) The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape.
London: Routledge. (A compendious selection of case-studies.)
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Bewley, R., S. Crutchley and C. Shell (2005) ‘New light on an ancient landscape: lidar survey in the
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12
Historic landscapes
Jonathan Finch
UNIVERSITY OF YORK
The study of the historic landscape has a diverse and rich heritage within a number of cognate
disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Attempts to define the historic landscape as
an academic commodity have, mercifully, proved notoriously difficult, preserving its multi- and
inter-disciplinary appeal. Historic landscape studies can, however, be broadly characterized as
sharing a central concern with ‘how people in the past conceptualized, organized, and
manipulated their environments and the ways that those places have shaped their occupants’
behaviors and identities’ (Branton 2009: 51). As such, the inter-relationships between place and
human activity are clearly important, yet the landscape is not limited to being the passive,
neutral, setting for human activity, nor should it be seen as merely another form of artefact,
created by human activity, instead it encompasses material, cognitive and symbolic realizations of
human-environmental relationships.
Any discussion of the subject is immersed within contested and negotiated definition of terms
which are fundamental to the human condition, particularly ‘landscape’ and ‘place’. The geog-
rapher Allan Pred usefully defined place as always involving ‘an appropriation and transforma-
tion of space and nature that is inseparable from the reproduction and transformation of society
in time and space’ (Pred 1984, 279). So whilst many practitioners find it useful to define land-
scape studies as concerned with ‘place’ rather than ‘space’, to denote the primacy of human
intervention and social value attached to meaning in the landscape (Preucel and Meskell 2004),
on another level landscape studies resist association with a single place or site. The issue of scale
is important, as ‘landscape’ is so often used in distinction to site-based enquiry, particularly
within the context of archaeology. So in addition to providing a framework through which to
interpret human behaviour within physical and social spaces, landscape studies also highlight that
behaviour across a series of localities which might include townships, parishes, regions or colonies.
Yet within these broad landscapes, connected and defined by the relationships evident within
them, a series of ‘nested landscapes’ may be discerned representing how different social groups
such as family, kin, community or gender ascribed very different meaning and significance to
the physical spaces within which they lived and worked (Knapp and Ashmore 1999).
Understanding the significance of the historic landscape has moved to the centre of
planning policy in the UK since the ratification of the European Landscape Convention (ELC)
in 2004 (Dejeant-Pons 2006). The convention recognized in law the value within everyday
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Jonathan Finch
landscapes – those fashioned by the traditional ways of life followed by the majority of the
population – as ‘an essential component of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity
of their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity’ – prompting a
new regard for the historic landscape within European definitions of public heritage (Jones
2007). In the UK, the development of historic landscape characterization (HLC) as a planning
tool, provided the vehicle for implementing the ELC. The adoption of the ELC and imple-
mentation of HLC broadly coincided with a series of publications and events to mark the fif-
tieth anniversary of W. G Hoskins’s (1955) The Making of the English Landscape – the publication
which many regard as marking the start of landscape studies. Hoskins’s undoubted legacy was to
establish a popular interdisciplinary subject within the UK, beyond the traditional constraints of
academia. However, his work has been criticized recently for its implicit value system, which is
imbued with nostalgia for an idealized rural landscape – values bequeathed by the Romantic
movement of Wordsworth and Ruskin, who campaigned for the preservation of rural land-
scapes which they saw as threatened by industrialization and modernity (Bender 1998; Johnson
2007). Hoskins was certainly forthright about the threats to the historic landscape from con-
temporary developments he saw around him, in particular, the continuing militarization of the
landscape and the unbridled interests of government bureaucracy and planners in the post-war
period. Significantly, echoes of Hoskins can be discerned within the European Landscape
Convention, with its commitment that the signatories should strive to sustain traditional ways of
life that in turn support diverse forms of landscape character. The wider impact of HLC in the
academic sphere is discussed elsewhere in this volume, (see Herring) so it will suffice to mention
here that within the UK the adoption of HLC has been a contested process, as has the imple-
mentation of the ELC and other forms of landscape designation across Europe (Austin 2007;
Finch 2007; Herring 2009; Krauss 2005; Williamson 2007).
Despite these initiatives and broad public interest in landscape heritage, there have been few
signs of the anticipated revival in historic landscape studies. Most of the contributions to a
three-volume set marking the half century since The Making of the English Landscape noticeably
conformed to what is often characterized as a positivist form of ‘reading the landscape’, based
around small-scale, empirical, intensive local studies, devoted to recording and identifying a set
of associated landscape features, such as a deer park or monastic grange complex (Aston 1985;
Bowden 1999; Muir 2000). Whilst undeniably valuable in recognizing the archaeological assets
within the landscape, few of these studies engage with broader research questions about social
or cultural change, preferring instead to determine a chronology (sometimes a relative chron-
ology) which might then be linked to a general historical narrative about, for example, the
relationship between Roman and post-Roman settlement sites, or the extent of monastic agri-
cultural expansion.
The reaction to this approach was developed by archaeologists seeking to challenge the
totalizing processual frameworks, based on systems theories, which were popular in the social
sciences during the early 1980s. By the mid-1990s the new wave of post-processualism
extended into landscape studies, shifting attention towards more subjective approaches that
eschewed overtly scientific methodologies in favour of the experiential, prompted by prehistoric
landscape studies, that emphasized how individuals engaged with the landscape and how the
environment was an active constituent in their social and cultural lives (Ashmore 2004;
Edmonds 1999; Ingold 2000; Tilley 1994). The crux of the debate between positivist and
post-processual approaches centred on the relationship between people and landscapes, both in
the past, and in the present, where narratives about the past are produced. For the post-
processualists, there was a distinct lack of people within the landscapes described by earlier
landscape studies, which focused on recovering and recording the material features within the
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Historic landscapes
landscape, to the exclusion of how they affected the cultural landscape as experienced by the
inhabitants.
Drawing on phenomenology and anthropological studies of relationships between cultures,
communities and landscapes, post-processualists emphasized that individuals exist within a reci-
procal relationship with our surroundings, rather than being abstracted and separated from it in
a Cartesian sense. Ingold has argued that landscape studies need to recognize the ‘dwelling
perspective’: emphasizing that people were reciprocally engaged with the landscape within
which they lived (Ingold 2000: 194–5). These post-processual approaches reflect, in one sense,
an attempt to reimagine prehistoric mindsets within which individual identities might become
blurred, as did concepts of myth, belief and natural resources. Such approaches have less obvious
advantages within the historic environment, where definitions, identities and relationships
appear, superficially at least, to be similar to those of the modern world. However, historical
studies, of even the recent past, reveal how much those relationships have changed over rela-
tively short periods of time, as working patterns changed dramatically in the first half of the
twentieth century. The secondary aim of post-processual studies is arguably more relevant to
historic landscape studies – that of seeking to connect subjective, fleeting lives with longer term
processes of change that create the material and cultural conditions visible within the landscape
(e.g. Barrett 1994: 1–3). The seasonal rhythms and temporality of practical activities are per-
ceived to ‘congeal’ within the landscape, creating patterns and forms that in turn inform the
continuation of those activities (Ingold 2000: 179). The general tendency, therefore, has been
to shift the focus away from traditional, abstract, external, views of the landscape, to a more
embedded, experiential, perspective. This approach appears to offer enormous potential for
historic landscape studies, with its extensive range of material, documentary and oral history
sources, yet few have taken it up with vigour. Whilst historians have shown the lead with
‘microhistories’ that place detailed narratives about communities within the nineteenth-century
landscape, for example, researchers have been slow to provide fine-grained, populated, land-
scape studies of the same quality (Reay 1996, 2004). This is despite frequent calls to represent
the historic landscape not just as an objective backdrop for social and cultural histories, but as an
inhabited space full of contested and negotiated relationships that are not pale reflections of
historical narratives, but are actually part-and-parcel of those cultural changes.
One of the obstacles to the wider adoption of the post-processual approaches has been that
they are often linked to the use of alternative forms of dissemination, such as creative writing,
which have hitherto been alien to a discipline so indebted to historiographical, rather than the
anthropological, practice. Post-processual narratives have drawn on a wide range of sources and
inspirations, from ethnography to poetry and oral history, in order to integrate direct experience
and emotional engagement with tasks and places apparent within the landscape. However, these
innovations have attracted sharp criticism, notably from Andrew Fleming (2006), who linked
the ‘hyper-interpretive’ style with the belief amongst post-processualists that practitioners
‘have to go beyond the evidence’ (original emphasis, Bender 1998: 7) particularly when reimag-
ining the prehistoric past. Historical archaeologists in the UK have expressed a concern that
they have too much data to assimilate, and so the prospect of ‘going beyond the data’ is rarely
tested or pursued (Austin 1990). Blake has also argued that in seeking to reimagine encounters
with landscape, phenomenological approaches can have a tendency to ‘universalize human
experience, and reduce it to a pre-cultural process onto which contingently derived meanings
are pasted’ (Blake 2004: 236). Historic landscape studies also suffer, arguably, from the apparent
familiarity of its material. The features of the modern landscape are recognized, classified and so
understood. Such an approach operates well, distinguishing or ‘reading’ events within the
‘palimpsest’ of landscape, but tends to reinforce the dualism between physical and cultural
145
Jonathan Finch
landscapes, emphasizing the former over the latter. The historic landscape is assumed to lack the
‘otherness’ that demands critical and theoretical engagement. As a result, it is rarely imbued with
an active role in social processes. This has, in turn, tended to perpetuate the notion that an
economic rationale is the determinant of change and the most significant engine of landscape
change.
One notable example of this is the way in which parliamentary enclosure, which transformed
the landscape of many English regions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, has
been dealt with by landscape studies in terms of the regularization of field boundaries, the
modernization of farming methods, and increased yields and rents per acre, rather than as part of
the cultural project for ‘improvement’, which resulted in radical changes to social relationships
and local geographies (Mingay 1997; Tarlow 2007; Turner 1980). One of the most notable
exceptions to this generalization about how historic landscape studies have tended to ignore
cultural values, has been the study of garden landscapes. Ornamental landscapes in both
Europe and North America have been extensively studied and interpreted in the light of
changing social relationships, power and aesthetics (Bermingham 1987; Leone 1984; Mukerji
1997; Williamson 1995). Yet perhaps significantly, these were uninhabited landscapes;
their significance is declared through the single discourse of aesthetics rather than through
the accumulation of social practice. It might be argued, therefore, that ornamental landscapes
have proved particularly amenable to cultural interpretation because they appear to have a
dominant message about property ownership and control, and can, consequently, be studied
in isolation from the productive landscape and the poly-vocal, mundane patterns of
everyday life.
In response to post-processualism, one of the most commonly adopted approaches to the
historic landscape has been the biographical narrative. This has been particularly true in the USA,
where archaeology has strong disciplinary links with anthropology, rather than history (e.g.
Praetzellis 1998). James Deetz has argued that since archaeologists should consider themselves to
be ‘storytellers’ they should engage with their responsibility to communicate and adopt more
accessible styles of presentation (Deetz 1998). Mary Beaudry (1998), for example, drew women
into the account of a farm excavated at Newbury, Massachusetts, by the ‘discovery’ of journal
fragments relating to the ‘voices’ of four individuals who were known to have lived there in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beaudry deliberately blurs the boundaries
between documentary record and fictional creation until a bibliographic essay at the end of her
piece reveals her sources, techniques and rationale. In the UK the creation of fictional vignettes
and narratives has been used by social historians as parallel texts to the more traditional histor-
iography (Lee 2006), whilst landscape archaeologists have also used vignettes, usually con-
structed from oral testimony in court records from individuals whose voice is rarely heard in the
historical record, since they serve to capture the broader historical currents within a snapshot of
ordinary lives (Whyte 2007).
Others have sought to weave together historical biography with influential landscapes. In his
chapter ‘Three around Farnham’, Raymond Williams (1985) contrasted perspectives on rural
landscapes of the politician and writer William Cobbett, the naturalist Gilbert White and the
novelist Jane Austen, all of whom lived within a few miles of each other on the border of
Surrey and Hampshire at the end of the eighteenth century, but who never actually met.
Williams used their writings to demonstrate the rapid changes in society, landscape and per-
ception, and to lead the reader into a ‘new kind of consciousness’ about the period and the
subject matter. Whereas Williams had to use his imagination to unite the three writers around a
landscape, a similar piece located within the landscape of Harewood House in Yorkshire, uses
historical sources to reconstruct the actual meeting of Humphry Repton, the landscape
146
Historic landscapes
Figure 12.1 Harewood House from the south-east by John Varley c.1805. The view shows the
extensive ‘naturalized’ landscape envisaged by ‘Capability’ Brown around the house
built with profits from the Lascelles involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and
Caribbean (reproduced by kind permission of the Earl and Countess of Harewood
and the Trustees of Harewood House Trust).
gardener, William Wilberforce the abolitionist, and Henry Lascelles from the family who
owned Harewood along with a considerable number of sugar plantations in the Caribbean
(Finch 2008) (see Figure 12.1). In both essays the landscape is the common ground between the
protagonists which brings out significant differences and similarities in perceptions, some of
which are themselves rooted in the experience of other, often very different, landscapes. One of
the best examples of using biographical narratives within a landscape context is Stephen
Daniels’s (1999) biography of Humphry Repton, which is structured around key relationships
between Repton and landscapes at different stages of his life.
Within all of these studies the biographical narrative, either of individuals or of a landscape,
plays an important role. Archaeological studies tend to adopt the idea of ‘artefact biography’ as
developed from anthropological studies (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986) and focus on a small-
scale landscape over the longue durée, or in some cases the narrative relates to an element within
the landscape, such as a building or workshop (Tatlioglu 2010). Others have turned instead to a
concept of landscape biography developed by the cultural geographer Samuels (1979), who was
one of the first to argue landscapes must be conceptualized as active in their ‘authorship’ of
relationships with people and communities. Samuels suggested that ideologies and cultural
representations of space and place, or ‘landscapes of impression’, were themselves the context
for the creation of landscapes, or ‘landscapes of expression’ (Samuels 1979: 72).
147
Jonathan Finch
These tenets of landscape biography have been used to effect in the study of landscapes in the
southern Netherlands, where a large scale project has sought to integrate a historical research
agenda within a development-led project, resulting in a study that preserves a strong sense of
the multilayered nature of landscapes, including the reordering, reuse and representation of the
past, without succumbing to a linear sense of development (Roymans et al. 2009). The project
aimed to view the landscape at various points in time as the ‘interim outcome of a longstanding
and complex interplay between the history of mentalities and values, institutional and govern-
mental changes, social and economic developments and ecological dynamics’ (Roymans et al.
2009: 339), developing the axiom articulated by Meinig: ‘one aspect which is so pervasive as to
be easily overlooked: the powerful fact that life must be lived amidst that which was made before’
(Samuels 1979: 44). Landscapes are active in binding people and generations together, whilst
creating their own life histories at different time scales through successive social contexts.
Interest in the dynamic and sometimes transient relationships between individuals, commu-
nities and resources within the historic landscape have led to the increasing use of actor–
network theory (ANT) as a way of modelling how fluid relationships between people, artefacts
and ideas can affect the patterns or systems of inhabitation. Introduced to the social sciences by
Bruno Latour and by the sociologist John Law, the emphasis upon non-human agency provided
potential for the materiality of landscape (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1999). One of the
most convincing studies to use ANT as a methodology for understanding the relationships
within landscapes, and in particular the impact and importance of non-human agency has been
Jones and Cloke’s Tree Cultures (2002). Jones and Cloke (2002: 1) centre their study on the
agency of trees in an attempt to provide a closely theorized study of the interconnections in
nature–society relations and place relations. In addition to considering the cultural significance
of trees in a manner similar to Daniels’s important earlier paper on the political iconography of
woodland in Georgian England (Daniels 1988), Jones and Cloke use ANT to develop further
the role of trees in both the creation of places of cultural significance, but also their role in the
mundane, everyday practices that through the creation of networks, generate diverse relation-
ships within and across landscapes. If post-processualism is to avoid the criticisms levelled at its
more extreme manifestations, then the methodology provided by ANT has the capability to
include multiple material-semiotic relationships through which multi-vocality can be realized
within landscape studies.
One of the most important areas within which historic landscape studies can make a sig-
nificant contribution is in understanding the global impact and legacy of colonialism. The
extension of competing national interests across the globe is one of the defining features of
modernity and remains the root for many contemporary issues of inequality. Initially, many
studies of plantations in North America and the Caribbean described how the spatial organization of
the landscape reproduced dominant power relationships and mirrored the inequalities inherent
in the slave system by prioritizing social control and surveillance (e.g. Delle 1999). Plantation
studies have also attempted to identify landscapes of resistance within the plantations, to provide
a narrative for those oppressed by the system (Delle 1998, 2000; Orser and Funari 2001). Studies
which sought to understand the landscapes familiar to the enslaved populations, however, were
forced to forego traditional methodologies and rely instead on oral testimony and tradition to
recover the uses and perceptions of landscapes of the enslaved (Pulsipher 1994).
It is notable that critical or interpretive studies of the historic landscape are arguably most
affective in designed landscapes. Early interest in ornamental landscapes in both the UK and North
America identified the manipulation of landscape with the expression of dominant ideologies.
Tom Williamson argued convincingly that the landscapes laid out around late eighteenth-century
country houses articulated the owners’ membership of ‘polite society’ – the emerging
148
Historic landscapes
cultural milieu that sought to integrate traditional landed wealth with that derived from mer-
cantile capitalism (including the Atlantic economy) – whilst serving to exclude members of the
bourgeoisie through the sheer scale of necessary landownership (Williamson 1995). Berming-
ham argued that the shelter belts that were planted to screen many such landscapes were tools of
spatial and visual exclusion, intended to isolate the ornamental landscape from the landscape of
toil and labour beyond, as well as isolating the class of owners from wider society (Bermingham,
1986). Interpretation of the William Paca garden in Annapolis has drawn heavily on structural
notions of geometry reflecting ‘natural’ hierarchies in nature as legitimization for asymmetrical
social relationships (Leone 1984; 2005). However, both ornamental gardens and plantation
landscapes represent examples of landscapes being manipulated to sustain or support particularly
well-defined social relationships: on the one hand the privileged position of the larger land-
owner and on the other the extremes of enslaved labour. The same observation can be made
about many other successful historic landscape studies – Casella’s excellent work on Tasmanian
women’s workhouses (Casella 2001) and De Cunzo’s (2001) study of institutional landscapes
around asylums in Pennsylvania, for example.
Attempts to recover the significance of everyday landscapes are much harder to come by.
Accepting that the bulk of the population did not have the power to remake landscapes on a
grand scale and yet were not without agency, has tended to focus attention back on the indi-
vidual (even the individual body) and onto smaller spaces, such as the domestic interior, where
routine, repetitive, activities might become ‘sedimented’ (De Cunzo and Ernstein 2006, 268).
But such studies open up debate about definitions of landscape and of the universal merit of the
individual, even within the relatively recent historic period.
There has also been a tendency to consider landscape developments in British colonies as
simply reflecting cultural developments in the metropole. However, recent studies have called
for post-colonial studies to de-centre the metropole and consider reciprocity in the relationships
(Hicks 2007). Historic landscape studies have also experienced an ‘ecological turn’ within the
context of post-colonial studies, and a number of important studies have sought to articulate the
impact of colonialism on the environmental resources (Driver and Martins 2005; Grove 1995).
The significance of historic landscape studies within colonial contexts is clearly one that can be
developed further and offers considerable potential given the networks that extend across
Europe and the Atlantic World.
There is still a sense that the traditional interpretations of the historic landscape do not
adequately address how they were used, perceived, or how they related to wider social and
cultural change. The success of biographical narratives in other areas suggests that they might
be one way in which to effectively repopulate and contextualize the historic landscape. The rich
variety of data available from the period makes it difficult to be comprehensive, but it may also
provide the means by which to avoid some of the criticisms that have been made about the
presumptions implicit within creative narratives. The greatest potential would seem to be in
using the empirical diversity and strengths of the historical period as a firm foundation
from which to offer new understandings about how individuals and communities lived and
worked within relationships that were bounded by and within landscapes of meaning: meaning
which was itself diverse, fluid, negotiated, contested and transient, but which was inextricably
linked to both the tangible, material, landscape and to the intangible perception of landscapes.
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13
Emerging landscapes of heritage
David Harvey
Parallel lines
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in both heritage and landscape; as categories of
scholarship and education, of experience and performance, of entertainment and commerce, of
policy engagement, and as markers of identity. Indeed, the two often fit nicely together, tagged
as being cultural and/or natural; tangible and/or intangible; personal and/or collective, and
especially national; as mutual reference points within popular, policy and scientific narratives.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the recent histories of heritage and landscape studies have been
closely intertwined, with their epistemological, ideological and methodological twists and turns
progressing amid a common, broad and interdisciplinary intellectual space. This has not been a
co-dependent evolution as such, although their trans-disciplinary connections would seem to
relate to a common theoretical resource. Rather, our enquiry into landscape and heritage would
appear to be a mutually supporting and sometimes parallel endeavour of intellectual
effort, which explores their significance as meaningful categories of emergence and process.
Furthermore, this recognition of both heritage and landscape as dynamic processes would seem
to be at odds with a commonly cited (and often reactionary) aspiration to fix; to preserve; to
stabilize and otherwise monopolize the meaning of both categories. While other chapters in this
collection implicitly cover the emerging heritage of landscape studies from a variety of per-
spectives, therefore, this chapter reviews the terrain of a dynamic relationship between these
categories. Rather than seeking to reify a series of dualities, the chapter traces the co-ordinates
of how such relations can be blurred, what consequences this line of thinking has, and what
opportunities heritage and landscape scholars have.
Reflecting a wider ‘postmodern turn’ in academia, the pursuit of intellectual questions sur-
rounding both landscape and heritage has transformed over the last couple of decades.1
Interestingly, however, while there appears to be much commonality in these developments,
very few texts have sought specifically to review this disciplinary evolution in parallel.2 Recent
work in landscape studies has emphasized the subjective nature of the term, with new questions
being asked, novel approaches utilized, and a much more sophisticated commitment to social
theory on the research agenda (see Wylie 2007, and other chapters within this collection).
Research in heritage studies has witnessed a similar practice of destabilization and increasing
152
engagement with social theory (see, for instance, Graham et al. 2000, Harvey 2001, 2008;
Howard, 2003; Smith 2006; Ashworth et al. 2007). As a result, both fields of research have now
tended to emphasize the contingent and processual nature of their subjects. While Tunbridge
and Ashworth (1996) and David Lowenthal (1998) emphasize the dissonance and conflict that
lie at the heart of heritage, Gunhild Setten (2006: 73) articulates this dissonance bound up
within landscape heritage as a series of tensions – between nature and culture, past and present,
public and private. Resonating with these sentiments, Wylie (2007: 1) simply notes that
‘landscape is tension’.
A further parallel theme in the trajectory of heritage and landscape studies is the notion of
‘becoming’; that both landscape and heritage are in a constant state of ‘cultural construction,
deconstruction and reconstruction’ (Kelly and Norman 2007: 173). Drawing from earlier work
by Barbara Bender (1998, 2001) that landscapes are never inert or passive, this more dynamic
understanding of heritage and landscape has been a powerful and resonant idea. Lee (2007: 88)
for instance, notes that a processual approach provides the ‘locus for the active “becoming” or
“re-imagining” of social relations, land-use and identity’. This dynamic understanding is
invoked in the work of Werner Krauss (2006, 2008: 427) as he explores landscape and heritage
not as entities that are simply ‘there’, but which are ‘poly-semantic, processual and relational’.
Work suggesting that heritage is not a ‘thing’ nor a ‘site’, but a ‘cultural process of engaging and
experiencing’ (Smith 2006: 44), draws attention towards ‘being in the world’; with heritage as a
verb, related to human action and experience (Harvey 2001: 327). In this respect, the question
is less about what heritage is, and more about what it does. As Setten (2006: 74) notes, heritage
is acted out in a ‘situated contextual and narrative mode of knowing in certain pasts and
presents’.
It is this ‘narrative mode of knowing’ that is bound up with the contextual and dynamic
reading of heritage, which can help us more fully understand the contested arena of landscape
studies. In other words, moving beyond the recognition of a series of parallels within the
intellectual terrains of landscape and heritage studies, I would argue that these mutually sup-
porting conceptual developments have consequences for the study and understanding of both
landscape and heritage.
Consequences: rethinking landscape-heritage and heritage-landscape

Having outlined some parallel ontological thoughts on heritage and landscape, I now turn to
the epistemological consequences of such developments. The emphasis on the processual
implies a new set of questions, different frames of analysis and some methodological innovation
in order to understand more fully our subject matter and, indeed, ourselves. In terms of the
lines of questioning, the undermining of the presumption of categorical stability has resulted in
a blurring of organizational dualities – of nature and culture; the past and present; the global and
local; expert and lay; tangible and intangible; stasis and movement. The suspicion of such
dualities is a hallmark of the work of Setten (2004, 2006) for instance, and has started to shift
the terms of debate more broadly. West and Ndlovu (2010: 202) for instance, point to how
the ‘relationship between nature and culture is a defining problem for recent debates over the
meanings of heritage landscapes’, while both academic and policy attention has recently been
drawn away from ‘fabric-heavy’ enquiry and practice towards an analysis of the intangible and
relational (see, for instance, Byrne 2003; Waterton 2010a). In many ways, these developments
reflect a broader turn in the social sciences that brings to the fore notions of hybridity (see
Bhabha 1994). Reminiscent of work focussing on the hyphen of nation-hyphen-state (see, for
instance, Sparke 2005, and Antonsich 2010), our attention should be drawn to the spaces
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David Harvey
between natural and cultural heritage; the tangible and the intangible; the hyphens of
landscape–heritage and heritage–landscape. Perhaps this is the ‘thirdspace’ through which the
mutable categories of landscape and heritage become present.3 Indeed, with the national
branding so prominent in much previous literature on both landscape and heritage, it is perhaps
not surprising that work that calls into question the fixity of the nation-state should act as a
prompt for our thinking about landscape and heritage.
With attention drawn away from the supposedly innate, the process of how values are
assigned and meanings attributed to heritage (or landscape) comes to the fore (Smith 2009: 34).
For Laurajane Smith (2006, 2009) and Emma Waterton (2010a), this activity leads them to
think through how such an ‘Authorized Heritage Discourse’ becomes implicated through a
multitude of heritage representations. More broadly, such analyses should also prompt us to
reach beyond the understanding of representational practice and engage with the ways in which
the world is not merely a discursive phenomenon (see, for instance, Wylie 2007, and this
volume). Following Brace and Johns-Putra’s (2010) work on creative writing, therefore, per-
haps heritage can be a vehicle through which the epistemological separation of representation
and non-representation can be avoided? Either way, such an emphasis on how decisions are
made, meanings constructed and values derived has placed a greater emphasis on self-scrutiny
on the part of academics, policy-makers and public alike. Work in Australia, in particular, has
clearly articulated this need for reflexive awareness of how understandings of land and heritage
have emerged (Ireland 2003; De Cunzo and Ernstein 2006: 261; Byrne 2009).
In terms of formulating research agendas, such a reflexive attitude has encouraged a greater
critical awareness of the role of disciplinary structures in the formulation of the heritage-landscape
relationship. Far from the apolitical search for objective truth or unproblematical management
practice, the very postulation of a relationship between heritage and landscape carries a burden;
often one of colonized and colonizer. As Croucher (2007: 61) notes, ‘western notions of
“landscape” are intimately tied in with the historical processes of European colonialism’. When
viewed alongside a reactionary invocation of heritage, as outlined by Robert Hewison (1987),
or channelled through an Authorized Heritage Discourse without being challenged by critical
analysis, therefore, the heritage–landscape relationship would appear to be both troublesome
and complicit in processes of exclusion. Such a stultifying relationship certainly lies at the heart
of many renditions of ‘national landscape’; the proverbial ‘bread and butter’ of many conscious
and unconscious acts of exclusion and self-referential practices of preservation. Enshrined within
the core of a western perspective of heritage ‘are a series of assumptions regarding expertise,
authenticity, integrity and value, all of which are cemented within a technical process of man-
agement that aims to safeguard and render “permanent” a very specific set of cultural symbols’
(Waterton, 2010a: 70). As Byrne (2003: 188) notes, however, such hegemonic practice offers a
fantasy of containment (my italics): it might be powerful, but it is never complete, and may
provide critical opportunity. Indeed, a series of feminist-inspired and postcolonial work appears
to show that heritage processes provide the means through which more nuanced, situated and
fluid understandings of landscape can be championed (see, for instance, Croucher 2007, and
Keitumetse et al. 2007). For Denis Cosgrove (2003: 113), therefore, heritage forces an
engagement with the ‘realities of a post-colonial, polyvocal and globalized world. … [Heritage]
signifies the decolonisation of the past’.
Such a process of decolonization has seen an increasingly fluid notion of temporality being
utilized to understand the heritage–landscape relationship. Rather than a palimpsestual approach,
in which the present is merely the sum of past episodes, notions of heritage allow the past to
become active in a ‘present and future orientated engagement with the environment’ (Lee
2007: 88). Rather than the retrospective memory of the palimpsest, therefore, the ‘immanence’ of
154
heritage process suggests a prospective memory; an unfolding and on-going relationship between
past, present and future (see Holtorf and Williams 2006: 237). Such theoretical work has
prompted the recognition of a non-linear temporality to be recognized in accounts that move
beyond the notion of a simple landscape, with a uniform and inevitable chronological narrative
(Kelly and Norman 2007: 176–77. See also Harvey 2003a, 2010; Edmonds 2006).4 This break
up of chronology (as linear, orderly, smooth and predictable) prompts us to understand ‘not
only our own practices as part of the stories of landscapes we wish to document, but [also to]
recast material pasts as having action, as having a stake, as being co-present, co-creative and
co-constitutive in contemporary landscape processes’ (Witmore 2007: 220).
Understanding and developing such reconceptualizations of the relationship between land-
scape and heritage has necessarily brought into focus the issue of method and source material.
For academics such as Smith (2006) and Waterton (2010a), not accepting the face value of
policy documents lies at the heart of their use of critical discourse analysis in order to reveal
what ‘lies between the lines’ of such representations. This is clearly articulated in Waterton
et al.’s (2006) work on the Burra Charter, which questions the apolitical and disinterested
nature of the ‘universal world heritage’ of groups such as UNESCO and ICOMOS. On the
whole, however, rather than the adoption of a specific methodological approach, it is the
diversity of sources and the application of novel methods that has most characterized approaches
to landscape–heritage in recent years (Hicks and McAtackney 2007). For instance, many
scholars have used a more rigorous textual analysis (of policy documents, tourist brochures,
guidebooks, and scientific reports), together with an iconographic approach, which seeks to
reveal the values and meanings that have been written into landscapes, as a useful means
through which to analyze some of the ‘sacred cows’ of heritage; that of the national (or
regional) landscape (see, for instance, Graham 1996; Crang 1999; Olwig 2002; Harvey 2003b;
Whelan 2003; Johnson 2004; Germundsson 2006).
As Brace and Johns-Putra (2010: 403), drawing on McCormack (2005), note, however, we
should be wary of prioritizing textual representations as the primary epistemological vehicle
through which knowledge is extracted from the world. Moving beyond the analysis of ‘stan-
dard’ representations, therefore, McAtackney (2007) combines the oral history of prison inmates
with the analysis of a range of external representations (such as planning and policy documents)
to complicate the heritage of the ‘objective’ survey at the Long Kesh/Maze Prison site in
Northern Ireland. Further oral historical work by Riley and Harvey (2005), Setten (2006) and
Keitumetse et al. (2007), for instance, have underlined this more fluid invocation of the land-
scape and heritage relationship. For Keitumetse et al. (2007: 107), oral history, allied with a
postcolonial theoretical framework that contests notions of authorship and authority, allowed
them to expose the processes through which landscape–heritage management plans were pro-
duced through ‘academic and expert cultures, [which acted to] exclude the ideas and value of
local communities’. Such a celebration of the subjective and non-expert raises the possibility of
other ways of knowing. For authors such as John Wylie (2002, 2005 and Chapter 4), an answer
can be found using phenomenological approaches, while Pearson (2006: 11) ‘urges a shift from
the optic to the haptic in the apprehension of landscape’ (italics in the original). Such a man-
oeuvre is important for heritage studies since, on the one hand it tends to foreground material
culture as a tactile and resonant entity within the experience of landscape–heritage. On the
other hand, such an embodied sense of landscape is suggestive of an analytical shift towards the
performative and practised, and thus towards the use of (auto)ethnography. The fleshy interac-
tion of people and things, therefore, has made space for an understanding of landscape–heritage
that acknowledges the materiality of being in the landscape. Indeed, much work on the life
history of monuments has underlined its instability of meaning and form (see Whelan
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David Harvey
2003; Holtorf 2000–2008, Harvey 2007, 2010). As Cosgrove (2003: 115) notes, the ‘fragmentary
nature of heritage is essential to its definition’, thus acknowledging the importance of actual
experience, the uncanny and even the absent presence of ghosts, which has become one of the
key motifs through which such phenomena have been studied in recent years (see, for instance,
Edensor 2005, DeSilvey 2006). Such an apprehension of the landscape, which brings forth a
notion of heritage, thus acknowledges the (subjective) importance of history, mythology, gen-
ealogy and memory for those people in both past and present, who inhabit these landscapes (see
Holtorf and Williams, 2006: 236).
Turning to issues of performance, Pearson (2006: 11) notes that landscape is ‘something to be
lived in’, and I would argue that it is this practising and performance of life – of living in the
world – through which heritage is invoked. As Cosgrove (2003: 123) notes, heritage is ‘always
and inevitably performative. … [H]eritage artefact or performance does not offer a sort of
objective/scientific “autopsy”. … Rather, it opens space for imagination, for mapping the
fragment into a contemporary space made up of many such fragments, authentic or fake,
reworked through the creative powers of memory’. This suggests that there is room within our
exploration of the landscape–heritage relationship, for both the bounded, artefact-based and
representational, and the relational, fluid and phenomenological. Indeed, their co-existence and
contradiction may produce an energizing space.
Practicalities: doing landscape–heritage

With the landscape-heritage relationship undergoing theoretical development, epistemological
innovation and consequent methodological diversity, it now behoves us to think through the
practicalities of what the study of landscape–heritage entails. Scholars have new questions to ask,
new material (and non-material) entities to utilize, and a processual understanding to frame their
analyses. In many ways, the injection of a landscape sensibility ought to break up what Byrne
(2003: 188) calls the ‘continued hegemony of the site’ concept that has so debilitated much
heritage studies. Ideally, therefore, such an approach should broaden our attention to look
beyond the monument, the artefact, and the fabric of a site-based case study and make room for
more open and contextual work (cf. Harvey 2001; Creighton 2002). In practice, however, the
key arena in which landscape–heritage has tended to solidify has been that of the nation.
Indeed, even the naming of most official bodies that are tasked with managing and interpreting
landscape heritage has tended to have a national (or quasi-national) frame of reference.5
The apparent eclipse of the nation-state as a primary unit within which things happen auto-
matically implies the complication and re-articulation of what a national landscape heritage
might entail (see, for instance, Jones, 2007 or Jessop 2008). Furthermore, the actual process
through which elements of landscape heritage are labelled as national become subject to scrutiny
(see, for instance, Waterton 2010b). The recognition, for instance, of Koli (see Figure 13.1) as
The Finnish National Landscape, invoking a national cultural and natural heritage should be
undermined as an essentialized phenomenon. The Koli website6 notes that ‘Finland has
156 scenic areas defined by governmental decree as of national importance. Of these, 27 of the
most valued have been selected as “national landscapes”. Koli is at the top of this list. Koli has a
particularly powerful symbolic value, a generally recognized place in the nation’s culture, his-
tory, and nature’. Such simple ‘national branding’ needs to be critically analyzed. Represented
through art, music and literature, Koli symbolized a certain version of Finnishness that acted as
an effective rallying point for a vulnerable emergent national community in the later nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Arguably, however, the landscape heritage of Koli might be seen as
perhaps too backward-looking, exclusive and essentialized.
156
Figure 13.1 Koli, Finland. The view across Lake Pielinen from the heights at Koli is widely
regarded as being one of the most important ‘national views’ in Finland.
Alongside such a questioning of the nation as a meaningful unit, the issue is raised of which
scale might be appropriate for viewing the landscape–heritage relationship. Indeed, the apparent
rise of both the local and personal on the one hand, and the global and universal on the other
has acted to cement the eclipse of the nation as a bounded container through which to
experience the world. This expansion in the importance of both the local and the global has
become a defining characteristic of much recent work on landscape–heritage.
While a focus on the local might seem to correspond to an inward-looking practice, its
proponents have sought to give their work a far broader resonance. Partly, this stems from a
theoretical sophistication such that their subject matter becomes an explication of a broader
point rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, while the epistemological and methodological
language of phenomenology and deep (auto)ethnography might appear to be very recent in its
provenance, a contextualization within the heritage literature reveals a debt to such authors as
Raphael Samuel and his championing of everyday experiences (see, for instance, Samuel 1995:
259–73). As Cheape et al. (2009: 104) note, ‘nowhere do notions of landscape, identity and
material culture come together more vividly as within the discourses of heritage’, and it is
through engaging with this process at a local and personal scale that the landscape can become
more dynamic and lively. For Atkinson (2008: 381), such a focus on the local represents a
process of democratization; a shift from ‘great stories’ to more commonplace, ordinary and
everyday spaces. Such a reconceptualization of heritage–landscapes away from the national and
the privileged towards the more local and personal ‘steers attention away from high-profile
heritage sites towards the less spectacular, quotidian and mundane places where social memory
is produced and mobilized’ (Atkinson, 2008: 382; see also Robertson 2008). Such an endeavour
to broaden and democratize the heritage base is increasingly being recognized within policy
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David Harvey
frameworks with the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) committed to develop a wider con-
stituency for heritage, noting that ‘[w]e believe that everybody should have the opportunity to
identify, care for and enjoy heritage, and want to help new people and groups take an active
part’ (see also Riley and Harvey 2005: 279).7
Contrasting examples of how Atkinson’s (2008: 287) ‘microscale subjectivities of everyday
life’ are drawn out to invoke such broad and dynamic understandings of landscape–heritage at
an intimate scale include work by Pearson (2006) and Lichtenstein (2007). Through Lichten-
stein’s (2007) deep ethnography, the landscape of Brick Lane in East London is articulated
through a series of personal and retrospective memories; at once both intimate and placed firmly
within a global network. The work of Pearson (2006), on the other hand, invokes what he calls
a ‘deep map’, as he seeks to break down simple chronologies in an autobiographical narrative of
place. In some ways, such a personalized approach might appear to be difficult to employ in any
wide-ranging sense without seeming to be relativist in the extreme. In practice, however, the
importance that I would place on the (personal) heritage of certain landscapes is both inescap-
able and powerful. Flatten the walls of the most ancient cathedral or tear up the ground of the
most ‘pristine’ landscape before anyone touches ‘my’ beach in Mousehole (Cornwall), with its
memories that are so carefully re-enacted whenever I pay a visit, either in person or in my
thoughts (see Figure 13.2)
Such a dynamic and overtly subjective understanding of the world is very much suggested in
the suffix ‘-scape’ that has long been habitually attached by those who talk, think or write about
Figure 13.2 The beach at Mousehole, Cornwall, UK. My personal connection to each rock on this
beach, informed by childhood memories (both good and bad), outweighs any sense
of objective heritage value.
158
the land. It is, perhaps, not surprising that this suffix has begun to be used in reference to
heritage matters. For Garden (2006: 394–5), the notion of heritagescape (with no hyphen) pro-
vides a flexible, transparent and replicable means of analyzing heritage sites. For Di Giovine
(2009) the heritage-scape (with hyphen) offers an opportunity for tackling issues that could
be considered as universal; most obviously through the UNESCO frame of reference, to which
we will now turn.
The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site

As Cooney (2007) notes, the adoption of the World Heritage Convention in 1972 acknowl-
edged the idea that heritage can be universal. For much of its history, however, UNESCO status
has tended to carry much political baggage, fetishizing the site, the tangible and the material,
reflecting a national rhetoric and western orientation of power and value systems (see Waterton,
2010a: 36–71). From 1994 a laudable decision to make World Heritage Site status more
representative has also tended to highlight the tensions and contradictions over the meaning of
‘outstanding heritage value’ (Hazen and Anthamatten 2007: 256). Despite a more inclusive and
open-ended definition, which has allowed both tangible and intangible qualities to be recog-
nized (Cooney 2007: 302), the World Heritage listing remains very site-centred and focussed
on ‘monumentality’ (Creighton 2007: 340). Furthermore, while it is all very well for UNESCO
to push a notion of ‘enhancing sustainable cultural landscapes’, Keitumetse et al. (2007) wonder
what lies beyond the rhetoric for people who live in socially invested ‘heritage–landscapes’.
I would argue that while opportunities exist, some thorny issues need to be dealt with, and a
processual approach to landscape–heritage provides the means through which we can usefully
frame an analysis.
The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site was chartered in 2001 (Figure 13.3). While it is
branded as ‘England’s first natural world heritage site’,8 each of these terms contains a level of
ambiguity that would seem to provide an interesting segue towards a more fluid meaning of
heritage. The role that this coast has had in developing an understanding of earth sciences and
Darwinian evolution, in particular, would seem to render its supposed ‘Englishness’ mean-
ingless,9 while its definition not as a ‘stable site’, but as an eroding cliff line, which must be
allowed to continue eroding for any heritage value to be recognized would seem to herald a
fresh approach to notions of stability; we must preserve the dynamic processes of destruction
and wholesale change. In this case, ‘conservation’ means the celebration of the ephemeral –
even the very bounds of the ‘site’ will change with each tide and winter storm. In many ways,
therefore, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site is an example of landscape–heritage ‘imagined
as an uncompleted process rather than a bounded and static thing’ (Thomas 2001: 181, original
italics).
As well as undermining the ‘natural’ heritage tagline, these processual components that would
seem to reflect a cultural and social investment, have been championed within the world heri-
tage site itself, particularly through its arts programme, Creative Coast, which seeks to make
critical interventions through a variety of means.10 These endeavours are suggestive of the
present and future orientated ‘transformational qualities’ of heritage that McAtackney (2007: 50)
cites, whereby a heritage understanding can help to animate a landscape. Such a plural and
dynamic understanding of the Jurassic Coast would seem to justify its heritage status, not in
terms of stability and scientific certainty, but through its participatory and open-ended con-
struction (see Krauss 2008: 428). There are traps within this celebration, however, with such
inclusive heritage in danger of being mere sound bites easily packaged as a marketable and
instrumentalist commodity. As Hicks and McAtackney (2007: 18) intimate, we need to be wary
159
David Harvey
Figure 13.3 The Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, UK. England’s only natural WHS requires
constant and ongoing coastal erosion to be maintained, representing a heritage of
destruction and change.
160
of heritage being ‘extracted’ and used simply for policy ends. While and Short (2011: 4–6) note
that, however heterogeneous heritage landscapes might seem, certain objects and meanings are
too often privileged over others, as regulatory regimes and policy frameworks seek to bind what
heritage does and how it is interpreted.
In their critique of the World Heritage Site approach, Keitumetse et al. (2007: 115) worry
that the privileging of ‘universal’ values might act to perpetuate communities’ dependence on
experts and state actors to manage and interpret heritage resources. What is required, therefore,
is an approach that places ordinary people’s feelings towards a delineated ‘World Heritage Site’
at the centre of interpretation. Ethnographic work by McClanahan (2006) at the Orkney World
Heritage Site has paved the way for such an approach (see also Card et al. 2007), which suggests
that a processual understanding of landscape heritage can find support through an ephemeral,
mobile and relational notion of place (see Massey 1996). Viewing place as a woven-together
and dynamic constellation of social and material relations, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage
Site becomes the locus of a much more fluid sense of heritage; one that can both speak to wider
policy ambition, but which can also resonate with the people who might have always been part
of such landscapes (see Keitumetse et al. 2007: 117). On the Jurassic Coast, work is presently
underway that explores the degree to which such community-orientated initiatives are either
enlivening and plural, or tacitly directing the engagement and interpretation of landscape heri-
tage along the coast (Croose, 2011). Whether empowering or instrumentally enrolling local
people, however, the landscape heritage of the Jurassic Coast can certainly not be stabilized as a
dead container or museum artefact.
Conclusions
The case study of the Jurassic Coast has shown that the parallel trajectories of research into
landscape and heritage can bear fruit. The ‘un-pin-downable’ nature of landscape heritage is
demonstrated in the instability and ephemerality of this dynamic coastline, where, as Hicks and
McAtackney (2007: 25) note, ‘scales co-exist simultaneously’. Such an approach underlines
how oppositions between public and private, or site-bound and universal, are a fallacy (see
Setten 2006: 74). In outlining how these approaches to landscape and heritage have such reso-
nance, however, a further question is raised about the connection between the two: what can
those working within the field of landscape studies learn from work in heritage studies and
vice versa?
While Cosgrove (2003: 115) notes that ‘landscapes have a special significance within heritage
debates’, he also argues (ibid.: 113) that it is heritage which forces an engagement with the
‘realities of a postcolonial, polyvocal and globalized world’. While a ‘landscape approach’ has
aided heritage scholars to move beyond what was a site-based engagement with their subject
matter, therefore (see Byrne 2003: 188), an increased recognition of heritage – both tangible
and intangible – has encouraged landscape scholars to heed the importance of the affective
qualities of how, as Holtorf and Williams (2006: 236) note, memories and mythologies, com-
munity and personal histories were ‘inherited, inhabited, invented and imagined through the
landscape’. With its focus on the present and future, I would argue that a heritage sensibility
would appear to provide a sense of hope and engagement.
Notes
1 While not entirely happy with the tagging of this development simply as ‘postmodern’, this
phrase suffices for what different disciplines refer to as a cultural, post-structural, linguistic, or
post-processual turn.
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David Harvey
2 Work that has done this, to a certain extent, includes Bender (1998), Cosgrove (2003), Hicks et al.
(2007) and, implicitly, Olwig and Lowenthal (2006). While it is difficult, and perhaps not helpful, to
pin down a date for this shift in research endeavour, the publication of seminal texts by Lowenthal
(1985) for heritage studies, and Cosgrove (1985) for landscape studies, provides a neat bookend.
3 See Soja (1999) for work on ‘thirdspace’.
4 This is resonant with histoire croisée, or ‘entangled history’, a relational approach to history that pro-
motes reflexivity and a crossing of spatial and temporal scales, thereby challenging pre-given brackets of
time (see Harvey 2011: 189, and Werner and Zimmerman 2006).
5 For instance, see English Heritage, CADW and Historic Scotland to name just a few – albeit anglocentric –
examples (see Riley and Harvey 2005 and Waterton 2010b). Even such things as the European Landscape
Convention presuppose the existence of national containers.
6 See http://www.koli.fi/In_English/Koli-info/Nature-attractions (accessed 22 October 2012).
7 See http://www.hlf.org.uk/Pages/Home.aspx (accessed 22 October 2012).
8 See http://www.jurassiccoast.com (accessed 22 October 2012).
9 With the Giant’s Causeway, in Northern Ireland, also recognized as a ‘natural world heritage site’ and
St Kilda, in Scotland, recognized as a mixed ‘cultural and natural world heritage site’, the Jurassic Coast
is the third ‘natural’ site within the UK.
10 See http://www.jurassiccoast.com/393/category/creative-coast-246.html (accessed 22 October 2012).
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14
Valuing the whole historic
landscape
Peter Herring
ENGLISH HERITAGE
Conditional and contestable landscape and value

Landscape is changing. Fairly closed discourses on aesthetics, art and architectural history are
being opened up and historical accounts of the development of place that emphasized over-
arching economic, social and political processes are being contested (see Chapter 11). As value is
typically placed on aspects that most directly inform favoured discourses, new ways of valuing
are stimulated by new definitions of landscape, including the European Landscape Convention’s,
‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of
natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe 2000). How landscape is experienced from
within, as ‘a constantly emergent perceptual and material milieu’ (Wylie 2007: 2) also influences
evaluation.
The typically critical and subjective emphases of the newer landscape studies suggest that
wider society can and should be actively and constructively involved in evaluating landscape.
They should then develop greater confidence to become involved in the democratically estab-
lished processes of formal planning and policy, in the management of the historic landscape, and
in the representation of more local or personal values in debates about place and identity
(Schofield 2008). More than that, people are encouraged to more actively recognize that a key
aspect of being human is the way we consciously and unconsciously work and play in and with
landscape, connect with and perform our lives in it. Such self-aware engagements increase those
other forms of landscape evaluation displayed through satisfaction and enjoyment, or their
opposites (Ingold 2000; Pearson 2006) (see Figure 14.1).
The notion that landscape need not be a detached and certain image, viewed from afar and
managed by those with developed knowledge, but instead a fluid impression, partly of our own
creating and located within us, is not necessarily new. It resembles how place was appreciated
and responded to by all in pre-Enlightenment times, deeply aware of the ways of their
world, but less constrained by the certainties imposed by more systematized forms of knowledge
or understanding (Tilley 1994: 26; Herring forthcoming). ‘Lanscape is nothing but Deceptive
visions, a kind of cousning or cheating your owne Eyes, by our owne consent and assistance,
and by a plot of your owne contriving’ (Edward Norgate, 1648–50, cited in Walsham
2011: 17).
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Valuing the whole historic landscape
Figure 14.1 Boconnoc, Cornwall. View from the Grade II listed building Boconnoc House, past
the Grade I listed church, and over the Grade II registered park and garden, desig-
nated nationally for their architectural, historic and landscape design values. All are
components of a complex and diversely valued landscape enjoyed this summer
Sunday by those attending a popular steam engine rally. The following day, with the
rally over, this place would be enjoyed quite differently. (Photo: P. Herring,
July 2007).
Less concrete, less certain, and thus more conditional and contestable, this formulation of
landscape liberates those contained and constrained by established ways of experiencing, study-
ing, and presenting place, or landscape. ‘The study of landscape is much more than an academic
exercise – it is about the complexity of people’s lives, historical contingency, contestation,
motion and change’ (Bender 2001: 2, italics original). Landscape is thus also active, driven from
within, being ‘the way in which people – all people – understand and engage with the material
world around them’. ‘We make time and place, just as we are made by them’, so landscape is
‘always in process, potentially conflicted, untidy and uneasy’ (ibid.: 3–4). The meanings of a
place, what it ‘signifies, indicates, evokes or expresses’ (Australia ICOMOS 1999: 3) and levels
of attachment to it (Byrne 2008: 149), grow, diminish and shift under the influence of obser-
vation, experience and memory (Tilley 1994), appreciation, persuasion, affection and anger
(Bender 1998). Landscape, fashioned by interplay of place, perception and cognition, can be
thoroughly personal and subjective. While cities are ‘interpreted and understood by exceedingly
few, their historicity is appreciated by the many’ (Worthing and Bond 2008: 25) (see
Figure 14.2).
Such views of landscape as encapsulated by Bender, Wylie, Tilley and the Council of Europe
have supported diversification over the last few decades in approaches to research, presentation,
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Figure 14.2 Eyre Lane, Sheffield: part of the early modern grid around which one of the steel
city’s industrialized quarters was arranged. Much changes (university buildings,
resurfacings, etc.), but much also continues (the roadline, plots, reused works, etc.),
creating variably legible and variably well understood historic landscape, but a richly
interesting and therefore deeply meaningful urban place. (Photo: P. Herring, May
2007).
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conservation and management, and thus evaluation. These increasingly reflect the broadening of
local and immediate empowerment allowed by reappropriation of landscape by all, and by each.
Of course, that empowerment is usually partial, there being other more concrete constraints on
action than those that developed alongside traditional approaches to landscape. Most land is
owned, its use under the control of particular individuals or groups, and most societies have
laws and rules (including those developed in response to the campaigns of conservationists), and
customs guiding the actions of owners, users and those others who value it (Worthing and
Bond 2008).
Value and change

Most change is deliberate, the outcome of thoughtful action. Planned change, whether physical,
perceptual or presentational, and whether undertaken by owners, developers, planners, historic
environment advisers or interested members of the public, typically revolves around consideration
of three factors, each informed by understanding: opportunity, vulnerability and significance.
When actors are attentive to each factor, management and exploitation are generally more
sustainable and presentation of place is more inclusive and stimulating (Herring 2009).
The ways that people either design or respond to change, including incidental or uninten-
tional change (like neglect), are affected by wider cultural contexts and processes. In Britain an
early modern culture supportive of preservation of selected aspects of heritage was reinforced by
influential individuals (such as Wordsworth, Ruskin and Betjeman) and bodies like the National
Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty (founded in 1894) and the Council for
the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) (founded in 1926 and renamed in 2003 as the
Campaign to Protect Rural England). Their equivalents, both individuals and bodies, exist in
most other countries and have contributed to ways of thinking about heritage, place, society,
identity and change. To some degree these were codified in the 1964 Venice International
Charter for the conservation and restoration of monuments and sites (ICOMOS 1964).
While such thinking might appear almost natural or commonsensical to those comfortable in
a society, to others, the more marginalized in particular, it may appear to privilege and support a
hegemonic culture. That might include an established heritage sector developing (however
benign their intent) what has been characterized as an Authorized Heritage Discourse (Waterton
and Smith 2009: 12–17). Balancing such Discourse with others has increasingly affected
landscape practice (Syse 2010; Tabbush 2011), as the remainder of this chapter illustrates.
Comprehensive, inclusive and fluid

We can briefly turn to England and to Cornwall in particular to sample more inclusive
approaches to evaluation and management being developed by the historic environment sector
in the UK. As in many other countries, this includes government, local authorities, rural and
urban agencies, environmentalist charities, lobbying groups and privately run consultancies. In
most cases evaluation is done with specified forms of physical change (such as creation, loss,
conversion, refurbishment, maintenance, etc.) in mind. Most also use ever-widening panels of
stakeholders to increase influence and multiply benefit when making the step from deepened
understanding to evaluation. This typically involves some form of prioritization, or ranking, of
opportunities, vulnerabilities and significance:
Developing strategies for sustainable futures of particular places by meshing evaluations of

the historic landscape with those of other sectors of society. The Bodmin Moor Vision, for
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example, set out to resolve differences in strategy, policy and publicly funded support
between, amongst others, those representing the historic landscape, the semi-natural
environment, landowners and the farming community (Reynolds 2010).
Conservation Management Planning (e.g. Cox 2010), using principles for inclusively
assessing vulnerability and significance as developed by amongst others, Kerr (2004) and
Clark (2001).
Using understanding and evaluation to produce more informed, integrated, innovative,
invigorating and inclusive community-led plans, such as parish, town and community plans
(English Heritage 2011).
Influencing spatial strategy by considering capability, vulnerability and significance of the
historic landscape in relation to particular change scenarios, such as solar power (Cornwall
Council 2010).
Informing research strategies; shifting emphasis from well-preserved and relatively static
‘relict’ landscape to more rapidly changing urban, peri-urban and industrialized places
(Penrose 2007; Herring in press).
Extending designation’s range to include more modern, industrialized, sub- and peri-urban
assets, including infrastructure and so on (Fairclough 2006a: 258–62; Schofield 2008;
Bowdler 2010).
Widening involvement in planning issues (policy, strategy and individual proposals), aiming
to use more holistic understanding of place earlier in decision-making chains to better
inform location and design of change. Exemplified by planning policy guidance and guidance
on master-planning (DCLG 2010; EH and HCA 2009).
Using historic landscape to frame local Historic Environment Action Plans (HEAPs)
(Herring 2007: 24; Rouse 2011).
Recognizing that all landscape matters, including the ordinary, and all can be thoughtfully
cared for: a principle underpinning Historic Landscape Characterisation (Herring 1998) and
Historic Area Assessment (EH 2008b).
Aspects of landscape make evaluation interestingly problematic. To begin with, all is cultural
and historic with, for most people, the natural (or semi-natural) environment being just one of
landscape’s many attributes. Most land in most parts of most countries has been transformed by
management and most is owned, named and known (Hoskins 1955; Herring 1998: 1–2).
‘[Saying] that certain things in certain areas are somehow more historic than other things or
places … is rather like saying that there is more geography in one place than another’ (Lewis
1979, cited in Worthing and Bond 2008: 13). The same applies to the sea (Hooley 2007) and
the sky. So, if the historic landscape is valued for the ranges of meanings it contains, then we
value it all and can care for it all. For most people such a conclusion reflects the reality of their
relationship with the world they know.
Landscape is also continuous; it ‘is, and always has been, a seamless canvas extending out in
all directions’ (Darvill et al. 1993: 566). Definitions of areas, boundaries, key components and
value vary according to observers’ interests. Bodmin Moor in Cornwall may be granite, an
upland, or a granite upland differently delineated and designated as National Character Area,
Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Less Favoured Area (Axford 1975; Countryside
Agency 2005). Writers may have dulled it by repeating adjectives like untamed, forbidding,
treacherous, sinister, immense, pure, and timeless (Bender et al. 2007: 37), but those studying it
or living and working there, know it as varied and time-rich; full of past and ongoing change.
They could subdivide it, if obliged to, by drainage, ecology, enclosure, tenure, names, net-
works, and so on, but many would not rely on systematically agreed representations and
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Figure 14.3 The signum triciput may symbolize our place in time and thus the feeling that land-
scape is within us. We look differently, more or less confidently or gloomily, at past,
present and future worlds. Sixteenth-century bench end in Cardinham church,
Cornwall. (Photo: P. Herring, May 2011).
divisions to corral their thoughts about the place. Instead they use mental maps, populated with
personal meanings, namings, emphases and distortions (ibid.: 38–39).
All the world’s historic landscape, while developed in the past, is located in the present, and
for most people its most active orientation is towards the future (Palmer 2009, 8; Herring
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forthcoming). If such landscape were represented by a symbol, then the medieval signum triciput
with its three-faced person looking backwards, outwards and forwards, might catch it best
(see Figure 14.3). A representation of prudence – pondering the past and present and using the
understanding gained while conceiving the future (Panofsky and Saxl 1926: 177–8) – the
symbol also captures the role of thoughtful evaluation in establishing present identity and
planning future change.
Landscape, then, is ever-changing, physically (in use and form), and in the ways individuals
and communities perceive it (Herring 2007). The ways people value landscape also change; the
triciput’s three faces are usually represented at different life stages, reflecting experience, under-
standing and outlook. Unless anchored by fixed or relatively abstracted criteria or principles,
values shift as circumstances and influences shift, and as developing issues or scenarios
concentrate attention and thought on particular aspects of change (or continuity).
Including communal and individual value

Given its contribution to establishing and sustaining a sense of worth in individuals and com-
munities, landscape may be regarded as vital for the future well-being of both society and
individual citizens (Jowell 2006: 11). The Council of Europe’s 2005 (Faro) Framework Con-
vention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society recognizes the importance of both indi-
viduation and communalization of engagement with chosen cultural heritage, itself ‘a reflection
and expression of … constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions’ (Council of
Europe 2005: Article 2). A preface to essays stimulated by the Faro Convention re-emphasizes
the value of both conscious and unconscious valuing.
A heritage … disjoined from ongoing life has limited value. Heritage involves continual
creation and transformation. We can make heritage by adding new ideas to old ideas.
Heritage is never merely something to be conserved or protected, but rather to be mod-
ified and enhanced. Heritage atrophies in the absence of public involvement and public
support. This is why heritage processes must move beyond the preoccupations of the
experts in government ministries and the managers of public institutions, and include the
different publics who inhabit our cities, towns and villages. Such a process is social and
creative, and is underpinned by the values of individuals, institutions and societies.
(Palmer 2009: 8)
As value is normally reducible to a good (or its opposite), consideration of how people value
places, or types of places, brings landscape studies close to ethics, especially when evaluation
effectively involves, as we have seen, the establishing and fixing of personal or communal
meaning. Fourteen articles in the 1999 Burra Charter covering the principles and practice of the
ethics of co-existence when conserving significant places were developed from the assumptions
that, ‘in a pluralist society, value differences exist and contain the potential for conflict; and
ethical practice is necessary for the just and effective management of places of diverse cultural
significance’ (Australia ICOMOS 1999: 20–1). The Burra Charter also set out the following
four overarching values (or forms of significance) now routinely used by Australian heritage
agencies when considering place:
Scientific (or ‘evidential’ as in the more recent equivalents in Conservation Principles; EH 2008a),
dependent ‘on the importance of the data involved, on its rarity, quality or representativeness,
and on the degree to which the place may contribute further substantial information’;
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Historical, based on how the place influenced or was influenced by ‘an historic figure,
event, phase or activity’;
Aesthetic, based on sensory perceptions of such qualities as ‘form, scale, colour, texture and
material of the fabric [and] the smells and sounds associated with the place and its use’;
Social, embracing the qualities for which a place may have become a focus of spiritual,
political, national or other cultural sentiment to a majority or minority group (Australia
ICOMOS 1999: 12).
As well as evidential, historic and aesthetic values, cultural, educational, economic, resource and
recreational values had also been identified as forces uniting and dividing communities of place
and of interest in England, and thus as drivers of policy and strategy (English Heritage 1997: 4).
Power of Place, a millennial review of historic environment policies concluded that ‘the future
will be richer if … built around the values people place on their historic environment’ (Cossons
2000: 1). The broad base of those values was set out in the document’s foreword:
Most people place a high value on the historic environment … and, in a multi-cultural
society, everybody’s heritage needs to be recognized. The historic environment is seen by
most people as a totality. They value places, not just a series of individual sites and buildings
[and] care about … the whole of their environment. This has implications for the way we identify
and evaluate significance. Everyone has a part to play in caring for the historic environ-
ment. Everything rests on sound knowledge and understanding. … [that] accommodates
multiple narratives and takes account of the values people place on their surroundings.
(ibid.)
Replying to Power of Place, the UK government noted that ‘We need to find new ways of
reaching and empowering excluded individuals and communities … [to respond to] people’s
desire to broaden the definition of what should be valued … [while also championing] the role
of historic assets in the development and regeneration processes and as a focus for community
cohesion’ (DCMS 2001: 4–5). That relationship between institutionalized valuing schemes and
more pluralist ones is nicely set out in A Force for Our Future:
We are rightly proud of the statutory designation systems which … protect our historic
buildings, monuments and archaeological sites. Informed decision-making to identify and
safeguard the most significant examples … will always … be a primary responsibility.
However, the designation system does … reinforce the sense that the historic environment
can be defined precisely, quantified even, in terms of formally listed buildings or scheduled
monuments. These decisions … taken by central government on the advice of professionals
within a framework of national criteria … do not always take account of other
factors which might be of importance to the local community. Yet the value a community
places on a particular aspect of its immediate environment might be … critical … in getting
engage[ment] in local planning or regeneration issues. The Government wants to ensure
that policy-making … takes proper account of this wider perception. The historic envir-
onment should be seen as something which all sections of the community can identify with
and take pride in, rather than something valued only by narrow specialist interests.
(DCMS 2001: 3.15–16)
It was felt then that designation could be complemented by approaches such as those in historic
characterisation (HC) programmes supported by English Heritage, the non-departmental public
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body advising central and local government on the historic environment. In place since the
early 1990s, these include historic landscape characterisation (HLC) and urban archaeological
assessment (ibid.: 3.17; and see Fairclough 2006a). They have since been extended to include
the sea (Historic Seascape Characterisation; Hooley 2007) and various types of place, such as
historic farmsteads (Lake and Edwards 2006).
HLC exemplifies the philosophy behind these characterization approaches. It treats landscape
as continuous and deals with all of it even-handedly, identifying blocks of land that appear
from consideration of systematic sources (maps, aerial photos etc.) to share a dominant historic
character, normally presented as being of a particular character type. The principles that
underpin the method and application of HLC were developed with plurality of evaluation in
mind. Care is taken not to assume that certain parts of the characterized historic landscape are
more important than others. Instead it sets out a spatial representation of a range of descriptive
and interpretative attributes, creating a framework that any user, whether in the heritage sector
or not, can use. Values can then be established as and when required, and according to the
emphases determined by the user and the needs of any scenario under consideration
(Herring 2009).
Of course it is impossible to escape systems of valuing and these surface in the selection of
attributes employed in characterization, and in the emphases placed on certain schemes of
interpretation, such as privileging understanding of plot patterns in urban landscape and field
patterns in rural areas. To minimize the effects of this and increase users’ confidence in the
material, sources and interpretation are transparently presented (Clark et al. 2004).
Public value
When critically assessing how the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) allocated funds on behalf
of the wider community, the think-tank Demos split the public value of heritage into three
parts, represented by the three equal sides of a triangle, and then correlated those with
three significant interest groups in society: the public, the politicians and policy makers, and the
heritage profession:
Intrinsic values within heritage, ‘the value of heritage in itself … in terms of the indivi-
dual’s experience of heritage intellectually, emotionally and spiritually’ (Hewison and
Holden 2006: 15), underpin much of what heritage professionals do, but they are also the
principal mode of engagement for most members of the public;
Instrumental values reflect how heritage may be used to achieve social or economic
purposes (regeneration, crime reduction, etc.) and are most readily associated with the work
of politicians and policy makers;
Institutional values embody the ways organizations, including government agencies,
engage with the wider public, enhancing trust and respect among citizens; they underpin the
work of heritage professionals, but the public are also sensitive to them as consumers (ibid.:
15–16).
Of course, values and actors are in actuality not so neatly separated; as we have seen, their
interaction increases each other’s potency, with all actors benefiting most when recognizing the
aims and limitations of all others. For example, ‘Politicians talk about accountability, but what
they need is democratic consent. By the same token, in order for professionals to be able to
address politicians, they need the engagement of the public’. This need not mean that ‘heritage
organizations should be ruled by public referenda and popular plebiscite’, and thus by the often
174
subjective and rapidly changing intrinsic values, as the Demos model of cultural value also gives
equal weight to institutional values (ibid.: 17).
Variety in how heritage agencies across Europe and around the world formally assess
institutional values and designate significant places reflects different understandings of what
constitutes heritage (Schut 2009: 9). In England, statutory protection of the historic environ-
ment, the responsibility of English Heritage, is largely focussed on ‘heritage assets’ (DCLG
2010: 13): buildings may be ‘listed’, archaeological remains ‘scheduled’ and battlefields and
wrecks ‘registered’. Parks and gardens, though not subject to statutory protection, may also be
‘registered’, to increase awareness of their value and to encourage owners, managers and users,
to care for them.
Such aims chime with those of the non-statutory Welsh Registers of Historic Landscapes of
Outstanding or Special Interest, that represent ‘an open book from which children and
adults alike can learn and understand the forces and events which moulded them, their
character and their nation’ (Feilden 1998: ix). The identification of these 58 areas, by ‘a sub-
jective assessment … informed and authenticated by professional consensus’ (Cadw 1998:
xix) is expected not only to ensure that continued change within them is guided with greater
care, but that they inspire those with an interest in Wales to care for the whole of its
landscape, including the much larger part lying beyond the registered areas (ibid.: xiv–xvi;
xxix–xxxii).
Most heritage designation, in Britain and elsewhere, aims to use systematized historical and
archaeological understanding to support either protection or the prioritization required to
guide action. Some stimulates conservation-oriented change, often by guiding use of scarce
resources, as in supporting research, targeting management (through agri-environment schemes,
urban regeneration initiatives, etc.) or funded conservation activities.
Evaluation for designation usually rests on judgements about significance based on a
heritage asset’s qualities (rarity, coherence, legibility, contribution to understanding the past,
etc.). Statements of significance may be framed so that these qualities appear intrinsic, or
absolute. The experts who contributed to the Welsh Registers privileged five forms of historic
landscape:
those subjected to intensive or extensive remodelling;

where change has largely been arrested at one stage (‘relict landscape’);
with legible evidence from several periods;
where evidence has been effectively buried or destroyed;
with historic or cultural associations.
‘Integrity’ and ‘coherence’ were also considered when reviewing candidate areas (Cadw 1998:
xxii–xxv). Other countries have also identified and protected by national or regional designation
areas of historic landscape (for Europe see http://heritagelaw.org/).
Discussions had also been initiated in England in the early 1990s on including ‘relict cultural
landscapes’ within the scheduling process (Darvill et al. 1993). English Heritage, however, chose
not to attempt rationalization of multiple and fluid values into one national designation scheme,
but instead to put resources into developing HLC, the practice of which, as we have seen,
avoids fixing formal value. Instead it recognizes that all places have historic fabric and character
that people can explore, relate to, communicate to others, and so develop the confidence to
champion and care for (Fairclough et al. 1999; Fairclough 2006b). It has been noted that des-
ignation or statutory protection is ‘particularly inappropriate when dealing with continuing
living cultural landscapes, since the inhibition of change may well destroy the essential
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Peter Herring
Figure 14.4 Temporary cranes of ‘change and creation’ (see Bradley et al. 2008) between
Blackfriars and St Paul’s, London. (Photo: P. Herring, May 2011).
characteristics of the landscape – in other words, its continuity of change’ (Worthing and Bond
2008: 15) (see Figure 14.4).
Gaining confidence
All this questions conceptions of historic landscape as a place whose value is inevitably reduced
as it changes. Change, including environmental change, is no longer inevitably relentlessly,
inexorably damaging. We no longer face the future exclusively defensively and in a state of
relative hopelessness. Being positive about change no longer feels like conceding ground to the
wider needs or wants of society (Schofield 2007; Fairclough 2009). It is important that the
historic environment sector is able to develop proactive approaches to landscape, building
HEAPs, informing design, extending the range and interdisciplinarity of landscape research (ESF
2010), and using the past to inspire and guide the direction of future change. In doing so it is
better able to support and inspire wider communities, of locality and of interest, to use the
richer, wider, deeper notions of historic landscape to build and reinforce senses of identity and
place, and to gather together the confidence to be positive and intelligent actors (Fairclough
et al. 2008).
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following who have contributed material or have wittingly or unwittingly discussed
aspects of this chapter with me: Judith Allfrey, Barbara Bender, Graham Fairclough, Peter
176
Howard, Graeme Kirkham, Jeremy Lake, Cathy Parkes, Ann Reynolds, Bryn Tapper, Roger
M Thomas.
NB: Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views, or policies, of English
Heritage.
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15
Constructing spaces, representing
places: the role of landscape in
open-air museum sites
Antonia Noussia
LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY
How might we imagine a museum in the open air? How might we conceptualize the impor-
tance of space in such a museum? The conventional museum conjures up images of a highly
ordered and differentiated space, with the passage of time and history classified behind glass cases
and inside buildings of often imposing architecture. Museums are seen as cultural forms for
‘showing and telling’ in an attempt to communicate certain cultural meanings and values while
they transmit experience to the visitor through movement as ‘organized walking’. Artefacts are
arranged to create a particular narrative which reveals the dominant role of the institution, as
represented by the curators. In open-air museums, these narratives are translated into secluded
landscapes which have many characteristics in common with public open spaces and parks.
Therefore, open-air museums are hybrids, fusing elements of conventional museums which are
aiming to collect, preserve and display artefacts, and of open spaces which are constructed so as
to create a sense of place. This dual identity of combining museum concepts and practices with
landscape design gives them their complex and unique character.
Based on research on five open-air museums in England, this chapter investigates how
museum languages interact with landscape to produce representations of the geographical heri-
tage of places, and how selected slices of the cultural geography of places can be rapidly repli-
cated within a strictly defined landscape. Space analysis ideas are considered in order to identify
and compare the spatial structure of the museums, whilst qualitative and quantitative methods
from museum and landscape research have been combined to explore the social implications of
this structure.
The past in the present

The majority of open-air museums were founded by groups of people responding to the
destruction of vernacular buildings or the changing ways of life in their localities. Initially, these
groups were dedicated to their goals which were far removed from making immediate profit.
However, in order to survive, the museums have had to become commercial operations and, in
most of them, management boards have taken over to maximize the financial security of the
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museums by exploiting changing patterns of leisure. The museums are now increasingly
engaged in a commodification process which is expressed in increasing numbers and types of
visitor attractions, living history displays and new interpretation techniques.
The five sites discussed in this chapter, which cover the main characteristics of the
contemporary open-air museum are:
Chiltern Open Air Museum in Buckinghamshire;

Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings in Worcestershire;
Weald and Downland Open Air Museum in West Sussex;
Blists Hill Victorian Town (part of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum) in Shropshire; and
Black Country Living Museum in West Midlands.
These museums fall into two categories based partly on their contents but mainly on their
approach and interpretation policies. Avoncroft, Chiltern, and Weald and Downland, which
can be called ‘museums of buildings’, have been developed in response to the destruction of
vernacular buildings and are more concerned with the history of architecture and construction
methods. They started purely as a collection of threatened buildings which were moved to the
museum site to escape demolition. Blists Hill and Black Country, which can be called ‘muse-
ums of ways of life’, have an industrial basis and represent the way of life of a particular region.
Their focus is on aspects of social history, and reconstructed or replica buildings are used as
shells for the illustration of selected aspects of everyday life in the geographical region as it was
understood to have been in a particular historical era. The crucial issue for these museums is to
be able to emphasize the sense of place of the locality, embodied in the industrial, commercial
and domestic settings. Having established these two types of open-air museum, the next section
will examine how conventional museum functions and practices can be translated into the
open space.
Museum practices and landscape functions

In museum studies there is a considerable amount of discussion about the basis on which objects
are classified and whether they provide evidence of what they represent. Collecting reveals the
power of the curator who makes decisions based on certain presumptions and pre-established
principles. Collections attempt to provide an adequate representation of the world by removing
things from specific contexts and then presenting them as ‘abstract wholes’ (Stewart 1984).
Open-air museums consist of collections of structures and artefacts arranged by curators in a
meaningful display through the operation of a classificatory system.
In the three ‘museums of buildings’, the objects are displayed by classificatory criteria alone,
and the aim is to present the history of buildings and their construction over time. This reveals
the intention of the curators in these museums to present ‘a gallery without roof’ (Lowe 1972).
Each building, which need not be structurally or historically related to the others, can stand in
its own right presenting a certain part of architectural history, and is not necessarily associated
visually with the rest of the buildings on site.
In the two ‘museums of ways of life’, the arrangement attempts to transmit a certain theme
and buildings of similar period and style are used for this purpose. Representative buildings of
the turn of the nineteenth century are used in Blists Hill in an attempt to simulate ‘a late
Victorian working town’. Similarly in the Black Country Living Museum typical buildings are
set up to ‘represent a cross-section of the social and industrial history of the Black Country’ (see
Figure 15.1) (Hudson 1987). In these museums, buildings are combined in order to portray a
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Landscape in open-air museum sites
Figure 15.1 Representation of a Victorian high street in the Black Country Living Museum.
story of ‘ways of life’. Every building needs the others in order to present a coherent whole.
Although none of the museums replicates a historically exact layout of a particular settlement,
the structure of space attempts to convey a sense of settlement, reproducing the most obvious
features such as a linear high street with shops or a specific type of industrial area. In reality,
there is more of a concentration of uses than would often be found in an exact reproduction of
a geographical settlement.
In conventional museums, the relationship between the building and its collection is influ-
enced by the changes in architectural ideologies and the principles of exhibition design, and can
be described as two distinct typologies. The older types of museum building have been descri-
bed as ‘well lit warehouses’ which can be ‘dissociated from their contents and usable for any
type of object in any sequence’ (Marcus 1993: 171). By contrast in many contemporary
museum buildings the intention of the architecture is to establish a dialogue between archi-
tectural design and the museum contents by integrating the building with its collections.
Similarly, in open-air museums where the functions of the museum building are performed
by the landscape, these typologies can be observed and translated into landscape terms. There is
a strong relationship between landscape and artefacts in the open-air museums. A significant
function of the landscape is to create and organize space for viewing the artefacts and in this, its
role can be seen as similar to architectural space within conventional museums. The layout of a
museum building structures the way that visitors explore the exhibitions and the building itself.
Museum design can also create an architectural spectacle which is experienced by visitors not
only in the galleries but in other public spaces (Psarra 2005). In museum exhibitions the col-
lections are spatially classified according to principles imposed by the curators, and the
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Antonia Noussia
exhibition layout reflects these principles. Some artefacts are arranged in close proximity in
order to encourage comparison, while others are separated to be viewed individually. In open-
air museums, to a certain extent, this arranging of artefacts is undertaken by the landscape.
Planting and topography have been used to manipulate visibility within the site in a similar way
that partition walls define exhibition layout in conventional museums. Landscape has become a
design tool to serve the intentions of the curators regarding presentation of the exhibits. The
research comparing these five sites linked conventional museum studies with open space studies,
testing the extent to which museum practices can be translated into landscape when showcases
are replaced by large artefacts.
Bridging disciplines: a research strategy

Academic studies have paid little attention to open-air museums as a spatial phenomenon. The
majority provide theoretical analyses of museum philosophy and practice, and focus on themes
which are often connected to wider issues of cultural representation and participation (Walsh
1992). Open-air museums have been subject to critical studies of their role in representing an
idealized, nostalgic and apolitical version of the past, as well as more supportive accounts of their
contribution to our understanding of the lives and places of previous generations (West, 1988;
Bennett 1995; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Harris 1993). They have also been included as examples
to complement studies on other heritage attractions (Shafernich 1993; Young 2006). There
have been few studies which deal with the contemporary growth of open-air museums as a
geographical phenomenon in which landscape and place are as important as collecting policies
(Cross and Walton 2005), although examples of open-air museums have been discussed in a
framework, ‘the heritagescape’, proposed for the analysis of spatial properties of all types of
heritage sites (Garden 2006).
This research on how spatial properties influence the ways that people experience open-air
museum sites, aims to explore the ways in which landscape is brought into the spatial layout of
the exhibits and how visitors experience these unique qualities of the museum. But what kind
of methodology would be appropriate for studying the spatial properties in open-air museums?
Methodologies commonly used in studying the spatial properties of conventional museums have
their limitations when referring to open space. Whilst valuable, the nature of conventional
museum space, enclosed in a building where the audience is also captured, makes the sole use of
these methodologies inadequate for the study of open-air museums. Landscape research, on the
other hand, has not been seen from a museological perspective. In looking at the properties of
open-air museums a cross-disciplinary approach of methodologies used in both landscape
research/techniques and museum studies was developed.
Previous studies of museum buildings are based on ‘space syntax’, a computer-aided method
which describes patterns of relationships in terms of connections between spaces (Choi, 1999;
Psarra 2005; Hillier and Tzortzi 2006). Although as a method alone, or combined with other
spatial techniques, space syntax enables the social encounter of visitors to be taken into con-
sideration, the analysis remains mainly dependent upon the quantitative nature of the technique.
In this research, methods of spatial analysis were considered, to examine the construction of
space of the open-air museum sites individually and comparatively in terms of their spatial
properties and organizational principles. The spatial configuration in each site was described
with the use of isovists, variables calculating visibility from certain points to the rest of the site.
This technique was introduced by Benedikt (1979) and also used by Choi (1999) and Psarra
(2005) in comparing layouts of art museums. The use of the isovist technique in the analysis has
a double aim. The first is to examine to what extent the layout of the paths in the museums
182
dictate the visitors’ pattern of exploration, based on the assumption that visibility affects the
decision on route selection. The second is to discover the extent to which the degree of visi-
bility from given points frames space and therefore contributes to the spatial perception of the
museum. This latter usage of isovists was combined with photographic representation taken by
visitors. Analysis of the photographs indicates whether the spatial structure of the museum
affects the way that people frame it, although it is possible that the selection of shots may well
be influenced by other cultural and social factors not relevant to the construction of space. The
purpose of this method is to explore ways of walking, looking and framing and to see how
these practices are influenced by the construction of space.
The role of the landscape

In open-air museums, the role of the landscape is powerful in translating the functions of the
conventional museum into the open air. Landscape has been deployed as a framing device,
which brings artefacts into view. It replaces the gallery, where buildings are arranged according
to principles imposed by the museum interpretation strategy. Not only does the landscape play
a central role in the production of space and the embedding of buildings into ‘places’ but it also
undertakes the role of walls and dividers for the setting up of exhibitions.
It also becomes a spectacle in its own right by reconstructing stereotypical images of heritage
landscapes. At the same time, it becomes a leisure landscape for visitors to enjoy walking
around, playing with their children and picnicking on the sites.
Landscape as visual experience

Landscape in open-air museums is used as a stage for the production of stereotypical images of
other landscapes in a condensed form. Space is constructed by melding representative elements
of particular cultural landscapes. These landscapes are supposed to be reproduced in the museum
and they are widely recognized as part of stereotypical images of urban/rural landscape and
countryside.
How do visitors experience the landscape in the open air museums? Does landscape come to
be regarded as a channel directing people towards the exhibits, or is it appreciated in its own
right? In other words which is the way that people explore the museum site? Do they walk
with determination to the next exhibit or do they enjoy the itinerary? In each museum the
landscape was treated in different ways. In some museums, visitors appreciated only the beautified
landscape, especially when it spoke to them of the English pastoral.
Hudson (1987: 127) pointed out: ‘[t]he site had to be chosen with great care. It had to be in
a pleasant country – the public, on the whole, does not enjoy spending its leisure time in ugly
and depressing surroundings’. This is a perceptive comment. In the Black Country Living
Museum, only a few visitors were able to appreciate the intentional dereliction and untidiness
of the mining and industrial areas. At Blists Hill, the director commented on visitors’ percep-
tions of museum sites: ‘they expect it all to be immaculate, totally manicured, perfect like a
National Trust stately home, lawn everywhere. They can’t understand our intended woodland
and derelict canal.’ It is suggested that when the landscape plays a subordinate role within the
design of the site as a whole, if it does not figure as a major element of the original design, it is
often not appreciated by visitors, unless by chance (see Figure 15.2).
A common feature in all the museums is the attempt physically to isolate the sites from their
contemporary surroundings, and most sites have well-defined physical borders. This is visually
reinforced with trees and shrubs to create an impenetrable screen. The separation of the sites
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Antonia Noussia
Figure 15.2 The canal and the industrial area in Blists Hill.
attempts to create a place isolated from the contemporary world. ‘We planted deliberately
around the boundaries to hide ourselves from the twentieth century,’ said the director of the
Black Country Living Museum. All the sites are enclosed by these green borders with the
intention that the past becomes literally another world as these very particular cultural land-
scapes are disconnected from the present. Separating the site from the outside area with trees
and vegetation was a common nineteenth-century park design strategy and remains usual
practice in archaeological sites.
An exception to this is the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum which forms part of a
nineteenth-century estate (see Figure 15.3). The park and the museum merge into each other
with no visible transition. Unlike the other museums which attempt to isolate themselves from
the present, the Weald and Downland offers spectacular views and visual connection with the
surrounding landscape. There was a clear intention to draw the internal and external features
together as a key part of the museum design and, in this regard, the museum may be judged the
most successful in landscape terms.
Landscape as a design tool

From the analysis of the five museums, it is argued that the configuration of space in each
museum complies with two parallel modes of structure. First, the spatial arrangement of exhibits
describes the distribution of buildings and objects around the site and their grouping according
to general classificatory principles set by curators; second, the spatial structure of the layout
describes the way that these classifications are arranged in relation to each other, in order to
communicate the museum narrative.
In all five museums the spatial arrangement of exhibits is independent of the museum inter-
pretation strategy; rather it is related to the way that the site has been developing over time.
184
Figure 15.3 Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. The surrounding landscape and the
museum merge into each other.
This can be compared with positioning gallery rooms in a museum building ready to host
various exhibitions. In sites with ad hoc development, the location of the first buildings/
artefacts has dictated the layout of the site, in the sense that buildings came first and footpaths
followed.
The spatial structure of the layout conveys the message that exhibitions are intended to
communicate. In the three ‘museums of buildings’, Avoncroft, Weald and Downland, and
Chiltern, the objects are displayed by classificatory criteria alone. Each building, not being
related to the others, can stand in its own right presenting a certain part of architectural
history and it is not necessarily associated visually with the rest of the buildings on site. Never-
theless, the underlying idea of the museum presentation is based on issues of building con-
servation and on notions of an idealized pastoral past. Each building is presented in a sanitized
and idealized form. The main function of the layout is to expose buildings to visitors through
circulation.
In the two ‘museums of ways of life’ the structure of the layout attempts to transmit a certain
theme and buildings of a similar style are used for this purpose. Each building needs the others
to create a coherent whole and to convey a sense of place. These groups of buildings can tell a
story of ‘ways of life’.
Exploring the ways that conventional museum strategies are physically translated into land-
scape, a useful parallel could be drawn between the display strategies of conventional and open-
air museums. Traditionally, there are two approaches to exhibition design: taxonometric or
thematic. In the taxonometric, objects are displayed only by classification criteria which allow
the public to draw their own conclusions and make comparisons. Thematic design entails the
development of a theme which evolves through the exhibition. This thematic strategy can
be presented in linear form, or mosaic form, or a combination of both types. The first type is
the simple linear narrative approach, whereas the mosaic type consists of a broad theme pre-
sented in separated displays (Miles et al. 1988). Taxonometric design is used in the ‘museums of
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buildings’ where artefacts are arranged according to classificatory criteria alone, and thematic
design is used in the ‘museums of ways of life’ where emphasis is placed on the relationship of
buildings and the creation of a sense of place.
Using this approach based on display strategies to define the museums’ spatial structure of
layout, and to clarify spatial differences and similarities among the five museums, two parameters
are important: the location of exhibits in relation both to each other and to the whole site, and
the organization of visitor circulation. In terms of visual appearance, layout pattern and form
three basic types can be distinguished: clustered, dispersed and linear. Layouts in the Black
Country, Chiltern and Weald and Downland are clustered, in Blists Hill linear and in Avoncroft
dispersed.
There has been no intentional imitation of any specific settlement pattern in any of the
museums, but a stereotypical spatial representation of cultural landscapes can be identified. For
example, one could argue that the pattern in Weald and Downland follows the simple model of
some rural settlement patterns represented by a village – a clustered central location and many
dispersed farmsteads within the farmland. Blists Hill bears a passing resemblance to a so-called
‘street’ village. Although this similarity is based on the ad hoc development and location factors
such as the position of a canal, the existing buildings and road, it may also remind visitors of
European planned linear villages established along streams and restricted by topography.
Circulation
The second parameter for the distinction of spatial structure is the organization of visitor
circulation. Circulation is an important characteristic of the museum experience for it reflects
the freedom of route selection within the site or, in other words, the level of control imposed
by the museum over visitors’ movements. Circulation is central to conventional museum design
and there has long been an argument about the relative value of two opposing models: selective
or free circulation versus coercive or exhaustive circulation. The purpose of an exhibition layout
is to display objects to the public in a meaningful way and according to principles imposed by
the museum creators. Meanings are created through movement as circulation imposes a viewing
order and sequence. An important aim of museum design is to tell stories through movement in
space. Circulation design should enable visitors to visit certain parts of the museum without
passing by all the other parts. In the open-air museums, this has been achieved best via a circular
or ring movement. Individual parts of the site are linked together in such a way that visitors are
able to select which parts of the site to visit first, or not to visit at all.
The museums’ layouts can be described as rings, linear, grid or mixed (see Figure 15.4).
Circulation in Avoncroft is based on a grid. The contours of a canal and the main road dictate a
linear pattern in Blists Hill. In the Black Country circulation is arranged in three rings which
link with each other, while in Weald and Downland (not shown in Figure 15.4) two main rings
organize movement. Finally, in Chiltern a ring connected to a linear axis defines a mixed organization.
Landscape as a pedagogic tool

A study by Peponis and Hedin (1983), on the layout changes in the Natural History Museum in
London, addresses how classification becomes a spatial issue and the way that space reflects
classificatory principles imposed by museum curators. In open-air museums, the concept of
intentional landscape manipulation for exhibition purposes can be described theoretically with
ideas drawn from work on the social structure of pedagogy. In his work, ‘Class, Codes and
Control’, Bernstein (1975) argues that the relationship between different elements (contents) of
186
Figure 15.4 Examples of circulation patterns and movement in open air museums: A) Blists Hill,
B) Chiltern, C) Black Country, D) Avoncroft.
the curriculum is essential for the social structure of pedagogy. Whether the boundaries
between two elements/subjects are ‘clear-cut’ or ‘blurred’ is fundamental. Elements well sepa-
rated from each other are said to be in a closed relationship, whereas reduced separation defines
an open relationship. Bernstein uses two concepts, classification and framing, to analyze the
structure of a message system during educational communications. It has to be emphasized that
these two terms have not been used by Bernstein in the familiar way. Classification is concerned
with the relationship between knowledge contents and not, as the term suggests, with the way
that these contents are grouped into classified categories. This is about how rigid and well-
insulated these contents are as subject areas. Framing deals with the structure system, that is, to
the degree of control that students and teachers exercise over the selection, organization, pacing
and timing of communication. Bernstein describes different types of pedagogy by means of
combining different strengths of classification and framing. Strong classification and strong
framing entail the collection-type, weak classification and weak framing the integrated-type. So
the underlying rule of collection-type is ‘things must be kept apart’ and of integration-type
‘things must be put together’.
Comparing the museum sites, it is possible to show how Bernstein’s ideas about classification
and framing can be spatially translated into museum terms and be applied to the relationship
between exhibition layout and the ways that space is explored by visitors. Exhibits are spatially
distributed and separated according to certain visual and thematic principles. This degree of
separation would be described by Bernstein as classification which refers to the degree of spatial
‘boundary maintenance’ between exhibits or thematic categories or, in other words, describes
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visibility between exhibits. Categories can be strongly or weakly insulated with respect to their
visual links. Framing would refer to the layout of the site and the way that visitors move around
and explore this layout. In museum terms, framing refers to the degree of control of circulation
and visitors’ movement, and thus of permeability between exhibits.
By examining the layout structure and the spatial subdivision in Avoncroft and Chiltern, for
instance, strong classification and strong framing can be observed. The thematic categories are
intentionally separated from each other and the circulation of visitors is rather tightly controlled
via footpaths. This may suggest an indication of the collection type and this imposes a degree of
restriction over comparisons between different exhibits. In the Weald and Downland Museum,
by contrast, weaker classification and weaker framing would suggest an integration type which
encourages comparisons between most of the exhibits.
Conclusion
Open-air museums employ established museum practices to construct narratives in the context
of the cultural landscape of places. By assembling structures from different geographical areas,
they attempt to recreate a micro-geography of particular places. By extracting elements of other
cultural landscapes, open-air museums represent the geographical heritage of specific places in a
condensed form. Landscape has been deployed as a framing device which brings artefacts into
view. It replaces the gallery, where buildings are arranged according to principles imposed by
the museum interpretation strategy. It also becomes a spectacle in its own right, by recon-
structing stereotypical images for visual consumption. Thus landscape operates on two levels:
the first, the ‘foreground’, stages representations, with the gaze being the main aim; the second,
the ‘background’, entails production of space according to museological criteria.
Bachelard (1964) reminds us that what we see from the window belongs to the house. In this
sense, visual access is very important in creating a sense of belonging. Visual access to the sur-
rounding landscape acts to incorporate that landscape as a central part of the experience of the
museum. Yet it is also apparent that when this link to the landscape as a whole is mitigated in
the design process, the relationship is undermined. Of the five museums, the overall structure of
the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum aims visually to incorporate West Dean Park into
the landscape design. There was a clear intention to draw the internal and external features
together as a key part of the museum design and, in this regard, the museum may be judged the
most successful in landscape terms.
The imposition of visually impenetrable boundaries breaks the functional integrity of the
landscapes in which the museums are situated. This can be noticed in sites like Blists Hill and
Black Country where the museum landscapes capture and portray an idealized version of the
very landscapes which are beyond the perimeter hedges. Conventional boundaries between
open-air museums and their wider cultural landscapes have been challenged with the develop-
ment of the idea of the Ecomuseum (Howard 2002). The design of open-air museums should
take the local landscape into account and include these qualities in the design of their site. With
such a strategy, it may be possible to encourage visitors to look more critically at both cultural
landscapes: the everyday world which often passes without notice, and the museum landscape
which is, perhaps, too often accepted uncritically as a nostalgic appreciation of a ‘lost world’.
References
Bachelard, G. (1964) The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press
Benedikt, M.L. (1979) ‘To Take Hold of Space: Isovists and Isovist Fields’, Environment and Planning B, 6, 47–65
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Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum, London: Routledge

Bernstein, B. (1975) Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 3, London: Routledge
Choi Y. K. (1999) ‘The morphology of exploration and encounter in museum layouts’, Environment and
Planning B: Planning and Design 26(2): 241–50
Cross, G. and Walton, J. (2005) The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century, New York:
Columbia University Press
Garden, M.C. (2006) ‘The Heritagescape: Looking at Landscapes of the Past’, International Journal of
Heritage Studies, 12: 5, 394–411
Harris, R. (1993) ‘Advantages and Limitations of Buildings in Social History’, in Kavanagh, G. (ed.) Social
History in Museums: a Handbook for Professionals, London: Stationery Office Books, pp. 142–6
Hillier, B., Tzortzi, K., (2006) ‘Space Syntax: The Language of Museum Space’, in Macdonald, S. (ed.), A
Companion to Museum Studies, London: Blackwell, pp. 282–301
Howard, P. (2002) ‘The Eco-museum: Innovation that Risks the Future’, International Journal of Heritage
Studies, 8:1, 63–72
Hudson, K. (1987) Museums of Influence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lowe, J. (1972) ‘The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum’, Museum Journal, 72(1): 9–13
Marcus, T. (1993) Buildings and Power, London: Routledge
Miles, R., Alt, M., Gosling, D., Lewis, B. and Tout, A. (1988) The Design of Educational Exhibits, London:
Unwin Hyman
Peponis, J. and Hedin, J. (1983) ‘The Layout of Theories in the Natural History Museum’ 9H, 5: 21–5
Psarra, S. (2005) ‘Spatial Culture, Way-finding and the Educational Message: The Impact of Layout on the
Spatial, Social and Educational Experiences of Visitors to Museums and Galleries’, in MacLeod, S. (ed.)
Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, London: Routledge, pp. 78–94
Shafernich, S. M. (1993) ‘On-site Museums, Open-air Museums, Museum Villages and Living History
Museums: Reconstructions and Period Rooms in the United States and the United Kingdom’, Museum
Management and Curatorship, 12:1, 41–61
Shanks, M. and Tilley, C. (1987) Re-constructing Archaeology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Stewart, S. (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press
Walsh, K. (1992) The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World, London:
Routledge
West, B. (1988) ‘The Making of the English Working Past: a Critical View of the Ironbridge Gorge
Museum’, in Lumley, R. (ed.) The Museum Time Machine, London: Routledge, pp. 36–62
Young, L. (2006) ‘Villages that Never Were: The Museum Village as a Heritage Genre’, International
Journal of Heritage Studies, 12: 4, 321–38
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16
Picturing landscape
Harriet Hawkins
ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Landscape has long formed a topic of artistic interest, rising to real prominence in the western
art world in the eighteenth century when it was finally accepted as an appropriate subject for
‘academic’ painting, and more recently coming to be a topic of engagement for artists working
in a range of different media – from sculpture to performance and land art (Clarke, 1999;
Andrews, 1999). Visual arts practices, and especially painting, have long played a crucial role in
the development of our ideas and understandings of ‘landscape’.1 Indeed, to grasp the sig-
nificance of artistic engagements with landscape it is important to examine how it is they have
become enrolled within studies of the social, economic, cultural and political significance of
landscape, and its theorizations.
For landscape scholars the value of art lies in the relationship that aesthetic practices develop
between the ‘really real’, of the physical and cultural landscape, and those things ‘really made
up’ – representations, signs, experiences, pictures – gathered together inside our heads (Olwig,
1996; Daniels, 1989). Instead, then, of a separation between the physical material world and our
experiences and imaginations of that world – that is, a thoroughly Cartesian divide – studies of
landscape art practices point us towards the myriad different ways in which the imaginary and
the material are connected. This allows us to explore and appreciate, for example, the ways in
which the scenes pictured in landscape painting can have real material consequences for what
that landscape looks like, and for those people who live in it (Daniels, 1989; Lowenthal and
Prince, 1964).
In order to make sense of such a large field of art practice, this chapter introduces just three
examples of the relationship between landscape and art, to: illustrate the scope of the ideas
about landscape that art has purchase upon; provide a critical framework for the analysis of
landscape art; and indicate future directions for study. Throughout, the discussion will empha-
size an expanded field of art and the visual cultures of landscape that encompass everything from
large oil paintings, of the sort found in galleries, to quick sketches, maps and photographs, as
well as scientific and computer generated visualizations.2 The first framing of landscape and
art relations considered here is an exploration of the visualizations of landscape that are
produced by a combination of artist and scientific approaches to landscape in the ‘Tropical
Visions’ produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The second focuses on a similar
period of painting, but examines how landscape oils of this era have become enrolled in
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discussions around the politics of landscape. To end, the third examination of landscape–art
relations will focus on future directions, pointing towards, the possibilities that landscape art
offers for thinking about embodied and performative acts of landscaping, examining how artistic
practices can help us to think about our multi-sensory relationships to the landscapes that we
inhabit.
Alongside an ongoing preoccupation with politics and ethics, one of the principal coordinates
for the analysis of landscape art is vision. Landscape is often understood as something that is
looked at, over or upon, with landscape painting associated with a ‘god’s-eye trick’, a seeing
subject, and an artist, who engage the landscape from positions of power. Here I want to
explore how landscape art opens us up to a range of ways of seeing and of sensing, from the
‘gaze’, to the veiling of unwanted sites, as well as reinforcing landscape as something we
experience and engage with through all our senses, not just something we look at.
The three framings of landscape and art presented here are by no means exhaustive, and,
despite their approximate chronological ordering, the three sections should resist being read as
an historical progression, or indeed a geographical circumscription. For whilst attempts have
been made to engage with literatures that explore landscape painting made in countries other
than the UK, Europe and the US, the focus of the conceptual engagements with landscape art
that form the focus of this discussion have tended towards work originating from these coun-
tries. Whether this can be interpreted as indicative of there being something peculiarly English
about landscape, as Cosgrove and Daniels (1988) suggest, is something that still warrants further
exploration, as recent theorists have, for example found much value in the non-representational
traditions of non-western landscape visualizations (Grosz, 2005).
Across the three sections, then, there are similarities and differences to be found: between the
ways in which the artists are engaging with landscape as they make their works, between the
different ways the art works develop our understandings and experiences of landscape, and, in
how it is that art is enrolled within landscape studies. Crucial across these sections are issues of
power and politics, together with, in the final section, questions around the place and value for
art in relation to an ethical conduct towards our landscapes and environment.
Empirical, imperial and ideal landscapes

I want to begin with Alexander Von Humboldt’s iconic landscape profile, the tableau physique,
of the Ecuadorian volcano Mount Chimborazo (1805).3 This was a period during which the
picturing of landscape was closely related to our ways of knowing the world more generally,
and thus was thoroughly bound up with the shift from the valorization of knowledge based on
teleological or metaphysical expositions (e.g. beliefs in divine powers), to one based in facts
derived from close observations and empirical verification. In this context artistic practices
were seen as part of the emergence of a scientific gaze, a methodology which demanded close
and faithful observation of natural objects, and that would not accept secondhand vision, being
there – in the landscape – was key (Dettelbach, 2005; Smith 1988, 1992; Stafford, 1984). In
such a role artists were understood as ‘more perfect’ describers, as being able to ‘make drawings
and paintings as may be proper to give a more perfect idea … than can be formed by written
descriptions alone’ (cited in Smith, 1988: 15). In the words of the naturalist and draughtsman
William Burchell, art was ‘a means of exhibiting nature and conveying information’ (cited
in Driver and Martins, 2005: 68).
Humboldt’s profile of Mount Chimborazo, at the time assumed to be the world’s
highest mountain, is an interesting form of landscape visualization because it enrols landscape
within a pictorial science that is about conducting analysis and educating the viewer. For
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Humboldt, Chimborazo was of interest as in ascending the mountain it was possible to

experience a then unsurpassed range of different environments and plant species. And, as well as
marking the climatic bands, Humboldt has also filled in, in a rather jumbled looking manner,
the names of different plant species he encountered, and provided data on 13 different scientific
variables he had measured, from temperature to pressure, and the height of the snowline, all
collected during his journeying (1799–1804) with the naturalist Aime Bonpland (Jackson
and Romanowksi, 2009). For Humboldt such a scientific appreciation of landscape could
only be gained through first-hand experience, and as such, was closely bound into an
aesthetic – sensed – appreciation, so he writes of the azure of the sky, the shape of the hills, and
the clouds.
The coming together of art and science in these depictions of tropical landscapes was to
have an important influence over the subsequent practices of art, but also the practices of
science, and in particular earth sciences like geomorphology (Bunkse, 1981; Dettelbach, 2005).
If Humboldt’s work functions as a form of pictorial science, a second example of landscape
visualizations from this period can offer us a rather different view of these same relations
between landscape, art and science.
Accompanying Captain Cook on the Resolution, when he departed on his second voyage to
the South Seas in 1772, was the Admiralty-appointed artist William Hodges. Hodges was a
pupil of Richard Wilson, one of the iconic artists of the English Romantic period, and he
became known for his large canvases, such as Tahiti Revisited (1776).4 In contrast to the more
scientific aesthetic of Humboldt’s diagrams, the composition and subject of Hodge’s work was
dictated by a combination of what he saw at the scene, but also the aesthetic conventions of the
time. In Tahiti Revisited we see the tropical landscape through the lens of a classically composed
landscape, a body of water in the foreground with bathing nudes, ringed by trees and
mountains growing hazy in the distance. As Smith notes:
topography … had always been given a humble place at the bottom of the academic table
but here was an attempt to elevate exotic topography to the high places reserved for the
ideal landscapes of Claude, the heroic landscapes of Poussin, and the picturesque landscapes
of Salvator Rosa.
(Smith, 1988: 6)
But yet such Tropical Visions (Driver and Martins, 2005), which Goethe once termed ‘half
truths’ (Goethe, cited by Dettelbach, 2005: 34), should not be so simply divorced from scien-
tific observations, but were rather to be understood as a blend of the documentary and the
aesthetically ideal. Indeed, Hodges worked to capture the light and meteorological phenomena
he encountered on his visits to the tropics, his engagements in part shaped by his close working
relationship with naturalists, astronomers and meteorologists on board ship.
This was an era from which emerged a ‘way of seeing, and knowing, in which the tradition
of landscape art was fused with a new spirit of observation informed by the experience of
voyaging around the world in the company of naval surveyors, meteorologists and astronomers’
(Greppi 2005: 24). Understood as such, landscape is both a site of scientific encounter and an
increasingly important artistic subject. Of course the advent of photography, with its associations
with realism, was to dramatically refigure the role of painting and sketching in the context of
scientific inquiry (Schwartz and Ryan, 2003).
In the case of the picturing of tropical landscapes, it is also important to consider these visions
as closely bound up with the politics of the European exploration of the South Seas (Said,
1978). Rather than engaging these tropical landscapes only in terms of the ‘“West” projecting
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its sense of cultural difference on the “rest”’, we should remain aware of the power and
dynamics of these landscape encounters, such that these tropical landscapes are not simply
screens onto which things are projected, but are ‘a living space of encounter and exchange’
(Said, 1978; Driver and Martins, 2005, 5).
A politics of landscape
John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain (1821)5 is perhaps one of the most iconic paintings of
the English rural idyll, and is a canonical image in discussions of the politics of the picturesque
aesthetic (Bermingham, 1986). This section will investigate how this, and other landscape paintings
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the subsequent growth of photography, have
became powerfully enrolled in a set of debates around the politics of landscape.
In contrast to understandings of aesthetics as merely decorative, and art as a rarefied indulgent
sphere separate from life, a key theme in the discussion of landscape art has been to understand
it as ‘not merely a reflection of, or a distraction from, more pressing social, economic or political
issues; [rather] it is often a powerful mode of knowledge and social engagement’ (Daniels,
1993: 8). Landscape ‘does not easily accommodate political notions of power and conflict,
indeed it tends to dissolve or conceal them; as a consequence the very idea of landscape has
been bought into question’ (Daniels, 1989: 196). And it is the role of landscape art in relation to
power, social justice and conflict that is the focus of the next section.
Fields of vision
Taking landscape painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a focus, an inter-
disciplinary body of research has gained purchase on these landscape images through an
exploration of issues of national identity, nature, colonialism, and capitalism (Cosgrove, 1985;
Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988; Heffernan, 1991; Mitchell, 1994). Key here has been the move-
ment beyond thinking about art as a scientifically truthful record, or as accurate representation
of the view, and instead thinking about landscape art following Marxist Humanists, like John
Berger (1972) as a ‘way of seeing’, what Cosgrove describes as a ‘social formation’. Landscape
painting provides then ‘a cultural image, a pictorial way of presenting or symbolizing
surroundings’ (Cosgrove, 1984).
The rigorous interdisciplinary study of art works’ iconography and iconology sought ‘to
probe the meaning in a work of art by setting it in historical context and, in particular, to
analyze the ideas implicated in its imagery’ (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988: 2). As Daniels
(1993: 8) elaborates ‘running through the pictorial analyses are a series of different discourses
and practices … Not all of them were put there by the artists. They are often activated, or
introduced, by the various contexts in which the images are displayed, reproduced, or
discussed.’ So, in the case of The Hay Wain, it is illuminating to consider how Constable’s
biography and the demands on his painting might have led him to depict the landscape a certain
way. For example, he was the son of a rural landowner, who acquiesced to demands of city-
dwelling patrons for pictures of peaceful rural scenes that promoted a timeless ideal of the
beauty and social order of the countryside. Constable’s work, like other paintings, can be under-
stood, then, to have developed a particular way of seeing, which creates an aestheticized vision
of landscape that is dangerously duplicitous; appearances were deceptive, hiding, in this case, the
‘realities’ of life in the countryside (Daniels, 1989; Mitchell, 1994). In the case of The Hay Wain,
the calm tranquillity of the country scene depicted belies the exploitative labour relations, and
the rural unrest and extreme poverty that was sweeping the countryside in that era.
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It was around these questions of the politics of landscape, and the duplicity or ideological
blindness of landscape visions that cultural geographers, art historians and other humanities
scholars were to coalesce, to explore; ‘the relation between the organization and appearance of
land and representations of it, the relation between perception and power, the spatial dimension
of social attitudes and relations, the sense of belonging to or alienation from places’ (Barrell,
1980; Daniels, 1989: 14). This was an attention, not as Mitchell (1994:1) suggests, ‘to just what
landscape “is” or “means” but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice’. These ideas
have also entered, at times controversially, into major art exhibitions and their accompanying
catalogues. Here, these sociological and political frames of reference provide a very different
curatorial logic to, for example, the chronological hangs that have long held sway (Rosenthal,
1983; Solkin, 1982).6
Circulating landscapes: making and shaping

Crucial to this relationship between landscape and art – whether it be painted rural idylls,
explorations of nationality, the industrial and scientific agencies in the work of Joseph Wright of
Derby or Turner (Daniels, 1993; Fraser, 1988), or questions around the artistic renderings of the
debates around Russian national identity (Bassin, 2000) – is an emphasis upon the potency of
these geographical imaginaries. What is crucial here are the connections drawn between the
symbolic cultural work these landscape paintings do, and how such aesthetics have material and
social effects: shaping landscapes and lives.
To return to The Hay Wain; over the centuries this image, and the artist’s other paintings of
that same part of Suffolk, have led to that area being named Constable Country, after the
painter, and shaped after his paintings. For example his rural imagination has been evoked to
prevent housing developments, to drive environmental campaigns as well as, during the First
and Second World Wars, to mobilize people to support the war effort, protecting England’s
‘green and pleasant land’. As such then Constable’s landscape vision has direct material, economic
and social consequences within the landscape (Daniels, 1993; Rosenthal, 1983).
This power of aesthetics to shape landscapes and lives is reinforced in studies of colonial
landscapes, wherein, for example, English landowners remake their plantation landscapes in the
contours of the aesthetic conventions of home, from the planting of vegetation, to the place-
ment of property and the undertaking of huge earth-works that quite literally shape these foreign
landscapes (Seymour et al., 1995; Seymour et al., 1998). These territories are far from a blank
canvas however; they are ripe for moulding in the vision of European homelands, and rather
new and interesting visions develop as European aesthetic ideals are negotiated alongside the
landscape practices of these areas. Ryan (1998) further unpacks this reciprocal relationship
between the modes of landscape depiction, the geographical imagination and Empire in his study
exploring developing technologies and the expansion of the British Empire under Queen Victoria.
These different examples, and many others to be found within the literature, attest to the
‘fluency of landscape, not its fixity’ and sensitize us to the multiple and mobile geographies of
artworks; the relationships between ‘the initial time and place of the images’ production, the
location and the places figured within the works, and the endlessly variable arenas through
which they circulate’ (Nash, 1996: 152). Analysis, must, therefore engage in careful studies of
the production of these works of art, as well as explore the contexts of their consumption, and,
the ways in which they circulate around the world. Writing more recently Daniels (2010) notes
how landscape scholars are coming to engage with this intersection of the making of art, and
the making and shaping of landscapes in new ways, engaging, often at first hand with the arts
practices. In doing so scholars are becoming active participants, and observers, of the political
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relations that frame the ways in which landscape art practices can make and shape cultural and
physical landscapes.
Landscape art: spaces of sensation

When Paul Cézanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter, wrote of the role of his en-plein air
methods in the making of his famous series of Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings,7 he was writing
of a very different mode of artistic landscape encounter than those delineated by Humboldt or
Hodges, detailed above. Cézanne’s mode of working highlights the ‘lived-experience’ of land-
scape and puts emphasis on individual experience of landscape, as opposed to an acceptance of
societal norms and universal precepts based on reason or aesthetic ideals (Zaring, 1977).
This final section will explore encounters between artist and landscape that relate to recent
landscape scholarship that emphasizes the experience of landscape by ‘being in’ and ‘moving
through’ it, rather than looking over it (Ingold, 2000; Dewsbury et al., 2002; Rose and Wylie,
2006). Interestingly, such studies of embodied acts of landscaping, despite focusing on the
experiential and emotional, have largely turned away from art as an empirical source, preferring
instead to report first-hand experience (Wylie, 2005; Lorimer, 2006). Considerations of both the
production and consumption of landscape art works can, however, add much to thinking about
how it is we experience landscapes.
Spaces of sensation: disrupting the ‘gaze’

When thinking about landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ one of the dominant ideas is the gaze: an
idea of sight in which the distance and objectification of a disembodied eye are paramount,
forming pictures of an ‘explicit topography constituted through surveillance, perspective and
detachment’ (Crouch and Toogood, 1999: 72). There is a range of studies of art works
though – of colonial and masculine landscapes, as well as in explorations of nature and everyday
practice – in which we find sight becoming firmly located in the body of the artist as
they experience the landscape (Dubow, 2000; Mitchell, 1999). By locating vision within our
messy, fleshy bodies we are reminded that we do not just see landscapes, but also hear, smell
and feel them. Moreover, as Nash and other feminist scholars make clear, landscapes emotion-
ally engage us, and we should not deny the ‘pleasure and emotive force which landscapes may
provide’ that, as Nash continues, ‘disrupt any sense of a pre-formed subject’ (Nash, 1996;
Pollock, 1996). In other words, admitting the pleasures and desires prompted by experiences of
landscape, and of landscape art, is to thoroughly disturb the position of a stable and detached
seeing subject, and to open up the ‘possibilities of multiple and mobile identifications with and
ways of seeing landscape,’ and it is also to develop landscape as a more intimate space of
encounter (Nash, 1996: 156).
These disruptions of dominant ideas about vision enable us to begin to think about art
practices as creating ‘spaces of sensation’. Think, for example, of land art-cum-performative
works produced by Richard Long who deploys walking as an artistic mode, creating works
produced in direct contact with the landscape.8 Describing A Line Made by Walking, Long
(1967) talks of getting a train from London Waterloo going South West, getting off in the
countryside, finding the nearest field and walking back and forth until the flattened grass caught
the sunlight and formed a discernible line. Long takes a photograph and then reboards the train.
These photographs present us with an artefact of the walk, but they do not convey Long’s
thoughts and feelings, nor in subsequent works that document longer walks, the sweaty, ardu-
ous and at times painful experience of walking hundreds of miles. Where Long does begin to
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explore the experience of the walk is in the words and poems, lists of observations, feelings or
conditions, that often accompany the photographs; it is through these words that we are
reminded of the experience of being in and moving through those landscapes.
In a rather different vein we can think of abstract landscape painting, by, for example, Peter
Lanyon,9 which has provided a valuable way for a number of landscape scholars to explore the
more-than-visual, more-than-representational knowledges at work outside of the symbolic
orders and ‘views’ of landscape (Crouch and Toogood, 1999; Causey, 2006). In this case
Lanyon’s expressive paintwork is suggestive of a ‘tactile knowledge’ (e.g. the sound of the sea,
the feel of the wind on the side of your face) of the world rather than an ‘explicit topography’.
This is a relationship between body and world that phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1968)
describes as being ‘caught in the fabric of the world’, painting is not then about an overseeing,
but rather is about the centralization of perceptions, movements and memories; painter and
painting are in and of the landscape. This is to direct us towards how, in making ‘sense’ of
landscape, the immediacy of smell, touch, and hearing must also be situated in the context of
past experience and memories.
Conclusion: an ethics and politics of landscape art?

In this discussion of three cuts into the relationship between landscape and art, a series of
key words have come up time and again; vision, the body, the senses and of course politics.
By way of a brief conclusion, I want to think about the potential of landscape art in
linking together questions around the embodied experiences of landscape and politics. For
some scholars the focus on the self that first person accounts of landscape experience develop
is apolitical (Sidaway, 2009), for others, however, these intimate experiences between
bodies, landscapes and the environment have much potential with regard to building an envir-
onmental ethics (Hinchliffe, 2002). An interesting future direction might be to explore the
potential of landscape art to harness and engage audiences with such an embodied ethics
of landscape, and hence the capacity for artistically produced experiences of landscape to ‘con-
tribute to a shift in [environmental] consciousness’ (Miles, 2010: 19; Hawkins et al., 2011;
Boetzkes, 2010).
Notes
1 It is worth noting that the ‘visual arts’ referred to here moves beyond paintings, drawings and
sketches to include sculpture, performance and installation works, as well as graphic arts and botanical
illustration.
2 I take the term ‘expanded field’ from the work of art theorist Rosalind Krauss. See also Hawkins 2010.
3 Humboldt’s tableau can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Humboldt1805-chimborazo.jpg
(accessed 10 May 2012).
4 Tahiti Revisited can be seen at http://nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=BHC2396
5 Constable’s The Hay Wain: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/john-constable-the-hay-wain
6 These emerging sociological and thematic frames of reference for art practices form a strikingly different
exhibitionary strategy to the chronological hang that has long dominated museological practices.
7 Examples from Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire series can be seen at http://www.metmuseum.
org/toah/works-of-art/29.100.64 (accessed 10 May 2012).
8 Long’s A Line Made by Walking can be seen at http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?
workid=8971 (accessed 10 May 2012).
9 Examples of Lanyon’s work can be seen at http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=
999999961&workid=20168&searchid=12364 (accessed 16 January 2011).
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Picturing landscape
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17
Art imagination and environment
Tim Collins
GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
This chapter is focused upon recent research and artwork that deals with environmental
change and landscape in the UK and the USA. A decade or more of work has resulted in
research groups with depth and breadth. There are networks of artists organized in the
EU (Cultura21), the UK (Land2, Landscape and Arts Network and eco/art/scot/land)
and the USA (Ecoarts Network and the Women Environmental Artists Directory), although
there is no robust academic network clarifying issues and direction. Leonardo Journal
has initiated a project called ‘Lovely Weather’ dealing with art and climate change. Otherwise
no journal or journals have emerged as a site for focused discourse. There is one museum
in the USA that explicates research-related work specific to the field. In general the curatorial
efforts to date are often iterations on themes, rather than a contribution to knowledge.
It is important to note that until recently artists primarily made things, while
critics, curators and historians wrote papers and books that evaluated, validated and identified
artwork of import. This is changing; doctoral research in art theory and practice is a
contributing factor.
The contemporary state of research in environmental art can be interrogated by a review
of sustained research interests, projects and exhibitions. Although the overlap between
academics in research posts and the artists, critics and curators developing work is often
minimal. This contradiction is particularly true in the UK, somewhat less so in the USA,
Europe, and the rest of the world. I will focus on the USA and the UK, the areas where I have
spent the most time. However, I must at least mention the terrific work being done by col-
leagues in the EU such as Nathalie Blanc, Director of Research CNRS, University of Paris, and
Sacha Kagan, a Research Associate at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. Simi-
larly, I should mention colleagues in Asia, including Wu Mali, at the National Normal Uni-
versity, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and Yutaka Kobayashi at the University of the Ryukyus in
Okinawa, Japan.
The story of contemporary art/environment and landscape research begins with formal/
sculptural investigations in land art that emerged from the minimalist art movement over fifty
years ago. Some of the original practitioners include Herbert Bayer, Walter De Maria, Michael
Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. The impetus for the
work flowed from the artistic, social, political and theoretical context of that time; and in many
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cases responded to post-industrial conditions, or embraced industrial tools as a means of making

marks and forms on the earth. The artists and the artwork have been widely discussed and
described in terms of emergent landscape tradition and evolution of form in John Beardsley’s
(1984) Earthworks and Beyond. Lucy Lippard’s (1983) Overlay took a broader approach linking
the work to prehistoric earth/sky forms, feminism, ritual, homes and graves, with an extensive
overview of both material and performative approaches referencing hundreds of artists and art-
works. The book has long been considered a key text for practitioners interested in this area of
work as its breadth and depth of scholarship and speculation about pre-history incites the ima-
gination. Many of us working in the field have found that Suzaan Boettger’s (2002) book
Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties provides significant new material about the earth-
artists and the context, intentions, processes and methods that informed their work. More
recently Amanda Boetzkes has written The Ethics of Earth Art (Boetzkes 2010). She treats the
artworks as the focal point of the Earth’s ‘elemental’ agency. This is an interesting idea sup-
ported by some very good research and analysis, although the ethical position of the artwork as
a medium where the earth manifests its own ‘irreducible otherness’ (Boetzkes 2010: 21) is not
fully resolved in that text.
Moving forward, Jeffery Kastner and Brian Wallis published Land and Environmental Art
(Kastner and Wallis 1998). The text provides earth/land art as the foundation and then provides
frameworks to understand the evolution of environmental art away from formal artworld con-
cerns, worked out with earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems,
processes and phenomena in relationship to social concerns. The book provides an in-depth
overview of international artists and artworks, followed by an impressive collection of articles by
artists and critics over a period of thirty years. Read together with Barbara Matilsky’s (1992)
Fragile Ecologies the historic precedents for this work become more obvious, as do the devel-
opment of integrated social and ecological approaches, as an ethical, restorative stance emerges.
Some of the original voices in the area include Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Ian Hamilton
Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Hans Haacke, Helen and Newton Harrison, Ichi
Ikeda, Herman Prigann, Alan Sonfist and Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Many of them remain
active and continue to develop new work, though most are quite senior now. Beuys and
Prigann have both died.
One might argue that the move from land art to environmental art tracks an evolution of
human subjectivity and ideas about human interrelationships to environment, landscape and
living things. Suzaan Boettger concludes her text on Earthworks with these words: ‘Earthworks
embodied ambivalent responses to the anti-institutional position of so much of late-sixties
culture and fused them with conflicted behaviour toward the natural environment’ (Boettger
2002: 245). In a deeply committed engagement with artists dealing with habitat creation and
recycling of waste, Barbara Matilsky points to artistic engagement as part of a process of ‘solving’
the world’s environmental problems. She differentiates ecological from environmental art
through a moral and ethical relationship. ‘Art is defined through the process of creation, and
ecological art consummately expresses this by enhancing the foundations of life’ (Matilsky
1992: 115). Writing eight years later, Brian Wallis takes this one step further. He identifies a
‘post-modern resistance’ that has ‘changed radically in the past thirty years’. He claims that there
is a ‘need to remain suspicious of the ideological freight and the constructedness of the concept
of nature and calls for its preservation: and to continue to call attention to the fragility of our
environment and organized threats to it’ (Wallis 1998: 41). The project of environmental art has
moved from a material engagement with landscape, through ethical relationships with natural
systems and then to a sense of suspicion about how we relate and interrelate to the natural
environment. As the world becomes increasingly aware of the significance of human impact and
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the limitations of our conception of nature one question to consider is: what can we do today
that makes a difference?
I will begin by describing the academic infrastructure in the UK and identify key researchers
in the process. Although many programmes have opened and closed through the years, the
longest running programme with a somewhat tangential relationship to this area was established
in the 1980s. ‘Sculpture and Environmental Art’ (SEA) at Glasgow School of Art is a four-year
undergraduate programme (with input into an MFA and an MLitt). The group also supports
two PhD students. SEA is focused upon public, social and political forms of artmaking. The
methodologies embedded in that course are socially activist and are often identified with David
Harding who ran it until 2002. It is more environment and society than environment and
landscape. Key researchers include: Susan Brind working on the body and its external influence
and internal references; Justin Carter working on issues of appropriate technology and sustain-
ability; and Shauna McMullan who is focused on communities of discourse engaged with issues
of mapping, landscape and place. Thomas Joshua Cooper is an external complement to this
group, with an extensive body of landscape-based fieldwork in photography that interrogates
the meaning of edges between land and water and their related histories.
Shelly Sacks launched the ‘Social Sculpture Research Unit’ (SSRU) in the late 1990s at
Oxford Brookes University. She was a student of Joseph Beuys and is considered a second-
generation leader in the social-sculpture tradition. With a decade of effort and an illustrious
roster of internationally recognized academics and professionals in the field, the SSRU has a
rising profile. Sacks runs a robust MA programme while supervising seven PhD students.
‘Land2’ is a research network established at the University of West of England by Ian Biggs in
the first years of the new millennium. It is a national network of artists, lecturers and research
students with a general interest in landscape and place-oriented art practice. Biggs’s specific
research interests in recent years have focused upon mapping and psycho-geography.
At about the same time Alan Johnston and Eelco Hooftman established the MA in Art, Space
and Nature at Edinburgh College of Art. The two-year course and its methods were inspired
by the work of Patrick Geddes; it is now informed by a broader range of contemporary eco-
philosophy. It continues to be led by artists and landscape architects and provides a framework
of advanced field studies to develop practical and academic interest in the visual arts, archi-
tectural and environmental practice. The group currently supports one PhD student. The staff
teaching on the course are also members of Creative Research into the Environment (CORE),
with an international network that rivals the SSRU. Key researchers include: Donald Urquhart,
recognized for his work in public art and health care; Ross McLean, focused on scenario plan-
ning and socio-ecological resilience in landscape architecture; Lisa Mackenzie focused upon the
application of ecological principles in design and master planning. Landscape architects Cathe-
rine Ward Thompson, working on access to public space, and John Stuart Murray working on
ecology and sustainability, provide an external complement to this group. David Haley is a
senior researcher and the lead on the MA in Art as Environment at Manchester Metropolitan
University. He is primarily allied with Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, two original
practitioners who inform his approach to whole systems ecology and critical futures. Haley embraces
the quantitative and the qualitative to inform poetic dialogue. He develops creative interventions that
intend to enable a community of inquiry that informs the development of ecocentric culture.
Daro Montag directs research in Art, Nature and Environment (RANE). It was established at
University College Falmouth as an MA course that examines the relationship between the
visual arts and ecological thinking. The programme includes an international lecture series and a
bi-yearly conference on art and environment. Montag supervises three PhD students. There are
other key researchers in the UK operating with less infrastructure and supporting coursework.
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Tim Collins
The list includes Simon Read at the University of Middlesex, and Mathew Dalziel and Louise
Scullion at Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. Likewise there are
key people working on environmental and landscape issues from a digital point of view in the
UK including Lise Autogena at the University of Newcastle, Jennifer Gabrys at Goldsmiths,
University of London, and Tom Corby at the University of Westminster. Corby led the recent
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded Digital Ecologies workshops. While
much of this work across the UK is pedagogically strong, when considered as research we are
looking for work that must be ‘effectively shared’ (HEFCE 2011, REF: 48) and have explicit ‘ques-
tions, context and methods’ (AHRC 2011: 59–60). Without specific texts that explicate and inter-
rogate these matters, the value of what may or may not be research remains difficult to ascertain.
With few exceptions, these artists and landscape architects have been largely ignored as a
confluence of UK funding has supported exhibitions, catalogues and texts that seek to address
cultural approaches to environmental change, and climate impact, with landscape as the over-
arching topic of enquiry. The Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) Arts and Ecology programme
ran from 2005 to 2010 as did the AHRC Landscape and Environment programme. The former
is closed, while work on the latter is still in a concluding phase with final work being done to
establish new research networks that focus upon living with environmental change (see further
reading). While the RSA Art and Ecology programme did a lot of good work, it largely
ignored the need for investment in practice-based research in the UK. Where the AHRC
Landscape and Environment programme did engage artists, it was still a minimum investment.
The largest project engaging an artist ‘The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image’ was
organized around the work of the noted filmmaker, Patrick Keiller. The research project would
‘identify, understand and document aspects of the current global predicament in the UK’s
landscape, and explore its histories and possible futures’ (Massey 2010). This is a breathtaking
scope of work. The work was presented at a seminar with Patrick, Doreen Massey and Patrick
Wright presenting at Nottingham University in 2009. The panel proved to be wildly explora-
tory providing little clarity on the work as a research initiative, but some sense of the depth of
exchange between artists and authors. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was
then shown at the New York Film Festival. The work is indeed unique, significant and it is
rigorous in Keiller’s inimitable style. Massey interrogates the work in an in-depth article
‘Landscape/Space/Politics: an essay’ (Massey 2010) which provides significant insight into the
critical ideas and process, the discourse exchanged over the work. Despite Massey’s claim that
the work, ‘is more demanding politically than the more usual critiques’, the fact remains
that the most imaginative critical analysis of what is, doesn’t take us much closer to a
‘possible future’. Of the smaller research grants, Craig Richardson ran ‘Landscape as Conceptual
Art’. It planned to validate various shale hills in the Mid-Lothian area of Scotland as Earth Art,
as so declared by the British Conceptual artist John Latham. Given even the brief history of the
field described herein, both of these projects can only be described as idiosyncratic; an invest-
ment in a unique variation on a known critique in the former case and a contemporary vali-
dation of what has been done in the latter case. The investment is in significant art and an
experimental curatorial practice. The contribution to the discourse in the field remains open to
question.
But let us consider one of the longest-standing arts and environment projects in the UK.
Cape Farewell was initiated by David Buckland and it is documented in the exhibition and
accompanying text ‘U-n-f-o-l-d’ (Buckland and Wainwright 2010). Operating for ten years
now, it is an environmental change based programme foregrounding artwork. The question is
how does this programme of expeditions with artists and scientists contribute to knowledge
within the field? Cape Farewell, sailing from the UK, develops art/science expeditions and
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produces travelling exhibitions, catalogues and lectures. This ambitious project places art, music
and literature at the centre of the climate-change debate. This is a programme of applied art and
design where artistic expertise in material, performative and literary methods is exchanged for a
ride on a boat to a cold place, where scientists explain why everything around the boat is
melting. I would suggest that this is a classic cultural assignment with roots in the traditions of
British Empire, where artists and scientists go forth and record images and capture data at
the edges of civilization (see Chapter 16). Nevertheless, Cape Farewell is a high profile, well-
funded, ongoing programme of Arts Council England. Its director David Buckland and the
exhibitions he organizes have international standing, and the work is a cultural symbol of
the commitment that Britain has made to highlighting the issue of climate change, particularly
through participation in touring exhibitions organized by the British Embassies in Moscow
and Rome, as well as programmes sponsored by the British Council in Germany, Canada
and Japan.
The expeditions include a Who’s Who of international art, literature and music. Artists
travel to the polar regions with scientists. According to Buckland it is the scientists who, ‘have
allowed the artists to gain a full understanding of the implications of human activity on the
fragile environment that is our planet’ (Buckland and Wainwright 2010: 8). But this raises two
questions: first, is science the single definitive path to understand climate change? Second, can
any of us actually secure a ‘full understanding’ of anything in twenty days? It is quite possible
that the expeditions have a deep impact upon all that participate. Cape Farewell always has a
world-class roster of artists, musicians, writers and poets on board, but does the work that fol-
lows expand the ‘climate imaginary’, and/or does it push the ideas and practices of art in new
directions? Much of the visual work is essentially pictorial, distanced and appropriative, although
there are exceptions. The literature that attends Cape Farewell suggests a limited interest in the
historical record of environmental art practice, and little or no sense of the theory or external
literature that might inform its subject matter. The artists on board the expeditions represent or
document a phenomenon, and record gestures and actions in the open arctic landscape. With
some exceptions the work is largely devoid of a critical relationship to ideas of nature, power,
politics or embodied values. Final forms are typically images, drawings or a mix of image and
sound. Artwork presented in ‘U-n-f-o-l-d’ includes Buckland’s now familiar projections of text
on ice, presented as photographs, 8mm films by Leslie Frost, geo-glacial archetypal photographs
by Nathan Gallagher, video with jungle sounds by Brendan McGuire and coloured flash pic-
tures of ice by Chris Wainwright. This is a, ‘landscape way of seeing, a gaze projected out onto
the land, a vision of authority and ownership, the mind’s eye of certain knowledge systems,
vested interests and desires’ (Wylie 2007: 93). In other words, I went, I saw, I understood things
on specific terms. The implication is that the Cape Farewell artists (informed by the science
team) have captured the ‘true meaning’ of climate change, embodied in their images and
experience of the last of the ice … for all to see. Admittedly the expeditions have resulted in
some important artwork. The project has reset the parameters for consideration of the real
publicity value of art and design on a topic of national interest. It has enabled the production of
works that function in a rhetorical fashion, giving emphasis and possibly adding depth to extant
ideas about climate.
It is useful to compare similar research and projects underway in the USA. I want to start by
considering what may be significant cultural differences; ideas about the role of visual arts in
society in the USA (Lippard) and the UK (Bunting).
Artists cannot change the world … alone. But when they make a concerted effort, they
collaborate with life itself. Working with and between other disciplines and audiences, and
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given the chance to be seriously considered outside the rather narrow world of art, they
can offer visual jolts and subtle nudges to conventional knowledge.
(Lippard 2007: 6)
The visual arts offer a myriad of powerful ways to think and feel more deeply about our
age and our humanity, but it is almost impossible to trace the causal links of how that may
feed through to political engagement or behaviour change.
(Bunting 2011)
Following Lippard one problem to consider is how to gauge ‘visual jolts and subtle nudges to
conventional knowledge’. Or maybe the point is to understand how art ‘engages with life
itself’. We can also ask ourselves is it really impossible to trace causal links to behavioural
change, as Bunting suggests? How is it we can accept the idea that an artwork affects how we
think and feel about our age and our humanity, yet suggest that it is simply impossible to
demonstrate ways in which it might effect political engagement or behavioural change? Isn’t it
possible to engage others to ascertain value and impact through social discourse? The term
‘causal’ indicates a relationship between the first event (the art) and the second event, the
viewer’s response to an experience of the art and its ‘jolts and nudges’. The power of the art-
work to affect thought and feeling is as valid a cause and effect relationship as any other causal
link. Although it may take extraordinary effort to prove behaviour change through art, is it
really impossible? The more important question may be – is it necessary? If we are talking about
a research-based approach to environmental art, this needs careful consideration.
There are fundamental differences between the USA and the UK. The National Endowment
for the Arts funds organizations such as museums and non-profits to support the creation of
artwork. There is no sense of investment in a culture of research in art and design. The doctoral
degree is not a standard offer in Art and Design at US universities. At the same time, the USA
has a tradition of philanthropic foundations that contribute significant funding to the arts and
culture sector, with diversity of intention and some surprising strategic impact.
One of the strongest areas for research in environmental arts has emerged in the south-west
United States, largely through the strategic support of the Lannan Foundation. Land Arts of the
American West (Taylor and Gilbert 2009) is a book, about an academic project. The project was
initiated in 2000 by Bill Gilbert at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico,
and Chris Taylor at the University of Texas, Austin joined the programme in 2002. LAAW is a
semester-long itinerant field programme. The University of New Mexico has also established a
robust art and ecology faculty, with support for both undergraduate and MFA students. Bill
Gilbert is founder of both LAAW and a co-founder of the arts and ecology programme in
studio art. He primarily uses video and installation to interrogate the relationship between
people and land. Other staff on the course include Catherine Page Harris, a landscape architect
focused on lines and built forms with dynamic landscape pattern as an orientation, or back-
ground to her studies. Andrea Polli has a dual appointment in art and engineering, with a focus
on science, technology and media and a specific interest in environmental data and practices in
the field of acoustic ecology. Molly Sturges is a composer and performing artist who con-
centrates upon collaborative community engagement and social/environmental equity.
The US Southwest is a region that stretches across five states and covers an area of more than
a half a million square miles; none the less I will suggest that LAAW has ‘regional resonance’
with other Lannan Foundation funded arts organizations such as the Chinati Foundation, cre-
ated in 1986 by the artist Donald Judd, in Marfa, Texas. Other organizations I will touch on
include the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), founded in 1994 in Los Angeles, it is
204
directed by Matthew Coolidge. The project has residency programmes at Wendover, Utah,
near the Bonneville Salt Flats and in Hinkley, California, near the Mojave Desert. There is also
the recently established Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, in Reno,
Nevada, with a programme of exhibitions and seminars. All of these organizations claim some
level of research interest.
LAAW and its ‘field projects’ have a lot in common with Art Space and Nature at Edinburgh
College of Art, University of Edinburgh. A mix of artists and architects, focused on travel and
consideration of the tensions between the built environment and nature. In their book, Taylor
and Gilbert explicate a process of land–art–learning by doing that includes historic analysis of
artists and artworks, consideration of archaeological and anthropological evidence of previous
human intervention as well as a process of in-situ tacit learning through art practice. The book
is full of information and details on the western landscape and a process of regular creative
inquiry. It is written in a non-academic style, which is actually quite similar to Land Art: A
Cultural Ecology Handbook (Andrews, 2006). Both of these offer a wonderful hardback com-
pendium of ideas and artists projects, which are presented at face value. In both texts there are
hints of research excellence, but the work is almost never interrogated. These texts explain and
describe, map what is known with only cursory attempts at analysis. The LAAW text docu-
ments the ideas behind the road trips describing a range of sites, from the classic ‘land art’ pro-
ject sites such as Michael Heizer’s ‘Double Negative’ and Robert Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ to the
ongoing work on Roden Crater by James Turrell to exploration of the legendary ‘Chaco
Canyon’, a site of intensive pre-European occupation which is now a National Park. The
methods are described as ‘place, mapping, space and artifacts’. The work begins with ‘basic
questions’ and ‘zones of inquiry’ as a way to orient the students and get them moving into their
own creative inquiry in those places. (Taylor and Gilbert 2009: 146). At the same time, the
project team operates from an ethical ‘leave no trace’ position, taking images but leaving no
marks or artefacts behind (Taylor and Gilbert 2009: 154). This is a unique pedagogical pro-
gramme with research potential that is only partially formed as research and remains lightly
interrogated at this time.
The Center for Land Use Investigation is known for an Internet-led process of open inquiry.
The project has developed a national database of visual and mapping materials that address
transportation infrastructure and the industrial and military complex, as well as the hinterland
and wastelands where human impact is significant. Having seen some of this work, I would
argue that it is most effective where a focused and seemingly obsessive visual record helps
one to grasp the physicality, the scope and the scale of an issue. I’ve seen a project on private
development and the California coastline, which was effective in this way. The work on the
Alaskan pipeline has similar potential depending on presentation. The noted critic Jeffery
Kastner states that CLUI projects ‘have the dual (and engagingly ambiguous) purpose of edu-
cating viewers about the meaning of specific sites, while at the same time striving to make new
meaning in given locations’ (Kastner in Andrews 2006, p. 25). I would argue that CLUI’s intent
is to document, not educate; the method is to present what is, rather than project what it may
mean. Consider CLUI’s American Landuse Database (http://ludb.clui.org/). The database is a
record of infrastructure and waste sites chosen by a stated criteria of the ‘unusual and the
exemplary’. As a body of lens- and map-based work it has potential to help us ‘see’, to witness,
a documented material truth. My own review left me underwhelmed with the generic facts that
document a few obvious choices of limited interest in three places I know well. Coolidge
argues, ‘Through us trying not to tell people what to think about the site – by getting in touch
with this truth of the ground – maybe you come away with more of an emotive or a psycho-
logical truth, a more complex and complete sense of the place’ (Coolidge 2005). The focus on
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Tim Collins
‘truth on the ground’ is not dissimilar to the claims of ‘full understanding’ by artists working on
Cape Farewell. The fact that both are primarily mediated through second-hand experience of
lens-based activity, devoid of intellectual consideration or critical interrogation, makes these
claims presumpt and weak.
CLUI’s practices are interrogated in an article in Frieze Magazine, where Kurt Mueller
examines artwork focused on the City of Houston, Texas and its oil infrastructure. He takes
issue with the claimed ‘objective lens’ and the overt ‘museological’ veneer of the work. Mueller
states, ‘the show itself remains physically, sensorially and politically clean’. He questions the lack
of direct critique, the disinterested view does not help the viewer come to grips with the
broader aesthetic issues embedded in the subject (Mueller 2009). Where Kastner finds engaging
ambiguity, Mueller finds a feigned objectivity. The artwork, like that of Cape Farewell, is pic-
torial, distanced and appropriative. Where Cape Farewell brackets any hint of didacticism,
CLUI insists upon an ironic objectivity. This is a calculated position that cloaks the artwork in
modernist ideas about scientific disinterest, measurement and factuality. In fact beyond what can
be seen by CLUI’s objective eye lays a complexity of ecological impact and social inequity that
is ignored as a result.
The Center for Art and Environment (CA+E) at the Nevada Museum of Art has made a
bold move into questions of environment. It is directed by William L. Fox, an artist and author
with a sustained interest in human cognition and its relationship to landscape. In the welcome
message to the 2011 CA+E conference, an exemplary international mix of first-rate artists and
academics, Fox said, ‘The study of art + environment is not just about remembering what
we’ve done, but is also an ongoing re-creation of the future through imagination, aesthetics,
and technology’ (CA+E 2011).
The research and curatorial programme has been developed in relationship to an expanding
archive of work on Land Art, with extensive material on the work of artists Michael Heizer and
Walter De Maria, as well as work from artists on six continents. The current exhibition pro-
grammes are exemplary and include work from Helen and Newton Harrison, Professors
Emeriti at UC San Diego, working on the climate change ecology of the Rocky Mountains;
Richard Black of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, working on the
Murray river; Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, Catholic University in Santiago, working on fog drip
collection; as well as a new body of work from Bill Gilbert of the LAAW, at the University of
Austin, Texas, exploring the relationship between information technologies and the embodied
practice of walking. CA+E is an exemplary new programme, an example of a museum serving
a regional interest providing an anchor-point for research in the field with significant interna-
tional impact.
Over the last ten years there has been a rush of important exhibitions dealing with art and
environment. ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’ at the Royal Academy of Arts (2009), London,
and ‘Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet’ organized by the University of
California at Berkeley Art Museum and the La Jolla Museum of Art in San Diego CA (Human/
Nature 2009). These exhibitions are notable in that they present visual work by the world’s
most prominent artists, although these artists have a tenuous relationship to the subject
matter. In the latter case artists were embedded in international conservation areas, where
biodiversity collapse is imminent. In counterpoint the following exhibitions featured artists
actively involved in the ethical-aesthetic issues of the field. One of the first to take the
climate issue head on was curated by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Art, titled
‘Weather Report: Art and Climate Change’ (Lippard 2007). Working in the same way, the
RSA Arts and Ecology Programme organized the ‘Radical Nature’ exhibition and catalogue
(Manacorda and Yedgar 2009). This was curated by Francesco Manacorda looking at
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utopian and visionary artwork that engaged nature as a living ecosystem integrated with human
interest.
In curatorial efforts more integrated with academic interests conversant with theory, there is
Beyond Green curated with a catalogue edited by Stephanie Smith (2005) at the Smart
Museum, University of Chicago. Smith is recognized for her attention to experimental public
art practices and alternative and international examples of cultural infrastructure. The exhibition
has been recognized and referenced for its ideas about sustainability in art and design. The
exhibition extends work done previously by Heike Strelow in the exhibition and catalogue
Natural Reality (Strelow 1999). Both projects inform Sacha Kagan’s new book Art and
Sustainability (Kagan 2011). Groundworks, was curated with a catalogue edited by Grant Kester
(2005) for the Miller Galleries at Carnegie Mellon University. The exhibition focused on artists
around the world that sustain work in the public realm and engage in creative projects at scale
with democratic/creative intent to engage others in an aesthetic discourse of change. The intent
of positive intervention and change is also embedded in the 2002 Ecovention: Current Art
to Transform Ecologies, an exhibition and catalogue edited by Sue Spaid, curated with
Amy Lipton that extends and critiques Matilsky’s (1992) original project (Spaid and Lipton,
2002).
In a strategic and significant extension of all of these models ‘RETHINK – Contemporary
Art and Climate’, was developed in Copenhagen with partners at the Nkolaj, Contemporary
Art Center, and the Den Frie Centre of contemporary art. This exhibition and catalogue
(Witzke and Hede 2009) included challenging artwork and an extraordinary depth of ideas,
philosophy and programmes that deal with contemporary theory and practice in the field. Anne
Sophie Witzke writes that our time ‘has given rise to questions regarding the role art can and
should play in relation to global problems such as climate change. Can, and should, art concern
itself with social issues of such serious and complex nature?’ (Witzke and Hede 2009: 9). The
exhibition is organized around ideas about relations, information, implicity and the concept of
kakotopia (a negative society, an anti-utopia of chaos and disintegration). It sharpens the ques-
tions and our ideas about the role of art; it possibly gives us all a point to move forward from.
I provide a sense of current developments in the field of art research in relationship to
environmental change and landscape. Art and design researchers are torn between the validation
and support of the classroom, the ever-present demands of the contemporary art world and the
emergent realm of research. Much of the long-term work and exhibition in the field remains
confined to questions of traditional media and ideas about visual aesthetics, ignoring a decade of
development in critical theory and environmental aesthetics.
We live in the age of the anthropocene where humanity’s reach has a negative effect upon all
living things on Earth. We are increasingly aware of the fact that in our relationship to nature,
environment and landscape we have bound future generations to a life that will be somewhat
less than our own. I would argue that the arts and humanities together have an important role
to play in the evolution of human imagination as well as; perception, subjectivity and ethical,
aesthetic obligation. To achieve that role, academics in the field needs to take stock, set strategy
and develop short-term tactics to help funders, publishers and curatorial interests see where
support and investment is most needed.
Further reading
There were fourteen ‘researching environmental change’ networks established by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council in 2010. Three were focused within the visual and performing arts; one
focused on environmental writing but included many artists in the working group. Relevant programmes
include ‘Data Landscapes’ with Dr Tom Corby at University of Westminster, ‘Learning to Live with
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Tim Collins
Water: Flood Histories’ with Professor Lindsey Jo McEwen at University of Gloucesterhire, ‘Reflecting on
Environmental Change Through Site-Based Performance’, Professor Stephen Bottoms, University of
Leeds, and ‘Values of Environmental Writing’ with Dr Hayden Lorimer at University of Glasgow.
Demos, T.J. (2009) ‘The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology’. In F. Manacorda and A. Yedgar (eds)
Radical Nature. London: Walther König Books, pp. 16–30.
Gessert, G. (2007) ‘Gathered from Coincidence: Reflections on Art in a Time of Global Warming’.
Leonardo, 40: 3, 231–6.
Knebusch, J. (2008) ‘Art and Climate (Change) Perception: Outline of a phenomenology of climate’. In
Kagan, S. and Kirchberg, V. (eds) Sustainability: A New Frontier for the Arts and Cultures. Bad Homburg:
Verlag für Akademische Schriften, pp. 242–61.
References
AHRC (2011) Arts and Humanities Research Funding Guide, Version 1.4, Swindon: Arts and Humanities
Research Council
Andrews, M. (2006) Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook, London: Royal Society for the Encouragement of
Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, in partnership with Arts Council England
Beardsley, J. (1984) Earthworks and Beyond, New York: Abbeville Press
Boettger, S. (2002) Earthworks: Art and Landscape of the Sixties, Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press
Boetzkes, A., 2010 The Ethics of Earth Art, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press
Buckland, D. and Wainwright, C. (eds) (2010) U-N-F-O-L-D: A Cultural Response to Climate Change, New
York: Springer-Verlag/Wien
Bunting, M. (2011) ‘Madeleine Bunting: Art and Climate’, available at http://www.artsandecology.org.
uk/magazine/features/madeleine-bunting (accessed 2 April 2011)
CA+E (2011) ‘Center for Art and Environment, Nevada Art Museum, 2011 Conference Programme’,
available at http://www.nevadaart.org/conference2011/welcome-message.html (accessed 16 September
2012)
Coolidge, M. (2005) ‘True Beauty: Jeffrey Kastner Talks with Matthew Coolidge about the Center for
Land Use Interpretation’, Artforum, Summer, New York
HEFCE (2011) ‘Assessment framework and guidance on submissions’, Higher Education Funding
Council for England, Bristol, Ref 02/2011, available at http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/2011-02/ (accessed
16 September 2012)
Human/Nature (2009) ‘Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet’, available at http://www.
artistsrespond.org/about/ (accessed 16 September 2012)
Kagan, S. (2011) Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag
Kastner, J. and Wallis, B. (eds) (1998) Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon
Kester, G. (ed.) (2005) Groundworks: Environmental Collaboration in Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh,
PA: Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University
Lippard, L.R. (1983) Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory, New York, NY: Pantheon
Books
——(2007) Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, Boulder, CO: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
Manacorda, F. and Yedgar, A. (eds) (2009) Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet
1969–2009, London: Walther König
Massey, D. (2010) ‘Landscape/Space/Politics: An essay’, available at http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.
com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/ (accessed 16 September 2012)
Matilsky, B. (1992) Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists Interpretations and Solutions, New York, NY: Rizoli
International Publications
Mueller, K. (2009) ‘Center for Land Use Interpretation: Blaffer Gallery, Houston, Texas’, Frieze Magazine,
123, May, available at http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/center_for_land_use_interpretation/
Royal Academy of Arts (2009) ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’, available at http://www.royalacademy.
org.uk/exhibitions/gsk-contemporary-season-2009/ (accessed 16 September 2012)
Smith, S. (2005) Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, Chicago, IL: Smart Museum
Spaid, S. and Lipton, A. (2002) Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies, Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati
Art Center, Ecoartspace, and the Greenmuseum.org
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Strelow, H. (1999) Natural Reality: Artistic Positions Between Nature and Culture. Daco Verlag (Stuttgart):
Ludwig Forum for International Art
Taylor, C. and Gilbert, B. (2009) Land Arts of the American West, Austin TX: University of Texas Press
Wallis, B. (1998) ‘Survey’, in Kastner, J. and Wallis, B. (eds) Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon,
pp. 18–43
Witzke, A. and Hede, S. (eds) (2009) RE THINK Contemporary Art and Climate Change, Aarhus: Alexandra
Institute
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18
The field and the frame: landscape,
film and popular culture
John R. Gold
OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY
Margaret M. Gold
LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY
[I]t is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the
essence of every picture is the frame.
(Chesterton, 1908: 57)
A small road in north-west Malta ends at a cliff-top car park, but the settlement that it serves is
no ordinary fishing village (see Figure 18.1). Vaguely reminiscent of small ports along the sleepy
backwaters of New England, the quays and clapboard houses of ‘Sweethaven’ in fact only date
from 1979 when a film production company selected the hitherto undeveloped inlet of Anchor
Bay to construct a set for the film Popeye, a musical commissioned by Paramount and Walt
Disney Productions and based on the cartoon character created by Elzie Crisler Segar (Inge,
1990). Begun in May 1979, the set took seven months to construct. Replete with extensive
earthworks and a substantial breakwater to protect the site from high seas during filming, the
final product constituted a substantial investment for a single film project.
After the end of shooting in 1980, the set’s future was undecided. The film company painted
the buildings with grey protective paint and left, passing ownership to the Malta Film Facility
(MCF). Rather than adopt the usual practice of quickly demolishing it and returning the area to
something approaching its original state, the MCF hesitantly decided to retain Sweethaven as an
attraction, seeking to generate revenue by drawing in tourists interested in visiting the sites of
the film’s production. While this remains an essential part of the raison d’être of the ‘Popeye
Village’, new owners have converted the buildings, all but two of which were originally just
shells, into functioning craft workshops and tourist amenities. Hence as Popeye faded into cine-
matic history, the landscapes of Sweethaven became shaped by new attractions related to the
packaging of Maltese tourism. During 2011, these included pedagogic instruction on the marine
environment and nautical skills, displays of local handicrafts, a year-round Christmas display
(‘Santa’s Toy Town’), and provision of adventure playgrounds – activities sometimes only
tangentially related to the adventures of the strip-cartoon sailor.
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Landscape, film and popular culture
Figure 18.1 ‘Popeye Village’, Anchor Bay, Malta (John Gold, January 2011).
The transformation of Anchor Bay provides insight into the complex relationship between
landscape and film and, beyond that, to wider relationships between landscape and popular
culture. With reference to the former, constructing the faux harbour in line with the produc-
tion needs of a Hollywood film emphasises the importance of the setting as part of the mise-en-scène
or, literally, the business of ‘staging an action’ for the sake of the cameras (Gibbs, 2002). Popeye’s
director and producers required convincing frames for the film’s action that would meet the
audience’s expectations and reflect the values and imaginaries that shape those expectations. As
frames, the landscapes function rhetorically in the construction of the film serving, amongst
other things, to provide information about characters’ identities, convey persuasive ideas about
the film’s emerging narrative and supply images that might enrich the audience’s experience
(Groenendyk, 2000). Yet, to continue the cinematic analogy, the field within the frame con-
tinues to change. For Sweethaven, the ab initio imaginative creations of the film-makers have
forever altered the landscapes of the bay, but a series of subsequent transformations have further
mediated their meaning. The landscapes of Sweethaven are now consumed by paying tourists
who visit an attraction now presented as a theme park, with the additional expectations that
experience of theme parks elsewhere brings. Certainly, there has been no fixity surrounding the
interpretation of the landscapes of this paradoxical, fictional-yet-existing place.
This example, of course, has features that are specific to the Maltese context, but it introduces
ideas that may be developed further about the complex and multifaceted relationship between
landscape and popular culture as mediated by film. At the outset, film is taken here to include
the products of both cinema and television, notwithstanding the differences in the ways in
which ‘images are constructed, used or looked at’ (Higson, 1987: 8). For its part, popular
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John R. Gold, Margaret M. Gold
culture – inevitably defined in contradistinction to elite culture (or the arts) – is defined as ‘the
system of shared meanings, values and attitudes and the symbolic forms … in which they are
expressed and embodied’ (Burke, 2009: xiii) associated with the overwhelming proportion of
the population who do not occupy positions of wealth and power in society. Against that
background, this chapter builds on earlier research (Gold, 1974, 2001, 2002; Burgess and Gold
1985; Gold and Gold, 1995) to consider three central themes. The first, discussed in the next
section, deals with the question of ‘realism’ in representations of landscape, using examples
relating to the documentary movement – the sub-genre of film-making that supposedly has
greatest concern with the notion of accurately holding up a mirror to the world. The second
part turns attention to the clichéd representations of landscape often found in the cinema, illus-
trated by considering the reasons why science-fiction film-makers routinely employ a powerful
but limited set of urban landscapes to anchor the narratives of their movies. The final section
examines the cultural meaning that landscapes acquire as a result of their contact with film
production, noting how such contacts challenge ideas that popular culture is necessarily
associated with ordinariness.
Landscape and documentary realism

The contested notion of ‘realism’ haunts discourse about documentary film and its characteristic
modes of representation. The idea that non-fictional film provides a truthful and accurate por-
trayal of reality is, of course, almost as old as the cinema itself. In 1898, the Polish photographer
Boleslaw Matuszewski recommended film as an instructional medium suitable for recording
history, daily life, artistic performances, even medical procedures (Winston, 1995: 8). Early
ethnographic film-makers were ‘burdened with the expectation’ that they would record the
practices and customs of marginal cultures before they disappeared (De Brigard, 1995: 13). In
response to one such film, the Scottish film-maker John Grierson described Robert Flaherty’s
Moana (1924) as ‘a poetic vision of Polynesian tribal life’ that had ‘documentary value’ (Hood,
1983: 100). Grierson’s was the first unambiguous use of the term ‘documentary’ for a genre of
‘utilitarian, pedagogic and impersonal’ films with a high informational content that differed
from straightforward travel films or pedagogic films by virtue of their social intent (Macdonald
and Cousins, 1996: xii).
This sense of social purpose was readily apparent in the documentaries produced on both
sides of the Atlantic from the 1920s through to the 1950s (Beattie, 2004; Chanan, 2007).
Benefitting from such changes in film technology as the introduction of safety film and smaller
formats, documentarists could escape from the studio and depict the living and working con-
ditions in the everyday world that the commercial cinema was simply ignoring. The results
were films that went beyond romantic travelogues about faraway places to throw light on
unseen rural and urban environments much closer to home. The landscapes depicted played a
strategic role in underscoring the message of the film. In Great Britain, for example, films on
housing conditions conveyed powerful images of the mean streets and decrepit buildings
experienced by those living in slum neighbourhoods (Gold, 1985). The imagery of urban des-
pair was then juxtaposed with glimpses of newer developments, particularly estates of flats,
which might offer hope for the future. The greyness, crowding and neglect of the outmoded
city were contrasted with the brightly lit and apparent spaciousness of the new dwellings.
Concerns with housing conditions, in turn, were routinely extended to argue the need for
town planning (Gold and Ward, 1997; Gold, 2002), although exemplars of better practice
might well be in short supply. This deficiency, however, could be resolved by means of collage.
The American documentary The City (1939), for instance, seemingly showed a Garden
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City-influenced settlement that would resolve the problems of the existing metropolis, but
stricto sensu the community shown living cheerfully in its sunlit and verdant surroundings did not
exist. Instead, it was a composite of shots from five different locations scattered across the USA
brought together in ‘sincere and justifiable reconstruction’ to flesh out the message of the film
(Barsam, 1973: 1).
Contemporary documentary film has retained the practices of using landscape as an adjunct
to exercises in public education, journalistic inquiry and radical interrogation, but the increasing
role of documentary as entertaining diversion (Corner, 2002: 259–60) has emphasised landscape
as spectacle. Where there is any latitude, for example, the director will use striking landscapes
that approximate to the right ones in order to advance the storyline rather than dwell on
visually dull landscapes that may be more accurate locations for the action. Even when based on
historic journeys, travelogues will be diverted to include adjacent, but not strictly relevant,
scenic wonders. Landscapes are frequently shot at the time of day that shows them at their
spectacular best (sunrise and sunset); times which may not reflect the presence of the presenter.
Night skies are routinely enhanced with image intensifiers and digital editing techniques,
because conventional camera technology can rarely do justice to the starlit panoramas about
which presenters are enthusing. All that is essentially required is that the audience believes that
they are witnessing landscapes as they are and actions as they happen without any obvious
intervention from the film-maker (Burgess, 1987: 6).
Travel series, a staple of television programme schedules, throw further light on the myth of
documentary realism. These range from programmes that glossily address the holiday market to
personal odysseys in which academics, journalists or ‘glitterati’ (celebrity presenters) undertake
nostalgic voyages of self-discovery for the sake of the cameras. The former essentially subsume
landscape depictions into an environmental rhetoric that has implicit commercial value for
tourist destinations (Dunn, 2005). The latter conventionally depict landscapes as part of a dia-
logue between presenter and place, although even here representations of landscape conform to
existing aesthetic-narrative conventions. Landscape shots, for example, are consistently edited
into the completed film to regulate their pace, with the freneticism associated with rapid jump-
cutting of images contrasting with the serenity imparted by slow wide panning. With respect to
the latter, the documentary producer David Wallace observed that incorporating landscape
footage helps a film ‘to breathe’ – a property enhanced by adding supporting music or appro-
priate lines of spoken text. Referring to the BAFTA-winning ‘River Journeys’ series (BBC
Television, 1981–4), for example, he observed that even ‘travelling up a river … these won-
derful landscapes going past (can) … all look the same’, but add ‘a simple piece of music or a
few well-chosen lines … and you can just run a scene like that forever’ (Wallace, 2011). It is
hard to avoid the conclusion that, even in documentary, ‘the landscape, the travel and
everything else’ are chosen ‘to inform the story’ (ibid).
Future shock
If documentary film masks selectivity in landscape representation through realist conventions,
science-fiction film routinely makes explicit use of a limited and highly stylised repertoire of
landscapes to contain narrative, provide spectacle and sustain atmosphere. In some respects, this
relative homogeneity is surprising. The novels on which so many science-fiction films are based
embrace a huge diversity of genres, from extraterrestrial fantasies and essays in time travel to
alien invasion and post-apocalyptic survival (Landon, 2002). Nevertheless, there is remarkable
consistency in the landscapes depicted when film-makers frame their narratives to negotiate the
characteristic polarities of the genre, such as between good/evil, light/dark, sanitised/
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contaminated, order/chaos, utopian/dystopian, and urban/rural. In line with both cinematic

and wider cultural traditions, they predominantly portray landscapes that bear testimony to the
longstanding hostility towards the city endemic in Western thought in general (e.g. White and
White, 1962) and science fiction literature in particular (Kuhn, 1999). Certainly the large city,
portrayed as a dystopian mixture of anthill and labyrinth, is the prime setting for science-fiction
film, with its landscapes used as signifiers to communicate where and when the action is set and
to offer coded information about what types of human behaviour one might expect to find
there (Gold, 2001).
The precise faces of such cities, however, have varied over time. During the interwar years of
the cinema, the dominant vision was the ‘vertical city’ – a prototype drawing partly on North
American urban experience that had already featured in novels written at the turn of the
twentieth century. The cinematic archetype of the vertical city was supplied by Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis (1926), a film framed around the sombre vision of human society ‘divided into brute
labour and trivial consumption, and then of the city shaped physically to embody these worlds’
(Williams, 1973: 374). When translated into set design, this juxtaposed a city with two vertically
distinct segments. The upper or ‘overground’ city, which Lang readily admitted was strongly
influenced by the visual appearance of Manhattan (Ott, 1979: 27), comprised an opulent high-
rise city that contained the homes and businesses owned by the ruling classes. By contrast, the
underground city presented a bleak and dehumanising environment, with barrack-like
tenement housing for the workers tending the machines that powered Metropolis.
Vistas of colossal buildings, cavernous roadways and skies filled with flying machines of all
descriptions became a de rigueur feature of the urban imaginary of science-fiction film. So
too did the close association between the city and its tyrannical ruling elites. Those who
confronted the forces of evil were outlaws driven to the margins – normally finding refuge
either in the sewers under the city or the desolate (post-apocalyptic) wilderness that lay outside
the city’s guarded boundaries. Nevertheless, convergence with other film genres led to
further iconographic innovations. The most notable was with film noir, characterised by the
atmosphere of darkness and pessimism conveyed by Hollywood crime dramas in the late 1940s
and 1950s (Dimendberg, 2004). Science-fiction cinema readily embraced a future city noir
(e.g. Sammon, 1996), the hallmarks of which were panoramas of densely packed cityscapes,
glimpses of city streets in perpetual night-time lit by flickering bonfires, skies besmirched by
industrial pollution and wastelands of decaying buildings presided over by brooding high-rise
buildings.
New York, commonly felt to be in terminal decline in the 1970s, became the archetypal
future city noir, just as it was once the inspiration for the vertical city. The proto-
environmentalist Soylent Green (1973), for example, depicted the city as a humid and claus-
trophobic place where the population had spiralled to 40 million by 2022. Escape from New York
(1981) offered a scenario by which the ruling elite had sealed Manhattan Island behind by a
50 foot high perimeter wall to serve as a dumping ground for dangerous criminals. Los Angeles,
the home of Hollywood, also acted as the setting for stories involving urban dereliction, decay
and abandonment. Blade Runner (1982), with its storyline about environmental collapse and
malfunctioning experiments in genetic engineering, embodied characteristic duality in its
anticipations of the Los Angeles of 2017. At its heart lay a high-density and teeming city centre
with a visual appearance influenced by elements drawn from the cityscapes of Tokyo, Hong
Kong and Las Vegas. Around it were the crumbling remains of the existing city, rendered by
clichéd noir settings of dark and deserted streets fringed by deteriorating blocks of apartments.
Regardless of what narrative twists were added, Blade Runner’s representations of urban
landscapes were essentially the present-as-future.
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The same representational strategy perhaps reached its apotheosis in science-fiction cinema
with the concept of hyperreality, whereby re-creations become so convincing that they are
more authentic than the real. The Matrix and its two sequels (1999–2003), for instance, find
human beings in the late twenty-first century living in a simulated world created by intelligent
machines in order to mask the fact that their human slaves are actually being held in suspended
animation so that their body heat can be used as a source of electrical power. The settings
replicate the above/below ground dichotomy seen in earlier films. Members of the human
resistance live underground in a future noir environment that remains undetected by the
machines. Meanwhile the hyperreality, into which the consciousness of most inhabitants is
locked, conveniently replicates the appearance of cities as they were at the turn of the twen-
tieth-first century. By virtue of this innovative stratagem, the future could be set authentically in
any suitable existing urban environment – in this instance using the central business district of
Sydney (Australia), lightly camouflaged with Chicago street names, for location work. The
exact location, however, clearly mattered little, since the future urban nightmare was apparently
anywhere and everywhere.
Out of the ordinary

When reviewing the neglect of the media and popular culture by geographers and others,
Burgess and Gold (1985: 1) argued that the ‘very ordinariness’ of media such as film and
television ‘masks their importance’ since they ‘are an essential element in moulding individual
and social experiences of the world and in shaping the relationship between people and place’.
Although that remains substantially true, it should not be taken to imply that popular
culture only addresses ordinary landscapes; perhaps as a parallel to elite culture’s typical concerns
with ‘special landscapes’. Certainly, it is perfectly common for ordinary landscapes to be trans-
formed into special ones through engagement with the institutions and practices of popular
culture.
Film illustrates this theme particularly well. Understandably most of the thousands of loca-
tions that have supplied settings for film production are within easy reach of studios, for
example, Central Park in New York has hosted over 200 cinema films alone since 1908
(Reeves, 2006). Yet while most films made for cinema and television arouse little or no lasting
interest amongst their audience in terms of wishing to see the landscapes where they were
made, a substantial number have aroused intense fascination amongst audiences keen to aug-
ment their vicarious experiences of the depicted landscapes with first-hand contacts. Indeed in
such cases, the strength of attachment makes it perfectly plausible to draw comparisons with
ideas of sacred space and pilgrimage.
The international film tourism industry (Beaton, 2005) that has grown up around this activity
is a phenomenon with ample precedents in the field of cultural tourism. The idea of being
drawn to places associated with creative works was a staple of the Grand Tour of continental
Europe, where Europe’s elite flocked to see the views glimpsed in famous paintings or visit the
locations of their artists’ studios (Black, 1992: 260–75), a form of cultural tourism that persisted
into the twentieth century with, say, the popularity of visiting Provence to see places and
landscapes associated with Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh (e.g. Pollock, 1998). In the late
nineteenth century, a craze occurred for regional monographs around the notion of ‘literary
country’, the typical aim of which invited readers to walk through the landscapes where the
‘thoughts and imaginings’ of the author in question ‘had their birthplace’ (Leyland, 1904: 1).
These were not confined to elite culture. For example, the sentimental novels written by
Scottish kailyard authors had their devotees and it was possible even in the 1940s to find
215
American tourists arriving in search of, say, ‘Crockett Country’ – the area of Galloway
associated with Samuel R. Crockett (Gold and Gold, 1995: 119).
While interest in ‘literary country’ as a focus for cultural tourism persists, continued interest
in such areas as special places for tourist consumption tends to rely on reinforcement from
the release of film or televisual interpretations of their novels. The MGM version of Far from the
Madding Crowd (1967), for example, spurred renewed visitor interest in the 22 identifiable
locations from central Dorset and Hampshire used to create the look and atmosphere of
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (Pendreigh, 1995). At the same time, there is a growing trend for the
creation of ‘film countries’ in their own right that had little or no existence as literary regions
before the screening of successful television series. Urry (2002: 130), for instance, identified a
series of areas in Derbyshire and Yorkshire – including ‘Peak Practice Country’, ‘Heartbeat
Country’, ‘Last of the Summer Wine Country’ and ‘James Herriot Country’ – through which
the tourist gaze was ‘produced, marketed, circulated and consumed’.
Understandably, the selling of landscape in this manner continually responds to new film
releases and the identification of new landscapes with special resonances for film tourists. The
film industry’s reassignment of Middle Earth to New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings trilogy
(2001–3), for example, saw the growth of international tourism to see a selection of the
150 places scattered throughout the two islands that were used for location work. Yet despite
the natural attractions of, say, the Matamata hills (the ‘Shire’ and ‘Hobbiton’) or the Tongariro
National Park (‘Mordor’ and ‘Mount Doom’), ‘conservation and legal requirements’ meant that
none of the original sets remain (Tzanelli, 2004: 32). The special meaning of the landscape
came from visitors being able to see the backdrop at which a fictional narrative, substantially
relying on overlayering of computer-generated imagery, unfolded, and then filling the spaces
with their imagination.
Not all destinations relating to film production retain their ability to attract film tourists once
memories of the films in question fade, but there are numerous instances of long-term attach-
ments developing. Hence despite more than 40 years having lapsed since its release, estimates
suggest that 300,000 tourists are still drawn to Salzburg and its surrounding region each year to
visit landscapes associated with the 1965 Hollywood musical The Sound of Music (Oxford
Economics, 2007: 41). In passing, it is worth noting that this compares with the 250,000 paying
visitors who attended the city’s Festspiele in 2010 – widely regarded as one of Europe’s premier
elite cultural events (Gold and Gold, 2011: 121). Intriguingly too, tourists also continue to flock
to sites in central Italy around Rome, and Almería in south-eastern Spain where low-budget
‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were made during the 1960s and 1970s (Weisser, 1992) – locations ori-
ginally considered viable precisely because they resembled somewhere else (the American
south-west). Other locations retain their attractions by continually hosting new films. The
architecturally rich townscape of Lacock (Wiltshire), for instance, is regularly pressed into
service for films involving costume drama, hosting more than 30 major film and television
productions since 1960. With building styles ranging from medieval to Victorian and strict
aesthetic control over new development, it supplies a townscape that has effortlessly represented
Jane Austen’s ‘Meryton’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Casterbridge’ or Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Cranford’
(Smith, 2010).
The special status that film connections can supply for some groups may also constitute points
of resistance for others. With regard to The Lord of the Rings, Tzanelli (2004: 36) noted the
existence of British resentment at attempts to present the story as part of New Zealand’s cultural
heritage rather than acknowledge its English origins. British critics suggested, for example, that
Tolkien had actually envisaged the green landscapes of Lancashire as the notional setting for his
epic fantasy. Local residents can also resent large-scale intrusions into landscapes that they regard
216
as special. Beaton (2005: 30) observed that the Friends of the Lake District had expressed con-
cern at the negative social and environmental effects that followed film production, arguing that
film-makers should be required to address the true costs that their projects pose for local
communities. For his part, Mordue (2001) analysed the contested meanings of place and land-
scape in ‘Heartbeat Country’, an area in the North Yorkshire Moors where Yorkshire
Television set their dramatisations of the Constable books by Nicholas Rhea. Despite the
simplicity with which the main settlement (Goathland) could be converted into ‘Aidensfield’ –
as easy as changing the sign to make the Goathland Hotel into the ‘Aidensfield Arms’ –
he noted the conflicts between the local inhabitants’ sense of community and the expec-
tations brought by visitors drawn by the Heartbeat series. For the local community, the
appropriation by visitors of the everyday landscapes of Goathland as special places linked to a
fictional television series was at odds with their own vision of ‘their traditional rural village’
(ibid., 249).
Conclusion
This reference to divergence between different groups highlights the recurrent theme of
polarity that occurs in this chapter. When discussing aspects of the multifaceted relationship
between landscape and popular culture as mediated by film, we have drawn attention to various
such polarities – most notably between elite/popular, field/frame, realistic/fictional, urban/rural
and special/ordinary. The first section considered the degree to which even documentarists
shape the depictions of landscape in light of their narrative needs rather than respond to literal
interpretations of realism. The second part looked at the way that science-fiction cinema, a
genre of film-making that has unrivalled opportunity to exercise imagination, instead
repeatedly recycles a stereotypically limited but culturally resonant repertoire of dystopian urban
landscapes. The third part considered the way that (mostly) ordinary landscapes become reva-
lorised into special places through their associations with film. Taken overall, it is true that, at
times, landscape may be little more than ‘just one of the arrows in the [film-maker’s] quiver’
(Wallace, 2011) yet, in other circumstances, film landscapes can represent the point where
‘theatre, text, image, industry, event and narrative all come together’ (Lukinbeal, 2005: 17).
Either way, its ability to imbue film with universal appeal and to absorb, if not necessarily
resolve, polarities makes landscape a rewarding focus for inquiry in any analysis of the workings
of popular culture.
Further reading
On popular culture:
Gans, H.J. (1999) Popular Culture and High Culture: an analysis and evaluation of taste, rev. edn, New York:
Basic Books
Harrington, C.L. and Bielby, D.D. (eds) (2001) Popular Culture: production and consumption, Oxford:
Blackwell
Storey, J. (2010) Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 3rd edn, Harlow: Pearson Education
For discussion of landscape in film:

Aitken, S. and Zonn, L. (eds) (1994) Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: a geography of film, Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield
Harper, G. and Rayner, J. (eds) (2010) Cinema and Landscape, Bristol: Intellect
217
McLoone, M. (2008) Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland: cityscapes, landscapes, soundscapes,
Dublin: Irish Academic Press
Peckham, R.S. (2004) ‘Landscape in film’, in Duncan, J.S., Johnson, N.C. and Schein, R.H. (eds) A
Companion to Cultural Geography, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 420–9
References
Barsam, R. (1973) Nonfiction Film, New York: Dutton
Beaton, S. (2005) Film-Induced Tourism, Clevedon: Channel View Publications
Beattie, K. (2004) Documentary Screens: non-fiction film and television, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Black, J. (1992) The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, Stroud: Sutton Publishing
Burgess, J.A. (1987) ‘Landscapes in the living room: television and landscape research’, Landscape Research,
12(3), 1–7
——and Gold, J.R. (eds) (1985) Geography, the Media and Popular Culture, London: Croom Helm
Burke, P. (2009) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edn, Farnham: Ashgate
Chanan, M. (2007) The Politics of Documentary, London: British Film Institute
Chesterton, G.K. (1908) Orthodoxy, London: Bodley Head
Corner, J. (2002) ‘Performing the real: documentary diversions’, Television and New Media, 3, 255–69
De Brigard, E. (1995) ‘The history of ethnographic film’, in Hoskings, P. (ed.) Principles of Visual
Ethnography, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 13–45
Dimendberg, E. (2004) Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Dunn, D. (2005) ‘Playing the tourist’, in Bell, D. and Hollows, J. (eds) Ordinary Lifestyles: popular media,
consumption and taste, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, pp. 128–42
Gibbs, J. (2002) Mise-en-scène: film style and interpretation, New York: Columbia University Press
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——(1985) ‘From Metropolis to The City: film visions of the future city, 1919–39’, in Burgess, J.A. and
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——(2001) ‘Under darkened skies: the city in science-fiction film’, Geography, 86, 337–45
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1750, Aldershot: Scolar Press
——and Gold, M.M. (2011) ‘The history of events: ideology and historiography’, in Page, S. and Connell,
J. (eds) Routledge Handbook of Event Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 119–28
——and Ward, S.V. (1997) ‘Of plans and planners: documentary film and the challenge of the urban
future, 1935–52’, in Clarke, D.B. (ed.) The Cinematic City, London: Routledge, pp. 59–82
Groenendyk, K.L. (2000) ‘The importance of vision: Persuasion and the picturesque’, Rhetoric Society
Quarterly, 30, 9–28
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Hood, S. (1983) ‘John Grierson and the documentary film movement’, in Curran, J. and Porter, V. (eds)
British Cinema History, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, pp. 99–112
Inge, M.T. (1990) Comics as Culture, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press
Kuhn, A. (ed.) (1999) Alien Zone II: the spaces of science-fiction cinema, London: Verso
Landon, B. (2002) Science Fiction after 1900: from the steam man to the stars, London: Routledge
Leyland, J. (1904) The Shakespeare Country, London: Country Life Illustrated
Lukinbeal, C. (2005) ‘Cinematic landscapes’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 23, 3–22
Macdonald, K. and Cousins, M. (1996) Imagining Reality: the Faber Book of Documentary, London: Faber
and Faber
Mordue, T. (2001) ‘Performing and directing resident/tourist cultures in Heartbeat Country’, Tourist Studies,
1, 233–52
Ott, F.W. (1979) The Films of Fritz Lang, Secaucas, NJ: Citadel Press
Oxford Economics (2007) The Economic Impact of the UK Film Industry, Oxford: Oxford Economics
Pendreigh, B. (1995) On Location: The film fan’s guide to Britain and Ireland, Edinburgh: Mainstream
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Pollock, G. (1998) ‘On not seeing Provence: Van Gogh and the landscape of consolation, 1888–89’, in
Thomson, J. (ed.) Framing France: the representation of landscape in France, 1870–1914, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, pp. 81–118
Reeves, T. (2006) The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, London: Titan Books
Sammon, P.M. (1996) Future Noir: the making of Blade Runner, London: Orion Media
Smith, B. (2010) Lacock: TV and Film Location Guide, Ferryhill: Trail Publishing
Tzanelli, R. (2004) ‘Constructing the “cinematic tourist”: the “sign industry” of The Lord of the Rings’,
Tourist Studies, 4, 21–42
Urry, J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edn, London: Sage
Wallace, D. (2011) ‘Interview between David Wallace and the authors’, unpublished transcript, 12 July
Weisser, T. (1992) Spaghetti Westerns: the good, the bad, and the violent, Jefferson, NC: McFarland
White, M. and White, L. (1962) The Intellectual Versus the City: from Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Williams, R. (1973) The City and the Country, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Winston, B. (1995) Claiming the Real: the Griersonian documentary and its legitimations, London: British Film
Institute
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19
New directions in the literary
representation of landscape
Richard Kerridge
BATH SPA UNIVERSITY
What is happening to landscape in contemporary writing? I will outline two of the most
important traditional genres of literary landscape, and then discuss some of the contemporary
concerns that are reshaping these traditions.
Allegorical landscapes and their literary inheritors

Allegory is a method of giving dramatic representation to abstractions, generalizations and
large political and social forces. Each character, thing, place or action in an allegory stands for
something specific. The text is a code. This precision and limitation of reference is the
difference between allegory and metaphor or symbol.
Landscape allegory uses generic landscape forms to represent virtues, vices, ideas, feelings or
political and social entities. An example is the Christian tradition of representing a person’s life
as a journey, a pilgrimage, on which difficult moral and emotional terrain must be negotiated.
Two instances of this are George Herbert’s poem ‘The Pilgrimage’, from his sequence The Temple
(1633), and John Bunyan’s novel The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The pilgrim must keep to the
true path and struggle through difficulties, striving to keep the destination, salvation, in view.
Delightful landscapes seen from the path are temptations to stray. Meadows and sweet flowers
thus acquire sinister significance. Their deceptiveness replays the original temptation, and reveals
the world to be fallen. In Macbeth, the porter speaks of ‘the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire’.
‘The Pilgrimage’ is the narrative of a journey through such a landscape:
I travell’d on, seeing the hill, where lay

My expectation.
A long it was and weary way.
The gloomy cave of Desperation
I left on th’one, and on the other side
The rock of Pride.
And so I came to Phansies medow strow’d
With many a flower:
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Literary representation of landscape
Fair would I here have made abode,

But I was quicken’d by my houre.
So to Cares cops I came, and there got through
With much ado.
That led me to the wilde of Passion, which
Some call the wold;
A wasted place, but sometimes rich.
Here I was robb’d of all my gold,
Save one good Angell, which a friend had ti’d
Close to my side.
Pride’s rock, Fancy’s meadow, Care’s copse and the wild wold of Passion represent spiritual
hazards on the pilgrim’s path. Similarly, Bunyan’s protagonist, Christian, has to cross the Slough
of Despond, climb the Hill of Difficulty, enter the Valley of Humiliation, and pass through the
Valley of the Shadow of Death. Commentators have identified these places with specific hills,
valleys and a swamp near Bunyan’s Bedfordshire home. For Puritans, such absolute threats and
questions of salvation were indeed part of the meaning of ordinary surroundings. Landscapes,
however familiar and tamed, were full of cosmic meaning.
The assigning of meaning to certain types of landscape in allegorical literature was therefore
more than purely allegorical or metaphorical; the matching of landscape type to vice or virtue
sometimes arose from traditions of direct belief that certain types of place were good or evil.
Cheryll Glotfelty has explored such traditional attitudes to arid landscapes, connecting the atti-
tudes with the industrial uses of these landscapes in recent history. She advocates a new landscape
writing that explicitly rejects such traditions (Glotfelty 2001). Rod Giblett, using psycho-
analytical theory in an account of the historical meanings of wetlands, proposes a celebratory
identification of these landscapes with postmodern values (Giblett 1996).
With secularization, systematic allegory became unusual. A hybrid form, in which a dominant
realism carried a trace of allegory, became common in literary representations of landscape. An
example is the use of the river in George Eliot’s novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860). Eliot was seeking
secular forms of morality that would retain continuity with Christian traditions. Her fictional river,
the Floss, flowing through the town where the story is set, is the basis of the town’s economy,
powering the mill. It is a realistically presented river, and it provides imagery with which the characters
and the narrator frequently express their understanding. The novel conveys the community’s
material, cultural and imaginative relationship with its river. Rich and painful dilemmas about the
idea of being ‘carried away’, for example, are explored by means of river imagery. In a feeling
that grows to an almost irresistible current, Maggie is tempted by the possibility of elopement:
They glided rapidly along, ( … ) helped by the backward-flowing tide, past the Tofton
trees and houses – on between the silent, sunny, fields and pastures which seemed filled
with a natural joy that had no reproach for theirs. The breath of the young, unwearied day,
the delicious rhythmic dip of the oars, the fragmentary song of a passing bird heard now
and then as if it were only the overflowing of brim-full gladness, the sweet solitude of a
twofold consciousness that was mingled into one by that grave untiring gaze which need
not be averted – what else could be in their minds for the first hour?
They are carried along in silence, ‘for what could words have been, but an inlet to thought?’
Small developments of the river imagery register narrative insights and shifts in the characters’
feelings – the brim-full gladness, the fluid mingling of consciousnesses, the inlet to thought. The
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Richard Kerridge
chapter is called ‘Borne Along by the Tide’. Maggie yearns to ‘glide along with the swift, silent
stream and not struggle any more’. The novel ends with a catastrophic flood, an intrusion of the
larger ecosystem into the self-preoccupied locality.
Several of Thomas Hardy’s novels use landscape similarly. The Woodlanders (1887) is the story
of a woodland village, a community of foresters; perhaps the closest thing to an indigenous
community, traditionally and intimately involved with its local ecosystem, still to be found in
England at the time of the novel’s events. Trees are regarded from many viewpoints in the
course of the novel. There is the modern industrial timber merchant’s view, and the traditional
forester’s. We encounter the viewpoint of folklore descended from animist beliefs, and the
viewpoint of the urban visitor with Romantic sensibilities, perhaps like the reader. The narrator
who tells us the story makes reference to literature, painting, science and philosophy. These
different views encounter each other continually.
Descriptions of woodland combine a Darwinian perspective with Schopenhauerian pessimism
and Hardy’s sense of tragedy:
They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves,
skirted trunks with spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green
gloves; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that
overflowed on rainy days and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees than
these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention
which makes life what it is was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city
slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen
ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.
(Hardy 1887: 82)
The novel is pervaded by a sense of the vulnerability of trees, formidable with accumulated
growth but stuck in one place – an image for the vulnerability of characters and of the
indigenous pre-industrial community itself. Rootedness is a blessing and a curse.
The leading ecocritic Lawrence Buell observes that critics and theorists have not given
‘setting’ the attention bestowed on other basic components of literary representation:
As a schoolchild ( … ), I imbibed a commonly taught, watered-down version of

Aristotelian poetic theory that defined “setting” as one of literature’s four basic building
blocks other than language itself – “plot”, “character”, and “theme” being the others. But
the term was vaguely defined and required nothing more in practice than a few perfunctory
sentences about the locale of the work in question.
(Buell 2005: 3–4)
In The Environmental Imagination (1995), Buell sets out four conditions to be met by environmental
literature:
1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence
that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.
2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest.
3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation.
4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least
implicit in the text.
(Buell 1995: 7–8)
222
The prospect poem and its inheritors

In the ‘prospect poem’, a sub-genre of pastoral that was fashionable throughout the eighteenth
century, the speaker is dramatically positioned on a hill or other vantage point, looking out
upon a landscape. Sometimes these works are called ‘reflective hill poems’. John Denham is
credited with initiating the genre, with ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (1642). John Dyer’s ‘Grongar Hill’
(1726) is a good exemplar, while Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’
(1742) may be the best-known prospect poem now, apart from Romantic developments of the
genre, especially William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’
(1798). Charles Darwin in the ‘tangled bank’ passage that ends The Origin of Species (1859) takes
up a stance similar to the speaker’s in a prospect poem, though his distance from what he sees is
a matter of feet rather than miles, and his lordliness of survey comes from the smaller scale of
the bustling world he contemplates. Philip Larkin picked up the genre in the mid-twentieth
century, in his poems ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1958) and ‘Here’ (1961), in which the vantage-point
overlooking the landscape is a train window.
In Gray’s ‘Ode’, the prospect of space becomes also a terrifying prospect of time. Gazing
down on the school prompts Gray to imagine – as allegorical figures – the likely fates waiting
for the children playing there. Shocked, he falls back on the thought that it may be better not
to attempt expansive vision: ‘No more; where ignorance is bliss,/’tis folly to be wise’. Words-
worth, in ‘Tintern Abbey’, gazes out at the river Wye, the wooded slopes above it and the
mountain streams that feed the river. The sight brings thoughts of the animating effect of blood
circulating in the body, and of sensations passing between body and mind. Memories, conscious
and subliminal, are like streams arriving from distant, unseen sources to nourish him:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration ( … ).
O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the wood,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
The speaker stands at a distance from the landscape, but this Romantic vision of flowing process is
a way of reinserting human selfhood in nature, since the memories come from the influence on mind
and body of natural places, and produce the instincts that lead the speaker to seek out those places.
Ecocriticism and the representation of landscape

To some ecocritics, the separation of self and world enacted by the prospect poem – even if the
poem then proceeds to question the security of the stance – is suggestive of the dualistic
separation of humanity and nature, mind and body, in the Cartesian tradition. Many ecocritics
associate this dualist tradition, and the view that it entails of nature as mechanism rather than
organism, with the industrial rationality they see as responsible for ecological crisis. Such eco-
critics are mistrustful of the removed viewpoint. David Abram is prominent among them; his
influential book The Spell of the Sensuous (Abram 1996) calls for a reawakening of the sensuous
awareness of the natural world that in modernity has fallen into disuse. These ecocritics seek
embodied perspectives, positioned in the midst of the world rather than gazing down on it.
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Richard Kerridge
Heidegger is an important philosophical source for this approach. Merleau-Ponty, with his
phenomenology of embodied perception, is another, particularly favoured by Abram.
The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics – especially the critique of ‘enframings’, the reductive
advance-definitions of things that can pre-empt the real encounter with the otherness of those things –
was one of the most important formative influences on Derrida’s critique of ‘the metaphysics of
presence’, and on post-structuralist ideas in general. Ecocritics and cultural geographers informed
by post-structuralist thinking will accordingly be suspicious of the view from outside. They seek
instead a representation of subjectivity as process, always forming and reforming in what the
ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton calls the ‘mesh’ of ecological relations (Morton 2010: 28).
‘Tintern Abbey’ contains a paradox. The poem expresses a joyful recognition of the
continuous flow – of time, emotion, physical feeling, physical cause and effect – that embeds
the individual subject in the infinite world. Yet the poem is able to make that recognition
because the subject is not swept away by the flow. Subjectivity is not dissolved. It is the
standing-back that makes possible the appreciation of flow. This version of the Romantic sub-
lime is dramatized in many Romantic landscape poems, and has been accused of egotism,
because of the sense of heroism that is sometimes generated around the notion of taking up an
exposed position, in which the lone subject stands in heroic relief against the infinite prospect.
Morton and other ecocritics look for a literary representation of landscape that avoids the
egotistical sublime but still recognizes the flow. From the ecocritical perspective, that flow is
now the ecological interconnectedness that gives our actions consequences beyond the spatial
and temporal horizons we can see. How is this beyond-horizon awareness to be combined with
the sense of embeddedness? Ursula Heise, in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Heise, 2008)
suggests that ecocriticism’s preoccupation with the importance of knowing one’s local ecosys-
tem has led to the neglect of something equally important – the perception and representation
of global ecological relations.
In Ecology without Nature, Morton (2007) criticizes a device that is common in contemporary
nature writing – the ‘as I write’ device, in which the narrator breaks off, as it were, to look at
and listen to the surrounding environment and think of the mass of processes at work in the
circumambient world beyond. For Morton, this is an example of ‘ambient poetics’ – a gesture
subject to a basic paradox: ‘The more I try to show you what lies beyond this page, the more of
a page I have’ (Morton 2007: 30). The gesture can also start with ‘as you read’; it is then the
reader who is invited to pause and imaginatively look and listen outwards. Temporal as well as
spatial distance is then drawn into the ambience, since the reading takes place sometime after
the present invoked by the writing. Morton suggests that the device seems to be an act of
opening but actually brings about closure, since for the ambience to be perceived there has to
be a pause or breaking-off of the narrative, producing the sensation of a still point around which
the ambience turns (Morton 2007: 29–35). What is beyond that circle is shut out.
How, then, is the combination of embeddedness and beyond-horizon awareness to be
achieved? The late Val Plumwood, the ecofeminist philosopher, invented the term ‘shadow
places’ for the places beyond the horizon of our vision that are damaged ecologically by our
actions here. If we are to accept responsibility for our ecological connections to places we do
not see, we must somehow incorporate the shadow places into our perception:
We must smell a bit of wrecked Ogoniland in the exhaust fumes from the air-conditioner,
the ultimate remoteness, put-it-somewhere-else-machine. On [this] criterion, we would
have to accept all these shadow places too as ‘our’ place, not just the privileged, special,
recognized place, the castle-of-the-self-place called home.
(Plumwood 2008: 2)
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Our conscious effort should be to attach new meaning to a sensation as physical as a smell. The
theorist of environmental education Mitchell Thomashow develops similar ideas, suggesting that
writing should have ‘the perceptual flexibility of moving between multiple perceptual worlds’
(Thomashow 2002: 103). An effort to acquaint ourselves more deeply with our immediate
environment will involve ‘experimenting with the juxtaposition of scale’ (ibid.: 95) and cross-
referencing between immediate observation and forms of research that open up different scales
of perception, both spatial and temporal. One technique is to investigate, and attempt to imagine,
the umwelt (Jacob von Uexkull’s term) of another creature – the world as revealed to that
creature’s organs of perception:
As I work the soil I plunge my spade into countless pebbles and small boulders. To
understand where they come from I must step out of my organismic umwelt and incorporate
the conceptualization of a larger time frame.
(ibid.: 95)
An interesting way to expand umwelt is to shift between the large and the small [original italics].
Try following an ant as it moves across the forest floor, or as it zips across your kitchen. See
if you can spend fifteen minutes or even longer observing any microhabitat – the lichens
on a boulder or tree trunk, soil microorganisms, pond scum. When you are fully immersed
in the microworld, shift your attention to the sky … Observe a plane as it crosses the
horizon. These shifts in perception allow you to expand or contract your gaze accordingly,
permitting you to play with the boundaries of perception.
(ibid.: 95–6)
The social anthropologist Tim Ingold makes similar suggestions, as part of his project of bring-
ing phenomenological ideas to bear upon anthropology. Ingold rejects what he sees as ‘a sys-
tematic bias in Western thought’: the tendency ‘to privilege form over process’ (Ingold 2000:
198). A painting, for example, will almost always be discussed as a final product rather than in
terms of the work of painting. Ingold contrasts this with the practice of some non-Western
cultures in which it is the activity of painting that constitutes the contemplative experience; the
finished works are not given any lingering attention.
‘Taskscape’ is the new word he produces as an alternative to ‘landscape’: a word to remind
us, when our surroundings seem to be laid out for our gaze, that our perception of them is not
comprehensive, but is a function of the activity we are engaged in, work or leisure. Perception
is conditioned by the specialization that a task involves – what the eye of the farmer or police
officer picks out, as compared to the birdwatcher or historian – and by the duration of the task,
its rhythms and the intervals for vision that it affords. ‘Tasks,’ Ingold says, in Heideggerean vein,
‘are the constitutive acts of dwelling.’ Each task is not isolated, but ‘takes its meaning from its
position within an ensemble of tasks, performed in series or in parallel, and usually by many
people working together’ (195). Ingold’s aims are not specifically environmentalist, yet he uses
the term ‘ecological’ to characterize his approach.
‘Material feminists’ such as Stacy Alaimo, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Karen Barad also
seek forms of representation that draw attention to the ‘mesh’ – to the way in which the material
world consists of entities continually producing each other. Like discourse-theory in general,
this approach has roots in Heidegger and the wider phenomenological tradition. ‘Material
feminists’ call for an extension of discourse-theory from culture to the whole material world – a
way beyond the exclusive cultural constructionism that has been characteristic of post-structuralist
thought. The Foucauldian argument is that concepts are discourses, always in the process of
being addressed by someone to someone else, and always already in the process of being
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generated by power relations and generating them in turn. But one result of discourse-theory is a
tendency to polarize culture and nature, identifying the former with fluidity, play, constant exchange
and the possibility of liberation, and the latter with intractable, fixed identity. Nature thus becomes
an idea to be mistrusted – an ideology of oppression. In its emphasis on the role of language and culture
in forming our beliefs about the world, discourse-theory tends to neglect material processes.
Barad introduces the term ‘agential realism’ as a way of acknowledging the agency of material
things: the active role that they play in the making of meaning. This is a ‘posthumanist’ account
of agency that extends it beyond human consciousness and action. Instead of the familiar term
‘inter-actions’, which implies the relatively separate engagement with each other of separate
entities, she talks of ‘intra-actions’, a term that situates the action as always already inside a larger
flow. The term constitutes a recognition that ‘relata do not pre-exist relations’ (Alaimo and
Hekman 2008: 133). Human beings are ‘part of the world in its open-ended becoming’, the
endless process of mutual shaping that constitutes all matter.
The world consisting of such matter is an ‘ongoing flow of agency’.
Literary strategies
If these ideas are to influence literary form, writers will need narrative and poetic strategies that
continually reposition the implied reader, and ask the real reader what their position is in
material relation to the place described. Disruptions of the narrative viewpoint seem likely, and
disruptions of the customary pace of reading.
A good model is the remarkable narrative technique used by Thomas Hardy in his novels,
when he moves the reader in and out of the viewpoints of different characters (sometimes their
‘taskscapes’), plunging us into points of view and then pulling us back to more distant per-
spectives, often when we are most gripped by the character’s feelings. He also switches between
the past tense of the story and a present tense in which he addresses generalized discussion to
the reader, implying (as the maps at the beginnings of the novels imply) a shared space that the
reader might enter, and thus a shared responsibility (see Kerridge 2001).
Another model is J. A. Baker’s extraordinary work of nature writing The Peregrine (2010
[1967]), the narrative of his observation of peregrine falcons in a small coastal area of Essex.
Several stylistic features are of interest in connection with the ideas I have been discussing. It is
hard to imagine a book more deeply lost in the inhabitation of one place, but from the
beginning Baker embeds that place in a larger world by using bold comparisons:
Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to
convey the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying
world, like Mars, but glowing still.
(Baker 1967: 21–2)
Similes continually expand the possibilities of the small patch of ground, revealing its capacity to
evoke other worlds, and making physical and imaginative landscapes merge. Owls are described
as ‘lemuring’ (ibid.: 155) – Baker frequently makes new verbs out of nouns. A peregrine is
‘lion-coloured’, and has under-feathers ‘thickly mottled with diamond-shaped spots, like the fur
of a snow leopard’ (ibid.: 128). Two woodpeckers ‘looked like strange primeval butterflies
clinging to a huge tree-fern in a steamy prehistoric jungle’ (ibid.: 153).
He plays with scale: ‘I swooped through leicestershires of swift green light’ (ibid.: 127) – the
phrase compares his cycling to the peregrine’s flight. One purpose of these experiments is to
strain towards recognition of the bird’s umwelt, as Thomashow would wish:
226
I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision.
They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible for us. Their lives quicken and
warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we
have finished growing.
(ibid.: 18)
Sounds, especially birdsong, are conveyed with a rhetorical synaesthesia that simultaneously
emphasizes their strangeness and places them on a continuum of sensation leading back to
ourselves: the nightjar’s song ‘would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood. The
sound spills out and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it’ (ibid.: 18). ‘Movement is
like colour to a hawk; it flares upon the eye like crimson flame’ (ibid.: 88). A flying peregrine
‘lives in a pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes
of land and water’ (ibid.: 36).
The writing has been criticized for its exclusions. Nothing from Baker’s family life or social
life is mentioned. There is no interruption; just the pursuit of the birds. Kathleen Jamie protests
at this – partly on feminist grounds – and writes a riposte to The Peregrine: an encounter with
the same bird in crowded space, interrupted by domestic life. In Findings, (2005) Jamie explains
that the discovery of peregrines nesting within sight of her home prompted her to read Baker
for the first time and write about her own birds in response. For these peregrines, she chooses
pointedly urban and unheroic comparisons:
The male peregrine was there today, sitting side-on, glumly inspecting his feet.
He lifted first one yellow talon then the other, like one who has chewing gum on
his shoe.
(Jamie 2005: 32)
The chewing gum startles with its incongruity, like a simile from ‘Martian’ poetry, yet seems
authentic as an exact and spontaneous comparison. It also brings the peregrine into the same
frame as ordinary urban experience. The nearest to it I can find in Baker is a line in the diaries:
I left the path back for a moment, and suddenly saw two Red Squirrels chasing about the
trees, principally on an oldish oak. One was after the other’s tail. Their tails, transparent as a
frothy orange drink, streamed out behind.
(Baker 2010: 388)
That frothy orange drink may have been in Baker’s lunchbox that day; suddenly we have a glimpse
of shops. Though compatible with Baker’s solitariness, the detail makes an interesting contrast
to the elemental blood and gold elsewhere in Baker’s writing. In deliberate contrast with Baker,
Jamie integrates her watching of the peregrines with the bustle and interruption of family life:
‘Swallows are back. Can you hear them?’ I said.

‘Mum, can we have our breakfast?’
‘Just a minute … ’
Dammit. I’d glanced away for a moment, and when I looked back the peregrine had
quit fidgeting and flown. But the door burst open again. ‘Mum – can we have our
breakfast? In the living room? So we can watch the cartoons on telly?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m coming.’
(Jamie 2005: 40)
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The back-and-forth between the two zones and registers is intricate. Jamie wants her children
to notice the wild birds, but ends up using a domestic idiom to characterize the peregrine: ‘quit
fidgeting’ is probably something she says to her children.
The different kinds of mobility of viewpoint and idiom that Baker and Jamie display show
what the new nature writing is beginning to do. A work that has not yet appeared but sounds
promising in its combination of local and global is Four Fields, a book about four loved fields in
Cambridgeshire, Zambia, Montana and Chernobyl, that the nature writer Tim Dee is currently
completing.
Ursula Heise suggests that the techniques of collage or cut-up developed by twentieth-
century High Modernists have potential for the representation of global ecological relations.
Dispensing with the single narrator or speaker, these techniques allow disparate perspectives to
be placed together, permitting jumps from personal experience to impersonal material, and
jumps of spatial and temporal scale. Heise examines ways in which science fiction writers such
as David Brin and John Brunner have adapted collage techniques from the documentary novels
of John Dos Passos. She finds similar potential in forms of representation achieved by new
technologies:
[T]he iconic representation of the “Blue Planet” seen from outer space has been superseded
by the infinite possibilities of zooming into and out of local, regional and global views
enabled by, for example, the online tool Google Earth and the multiple databases,
geographical positioning systems, and imaging techniques on which it draws.
(Heise 2008: 10–11)
The poet Harriet Tarlo is another ecocritic who finds the use of cut-up and ‘found material’ in
recent Modernist (or ‘linguistically innovative’) poetry especially apt for the representation of
ecological crisis. These techniques emphasize language as a kind of commons, a public space in
which the visible features are not privately or corporately owned; in this spirit, poets such as
J.H. Prynne, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Peter Reading, Tony Lopez, Frances Presley and Tarlo
herself practise a public ‘détournement’ – a wresting-back of language from official or corporate
use, and a release of meanings that exceed and subvert the instrumentality of that use. The poet
becomes ‘a re-user, a recycler of words’ (Tarlo 2009: 121). Tarlo argues that the awareness of a
textual and cultural ‘ecology’ that these techniques produce leads directly to ecological awareness
in the usual sense:
Lopez’s work insists that language is never wholly one’s own in poetic practice.
In common with all the poets here, he draws attention to the textual, material quality
of poetry and, above all, to the fact that it exists in a sea of other textual, material
language, rather than as a separate poetic discourse existing within its own rarefied
tradition.
(ibid.: 122)
The Ground Aslant (2011) is an anthology of ‘radical landscape poetry’ edited by Tarlo that
brings together diverse poets using these techniques to address landscape.
I will end by offering some examples of Modernist technique in contemporary landscape
poetry that begin to answer the criteria raised by Heise, Thomashow, Plumwood and others –
poetry using ‘found materials’ or influenced by the ‘open field’ techniques developed by
Charles Olson and the Black Mountain poets. For a twist of scale in poetic response to
landscape, here is J.H. Prynne writing about South Dakota:
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All no more than

a land in drift
curled over and dry, but
buried way under the ice
and as spillway for these
glacial waters the
scented air
runs easily into the
night and while
the public hope is as
always the
darkened ward
the icecap will
never melt
again why
should it
-from ‘If There is a Stationmaster at Stamford S.D. Hardly So’ (1969)
(Prynne 2005: 45)
The movement of land in the process of geological change is too slow for the time-scale of
human sense-experience, but here a shift of scale makes it visible, speeding it up to the pace of
human or animal body-movement in search of shelter (curled over and dry), and the movement
of reading too. Or, for landscape as mesh of energies, here is Peter Larkin addressing hillside
trees continually flexing:
Trees pale in knot but nowhere in cooped flux of them, not-bending swivels a sky fold-
lessly relenting. Leaning skyward can’t suffer on the slant, only drawn off slope by the
unholdable intimacy of vertical separation.
-from ‘Lean Earth Off Trees Unaslant, 3’
(Tarlo 2011: 70)
Or compare the regular lines and compact stanzas of landscape-description in Philip Larkin’s
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ or ‘Here’ with the spaces opened up by Tarlo:
steady yourself on a grass
late ragwort
late clover
the way up meal hill
plashy donkey steps
green berries
all the green berries
hawthorn gone to berry
first blackberries
heather out stretching
nab purple
shining irregular edge
-from ‘Nab’
(Tarlo 2011: 140)
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Richard Kerridge
In the Philip Larkin prospect poems, the landscape is sharply observed but clearly set at a distance.
The description is tightly controlled and measured out, each metonymic detail standing for a
conceptual whole. In the Tarlo, the spaces imply the physical process of the hill-walk: the body
moving and pausing, the eye casting around. They place the person in the scene, encouraging
speaker and reader to acknowledge the excessiveness of a landscape that is not represented
whole, but experienced as part of a larger continuum of space and time.
References
Abram, D. (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, New York: Vintage
Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (eds) (2008) Material Feminisms, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Baker, J. A. (2010 [1967]), The Peregrine, The Hill of Summer and Diaries: the complete works of J.A. Baker,
Fanshawe, J. (ed.) London: HarperCollins
Buell, L. (1995) The Environmental Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard
——(2005) The Future of Environmental Criticism, Malden, MA: Blackwell
Giblett, R. (1996) Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Glotfelty, C. (2001) ‘Literary Place Bashing, Test Site Nevada’, in Armbruster, K., and Wallace, K. (eds)
Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of
Virginia
Heise, U. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, New York: Oxford University Press
Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London:
Routledge
Jamie, K. (2005) Findings, London: Sort Of Books
Kerridge, R. (2001) ‘Ecological Hardy’, in Armbruster, K. and Wallace, K. (eds) Beyond Nature Writing:
Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia
Morton, T. (2007) Ecology without Nature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
——(2010) The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Plumwood, V. (2008) ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review 44,
March, available at http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-March-2008/plumwood.
html (accessed 5 May 2012)
Prynne, J.H. (2005) Poems, Fremantle/Tarset: Fremantle Arts Centre Press/Bloodaxe
Tarlo, H. (2009) ‘Recycles: the Eco-Ethical Poetics of Found Text in Contemporary Poetry’, Journal of
Ecocriticism 1(2) July, 114–30
——(2011) The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Exeter: Shearsman
Thomashow, M. (2002) Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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20
Landscape, music and the
cartography of sound
George Revill
THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
It’s not much to look at, the stretch of road between the Helensburgh roundabout
and Luss on the west side of Loch Lomond. But that small section of the A82
resounds with music for me – to be precise, the scherzo from Anton Bruckner’s Ninth
Symphony. The first time I listened to that piece, in Eugen Jochum’s recording with
the Berlin Philharmonic, that’s where I was, travelling in the back of my family’s car.
The shock of the music, its intensity and its stark beauty, burnt itself into my memory,
and is forever etched into the landscape at that precise point of the journey north from
Glasgow.
(Service 2010)
From film soundtracks to folk song, music is often thought to invoke particular landscapes, their
moods, textures, beauty, grandeur and tranquillity. As might be understood from the quote
above such associations can be highly personal and private, or communal and public shared by
audiences and musicians at concerts and festivals. The apparent naturalness of sound and its
diffuse and pervasive character seems to echo the perceived naturalness of landscape itself. Yet
the relationships between music and landscape are not nearly as simple and direct as record
promoters and CD packaging designers would have us believe. Powerful as the associations
seem to us, only since the mid-nineteenth century has music been written in direct depiction of
landscape.1 When this has been the case, it has most frequently been informed by complex
historical and political ideas and ideologies. In the history of ‘serious’, ‘art music’, depiction of
people, places and environments, so called ‘extra musical associations’ have conventionally been
frowned upon as irrelevant to the development of musical expression founded in the working
of abstract form, melody, harmony and structure. Only in the twentieth century have landscape
and music become increasingly closely connected. This can be understood in terms of two
connected sets of changes, one related to events within music itself and the other to issues of
technology and media. Firstly, the development of musical romanticism in the mid-nineteenth
century (works such as Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture Op.26, 1830) and subsequently varieties
of musical impressionism and the tone poem (see for example Strauss’s symphonic poem An
Alpine Symphony Op.64, 1915, or Bax Tintagel, 1919) forged increasingly explicit connections
between landscape and music. Secondly, the development of recording technology and
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broadcast media has brought landscape and music together in a variety of new cultural forms
(Bull 2000; Connell and Gibson 2003). These range from the cinematic experience of film
which brings together music and moving images and outdoor music festivals which rely on
amplified sound, to the soundtrack provided by personal music systems in cars, and whilst
walking, jogging or taking public transport. Today landscape and music interpenetrate in so
many ways as taken-for-granted divisions break down, for example between classical and pop-
ular, performer and audience, environmental and composed sounds, music and noise. Site spe-
cific works, installations and interactive performance juxtapose music and landscape in ways
which challenge established ways of understanding relationships between the two. In the con-
text of recent criticisms of dominant visual approaches to landscape (Wylie, 2007) this paper
examines some of the ways scholars in musicology, social science and the humanities have
understood the relationships between music and landscape. It concludes that we need to address
the specific qualities of sound in music to engage with music and landscape in terms which
connect directly with both.
Nature, culture and the cartography of sound

Most frequently music is connected to landscape through the lyrics and words of songs, the
soundtracks to movies or drama, scene setting and libretti of operas and musicals. Providing an
appropriate setting for words, the sounds of music often reflect and invoke landscape at a dis-
tance, supplying rhythm, melody and harmony to support and set the scene for description in
words, narratives and images. Because music appears, as Chanan (1994) says, to be a ‘semiotic
system without a content plane’, great difficulties present themselves when trying to relate the
meaning of musical sounds to the environments and social practices which produce those
sounds. Meanings and practices seem to be held apart in a state of flux and indeterminacy by
the multiple and contingent qualities of musical meaning. One key area in which this ambiguity
has been played out is in the relationship between natural and musical sounds which map
through complex sets of value judgements on to constructions of nature and culture. In a key
text Jacques Attali (1977) examined these relationships in music through painting in what he
called a cartography of sound. Landscape has proved important for marking out this terrain.
There are analogies here with what Richard Leppert has called the struggle between authorized
and unauthorized sound (Leppert 1993: 18). In his essay on seventeenth-century Netherlandish
landscape painting, Leppert examines Abel Grimmer’s painting Spring (1607). This shows
labourers working on the garden of a wealthy estate. In the middle-ground beyond a river the
musicians play for an aristocratic couple who embrace in a boat on the water. The aristocrats lie
in stillness contemplating the music. In this image music represents the culture of civilized
leisure, the embodiment of rational contemplation, whilst in the foreground the physical exertion
of the workers exists in a non-musical world of physical, natural and bodily noises insensitive to
the cerebral pleasures of music. In this way Grimmer shows how sound is spatially ordered in
the landscape as music as opposed to noise, at the same time he implies a whole series of
judgements on social status, the designed landscape and appropriate behaviour (in Leyshon et al.
1998: 294).
Such moral and aesthetic judgements are informed by complex historical and political ideas
and ideologies. In this way David Matless examines the sonic geography of the Norfolk Broads
as a ‘nature region’ during the twentieth century. He asks the questions:
Moral geographies of conduct turn on such questions as: Which sounds should be present
in the public open air? Does nature demand quiet? Are certain musics in the regional
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Landscape, music, cartography of sound
cultural grain? Which styles of voice belong in the landscape? Does nature make music,
noise, both or neither?
(Matless 2005: 747)
In answer to such questions Matless draws on a range of writings by naturalists, topographers

and novelists to show how the increasing leisure use of the Broads bring into hearing a highly
political and class-divided landscape in which a sing-along to banjo and piano, or popular dance
music on the radio is unacceptable, but the performance of folk music and the ‘natural music’ of
wind, reeds and bird song become highly valued. These sonic judgements he argues are central
to the cultural valuation of this regional landscape. Such controversies continue into the
twenty-first century and are evident in debates about rural tranquillity and the appropriateness
of rock, pop and dance music in the countryside, in for example the conflicts sometimes gen-
erated by the increasing number of rural festivals such as that at Glastonbury in Somerset, or the
efforts by government and police during the 1990s to stop rural rave parties, or indeed conflicts
over traffic noise and attempts to map and measure tranquillity (CPRE 2005).
One of the most enduring sets of conventions which link music and landscape in western
culture is derived from the classical pastoral. This has been an enduring ideological resource for
the making of cultural landscapes in Europe from its origins in classical antiquity. Through the
pastoral, music is located in landscape at the intersection of nature and culture in a manner
similar to that highlighted by Attali, Leppert and Matless (Revill, 2000). As Clarence Glacken
(1967: 17) demonstrates, musical theories of cosmic, material, moral and social order are central
to classical science, its imagination and its geography (see also James 1995: 38, 53–4).
Throughout the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment music and mathematical science fuse
in both theories of cosmic and social order within practical treatises on harmony and counter-
point. The pastoral in music is perhaps most directly linked to classical and renaissance science
through the Greek legend of Orpheus, an enduring theme in musical history (Mellers 1987).
Thus the pastoral provides a very powerful set of metaphors for ordering and classifying material
and spiritual worlds. Unusually for music, the pastoral also provides musicians with a set of
symbolic codes which provide relatively unambiguous extra musical references including:
imitation of nature for example, bird song, rain, wind; quotation of idealized rural life for exam-
ple, folk songs, village scenes; and allegory, for example, use of flutes and recorders to suggest the
reed pipes played by Pan, god of musicians and shepherds.
The pastoral has been important for music in a variety of historical periods. Daniels (2006),
for example, examines the Beatles’ double-A-sided single Strawberry Fields Forever/Penny Lane in
terms of a suburban pastoral which for Lennon and McCartney was steeped in layers of ideal-
ized personal memory. The place of landscape within music of the so-called British musical
renaissance (1880–1940) has formed a focus for study linking musical culture into wider cultures
of nostalgia and modernization in addition to a range of important social, economic, environ-
mental and political dynamics (Revill, 2000). Though the pastoral may be seen as fundamental
to the development of music in its most abstract forms, the traces of realism, the extra musical
references symbolized in imitation, quotation, allegory and the like have enabled the pastoral to
form a powerful resource within nineteenth-century romanticism and in the schools of nationalist
composition evident in Europe and elsewhere from the 1830s (Bohlman 2004). For nationalist
cultures, the fusion of idealized realism with the historical symbolism of mythology in the pas-
toral provides a powerful set of musical resources which map on to the imaginaries of cultural
nationalism its poetic spaces and mythic places (Smith 1997). Focused on the memory of a
golden age and set within a range of idealized though metaphorically translocatable places,
garden, orchard, pasture, city and village, the pastoral provides a range of representational
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George Revill
resources suitable for the musical culture of nationalism (see Dahlhaus 1989: 52–72). A key
work of European national music Ma Vlast/ My Country (1874–79) a set of six symphonic
poems by the Czech nationalist composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) illustrates this
point. Ma Vlast depicts a series of key locations and natural landscape features important to the
Czech nation, for example, Vysehrad the great rock overlooking the river Vltava which
guards the entrance to Prague and the river Moldau, a symbol of national integration. The
work further grounds its patriotic message through a variety of overtly pastoral references. In
the final part of the work the Czech landscape and Hussite history become fused with pastoral
conventions of exile, wilderness and the symbolic role of the shepherd as protector of the
Czech nation.
Yet in addition to providing a set of representational codes for music the pastoral also reaches
right to the centre of the problems of music conceived as a form of expression or language
which depicts or represents a reality external to the music itself. Vaughan Williams’s Pastoral
Symphony (Symphony No 3. Completed 1922) was derided by the music critic and composer
Constant Lambert as the ‘creation of a particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape
mood’ which ‘has outweighed the exigencies of symphonic forms’ (Lambert 1948: 107).
However, as Vaughan Williams himself said, the work had nothing to do with what he
described as ‘lambkins frisking about’, rather it reflected on his personal experience serving in
the Royal Army Medical Corps on the battlefields of France during the First World War
(Saylor 2009). In his study of the Norwegian nationalist composer Edvard Grieg, Daniel
Grimley (2006) warns against simplistic one-to-one readings of the depiction of landscape in his
music. He concludes ‘the association between Grieg’s music and the Norwegian landscape is
not a natural one’ but rather a kind of complex spatial and temporal space in which history,
biography and politics come together to produce something synthetic, inward looking and
abstract rather than pictorial and representational.
The relationships between abstraction and depiction in music continue to shape the ways in
which conceptions of nature and culture are brought together in musical landscapes. This
highlights both the complex chains of association by which music represents landscape and the
way in which the ambiguous relationship between music and nature suggested by the mathe-
matics of harmony and proportion call into question the process of composition. As Grimley
(2005) shows in his consideration of the music and writings of the Alaskan-based composer
John Luther Adams, whose book and CD Winter Music were published in 2004 about the time
the re-election of US President George Bush reawakened fears of oil drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. Adams describes how:
In Western music melody and harmony are the equivalents of figure and ground. Together
they constitute a kind of musical perspective, which evolved parallel to that in Renaissance
painting. In the musical textures of Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing I wanted to
lose musical perspective, to blend line and chord into a single sphere of musical space …
Figure becomes ground in dense clouds of expanding rising lines. Ground becomes figure
in the glacial movement of large harmonic clouds, which (as the listener enters the suspended
time-frame of the music) begin to sound melodic – like exaggeratedly slow chorals.
(Grimley 2005: 670)
Grimley shows how for Adams, like the Finnish nationalist composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957)
known for drawing inspiration from landscape and history, landscape is not purely concerned
with patterns of association, or with purely visual modes of perception, but with deeper struc-
tural resonance between music and environmental processes. These have intellectual origins in
234
nineteenth-century romantic approaches. Here Adams draws on the dictum of avant-garde

composer John Cage (1912–1992), that we have much to learn from nature ‘in the manner of
her operation’ (ibid.: 28, 79). Relating musical creativity to nature, Sibelius claimed: ‘[w]hen I
consider how musical forms are established I frequently think about the ice-ferns which,
according to eternal laws, the frost makes into the most beautiful patterns’ (Hepokoski 1993: 22).
In this context the composer is in some senses reduced to the function of a transmitter or
communicator through which the music speaks, Thus as Grimley (2005: 671) argues, the
composer becomes the shamanistic guardian of a natural truth or spiritual order. Music thus
becomes divine inspiration, the voice of the animating spirits of water, rock, and air speaking
through the agency of a privileged human presence (see also Rehding 2009).
Soundscapes, visuality and acoustic ecology

As shown in the previous section, for critical musicology, cultural history and geography, the
relationship between music and landscape is rarely one of simple depiction. Rather, it is a
complex of overlapping musical and extra-musical elements, traces and influences. However,
more direct approaches to music and landscape which explore the spatiality of sound draw
concepts and terminology directly from the study of visual landscape. Following the pioneering
work of R. Murray Schafer, soundscape studies suggest an easy translation of the conceptual
schemas of landscape directly into sound. The term ‘soundscape’ was coined by Schafer in the
mid 1960s, and developed by him and those involved in the World Soundscapes Project
through the 1970s resulting in a large number of individual studies and a wide range of pub-
lications. The study of sonic landscapes if not the term itself does, however, have a longer his-
tory. Porteous traces the idea of sonic geographies back to the work of the Finnish geographer
Grano (1997) for his work on the sonic landscapes of agrarian environments (Porteous 2000: 5;
Rodaway 1994: 87).
As formalized by Schafer (1977) in The Tuning of the World the vocabulary of soundscapes
studies, or acoustic ecology as it is otherwise known, is adopted from visual landscape enabling
researchers to account for the spatiality of sound. Background sounds are defined as ‘keynotes’
in analogy to music where a keynote identifies the fundamental tonality of a composition
around which the music modulates. Foreground sounds intended to attract attention are termed
‘sound signals’, whilst, analogous with landmarks, ‘soundmarks’ are sounds that are particularly
regarded by a community and its visitors. Natural examples of the latter include geysers,
waterfalls and wind traps while cultural examples include distinctive bells and the sounds of
traditional activities (Schafer, 1977). Schafer’s terminology helps to express the idea that the
sound of a particular locality, its keynotes, sound signals and soundmarks, can express a com-
munity’s identity in parallel with local architecture, customs and dress, to the extent that
settlements can be recognized and characterized by their soundscapes.
The term ‘soundscape’ is also used in the context of anthropological studies which focus on
the phenomenology of environmental experience. In this context the ‘soundscape’ is drawn
more broadly from specific environmental experiences. Steven Feld, for example, shows how,
for the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, the auditory represents a primary means of
ordering the world. He shows how the aesthetic organization of their musical practices repre-
sented by the idea of ‘lift up over sounding’ is both derived from the practical experience of
living amid tropical forest and is used to express and justify a cultural disposition to the world
which connects aesthetic preferences to established modes of social organization (Feld 1996: 62).
For the anthropologist, the idea of soundscape provides a useful way of addressing the engage-
ment between auditory experience and sonic communication. It appears particularly appropriate
235
George Revill
when applied to societies where the relationships between the means of material existence and
social and cultural practices appear relatively easy to draw. The auditory makes sense, and is
made sense of, within a nexus of ritual and work routine, dance and gesture which are as much
visual and somatic as they are aural. In fact, as Martin Stokes suggests the way forward for an
engagement between anthropology and the auditory would be to stress, for example, musical
practices as integral to social organization, ‘music not just in society but society in music’ (Stokes
1994:S2). However, it is primarily an environmentalist agenda concerned with fragile biotic and
cultural ecologies which provides common ground between soundscape studies in ethnomusicology
and acoustic ecology.
For Schafer soundscapes are a way of reclaiming the auditory environment from what he
perceives as the descent of sonic experience from pre-modern, or rather early modern ‘High
Fidelity’, to modern ‘Low Fidelity’ environments. The former is typified by church bells, bird
song, folk singing and town criers and is valued as a high quality and desirable auditory set of
auditory experiences. The latter is typified by piped muzak, the background hum of traffic, air
conditioning systems and mobile phones and is considered as low quality and undesirable. The
former denotes an area ‘possessing a favourable signal-to-noise ratio’, with ‘discrete sounds’
clearly heard above a ‘low ambient noise level’, the latter an ‘overdense population of sounds’
where ‘perspective is lost’ (Schafer 1977: 43). As Matless (2005) suggests, Schafer deploys the
distinction in part to idealize a particular rural soundscape and criticize the racket of the city.
These ideas are largely in keeping with both ‘conservative’ traditions in music and cultural
criticism and defenders of modernist authorial authority and high art such as Theodor
Adorno (Labelle 2008: 203). Schafer’s project is modernist and technocratic, it seeks to aesthe-
ticize the auditory environment, to give it a formal and technical vocabulary as the basis for a
profession of ‘sound architects’ working within a new discipline akin to landscape architecture.
He posits a whole range of ‘educational’ measures including ‘earcleaning’ in order to rescue
sound from the ‘apex of vulgarity’ and develop appropriate aesthetic responses to sound in the
‘general public’:
[I]s the soundscape of the world an indeterminate composition over which we have
no control, or are we its composers and performers, responsible for giving it form and
beauty?
(Schafer 1977: 4–5)
Drawing inspiration from Schafer’s provocative assertions, soundscape studies or acoustic ecol-
ogy have also formed a productive territory for creative musical composition using samples and
recordings made in specific landscapes, environments and places. Two themes dominate this
work: firstly, the recovery, documentation and preservation of what are perceived as high-
quality sonic environments of the past; and, secondly, the exploration of place identity created
through characteristic sound worlds. Exemplifying these twin foci are the Five Village Soundscapes
made during a European tour of the World Soundscape Project led by Schafer in 1975. This
work mapped and recorded the sonic environment of five rural settlements in Europe including
Finland, Italy and Scotland using a variety of sonic and graphic techniques and strategies. The
villages in Finland were revisited in 2009 in order to chart changes brought by ‘urbanization’.
However, as Hildergard Westerkamp, a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic
Ecology, says, ‘practitioners of soundscape studies need to recognize that their practice is cul-
turally creative rather than simply a form of empirically neutral description and documentation’.
For Westerkamp, sampled and recorded environments are always creative even if only for the
reason that a recording of a specific place and time ‘can only speak specifically of that moment
236
and place’. Significantly she also acknowledges the aesthetic judgements made by soundscape
composers who bring their own aesthetic musical language and meet the language of recorded
sounds, ‘in the process of composing’ (Westerkamp 2002; see Labelle 2008: 201–15). For
Westerkamp, soundscape composition is an environmentally sensitive and sensitizing art form
which ‘can and should create a strong oppositional place of conscious listening – that is, in the
face of wide-spread commercial media’ (Westerkamp 2002: 53).
In this context soundscape studies are a normative practice which reinforces the sort of
commonsense and conventional divisions between music and noise, culture and nature exam-
ined in the previous section. Yet the complex relationships between music landscape, sound and
the making of modernity still pose a range of important questions concerning the ways in which
landscape is experienced and valued. Some of these issues are explored in studies which draw on
the vocabulary of Schafer’s soundscape studies but connect this to a critical examination of the
moral cartographies of sound described by Leppert and Matless. Emily Thompson’s study of
New York’s soundscapes during the early twentieth century is concerned with both technology
and modernity and explores the ways which sounds and noises become designated musical and
non-musical. Although she uses the term soundscape, Thompson’s work is closer to that of the
historian Alain Corbin, whose study Village Bells (Corbin 1998) traces the sonic spaces of cul-
tural and political change in rural France. Corbin shows how by the end of the nineteenth
century church bells were physically louder because of new design and casting technology, but
ironically much quieter in terms of their local social and cultural meaning. For Emily Thompson
(2002: 2), like Leppert and Matless, a ‘soundscape, like a landscape, ultimately has more to do
with civilization than with nature’. Thompson’s study, centred on New York, examines the
transformation of urban sound through its legal control, technological measurement, archi-
tectural and electronic design, through battles between noisy neighbours, the endeavours of
scientists, engineers, broadcasters and city officials. She shows how increasing human manage-
ment and control of the soundscape simultaneously distanced and clarified sounds transforming
an unmanaged sonic landscape into the packaged and controlled urban soundtrack typical of
modern life. To this extent Corbin and Thompson tell stories which are congruent with the
worst fears of Murray Schafer, yet as Thompson also shows in her discussion of Charles Ives’s
symphonic work Central Park in the Dark (1906) music has increasingly engaged with landscape
in order to celebrate rather than simply reject the sounds of modern life. In this work orchestral
instruments represent the cacophony of the urban street, its shouts, whistles and car horns pro-
foundly questioning the relationships between noise and music in the experience of landscape.
This work helped set an agenda for generations of twentieth and indeed twenty-first century
composers who continue to question and explore the boundaries of music and musicality,
transforming taste and listening practices in the process. Ironically such work, for example
represented by the use of found and extra musical sounds in ‘music concrete’ have paved the
way for precisely the sort of soundscape compositions championed by the World Forum for
Acoustic Ecology.
Conclusion: sound, perspective and the refiguring of landscape

Increasingly landscape has formed a terrain on which musical and extra-musical sounds interact
transforming conceptions of acceptable and unacceptable musical sounds in the process. These
developments have challenged conceptions of music and landscape based in cartographies of
nature and culture and approaches derived from visual perspective. Yet composers, musicians
and audiences continue to seek ways of using landscape to provide vivid, vital, immediate and
immersive experiences of landscape. Amongst the many musicians endeavouring to make these
237
George Revill
connections is the composer, musician, folklorist, Sam Richards. As a former member of

Cornelus Cardew’s avant-garde Scratch Orchestra (formed 1969) and a former community arts
worker, Richards search has been primarily for democratic ways of making music which draw
on traditions of community music making and the experience of life in specific locations.
Amongst his musical works the piece Exmoor Landscape (1990) follows literally the morpholo-
gical contours of hill and dale drawn in a straight line from an Exmoor farm where Richards
collected folk songs to the sea near Plymouth. Other work for a scratch group including trained
and untrained musicians who started the compositional process with rehearsals on Dartmoor.
Richards recalls:
The quarry gave a lot of scope for playing with distance, images of falling, resonance
and echo, the sound of machinery. I looked at the gouged-out rock face and noticed
intricate scarring patterns that had been made by machinery, the years, the weather.
This was as suggestive of ways of playing sounds as many graphic scores I had seen or
written in the past.
(Richards 1992: 171)
Here for Richards the process of musical composition and performance through direct
engagement suggests something of landscape as a complex temporal and spatial place envisaged
by Grimley. Yet as Richards continued to experiment with audience involvement, moving
performance from location to location and bussing audiences to different performance spaces, he
continued to be dissatisfied with levels of interaction between music, people and landscape.
Perhaps Richards recognized the sense of distancing and clarification in the face of cacophony
noted by Thompson in the making of modern soundscapes. Interpreted as decline and decay
this sense arguably animates and informs work in acoustic ecology. Given music’s engagement
with previously non-musical sounds and the technological recording and projection of sounds
noted in the introduction, it is possible to suggest a broad reworking of landscape perspective
through sound. Where romantic and nationalist music grounded in the symbolic language of
the pastoral provided a sort of affective and emotional closeness mediated through established
forms of musical language, the embrace of previously extra musical sounds in more recent music
is often dependent on recording and amplification technologies which bring their own form of
mediation, distance and closeness. When, in the quote which heads this chapter, Tom Service
described the very personal experience of music and landscape whilst travelling by motor car he
describes an experience precisely shaped by Thompson’s paradox of immediacy, clarification
and distancing. Such a contradiction is evident also in Westerkamp’s reflections on soundscape
documentary as creative composition. As Labelle has shown, acoustic spaces are shared, con-
flictual, intimate, animate and energetic, combining points of focus with points of diffusion.
Sound he says is:
promiscuous. It exists as a network that teaches us how to belong, to find place, as well as
how not to belong, to drift. To be out of place, and still to search for new connection, for
proximity. Auditory knowledge is non-dualistic. It is based on empathy and divergence,
allowing for careful understanding and deep involvement in the present while connecting
to the dynamics of mediation, displacement, and virtuality.
(Labelle 2010: xvii)
Perhaps we would do well to recognize the very different properties of sound in relation to
vision, rethinking landscape in relation to sound requires us to move away from models
grounded in visuality and its symbolic codes and address head on the alterity of sound.
238
Note
1 Here the term ‘landscape’ refers to an assemblage of land, people, place and ecosystem, culturally
mediated through design, representation and experience. It is familiar in dominant cultural landscape
traditions of, for example, Europe, Japan and North America.
Further reading
On music and landscape

Leppert, R. (1993) The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the History of the Body, Berkeley, CA:
University Of California Press
On music, nature and culture

Rehding, A. (2009) ‘Eco-musicology,’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127:2, 305–20
Soundscape studies
Schafer, M. (1977) The Tuning of the World, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart
Thompson, E. (2002) The Soundscape of Modernity: an investigation of architectural acoustics and listening in early
twentieth century North America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Corbin, A. (1998) Village Bells, New York: Columbia University Press
Studies of sonic spaces and sound art:

Labelle, B. (2008) Background Noise: perspectives on sound art, London: Continuum
——(2010) Acoustic Territories: sound culture and everyday life, London: Continuum
References
Attali, J. (1977) Noise: the Political Economy of Music, (trans. 1985) Manchester: Manchester University Press
Bohlman, P. (2004) The Music of European Nationalism: cultural identity and modern history, Oxford: ABC-Clio
Bull, M. (2000) Sounding Out the City: personal stereos and the management of everyday life, Oxford: Berg
Chanan, M. (1994) Musica practica: the social practice of Western music from Gregorain chant to postmodernism,
London: Verso
Connell, J. and Gibson, C. (2003) Sound Tracks: popular music, identity and place, London: Routledge
Corbin, A. (1998) Village Bells, New York: Columbia University Press
CPRE (2005) Mapping Tranquility: defining and assessing a valuable resource, London: Council for the
Preservation of Rural England
Dahlhaus, C. (1989) Nineteenth-Century Music, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Daniels, S. (2006) ‘Suburban pastoral: Strawberry Fields forever and Sixties’ memory’, Cultural Geographies
13, 28–54
Feld, S. (1996) ‘A poetics of place: ecological and aesthetic co-evolution in a Papua New Guinea rainforest
community’, in Ellen, R. and Fukui, K. (eds) Redefining Nature: ecology culture and domestication, Oxford: Berg
Glacken, C. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and culture in Western Thought from ancient times to the
end of the eighteenth century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press
Grano, J.G. (1997 [1929]) Pure Geography, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Press
Grimley, D. (2005) ‘Winter music: composing the North’, Music and Letters 86, 4, 669–71
——(2006) Grieg: music landscape and Norwegian cultural identity, Woodbridge: Boydell Press
Hepokoski, J. (1993) Sibelius: Symphony no. 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
James, J. (1995) The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe, London: Abacus
Labelle, B. (2008) Background Noise: perspectives on sound art, London: Continuum
——(2010) Acoustic Territories: sound culture and everyday life, London: Continuum
239
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Lambert, C. (1948) Music Ho! A study of music in decline London: Penguin

Leppert, R. (1993) The Sight of Sound: music, representation and the history of the body, Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press
Leyshon, A., Matless, D. and Revill, G. (1998) The Place of Music, London: Guilford/Longman
Matless, D. (2005) ‘Sonic geography in a nature region,’ Social and Cultural Geography 6, 5, 742–66
Mellers, W. (1987) The Masks of Orpheus: seven stages in the story of European music, Manchester: Manchester
University Press
Porteous, J.D. (2000) Landscapes of the Mind, Toronto: University of Toronto Press
Rehding, A. (2009) ‘Eco-musicology,’ Journal of the Royal Musical Association 127:2, 305–20
Revill, G. (2000) ‘English pastoral: music, landscape, history and politics,’ in Ryan, J., Cook, I., Crouch,
D. and Naylor, S. (eds) Cultural Turns/Geographical Turns: perspectives on cultural geography, London:
Longman
Richards, S. (1992 Sonic Harvest: towards a musical democracy, Charlbury: Amber Lane
Rodaway, P. (1994) Sensuous Geographies: body, sense and place London: Routledge
Saylor, E. (2009) ‘“It’s not lambkins frisking at all”: English pastoral music and the Great War,’ Musical
Quarterly 1, 39–59
Schafer, R. Murray (1977) The Tuning of the World, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart
Service, T. (2010) ‘Music and landscape,’ Guardian, 2 January, available at http://guardian.co.uk/music/
2010/jan/02/tom-service-music-landscape-review (accessed 5 May 2012)
Smith, A.D. (1997) ‘The “Golden Age” and National Renewal,’ in Hosking, G. and Schopflin, G. (eds)
Myths and Nationhood, London: Hurst & Company
Stokes, M (ed). (1994) Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the musical construction of place, Oxford: Berg
Thompson, E. (2002) The Soundscape of Modernity: an investigation of architectural acoustics and listening in early
twentieth century North America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Westerkamp, H. (2002) ‘Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology,’ Organised Sound 7:1, 51–56
Wylie, J. (2007) Landscape, London: Routledge.
240
Landscape, society and justice
21
Landscape and social justice
Gunhild Setten
NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, TRONDHEIM
Katrina Myrvang Brown

JAMES HUTTON INSTITUTE, ABERDEEN
Vignette
As perhaps with any newcomer to a country struggling to recognize and negotiate the local
norms of encounter, I had now for many weeks been cycling around the city and surrounding
woods in a heightened state of awareness – and at times apprehension – longing for the com-
pletion of this discomforting apprenticeship of mobile citizenship. Sometimes coming up against
the hard edges of social expectation on the trail just made me feel clumsy or mildly embarrassed.
But other times it was felt as a sharp sanction. On one such occasion I was cycling along an
undulating coastal woodland trail popular with many townsfolk. I had carefully chosen to
explore at a time I knew would be less busy with other users, although it was still necessary for
the small numbers of walkers, runners and cyclists there to actively orchestrate their mutual
passage from time to time. Approaching from behind two women walking in the same direc-
tion as me, I was keen to do the right thing in order to have a congenial encounter and prevent
them getting a fright. So I shouted what I thought to be a friendly ‘hallo’ and slowed down to a
near stand-still. One woman jumped to the side and shouted ‘All you have to do is use a bell!’
I felt the sinking gut feeling of hurt and confusion. I didn’t have a bell nor would I have
felt comfortable using one as in my woods at home using a bell would be construed more as an
impudent ‘I demand you let me through’ than a polite ‘I am here and would like to pass’.
Reeling viscerally for the rest of the outing I thought it unlikely that I would enjoy that
trail again.
Conceptualizing landscape and social justice

There are two reasons for starting with one of the present authors’ everyday encounters with
localized norms. The first reason is that the intention in this chapter is to make the reader think
about landscape and social justice as an everyday experience. The second reason, which follows
the first and paraphrases Schein (2006: 1), is that it is always possible to think about landscape
and social justice, even in one’s everyday environments. Regarding landscape and social justice
243
Gunhild Setten, Katrina Myrvang Brown
there are two aspects in particular that this vignette speaks to. First, her way of doing landscape
was inferior or less valid; the ideal citizen within that particular landscape is a walking and not a
cycling subject. Second, she was sanctioned because she couldn’t perform what the (local)
expertise demanded. So, in trying not to be deviant, she was still unacceptable.
In this chapter we wish to say something about why her landscape doing was seen as less
acceptable and hence contested. Yet, we want to make three somewhat broader claims; that
people try to do the landscape in different ways; that there are different judgements about the
appropriateness of the doing; and that the landscape is implicated in both the doing and the
passing of judgements, and hence there are implications for who is included and excluded, and
in what sense.
Landscape and justice are fundamentally and inextricably linked (for example Henderson
2003; Mitchell 2008). Landscapes are struggled over and are the means of struggle. In order to
demonstrate this relationship between landscape and social justice, we lean on a landscape
conceptualization where landscape is a site of such contention and struggle, claims and con-
testations. Social struggles not only shape landscapes but crucially also involve attempts to nat-
uralize them, making them seem inevitable, ordinary, and even necessary. Social struggles are
also attempts to resist such naturalization. Landscapes, then, work to (re)produce certain iden-
tities and ways of life, and become a spatial configuration of particular people’s legitimacy and
moral authority (Mitchell 2003b; Setten and Brown 2009).
In this way landscape speaks explicitly to social justice, or rather injustice, particularly through
social processes of contestation, oppression and resistance. Social justice is a real world issue,
produced and reproduced socially (see for example Young 1990; Harvey 1996; Mitchell 2003a),
rather than bound in theoretical constructs and universal truths (see for example Rawls 1999).
Generally, theories of social (in)justice have been concerned to explain the (re)production of
equity, distribution and redistribution in society, although taking different approaches to the
achievement of socially just outcomes. Much effort has, however, been devoted to demon-
strating that one can only with difficulty ‘arrive at a socially just end without changing the
production system’ (Newman 2009: 196). This Marxist perspective on (in)justice is key to
the theories of, for example, Harvey (1996) and Mitchell (2003a). Crucially, however important
the production system is, post-structuralists, including feminists, have pointed at the fact that
many groups would still be oppressed even if economic injustice was eliminated (Newman
2009: 196; see also Young 1990; Rose 1993). There are, hence, differing notions of justice.
Useful here is the distinction O’Connor (1998) draws between distributive (who gets what and
where), procedural (mechanisms of distribution and their fairness) and productive (involvement
and control over choices and decisions) justice (see also Waterstone 2010). Social justice is
hence fundamentally a relational question.
Following this logic, Iris Marion Young, in her influential book Justice and the Politics of
Difference (Young 1990), offers a cultural politics concerned to explain (in)justice also beyond
‘equitable distribution of life’s necessities, comforts, luxuries and burdens, to include the
potential for people to participate fully in the conditions, situations and decision processes that
give rise to particular distribution in the first place’ (Waterstone 2010: 423). Young’s theory is
important because she demonstrates how injustice or oppression is always social, contingent and
systemic. This allows her to identify more than one source (i.e. the economic, distributive
system) of oppression. In outlining five facets, or ‘five faces of oppression’ – exploitation, mar-
ginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence – Young (1990) draws attention to
the multifarious ways (in)justice is (re)produced. Only the first three ‘faces’ are explicitly related
to the economic system and division of labour. Cultural imperialism and violence operate
differently:
244
To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a

society render the particular perspective of one’s own group invisible at the same time as
they stereotype one’s group and mark it out as the Other.
(Young 1990: 58–9)
A systemic hierarchy of norms and perspectives result, producing and naturalizing inferiority,
very much as experienced by one of the present authors’ encounters with local norms while out
cycling.
Young’s sensitivity to the social and contingent nature of (in)justice points to the importance
of thinking about justice as fundamentally spatial. Even though landscape scholars have been
relatively slow in taking this on board, this spatial sensitivity suggests the importance of land-
scape. The coupling of the fields is thus to a large extent due to landscape scholars’ recent
engagement in drawing attention to how race, gender, class and labour are always implicated in
spatially unjust landscape processes (see for example Blomley 1998; Henderson 2003; Mitchell
2003a; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Schein 2009). So, even though cultural geographer Carl
Sauer, in the early 1900s, defended local cultures and populations against the vicissitudes of
development, the critical field of ‘landscape and social justice’ must be seen as relatively nascent,
evident in the fact that only recently have several scholars argued for a redirecting of landscape
studies towards questions of social justice:
What is needed is a concept of landscape that helps point the way to those interventions
that can bring about much greater social justice. And what landscape study needs even
more is a concept of landscape that will assist the development of the very idea of social
justice. … [T]he study of landscape, that thing which so often evokes the plane on which
normal, everyday life is lived – precisely because of the premium it places on the every-
day – must stand up to the facts of a world in crisis, to the fact that the condition for
everyday life is, for many people, the interruption or destruction of everyday life.
(Henderson 2003: 196; see also Mitchell 2003b)
It is thus over the past 20 years or so that landscape scholars, and in particular American land-
scape scholars, have engaged explicitly and critically with theories of justice coming out of fields
such as philosophy, political science and geography (Young 1990; Harvey 1996; Fraser 1999;
Rawls 1999).
Against this background, we have identified five discernible, yet interlinked strands of
thought and practice where landscape is given conceptual power in relation to different versions
of social justice.
Landscape and social justice – five strands of thought and practice
Public participation and policy

An increasing range of writings generally concerned with challenges of public participation and
policy has appeared in recent years. Parts of this literature more specifically address landscape as
the site in which (groups of) people collaborate, yet also being itself at the heart of conflict.
Public participation, ‘involving individuals and groups who are outside the formal decision-
making processes of the government and local authorities’ (Jones 2011: 30), has, according to
Selman (2004: 367), to a large extent become ‘part of the conventional rhetoric’ of nearly any
issue related to landscape planning and development. An illustrative example is the European
245
Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe 2000), designed to promote landscape pro-
tection, management and planning within and across the states of Europe. With an overall aim
of establishing ‘a true landscape democracy’ (Explanatory Report par. 64, quoted in Arler 2008),
the strength of the Convention is down to the success or failure of people’s abilities and will-
ingness to participate in assessing the qualities of their local landscapes. That is, ‘participatory,
dialogue-based approaches mean that values and meanings attached to landscapes by different
groups need to be negotiated between competing interests’ (Jones 2011: 28). The intention of
participation in the ELC, then, is to:
bring landscape issues into the public domain by reaching decisions through discursive and
dialogic processes rather than leaving landscape character to be something determined by
purportedly ‘objective’ technocratic approaches.
(Jones 2011: 29)
Although often rather subtle, a justification for landscape participation is hence a notion of
social justice, through the reinforcement of legitimacy, cooperation and trust, information
exchange and tackling of conflicts. In short, public participation basically means the acceptance
of heterogeneity as a social justice tool (Jones 2011; see also Pretty 1995; Buchecker et al. 2003;
Selman 2004; Arler 2008). In researching public participation, scholars have drawn on both
quantitative and qualitative methodologies: ranging from traditional methods such as surveys,
observation and interviews, to more critical methodologies involving activism and participation
in community groups, a feature shared with several of the strands outlined below.
‘Public participation’ is neither scientifically nor politically a coherent field of practice, and is
possibly the most wide-ranging perspective on landscape and social justice identified here. Yet
there has been a general agreement that participation ‘is one of the critical components of suc-
cess’ (Pretty 1995: 1251) in planning, policy-making and management. Inspired by experiences
from the South, ‘public participation’, as a deliberative democratic tool, has recently been taken
up within a Western context. Within the landscape field, however, a majority of the literature
is, despite the critical scope folded into the notion of public participation, surprisingly under-
critical and apolitical. The analytical potential represented by O’Connor’s (1998) category of
productive justice is hence so far a missed opportunity. Studies are often either theoretical (see
for example Jones 2011), or they tend to report on varying degrees of public participation or
describing differing participatory processes (see for example Buchecker et al. 2003; Brown et al.
2004). There is therefore a relative lack of critical appraisal of the fundamental ideologies
underlying participatory processes themselves (Pretty 1995), as well as a building in of the
explanatory agency of power relations and thus how particular processes themselves still create
or perpetuate injustice. For example, particularly within disciplines such as landscape planning,
landscape architecture, landscape ecology and partly (European) human geography, the ELC has
been embraced, simply put, because locally produced landscapes should be managed and eval-
uated locally. At the same time, the ELC allows for a possibility – and tendency – to fall into
what Purcell terms ‘the local trap’, which:
refers to the tendency of researchers and activists to assume something inherent about
the local scale. The local trap equates the local with ‘the good’; it is preferred pre-
sumptively over non-local scales. … The assumption is that localizing decision-making will
democratize it and that democratization will result in greater social justice and ecological
sustainability.
(Purcell 2006: 1923–4)
246
This critical conflation of local with ‘good’ democracy can, explicitly and implicitly, be seen to
characterize much landscape literature concerned with notions of justice. This point has
resonance too with the next strand of thought and practice.
Law, justice and polity

A distinctive contribution to the field of ‘landscape and social justice’ is the work of Kenneth
Olwig (1996, 2002). Olwig’s etymological dissection of the landscape concept represents a
reconsideration of scenic and territorial definitions of landscape. Using ‘substantiveness’ as a
prism through which landscape unfolds, Olwig argues that:
Landscape … need not be understood as being either territory or scenery; it can also be
conceived as a nexus of community, justice, nature and environmental equity, a contested
territory that is as pertinent today as it was when the term entered the modern English
language at the end of the sixteenth century.
(Olwig 1996: 630–1)
The crux, then, to use Mitchell’s words, is that landscape in this sense is a:
… material reality, a place lived, a world produced and transformed, a commingling

of nature and society that is struggled over and in. In these struggles, productions and
lives, law (as a social practice) [is] critical, and normative goals of justice [are] always
foremost.
(Mitchell 2003b: 792)
Social justice is thus folded into the landscape. Consequently, landscape is political, and ‘can
be seen as the intersection of place, space and the (political) body’ (Mels 2003: 382). This
landscape, or Landschaft, conception is derived from German, and, according to Olwig (2002:
19), ‘The primary meaning of Landschaft appears to have been a judicially defined polity, not a
spatially defined area.’ What is frequently seen as a northern-European landscape conception is
thus derived from ideas of custom, law and community as they came to be expressed in and
through the landscape (Mels 2003). With a special reference to medieval Scandinavia, Olwig has
demonstrated how landscape was a polity, i.e. traditions, customs and institutions were part and
parcel of the substantive landscape: ‘A substantive landscape thus comes to be articulated
through a polity’s ideals and practices of law and justice’ (Setten and Brown 2009: 193). Land-
scape, then, is always a site of contention, i.e. it is in the nature of landscape to (re)produce both
physical and symbolic articulations of power.
Given the historical nature of Olwig’s narrative perspective, it builds on extensive archival
work. Additionally, and importantly, analyses of artistic and literary representations also feature
prominently, despite this perspective’s almost anti-representational nature, save for the importance
of local political representation.
Seeing current landscapes as morally constituted by people, polity and place offers some
radical insight, but has only to a limited extent been demonstrated or radically theorized. More
to the point, there is a favouring of local agency without critically thinking about how this
creates or sustains exclusions of its own. Furthermore, it is not clear how a local landscape as
polity fits in with issues of justice on multiple and larger scales. There are, however, interesting
links to post-colonial theorizations of nation, polity and citizenship, and how ‘narrative becomes
a tool for a political, historical and cultural ideology in the recording of landscape history’
247
(Tolia-Kelly 2011: 72). To this we return below. First, we turn to a related and similarly
substantive approach to landscape and social justice.
Labour, class and production

This approach rests on the landscape theory of Don Mitchell (1996, 2003a, 2008). Stating that
‘Social justice is impossible … without the production of a socially just landscape’, he pro-
grammatically holds that landscape is key to a just society (Mitchell 2004: 767). Similar to
Olwig, Mitchell leans on a substantive understanding of landscape, one which cannot be
reduced to a textual, discursive or symbolic representation, although landscape is all of these
too. In aiming to steer landscape studies towards a greater concern for social justice (see also
Henderson 2003), he has convincingly demonstrated how landscapes are made and remade
through labour, exploitation and struggle, and, crucially, how landscapes then become ‘naturalized
by the work that ideological landscapes do in making invisible the associated material injustices’
(Setten and Brown 2009: 193–4).
In order to explain the morphology of the landscape, then, Mitchell (2008: 33, emphasis in
original) urges us to pay ‘close attention to what struggle in and over the landscape is about’.
Because landscape is anything but self-evident, we need to understand how landscape obscures
the workings of power and injustice. According to Mitchell, obscurity lies in processes of pro-
duction, capital and circulation, and ultimately power. So even though landscapes are made
locally through work, life and production, they are crucially also not local. Whereas the two
strands outlined above encourage a preoccupation with the local, Mitchell (1996) is at great
pains to demonstrate how one landscape, for example the strawberry fields of California, is
always closely and directly linked to other landscapes, for example to Mexico and India through
migrant workers. Just as important as the production of landscape are thus the outcomes of
these networked landscapes, one of them being obscurity, or the concealing of labour and social
relations.
Another outcome is consequently related to whose interests are ultimately served by manip-
ulating and controlling particular people, resources and behaviours in such ways. The material
manifestation of landscapes and their role as a concretization of social relations means that
struggle over its various forms, meanings and representations impinge on real people’s bodies
and lives and the very structures and conditions of existence. Consequently, landscape is always
about justice. Moreover, the very ability of landscape to obfuscate the social and labour relations
through which it is (re)worked and articulated, enables a fundamental forgetting of how land-
scapes revered for their aesthetic or productive value can only come into being through, often
differently located, landscapes of exploitation, appropriation and devastation (Mitchell 1996).
Methodologically, this perspective draws on a range of tools, in particular qualitative meth-
odologies such as interview material, archival studies, and analysis of visual and textual materials.
This perspective also importantly draws on activist approaches to people’s everyday landscapes,
and thus links closely to the fifth strand outlined below.
Nation, race and memory – postcolonial insights

Over the past couple of decades, insights from post-colonial studies have offered valuable per-
spectives on landscape, and ‘recast ostensibly local cultures and landscapes in hemispheric and
even global terms’ (Henderson 2003: 186). First, post-colonial landscape theory links, to the above
‘Mitchellesque’ perspective. Both Mitchell and Henderson focus on the co-constitution of near
and far-away landscapes and how relations between landscapes are obscured. However, whereas
248
Marxist scholars such as Mitchell (2003a) and Henderson (2003: 190) see landscape as inte-
grative to a fundamental ‘conflict model of social theory’, postcolonial studies lean more on
ideas about and processes of ‘Othering’, particularly along differentiating axes such as gender,
sexuality, race and class (see for example Agyeman 1990; Rose 1993; Dubow 2009). Although
some of these post-colonial landscape studies do not make explicit references to ‘social justice’,
they are infused by dimensions of belonging, alienation, loss, exile, negation, marginalization
and memory (cf. Bender and Winer 2001; Tolia-Kelly 2011). Second, and particularly through
a post-colonial recasting of notions and narratives of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’, these works are
implicated in Olwig’s (2002) narration of the political landscape. Through a practice of ‘writing
in and out’ of the landscape:
Narrative is … an important tool in ‘storying our world into shape’ (Daniels and Lorimer
2009). In this research narrative does not sit benignly in service to the material landscape or
artefactual evidence, but actively shapes the encounter, experience, cognition and com-
prehension of the landscape. … Narrative is understood and becomes phenomenon
through a synergistic binding between representations, narrations and the embodied
experience of landscape, and is often orientated through national historical framings …
(Tolia-Kelly 2011: 75)
Bender (2001: 5) reminds us that we need to be alert to these framings; attending to ‘whose
stories are being told, and to be aware that they naturalize particular sorts of social relations’,
particularly because ‘[w]ithin nation states, history and heritage tell powerful stories, often ones
that stress stability, roots, boundaries and belonging’. Post-colonial insights are important in this
respect because the conflictual untidiness of (national) landscapes is conveyed. At the same time,
untidiness and unease is produced (e.g. Tolia-Kelly 2011).
Third, there is resonance with ‘participation’ in recognizing the myriad positions and per-
spectives through which landscapes take their form and become meaningful through people’s
perceptions and engagements. Post-colonial insights have, however, actively made visible
aspects that have been obscured in these engagements.
Fourth, narration is not only an ideological framing of a landscape understanding, it is also a
methodological strategy. According to Tolia-Kelly (2011: 76) narrative, and crucially non-linear
narratives, ‘allows and enables a plural and multifarious account in historical representation’.
Through text, artefact, image and voice, both literally and metaphorically, counter-narratives
are produced in order to reformulate hegemonic and limited understandings of landscapes.
Everyday struggle and belonging

Everyday struggle is at the heart of any ‘face of social justice’, to paraphrase Young (1990). This
fifth and final strand is no exception. Still it can be justifiably singled out because a distinct body
of work, mainly North American, theorizes the doing of the everyday, material landscape for
processes of justice, belonging and broader notions of entitlement and property (Blomley 1998;
Duncan and Duncan 2004; Schein 2009; see also Mitchell 2003b). Schein’s (2009: 811) work
on ‘people who have often been written out of “belonging”, precisely through land and land-
scape’, throws light on the power of landscape for citizenship and community, or rather their
denial, and ‘the right to claim belonging’. Within this strand contested claims to belonging have
been demonstrated through notions of aesthetic, or landscape appearance, race and property:
Duncan and Duncan (2004: 161) demonstrate how the ‘potential tension between the aesthetic
and social justice presents a political problematic for understanding and analyzing landscapes of
249
home’, whereas Schein (2009: 813), through studies of race questions ‘what happens when
someone else does not want you to belong’. Closely related to these works on ‘belonging-as-
social-justice’ (Schein 2009: 811) is Blomley’s (1998) work on landscapes of property. Questions
of property are questions related to who can – and cannot – make legitimate claims to occupy,
appropriate, or alienate landscapes. So, whether landscape is understood as ‘morphology’ or
‘representation’, it is ‘shot through with contesting claims to property’ (Schein 2009: 576).
Blomley’s studies of resistance to gentrification have thus demonstrated that urban landscapes,
produced by neoliberal, non-social notions of property, stand in sharp contrast to community-based
and more inclusive and egalitarian notions of landscape.
Importantly, this strand of thought and practice does not confine itself to researching the field
of landscape and social justice. Wylie (2007: 190) points out that much of this work also needs
to be seen as ‘part of a broader movement advocating social change and justice’, very much like
the above outlined radical landscape analyses of Don Mitchell.
Landscape and social justice: towards relational landscapes?

Landscape (research) has a very long tradition of being concerned with dwelling and
settlement. Being for a long time almost exclusively a conceptualization and marker of rural and
agricultural lands, the preoccupation with settledness appear somewhat ‘natural’. However,
‘[a] currently widespread discourse within the social sciences (and elsewhere) is an insistence on
a rejection of settledness’ (Massey 2006: 40). We think this is potentially of critical importance
for the development of more socially just landscapes as well as a concept of landscape
more sensitive to social justice. In particular, post-colonial and Marxist perspectives
are demonstrating the role of movement, process and flow for steering landscape in more ‘just’
directions, whereas participatory approaches, somewhat ironically, are only beginning to
acknowledge the challenges of globally open landscapes. We thus concur with Massey when
she holds that:
Rather than that dwelling-saturated question of our belonging to a place, we should be

asking the question of to whom this place belongs. Who owns it? … Feeling you belong
to a place in no way necessarily entails that it belongs to you. … Ask not ‘do you belong to
this landscape?’ but ‘does this landscape belong to you?
(Massey 2011)
The compulsion to read the landscape through history – and we do not deny the crucial
importance of that – has tended to reinforce a local, inward focus which narrows and
obscures the spatial depth of landscape (cf. Blomley 1998; Mitchell 2003a). For current research
on landscape and social justice we believe that there is considerable scope to think about
landscape in more relational ways where the interrogation of various (dis)connections and
mobilizations of representational and material landscapes across space sand scales leads to
greater understanding of how injustice is created and sustained, and ultimately works to
address it.
Further reading
Blomley, N. (2004) Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property, New York and London:
Routledge
Cooke, B. and Kothari, U. (eds) (2001) Participation: the New Tyranny? London: Zed Books
250
Hampton, G. (1999) ‘Environmental equity and public participation,’ Policy Sciences 32, 163–74
Olwig, K.R. (2007) ‘The practice of landscape “conventions” and the just landscape: the case of the
European Landscape Convention,’ Landscape Research 32, 579–94
Tolia-Kelly, D.P. (2004) ‘Landscape, race and memory: biographical mapping of the routes of British Asian
landscape values,’ Landscape Research 29, 277–92
References
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16, 232–36
Arler, F. (2008) ‘A true landscape democracy,’ in Arntzen, S. and Brady, E. (eds) Humans in the Land: The
Ethics and Aesthetics of the Cultural Landscape, Oslo: Unipub, pp. 75–99
Bender, B. (2001) ‘Introduction,’ in Bender, B. and Winer, M. (eds) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile
and Place, Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–18
——and Winer, M. (eds) (2001) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, Oxford: Berg
Blomley, N. (1998) ‘Landscapes of property,’ Law and Society Review 32, 567–612
Brown, T., Hawken, S., Griffith, F., Franklin, L. and Hawkins, C. (2004) ‘Science, landscape archaeology
and public participation: the Community Landscape Project, Devon, UK’, Public Archaeology 3, 217–26
Buchecker, M., Hunziker, M. and Kienast, F. (2003) ‘Participatory landscape development: overcoming
social barriers to public involvement’, Landscape and Urban Planning 64, 29–46
Council of Europe (2000) European Landscape Convention, Florence
Dubow, J. (2009) Settling the Self: Colonial Space, Colonial Identity and the South African Landscape,
Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag
Duncan, J.S. and Duncan, N.G. (2004) Landscapes of Privilege, New York and London: Routledge
Fraser, N. (1999) ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition and participation,’ in
Ray, L. and Sayer, A. (eds) Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 25–52
Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Politics of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell
Henderson, G.L. (2003) ‘What (else) we talk about when we talk about landscape: For a return to the
social imagination,’ in Wilson, C. and Groth, P. (eds) Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies After
J.B. Jackson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 178–98
Jones, M. (2011) ‘European landscape and participation: rhetoric or reality?’ in Jones, M. and Stenseke, M.
(eds) The European Landscape Convention: Challenges of Participation, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 27–44
Massey, D. (2006) ‘Landscape as provocation: reflections on moving mountains,’ Journal of Material Culture
11, 33–48
——(2011) ‘Landscape/space/politics: an essay’, available at http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/
landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/ (accessed 22 October 2012)
Mels, T. (2003) ‘Landscape unmasked: Kenneth Olwig and the ghostly relations between concepts,’
Cultural Geographies 10, 379–87
Mitchell, D. (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Minneapolis, MN, and
London: University of Minnesota Press
——(2003a) The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space, New York and London:
Guilford Press
——(2003b) ‘Cultural landscapes: just landscapes or landscapes of justice?’, Progress in Human Geography 27,
787–96
——(2004) ‘Geography in the age of extremes: a blueprint for a geography of justice’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 94, 4, 764–70
——(2008) ‘New axioms for reading the landscape: paying attention to political economy and social
justice,’ in Wescoat, J.L. and Johnston, D.M. (eds) Political Economies of Landscape Change, Dordrecht:
Springer, 29–50
Newman, K. (2009) ‘Social justice, urban,’ in Kitchin, R. and Thrift, N. (eds) International Encyclopedia of
Human Geography, Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 195–8
O’Connor, J. (1998) Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism, New York: Guilford Press
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Geographers 86, 630–53.
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Pretty, J. (1995) ‘Participatory learning for sustainable agriculture,’ World Development 23, 1247–63
Purcell, M. (2006) ‘Urban democracy and the local trap,’ Urban Studies 43, 1921–41
Rawls, J. (1999) A Theory of Justice, Rev. edn, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Rose, G. (1993) Feminism and Geography: the Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Cambridge: Polity Press
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Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 36, 71–88
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22
The law of landscape and
the landscape of law: the things
that matter
Kenneth R. Olwig
SWEDISH UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES, ALNARP
It could be argued that what connects law to landscape depends upon what one means by
landscape. It could alternatively be argued that what one means by landscape derives from one’s
conception of law. If, in the first instance, one argues, for example, that landscape is some sort
of material thing, or aggregation of things, then the legal issues of interest would be those laws
concerned with the regulation of that thing, or those things. This is the sort of law with which
ordinary lawyers ordinarily deal (Martin and Scherr 2005). If, on the other hand, ideas of law
are foundational to landscape, then we will be concerned with law in a more abstract and ele-
vated sense which, as will be seen, is closer to the ideas of law one finds enshrined in national
constitutions or international treaties. The difference lies in the distinction made by the
anthropologist Bruno Latour, following the philosopher Martin Heidegger, between a thing in
the modern sense of a material entity and the original sense of thing as an ancient form of
parliament, a moot, or meeting, where people gathered to discuss things and agree upon the
laws that would govern them. Of this, Latour writes:
Now, is this not extraordinary that the banal term we use for designating what is out there,
unquestionably, a thing, what lies out of any dispute, out of language, is also the oldest
word we all have used to designate the oldest of the sites in which our ancestors did their
dealing and tried to settle their disputes?
(Latour 2004: 233; see also Latour 2005; Olwig 2002, 2007)
Latour’s point is that when discussing things in the physical material sense (e.g. the things that
are the object of environmental science) it is important to understand that these things first gain
meaning when mooted in social discourse and debate, not the least within the modern institu-
tions (such as universities and research centers) and media that, like the ancient judicial thing,
shape the basis for law and policy through that which Latour calls Dingpolitik (Latour 2005).
This is, furthermore, hardly a moot point with regard to landscape, because the assembly of the
judicial thing also was core to the organization and law of landscape in its original sense as a
polity and the lands it governs (Olwig 2002).
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Kenneth R. Olwig
Landscape polities varied in size and composition and are known to have existed in northern
Europe since Medieval times under a fluid variety of Germanic spellings, depending on time
and place (e.g. Landschaft, German; landskap, Swedish; lantscap, Dutch; landskip, English). These
tended to be relatively analogous in governance and name to the present-day townships of
New England (which derived from old England), though a landscape polity often was larger
than a township – the suffix -ship is cognate with -scape, and a town forms the core of both the
township and the historical landscape polity. The equivalent name for similar polities in the
Romance languages was some variant of paysage (French) or paesaggio (Italian), where pays
meant land in the sense of the country of a polity, and -age, is relatively equivalent to -ship,
meaning something like character, constitution, state or shape (Olwig 2002). Landscape is thus a
place with the character of a land, and a landscape painting would be concerned to capture this
character, much as a portrait would be concerned to capture the character of a person. It should
be remembered, however, that prior to the rise of the central state, and land enclosure, the
‘lands’ making up a landscape need not have been spatially contiguous within the circumscribed
space of a mapped territory, as we expect with modern regional governance and property
demarcation (on the relationship between boundaries and property see Widgren 2005), but
might have fuzzy boundaries as demarcated by mountains or swamplands. Lands belonging to
the church, the king, and differing noblemen, might likewise be interspersed amongst the lands
assembled through the assembly of a thing made up of free farmers. Such semi-autonomous
polities have been officially supplanted in most places by regions or provinces under the rule of
a centralized state with its maps, but they persist in popular discourse concerning law and gov-
ernance (Mels 2005), as in the case, for example, of the European Landscape Convention (ELC)
(Olwig 2007). Thus, the relationship between law and landscape depends upon what one
means by thing and by landscape. To begin with, let us look at the relationship of law and
landscape when landscape is conceptualized as a material thing, or an assemblage of aggregated
things.
The thing about landscape as an assemblage of material things

The modern German meaning of landscape developed largely in the nineteenth century con-
text of a plethora of small, often absolutist, states in which an educated bureaucracy took a
leading role in making the transition from feudalism to absolutism to a modern democratic
state. At this time the pre-existing historical Landschaft polities described above were displaced
by modern central forms of regional state administrative law, and the notion of Landschaft
changed accordingly from designating a polity to designating a regional territory and the things
within it. The influential discipline of geography that arose in Germany at this time not only
played an important role in this process, it also gained world prominence, particularly through
the work of Alexander von Humboldt, giving the modern German geographical notion of
Landschaft as a demarcated region, with a characteristic physical landscape and corresponding
cultural landscape, a leading role in geographical thinking worldwide (Tang 2008). This geo-
graphical definition is congruent with such standard dictionary definitions of landscape as: ‘the
landforms of a region in the aggregate’ (Merriam-Webster 1996: landscape). If this is what one
means by landscape, then the related legal issues might involve material things of concern to
geographers, environmental planners and natural scientists such as the regulation of agriculture,
forestry, nature preservation, urban development, resource use, access, and so forth; the catalo-
gue is endless. Not only is it difficult to limit the number and kinds of legal issues connected
with landscape defined as a physical thing, it is also hard to find a single logical or scientific
principle that links the different categories of landscape covered. Landscape, approached this
254
Law of landscape and landscape of law
way, involves a hodgepodge of often unrelated disciplines ranging from geology, climatology,
soil science, ecology and physics, to sociology, cultural studies, political science, architecture,
history and archaeology, etcetera, etcetera (for an example see Backhaus et al. 2008). The clas-
sical solution to the problem of dealing with such a multifarious subject, especially in the tra-
dition of German Landschaftsforschung, is to diagrammatically map the different aspects of
landscape into a structure of drawer-like boxes, and sub-boxes so that the lowest might be for
geology, with topography above it, and the different categories of cultural landscape above this,
and above it all boxes for various super-terrestrial spheres representing climate, the cosmic
spheres, etc. There are also boxes for various groups of ‘stakeholders’. Various arrows suggesting
the interrelationship between the differing boxes then link all this. Like an office bureau desk
with its chest of drawers, it then becomes possible to pull out each drawer like box as needed, as
when, for example, one might want to compare soil quality, agricultural land use, field
boundaries and the architectural form of rural buildings.
The sort of compartmentalized and categorized information described above is the kind of
information that is especially of use to public officials who are charged with overseeing the laws
and regulations governing the area of an administrative district. And, as might be suspected,
much landscape research producing this sort of boxed and shelved landscape has also been
designed to serve the needs of planners and administrators (e.g. Backhaus et al. 2008). It is thus
also appropriate to use the analogy of the office bureau as a figure to explain the logic behind
this approach to landscape, since bureau forms the root for both the French and German words
for office, and for the French derived word for such public officialdom, i.e. bureaucracy. The
German word for the office held by such officials is Amt, and it is also relevant to note that in
the Danish–German borderlands of Schleswig-Holstein the territories governed by the central
state were called Amt and the bureaucrat in charge of governing them was called an Amtman,
whereas similar sized territories which were governed under locally evolved constitutions with a
representative form of government (the Ding in German, ting in Danish, thing or moot in
English) were called Landschaft (or landskab in Danish) (Olwig 2002). The Amtmand, who gov-
erned these districts on behalf of the state, was thus administering a territory according to a
body of statutory state law in which such a bureau of multifarious landscape information would
have been most valuable.1 A comparable neighbouring Landschaft polity would be governed, on
the other hand, according to a body of customary law adjudicated by a meeting (moot) of the
Ding or thing (for a contemporary analysis of the ‘Dingpolitik’ of such a Landschaft, see Krauss
2010, and for a contemporary analysis of the relevance of the historic concept of Landschaft, see
Cosgrove 2004).
The above example of landscape as a kind of bureau, or regional frame (see Figure 22.1),
which acts to assemble and aggregate highly diverse things for the use of regional administration
and law suggests that the relation between this notion of landscape and the legal role of a
regional state administrator was not coincidental. It could thus be argued that this approach to
landscape arose concomitantly with the rise of the centralized state, and with its centralized and
codified body of statutory law. It was thus this state that sponsored the development of the
surveying techniques that made both modern cartography and the perspectival representation of
territory possible, and these techniques, along with statistics, made it possible to map, depict and
correlate the information that forms the basis for the kind of landscape approach that has been
outlined above (Cosgrove 1988). Centralized administration required a landscape bureau, ana-
logous to that described above, in order to efficiently administer the territories under its control,
and it was under this administration’s auspices that many of the means of classifying and cate-
gorizing landscape information that are familiar today, ranging from the map to areal statistics,
first were developed. It was also this state that supported the legal structures necessary to use
255
Kenneth R. Olwig
Figure 22.1 This editorial cartoon by Peter Lautrop, from the Danish newspaper Information
(29 July 1991), is captioned ‘Et landskab’, in translation: ‘A Landscape’. In Danish
this caption involves a play on words, possible in many Germanic languages, in
which the suffix (-skab) can both mean something like ‘shape’ or ‘character’, or it
can also mean a bureau. The cartoonist is thus making an apparent comment upon
the way the landscape is often treated (e.g. the bureaucrats) as something that can
be stored and locked up in a bureau. The drawing is being reproduced with the
cartoonist’s permission.
these surveying techniques to transform feudal lands and commons into private property.
It was, by the same token, this same state that used these techniques to transform
historically evolved, quasi-independent territories, such as the above mentioned Landschaft, into
centrally administered territories under the state as defined by the contiguous space of
boundaries on a map.
The shift between the meaning of landscape as an assembled polity and its lands, to that of a
spatially inscribed Raum framework in which an assemblage of material things is aggregated
resembles the shift between thing as a legal assemblage of people and thing as an object, or
assemblage of objects, described by Latour. Similarly, words meaning something abstract, like
office or Amt, signifying ‘a position of authority, trust, or service, typically one of a public nature’
shifts towards a more concrete meaning as ‘a room, set of rooms, or building used as a place for
commercial, professional, or bureaucratic work’ (NOAD 2005: office). The office, as a physical
room for the official, is analogous to the Raum of the landscape as an administrative district in
the political sense, or, in the ecological sense, the ‘landscape scale’.
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Landscape scenery, civic humanism and aesthetics

In the modern German derived sense of landscape physical things are aggregated primarily
within the space of a mappable region. There is another sense of landscape, however, which is
arguably more particular to English, in which the things within the landscape are framed
according to visual criteria. This idea of landscape is captured by another dictionary definition:
‘a portion of territory that can be viewed at one time from one place’ (Merriam-Webster 1996:
landscape). Here, the emphasis is upon the definition of landscape via its viewing as scenery, as a
landscape painting or within a landscape garden. This approach to landscape has, as will be seen,
consequences for the way landscape is related to law, which distinguishes it somewhat from the
German derived approach. This idea of landscape came out of developments in the art of per-
spectival visual representation that emerged particularly in Renaissance Florence and Venice in
tandem with a philosophical movement known as ‘civic humanism’. The decline of feudalism
and the alienation of feudal lands, giving rise to a class of influential propertied individuals, was
foundational to this new interest in the civic role of the individual as inspired by classical
Greek and Roman ideals of the res publica. When land became the property of individuals,
rather than feudal lineages, the legitimization of social influence and power shifted from the
feudal lineage to the property from which the wealth of the commonwealth was seen to derive
(Olwig 2005). The properties, or characteristics, of these privately owned properties thereby
came to be of interest not only for practical purposes, as represented by the developing
techniques of geographers, cartographers and statisticians, but also to painters, poets, gardeners
and architects for aesthetic reasons (Cosgrove 1984). The classically inspired Palladian
architectural ideal, with its pastoral landscape, as developed particularly in republican Venice,
was of particular inspiration, as a symbol of civic governance, to eighteenth-century British
private estate owners who were anxious to establish their legitimacy as the civic leaders of a
Britain in which Parliament was playing an increasingly central role (Pocock 1975; Barrell 1986;
Barrell 1987; Cosgrove 1993). The ‘Palladian’ landscape of Venice, and its British permutations,
not only set new standards for park and garden design, they were also tied to new notions of
civil society and republican government. In these cases we are thus not only dealing with
detailed issues of law, but also with more lofty ideas of justice, human rights and rights of
property.
The English landscape garden, with its extensive pastoral parklands dotted with mansions and
follies in the Palladian style became emblematic of the ideals of civic humanism (Barrell 1987;
Cosgrove 1993). The landscape was an idealized version of a shepherd’s commons, but it was a
commons symbolic, as the poet Alexander Pope noted, of the pastoral environment of a golden
age, as described for example by Virgil, when the ‘best’ of men were shepherds (Pope 1963:
120). This idea of landscape grew out of both pictorial art and theatre, and it was related to
philosophical thinking which saw politics and law as a kind of theatre in which the citizen was
to perform (Olwig 2011). The idealized landscape of the landscape garden thus provided the
necessary scenic setting for the achievement, at least in ideal, of a modern enlightened society
based upon representative government and the rights of the individual, not the least the right to
break with the feudal system and own and dispose of private property. It was thus hardly an
accident that Thomas Jefferson, who framed the American democratic constitution, lived in a
Palladian villa (of his own design) surrounded by a pastoral landscape garden park which he saw
as being contiguous with the larger landscape of Virginia and America (Marx 1964). This, then,
was a landscape symbolic of law, but of an ideal of law in a larger and more abstract sense than
the kind of laws and regulations compartmentalized within Landschaftsforschung. This is the sort
of law which is concerned with individual human and property rights as enshrined, for example,
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Kenneth R. Olwig
in the Bill of Rights attached to the US Constitution. It is, of course, easy to point out the
glaring contradictions between the situation of a British Whig estate owner/parliamentarian,
living off lands enclosed from the commons, or a rich slave owner with a large Virginian estate,
like Jefferson, and the enlightened ideals which they expressed, but these ideals were never-
theless foundational for the laws guaranteeing the democratic liberties many people of lesser
wealth now value today.
Though the scenic ideal of landscape emerged within the context of the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, when it was freighted with political and social symbolism, it persists today often
in a context in which it has become a more purely aesthetic ideal linked to individual human
well-being. In this context landscape scenery has become, somewhat parallel to the modern
German idea of Landschaft, an assemblage of physical things. This assemblage, however, is united
by the eye, as positioned in a particular place, rather than by a regional boundary. In this case
the laws and regulations tied to this idea of landscape tend to be the concern of the landscape
architect or spatial planner, and these might deal with the visual aesthetics of landscape and
the protection of the view, e.g. zoning with regard to the size and materials of architecture, or,
more abstractly, with the spatial structure of landscape elements such as openness (fields, mea-
dows, heaths, parks), closed (forests, the built environment) and lines (hedgerows, green struc-
ture). There is even a body of research concerned with people’s landscape preferences and the
effect of visual surroundings on people’s physical and mental health. Here, too, the catalogue of
possible legal and regulatory issues is potentially endless.
Though the ‘German school’ areal notion of landscape, and the ‘English school’ scenic
notion of landscape tend to lead to a differing emphasis concerning the legal regulation of
things in the landscape, they are not incompatible, and present day landscape research often
aggregates them within different compartments of an overarching landscape framework with its
bureau-like boxes. This is because perspectival pictorial representation developed out of the
techniques of surveying and cartography. From a top down projection the map allows for the
bounding of space necessary to demarcate administrative regions and private properties, but
when the projection is tilted towards the horizontal a perspectival, pictorial, image emerges. An
underlying factor thus in present day law concerning landscape tends to be legal rights tied to an
area of land that is understood at bottom to be property, be it that of the state or the individual
(Blomley 2005; Mitchell 2005). Legal statues concerning landscape scenery thus also tends to
involve the rights of certain property owners to a view, which can have considerable value on
the real estate market. Likewise, the rights of ‘stakeholders’ in landscape analyses tends to be the
rights of property owners.
Most languages today define landscape, at least in part, in scenic terms, but the older meaning
of landscape as polity and its place often maintains a subaltern existence. This is in part because
in the Romance languages the various equivalents of the French prefix pays designates a land in
the sense of country, not in the sense of land surface, which is important to the modern idea of
landscape as the things making up a scenic land surface. There would also, however, appear to be a
revival of the idea of landscape as place and polity in the older sense of Landschaft (Cosgrove
2004), as expressed, for example, in the areal definition of landscape given in the ELC, and with
regard to its concern for the value of landscape to human communities (Jones 2007; Jones and
Stenseke 2011; Olwig 2007).
The common(s) landscape of customary law

The historical landscape as a polity and its place was not thought of as a thing, but as the
assemblage of land, or the country, governed by the laws of a thing. An important aspect of this
258
landscape was that its laws were not imposed from above as statutory law, but developed from
below through the workings of custom. As Sir Edward Coke, who became England’s chief
justice in 1606, explained, there are ‘two pillars’ for customs: common usage and ‘time out of
mind’. Customs, for Coke, ‘are defined to be a law or right not written; which, being estab-
lished by long use and the consent of our ancestors, hath been and is daily practiced’ (quoted in
Thompson 1993: 97, 128–9). The function of the judicial thing was basically thus to formalize
and (re)interpret custom in a memorable form as law. Though official polities analogous to the
historical landscape as polity survive in places such as New England, Switzerland and the Åland
Islands (the official name is Landskapet Åland), the legal traditions descending from the ancient
judicial thing or moot have persisted more generally through the vehicle of customary law. This
is particularly true in Britain where custom remains foundational to law, and not only Britain,
but in most of the English speaking world. One reason for this persistence is the failure of the
Stuart kings of England in their struggle to establish statutory law against Coke’s defence of
common law, and in their bid to quash the rights of parliament, which were based on custom,
and establish a form of government resembling the absolute monarchies of continental Europe.
On the continent, on the other hand, statutory law predominates and customary law leads a
somewhat subordinate existence. The hidden power of custom and customary law, nevertheless,
still has a significant effect in constituting and shaping a subaltern, unofficial, landscape as polity
and place (Jones 2005).
The power of custom emerges through practice rather than, as in the case of statutory law,
some form of cerebral rationality. It thus emerges through what people do, and if this practice is
repeated enough to form a pattern practised by a number of people, then it can be termed the
custom of a community of people. The power of custom is reinforced through social control
sanctioned by morality, the word moral deriving from the Latin for custom, mores (see also
Gudeman 2001: 28; NOAD 2005: custom). If there is a conflict concerning the character of a
custom, then the matter can be brought before a thing, moot or court, where the things involved
can be discussed and the matter can be resolved and formalized as customary law. It is in this
way the people of land become shaped (a sense of -scape) as a community (Gudeman 2001: 27), a
polity a commonwealth or res publica. Things are thus discussed and defined through the process
that Latour calls ‘Dingpolitik’, and which in his view now takes place through the medium of a
large variety of institutions (Latour 2005). The power of custom thus lies in the fact that it is not
generally articulated verbally, but generated through people’s practice (Olwig 2008). Custom is
an unspoken law that is enforced through social control legitimated by an unspoken morality
which binds people together as a community. Custom thereby maintains an invisible character
which, though it may be subaltern in relation to an official body of statutory law, maintains a
power and effectiveness which the official body of law, and its enforcers, can have difficulty
attaining (Gudeman 2001; Olwig 2005). When, however, custom is formalized as customary law
through the workings of a court, and particularly when that customary law is regulated, as in
Britain, through the workings of higher courts, then custom becomes part of an official body of
common law. As Sir John Davies explained in 1612:
For the Common Law of England is nothing else but the Common Custome of the Realm;
and a Custome which hath obtained the force of a Law is always said to be Jus non scriptum:
for it cannot be made or created either by Charter, or by Parliament, which are Acts
reduced to writing, and are alwaies matter of Record; but being onely matter of fact, and
consisting in use and practice, it can be recorded and registered no-where but in the
memory of the people.
(quoted in Pocock 1957: 32–3, emphasis in original)
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Kenneth R. Olwig
In this case the official law gains legitimacy through its origins in custom, but custom retains its
subaltern power should the common law cease to reflect custom.
The fact that custom originates in practice means that it will tend to be bound up with
people’s doings in relation to things in their material surroundings as part of their daily activities,
particularly where people’s subsistence, reproduction and recreation depended largely upon the
immediate environment (Mitchell 2005). This is why the environment of landscape polities was
shaped in characteristic ways by their customs, thus creating the physical landscape as a thing
which modern society identifies with differing cultural regions. This is not, however, just a
historic phenomena, but also a contemporary phenomena where, for example, customary forms
of land use or recreational practice can both have a significant influence in shaping the
physical landscape and have great significance for people dependent on these resources. The
problem is that the subordinate, unwritten character of custom can make it difficult for people
in marginalized social or geographical positions to assert their legal rights when, for example,
powerful interests seek to enclose common resources and literally alienate the common person
(Olwig 2005; historical studies of this issue can be found in Barrell 1972; Thompson 1975,
1993. For contemporary analyses and studies see Landscape, Law and Customary Rights (Jones and
Schanche 2004)).
Because the landscape of customary practice tends to both generate, and reflect, the
activities of a community, it tends to manifest itself in relation to common resources, such as
some form of commons, rather than in relation to private property (Mitchell 2005). Thus,
whereas individual identities, such as those of civic humanism, were manifested in relation to
the individually owned pastoral landscape garden/park lands (a symbolic commons), the
landscape of custom manifests itself in relation to a working commons, which provides
both sustenance and recreation (Brown 2005). A commons, however, need not be a
shared concrete piece of land, such as a pastureland. Its meaning can be extended and abstracted
in many ways, as Elinor Ostrom has done in her work in governmentality and
economics (Ostrom 1990) and as Stephen Gudeman has done in the area of anthropology when
he argues that:
The commons is a shared interest or value. It is the patrimony or legacy of a community

and refers to anything that contributes to the material and social sustenance of a people
with a shared identity: land, buildings, seed stock, knowledge of practices, a transportation
network, an educational system, or rituals.
(Gudeman 2001: 27)
Whereas the use of private property is the prerogative of the private individual owner, and
hence property rights, the use of the commons is dependent upon the mutual agreement of a
community regarding the use rights of individual community members, which is the key thing.
The two forms of landscape, the one rooted in property and aesthetics, and the other rooted in
custom and the commons, can coexist. Thus, the same society, in the same period of time, can
include both kinds of landscape, as when the Capability Brown-designed landscape of the
Chatsworth estate abuts upon the landscape of the (former) commons of the Peak District,
which has now become a National Park, where the workers movement, inspired by the heri-
tage of the commons, achieved a use right to the land for recreational purposes. A commons is
difficult to manage, or visualize, according to the framework of the landscape bureau or even
that of landscape scenery. This is because it lacks the geometric logic of the field that has been
enclosed as property, or laid out as a landscape garden. The operative principle is use, rather
than ownership, and that use is governed by a highly complex amalgam of natural and cultural
260
factors that can be determined in both cases by the logic of precedence which gives a
‘prescriptive use right’.
Conclusion
The thing about the relationship of law to landscape depends upon how one defines landscape
and thing. Is it via the ‘Dingpolitik’ of the assembled people who make up the res publica that the
material things in the landscape are assembled as the place of a polity, or is it the spatial or visual
framework of a map or landscape image that aggregates an assemblage of physical things as a
landscape? The answer to this question is constitutional to landscape and to the laws that make
up its constitution.
Note
1 A contemporary example of such a bureau is: Büro für Landschaftsforschung und Kommunikation,
Finkfeld 10b, 3400 Burgdorf, Switzerland.
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23
Navigating the global, the
regional and the local: researching
globalization and landscape
Jacky Bowring
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, NEW ZEALAND
Research on landscape and globalization traverses a vast terrain, reflecting the array of relation-
ships between the immutability of physical place and the fluidity of ideas. The theories that
coalesce in this field of research are coloured by the complex nature of what it is to be human,
and the enduring question of how we relate to where we are. The very core of our collective
and individual identity is bound up in landscape, heightening feelings about threats of oblit-
eration and change that are often associated with globalization. Counter to this are beliefs that
the effects of globalization on the landscape are simply inevitable, or even welcome.
As a means of charting the field of research, this chapter travels through three distinctive
realms: the global, the regional and the local. Rather than stepping through the scales incre-
mentally, the two poles of this research spectrum are explored first – the global and the local.
These extreme positions vividly illustrate the breadth of theory implicated in any consideration
of landscape and globalization. At one extreme the acceptance of a global commonality gen-
erates theories that transcend particularity. And, at the other, there is a kind of denial, where
ideas such as local distinctiveness seek to avoid the consequences of global flows of ideas.
Having explored the two poles, the chapter proceeds to a theoretical equator, a midpoint – that
of the region. As something smaller than the globe but larger than the locality, the region
provides a point of negotiation between the extremes.
While the sequence of global to local to regional provides an itinerary, the vehicle for
exploration is that of design – especially landscape architecture – allowing for a focus to be
found within the immensity of the field of landscape and globalization. Two major recent
conferences on landscape architecture and globalization illustrate the areas of investigation, with
the contributions reflecting the breadth of the discipline, ranging from landscape ecological
considerations through to the impact of globalization on design (Bowring and Swaffield 2004a,
2004b; Stewart et al. 2007; Swaffield and Bowring 2005). Landscape architecture is motivated
by a vital need to engage with understandings of the local, the regional and the global, as it is a
discipline which is not simply scholarly, but one which influences the very nature of the
environment through translation of ideas and values into physical form. Design offers a unique
research method, where the ‘experiment’ is the design itself. ‘Design as research’ is an emerging
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Jacky Bowring
research approach for design disciplines, where both hypothetical and actual problems are
explored and tested, generating new knowledge and critical understanding. Even when not
conceived of as design as research per se, a work of design can provide unique insight into a
problem, and this chapter will allude to design experimentation alongside more conventional
research.
The global
Research on the relationships of landscape and globalization from a global perspective challenge
orthodox understandings of ‘landscape’. The idea of a ‘global landscape’ could even be seen as
something of impossibility, given the etymology of landscape and its conceptual dimensions
within cultural geography (Corner 1999; Jackson 1984). Landscape is rooted in a place-based
understanding of the environment, whether through the cultural milieu of landschaft or the
scenic view of landskip. From the panoptic viewpoint of the global, this physical particularity of
place fades out of focus, becoming instead constituted by flows of people, information and
material, as in Castells’ conceptualization of the ‘space of places’ being replaced by the ‘space of
flows’ (Castells 1996). These flows are the source of concerns over globalization’s effects,
including the ‘disembedding’ from the local (Giddens 1990).
Some researchers adopt a perspective on globalization which can be seen as acquiescent, even
cynical, where the globalised environment becomes a potent domain for design. Rem Koolhaas’s
provocative theory of the ‘generic city’ is at the core of thinking about landscapes in this way, a
vision which he portrays as liberating, allowing the ‘straightjacket’ of identity to be removed
(Koolhaas 1995). The de-localising that is embodied in the concept of the generic city is echoed
in research by Dutch practice MVRDV into landscapes derived entirely from data (MVRDV
1999). The so-called datascapes elevate information as the basis for design, with landscapes
constructed solely from data providing experimental demonstrations of extreme scenarios, such
as Metacity/Datatown – ‘A city that wants to be explored only as information. A city that
knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology, no representation, no context. Only huge,
pure data’ (MVRDV 1999: 58). Information and data are inherently global phenomena – they
epitomize Castells’ ‘space of flows’ – and represent the embrace of a globalized apprehension of
landscape, far from the inflected particularity of the local.
Research on datascapes reveals one of the most pernicious effects of globalization on land-
scape – a detachment from experience. Visual culture is the primary conduit for globalization,
with ideas travelling with ease across the Internet, on television, films and in print media.
Inevitably, this leads to a reduction in the range of sensory experience to almost a single sense,
where sight and sometimes sound become the sole means of relating to landscape. The focus on
the visual – or ocularcentrism – is one of the threads of research that informs the tension between
the global and landscape (Bowring 2007). Ocularcentrism is not a recent practice, but has
influenced the landscape for centuries, with the overemphasis on the visual gaining ground
through theories like perspective and the picturesque, and the rise of viewing-based practices such as
museums, zoos and tourism. Reclaiming the landscape from an ocularcentrist perspective is one of
the imperatives for those seeking to resist the homogenising influence of globalization. Research
on hapticity marks an important dimension of this field, notably in the work of Finnish archi-
tectural theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa (see Holl et al. 2006; Pallasmaa 2000, 2005a, 2005b). Pallasmaa
provides one of the most potent warnings of the effects of ocularcentrism, pointing to how through:
the power of the eye over the other sensory realms, architecture has turned into an art
form of instant visual image. Instead of creating existential microcosms, embodied
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Landscape: global, regional and local
representations of the world, architecture projects retinal images for the purpose of
immediate persuasion. Flatness of surfaces and materials, uniformity of illumination, as well
as the elimination of micro-climatic differences, further reinforce the tiresome and soporific
uniformity of experience.
(Pallasmaa 2000: 78)
Design is one of the most potent vectors of globalization, and geographically nimble design
disciplines such as fashion and industrial design can easily go with the flow, moving around the
globe via the primarily visual medium of popular culture. Architecture is slightly more resistant
to global flow, in terms of the practicalities of the physical environment, but the particularities
of place can often be mitigated through technology. For landscape architecture, the physical
environment provides more of a necessary rootedness in place, but even for this discipline ideas
can be fluid. As noted above, the picturesque is implicated in the globalization of ideas through
its visual appeal, influencing landscapes throughout the British Empire and beyond (Smith 1989;
Park 2007). Research shows that formal landscape styles, too, were transported globally, as in
the design for Peterhof in St Petersburg, which was known as the ‘Versailles of the North’
(Bowring et al. 2009). Although undeniably a locally responsive design explicitly acknow-
ledging its maritime setting, Peterhof was also a ‘Russianisation’ of Baroque garden design. Peter
the Great wholeheartedly adopted the ideas of the West and grounded them in place at his palace –
perhaps not so cynically as Koolhaas’s generic city, but still with an explicit acknowledgement
of borrowing from elsewhere, of becoming part of the global flow of ideas.
A more recent globalised landscape is that of the golf course, where the generic aesthetic that
has become the ‘default’ is one associated with a lush Florida-style landscape, rather than the
windswept fairways of golf’s home landscape of St Andrews in Scotland. Thayer (1989) has
written on the environmental hazards of a globalised landscape being imposed upon an
incompatible bioregion, where:
[i]n the low-desert Coachella Valley of California … there are 74 golf courses – so many
that the entire microclimate of the valley has become more humid and water resources are
stretched to the limit, and as a consequence substantial chemical intervention was required,
with at least one documented case of death due to Malathion poisoning of a golfer at a
military golf course.
(Thayer 1989: 103)
The local
Switching scales to the local, and for the moment bypassing the regional, research in this area
investigates issues of identity rooted in place and provides a strong counterpoint to the cham-
pioning of globalization. Founded on research such as that on place and placelessness, the local
is conceptualised as belonging, of identifying with a locality – of the ‘insider’ and the ‘outsider’
as theorised by Relph (1976), who established that ‘to be inside a place is to belong to it and to
identify with it, and the more profoundly inside you are the stronger is the identity with place’
(Relph 1976: 49). Allied fields explored in this volume, such as tourism and heritage, yield
research relevant to the localized dimension of globalization and landscape (see contributions by
Harvey and Knudsen et al. in particular: Chapters 13 and 25). Some of the most potent critiques
of globalization stem from its effects upon the local, as exemplified in Tillman’s (2009) assessment
of the impact of global businesses on the particularity of a Latin American plaza. The clichéd
signs of globalised landscape – McDonald’s, Walmart and Burger King, for example – are
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identified as the forces eroding the qualities of the local, so that ‘historically distinct places
become increasingly similar in their outward appearance’ (Tillman 2009: 353).
As an approach which might be called ‘localization’, research in this area includes local dis-
tinctiveness and the politically charged militant particularism, which are set in opposition to the
perceived homogenising forces of globalization. A term coined by British organization
Common Ground, local distinctiveness refers to the very fine scale of the neighbourhood or
parish. Local distinctiveness elevates the unique qualities of place into having a special status,
insulating them from globalization or even nationalization, with directives such as: ‘Oppose
monoculture in our fields, parks, gardens and buildings. Resist formulaic and automatic order-
ing from pattern books which homogenize and deplete’ (Common Ground n.d.). At the same
time as local distinctiveness resists the effects of homogenization, it recognises that the local is
not a static condition and that landscape is cumulative, with ongoing change bringing ‘new
layers of particularity to different places’ (Clifford and King n.d.). Militant particularlism, which
was theorised by Raymond Williams and David Harvey, also champions the local, but does not
seek to detach from global forces, instead pushing ideas that are developed in local settings
(including the environmental movement) into the global arena (Williams 1977; Harvey and
Williams 1995; Harvey 1996).
The amplification of the local as a means of creating place identity in an homogenized world
is explored by Ashworth, emphasising the value of belonging as part of a person’s wellbeing
(Ashworth 2003, 2008). Ashworth develops the understanding of landscape as key to this sense
of belonging, and in particular the value of heritage as a core to local identity. However, there
is also a potential for even the attention to the local to become homogenised, as governmental
directives can have the effect of a blanket approach that becomes standardised. As Ashworth
explains, the cumulative effects of localization can become incipiently globalised: ‘The local
may become global in its reproduction of the same local features and conversely the global may
itself be a universalization of what was originally local’ (Ashworth 2008: 193).
Conceptualising the local in opposition to the global is addressed in recent work by Primdahl
and Swaffield (2010), who explore this dynamic in the context of the agricultural landscape.
They extend the debate over the global and the local to a consideration of what – in the
modified landscape of agriculture – could be termed ‘the local’. This problematises the frequent
conflation of the local with a natural baseline, an elision which is common in many landscape
ecology studies, and, like Clifford and King above, Swaffield and Primdahl emphasise the need
to recognise that local conditions are often the product of cumulative and extensive landscape
change (Swaffield and Primdahl 2010: 245).
The content of the local is core to theories of the vernacular, where local idioms respond to
the necessity of the given conditions. The work of landscape architect Laurence Halprin and
architectural firm MLTW (Charles W Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull Jr, and
Richard Whitaker) at Sea Ranch in California is an exemplary design experiment of working
with the local. While not making an explicit statement about eschewing global influences, their
work at the site scale amplifies the potency of the local. Vernacular landscapes are derived from
the needs and materials of a local setting, and in his reflection upon Sea Ranch Donlyn Lyndon
uses the term ‘qualified vernacular’ (Lyndon 2009: 81). Studies of the local context including
the biophysical and cultural landscape underpinned the design response at Sea Ranch, and
exemplify the intimate attention to place via a microscopic mode rather than the detached
panoptic view of the global. These detailed studies constitute a fundamental stage in the
research, captured in the evocative analytical drawings made by Laurence Halprin (2006).
Lyndon’s and Halprin’s writings exhibit a vital component of how design can be research – a
critical reflection on the process and outcomes of the ‘experiment’. The critique of outcomes by
266
either the designer themselves or an external critic allows for the extraction of new knowledge,
a mining of the design itself.
The local is at once both an inviting and treacherous counter to the global. Mitchell (2001)
highlighted this through reference to the double-edged title of Lippard’s (1997) book The Lure
of the Local, where the ‘lure’ is at once a ‘siren song’ and a ‘hook [for] the unwary’. In focussing
on the opposing pole to the global, the embrace of the local in research foregrounds the
importance of identity rooted in place, but also how even that is subject to homogenization
through replication. The itinerary now proceeds to a possible middle ground – that of the
region.
The regional
At the scale of the regional, research grapples with the dynamic potential of globalization and
landscape. In his comprehensive anthology on architectural regionalism, Canizaro states that
‘[r]egionalism is never a single theory or practice but is most often a means by which tensions –
such as those between globalization and localism, modernity and tradition – are resolved’
(Canizaro 2007: 16) Lefaivre and Tzonis, two of the founding theorists of critical regionalism,
explain how regionalism ‘stands for the local and the specific to a region, that is to a unique,
distinct geographical area occupied homogenously by similar objects or objects having
similar characteristics’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2001: 2). Although the region offers a seemingly
straightforward way of defining a geographical armature for identity, Lefaivre and Tzonis cau-
tion that such divisions are infinite, and it is only humans’ need for definite boundaries that
facilitate such divisions – and because of this, regions embody all of the biases that underpin
their delineation.
One of the main approaches to defining a region is biophysically, as in the concept of the
‘bio-region’, a scale of particular relevance to landscape architecture. Theorists Robert L.
Thayer and Michael Hough have contributed to the development of this field, where the
bioregional is a counter to places that are ‘usurped by machines, sprawled out by the auto-
mobile, homogenized by consumer culture, seduced by the globalizing economy, trivialized by
television, and disconnected from deep wisdom by the shallow superficiality of the “electronic
superhighway”’ (Thayer 2003: 3). The bioregion or ‘LifePlace’ is a ‘naturally bounded region or
territory’ (Thayer 2003: 4) and includes defining elements such as watersheds (Hough 2004).
Lefaivre and Tzonis outline a range of culturally informed regionalisms that range from the
sentimental ‘Picturesque’ and ‘Romantic’ through to the chauvinistic ‘Commercial’ regionalism,
which appropriates regional characteristics as a kind of commodity – as a form of ‘architectural
pornography’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 2001: 6). The region can be far from being a benign carrier
of identity, being appropriated as a form of exclusion, most tragically in the instance of the Nazi
promotion of blut und boden (blood and soil) as defining qualities. Thus, through an over-
emphasis on the ways in which identity is founded upon the local or the regional, the landscape
can become complicit in destructive acts of elimination, both culturally and ecologically.
The theory of critical regionalism was developed as a means of transcending the suffocating
sentimentality of a romantic regionalism that was in denial of global forces and the fascistic
promotion of regional specificity, and at the same time moderating the potential erosion caused
by globalization (Frampton 1983; Lefaivre and Tzonis 2011; Tzonis et al. 2001; Tzonis and
Lefaivre 2003). Instead, critical regionalism proposed a ‘mediation’ between the global and the
local, between Ricoeur’s ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’ (Frampton 1983: 16). The operation of the
‘critical’ component is explained by Tzonis and Lefaivre (1996: 488) as a form of reflexivity,
where on one level the works are critical by ‘providing contrasting images to the anomic,
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Jacky Bowring
atopic, misanthropic ways of a large number of current mainstream projects constructed world
wide’, and then on another level ‘they raise questions in the mind of the viewer about the
legitimacy of the very regionalist tradition to which they belong’.
Critical regionalism amplifies the role of the landscape in inflecting design, primarily through
the advocacy of phenomenology and the concomitant heightening of the experiential dimen-
sion of landscape. This dimension of engaging with the region is advocated by Frampton (1983)
as a promoting of the tectonic over the scenographic, the tactile over the visual. Frampton
describes how these factors amplify experience as the most potent way to relate to place, it is
something that cannot be reduced, and cannot become part of the global flows of information
since it is rooted to location. Frampton asserts that ‘[t]he tactile and the tectonic jointly have the
capacity to transcend the mere appearance of the technical in much the same way as the place-
form has the potential to withstand the relentless onslaught of global modernization’ (Frampton
1983: 29). Critical regionalism also relates to landscape through defamiliarization, through
working with the qualities of the region by ‘identifying, decomposing, recomposing’ a process
which ‘makes them appear distant, hard to grasp, difficult, even disturbing … It disrupts the
sentimental “embrace” between buildings and their consumers, “de-automatizing” perception
and thus “pricking the conscious” … ’ (Tzonis and Lefaivre 1996: 489).
And in-between
The global, the local and the regional provide an efficient itinerary for exploring the field of
research on landscape and globalization. But there are many paradoxes and contradictions which
constantly enliven the research domain and test the boundaries of ways of relating to place.
Massey’s notion of the ‘global sense of place’ emphasizes the fluidity of relationships between
people, landscape and identity. How can identity stem at once from the global and the place-
based (Massey 1994)? Dislocation from one’s homeland poses research problems that further
trouble the consequences of globalization for landscapes of memory and identity, as fore-
grounded in the work of Boym (2001) and Armstrong (2004). Yet, even under the trying
circumstances of dislocation, the landscape emerges as resilient, not only in terms of its
immutability in physical terms, but that which is carried in the mind or in representations – the
portmanteau landscape of ‘home’.
Global, regional and local can also be embedded into ideas of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ –
relative locations implied in the theory of critical regionalism. Eggener, in his seminal critique of
critical regionalism, pointed out that notions of the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ are in fact
constructions of the west, casting itself as the centre (Eggener 2006). Those on the ‘periphery’
may not be resisting the ‘centre’ at all, but simply engaging with their landscapes as they have
always done, oblivious to the construction of a geographical hegemony. Till and Wigglesworth’s
(2007) research also challenged the centre-periphery power differential, through highlighting
that the margins are a place of strength. Recalling the work of Rural Studio’s Sam Mockbee,
Till and Wigglesworth take from his legacy an idea of working beyond the limits, in the mar-
gins. From the margins you can see the centre, they explain, how the ‘center should disperse to
accept the multiple values and diverse cultures that the margins address’ (Till and Wigglesworth
2007: 430).
Further contesting the dominance of the centre over the periphery is the creativity with
which the global might be inflected by the local. It emerged as a paradox in the study of
St Petersburg that locals had so wholeheartedly embraced seemingly generic and homogenized
landscape elements as part of a street pedestrianization (Bowring et al. 2009). On closer exam-
ination, it became clear that the locals had overlaid the formulaic globalised street with their
268
own narratives and superstitions – things that may only be apparent to insiders, while outsiders
read the landscape as yet another place made placeless through the adoption of a standard design
language. The relationships of landscape and globalization can be subtle, and close reading and
immersion is necessary to avoid overlooking the ways in which the landscape – both physical
and cultural – persists and provides a grounding in place.
Future research
This chapter has traversed a range of research on landscape and globalization with a particular
focus on design. As a body of theory which has the potential to actively influence future land-
scapes, design represents one of the most pressing realms for future research. Through devel-
oping and exploring theoretical approaches to designing landscapes which respond to
globalization, future research needs to deepen understandings of the relationships between the
global, the regional and the local. The connections between the scales represent what Harvey
calls a ‘central confusion’ and he points to the writing of Neil Smith as an illustration of the
need to grasp this connection. Smith (cited by Harvey) illustrates the problem through the
example of Tiananmen Square – an emphatically political landscape – and asks was the brutal
repression of the space:
a local event, a regional or national event, or was it an international event? We might

reasonably assume that it was all four, which immediately reinforces the conclusion that
social life operates in and constructs some sort of nested hierarchical space rather than a
mosaic. How do we critically conceive of these various nested scales, how do we arbitrate
and translate between them?
(Smith cited in Harvey 1996: 93)
In the context of landscape, and particularly for design, the impact of the scalar relationships is
vital, as it provides the frame for identity. As with Tzonis and Lefaivre’s (1996) instruction to
‘identify, decompose, recompose’, at what scale does this happen? And even if the scale is
described as regional, what does that mean? Stobbelaar and Pedroli point out that even the
‘interaction between region and nation has not yet been fully covered’, and with reference to
Lowenthal’s 1994 work, provide a reminder that nationalism itself can be a suppression of
regional identity – let alone that of globalism (Lowenthal 1994; Stobbelaar and Pedroli 2011:
330). They add that ‘[i]n times when the world is getting smaller, and Europe does not yet feel
like a safe haven, people are keen to identify with their local environment, in which they feel
the basis of their regional identity. Thus globalization increases the need for the regional identity’
(Stobbelaar and Pedroli 2011: 330).
Future research into landscape and globalization must therefore join with the field of identity,
as well as memory and phenomenology, which are also explored in this volume. As landscape is
vital to the construction and apprehension of identity, the influence of global forces requires
further understanding, particularly in the ways in which it may affect the vulnerable traces of
memory in the landscape. And, as a means of foregrounding the fact that landscape is not simply
a visual domain, further research on experiential landscape – on landscape phenomenology – is
vital, including design experiments which explore and demonstrate the potency of multisensate
approaches.
The breadth of research on landscape and globalization demonstrates the complex relation-
ships between the physicality of place and the more fluid nature of culture and ideas. Explora-
tion of these relationships traverses a wide spectrum of value judgements and ideals, from the
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socialist underpinnings of militant particularism to the indifferent attitude of the generic city.
For landscape architecture and allied disciplines engaged in analysing and intervening in the
landscape, this breadth of research is reminder of the need for an ethical approach to practice.
After all, design is inherently political, and perhaps nowhere more so than in how it responds to
the global – whether embracing it, denying it, resisting it, or even attempting to mediate it.
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24
Landscape and identity: beyond a
geography of one place
Shelley Egoz
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, NEW ZEALAND
‘Landscape and identity are inherent components of culture, one informing the other.’ This
statement opened a call for papers for an international workshop, ‘The Right to Landscape,
Contesting Landscape and Human Rights’, launching an initiative by the same name in
Cambridge, UK on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
(UNDHR) in December 2008 (CCLP 2008). The call for papers attracted much attention on
behalf of landscape scholars and professionals, attesting to a wide spread consent on the sig-
nificant contribution of landscape to identity as an expression of one of the fundamental human
needs and a pervasive human motive – the need to belong.
The Right to Landscape (RtL) concept is derived from an interpretation of landscape as a
universal theoretical concept similar to the way in which human rights are perceived. It stems
from the notion that landscape is at once the relationship between humans and their sur-
roundings and the manifestation of the confluence of physical subsistence and psychological
necessities; it is a place that ought to support livelihood and wellbeing, both values that are at
the core of universal human rights (Egoz et al. 2011).
Building on the axiom that landscape and identity are to be interpreted within the sphere of
human rights, this chapter highlights some of the dilemmas associated with landscape and
identity in the twenty-first century. The discourse on landscape and identity merits more
attention and reflection, in particular in landscape architecture, a discipline that is engaged in
active production of landscape.
The literature on landscape and identity is prolific; landscape identity is a much referred to
topic but it is not always clear what is being discussed, as it is dominated by two main concepts:
Landscape identity – the identity of the landscape – is the spatial character of the landscape.
It is an evaluation of a physical entity that can be analysed according to set criteria;
Landscape and identity – the relationship between landscape and the identity of humans
engaged with the landscape – represents the formative role of landscape in building identity,
both collective and individual, in response to the basic human need to belong.
At first glance, these two interpretations may seem parallel and necessitate separate discourses:
the first relating to the built environment disciplines, and the latter to social sciences fields such
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Landscape and identity
as anthropology, psychology, sociology and so forth. Nonetheless, the body of interdisciplinary

work on landscape is the theoretical foundation for the discipline of landscape architecture, thus,
in the context of the right to landscape and the interpretation of landscape as a relationship
(Egoz 2010), both concepts are intertwined and addressed as one.
Modern development of the concept of landscape and identity

‘A Man is but a mould of his native landscape’, wrote the Russian-born Hebrew poet Shaul
Tchernichovsky in the 1920s. Such an intense association of landscape with identity was the
focus of human and cultural geography discourse in North America in the 1930s. Carl Sauer’s
seminal contribution to the idea of the cultural landscape refuted nineteenth-century environ-
mental determinism paradigms set forth by German geographer Friedrich Rätzel that had been
imported to North America by geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, a disciple of Rätzel. It is no
coincidence that environmental determinism theories were reinforced in nineteenth-century
Europe at the time of the 1848 European Spring of Nations and were conducive for supporting
nationalist ideologies of ‘Blood and Soil’ and asserting national identity through landscape.
Landscape has since become one of the foundation stones for building national identity (see for
example Crang 1999; Egoz 2008; Egoz and Merhav 2009; Long 2009).
After the Second World War, the discipline of cultural geography that had flipped the causal
relationship of landscape and humans from the physical environment as the moulder of human
personality and cultural identity to that of landscape as the repository of human culture gained
momentum. Scholars such as J.B. Jackson, with his 1950 pioneering publication of Landscape
Magazine, and English historian W.G. Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape (1955)
paved the way for a whole new body of work that reflected on the shaping of landscape and
discussed its humanistic meanings. Much of this work was categorised under ‘landscape per-
ception’ and set the stage for a discourse on landscape and identity that later permeated into
other disciplines and formed a significant theoretical grounding for the discipline of landscape
architecture. Scholarship in the 1970s continued to see humanistic values endorsed through
some ideas on universal values embedded in landscape, introduced by geographer Yi Fu Tuan’s
insights in Topophilia (Yuan 1974). Donald Meinig’s (1979) collection of essays, The Interpretation
of Ordinary Landscapes, summarised and established some foundation concepts about the every-
day landscape and identity that have since been generally accepted and further explored. Now it
was not only the idea that landscape represents cultural identity but so too does the role of the
physical landscape serve as an identity builder.
Identity associated with landscape became a much-discussed topic across the humanities’
fields, generating a plethora of literature. Anthropologist Barbara Bender’s conceptualisation of
landscape as ‘part of the way in which identities are created and disputed, whether as individual,
group, or nation-state’ (Bender 1995: 3) is considered an inspiration (Tilley 2006) for
similar approaches in archaeology, environmental history, anthropology, heritage studies and
cultural studies. Within the built environment disciplines, it is today almost a maxim that
responsible architecture and landscape designs are, and ought to be, understood as expressions
and builders of identity, in particular in relation to regional geography. The roots of
contemporary regionalism can be traced to the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
North America Prairie School of architecture. The horizontal qualities of the Midwest land-
scape became a dominant feature in the form of architecture. Influential figures such as archi-
tects Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright are associated with promulgating these lines of
design language, underpinned by the want to express identity through references to the char-
acter of the regional landscape. Danish-born American landscape architect Jen Jensen
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Shelley Egoz
collaborated with Wright and the ‘Prairie School’ style, which included a promulgation of the use of
native plants, and formed an eminent legacy in contemporary landscape architectural approaches.
Another considerable influence on landscape architecture today can be ascribed to the writ-
ings of architect Kenneth Frampton in the 1980s. Critical Regionalism theory (Frampton 1983)
derived from earlier work by Tzonis and Lefaivre (1981), and emerged as a reaction to what
was promulgated as ‘lack of identity’ of the modernist international style in architecture. While
Critical Regionalism affirmed the role of the local landscape in shaping identity, it at the same
time critiqued a naïve, nationalist ‘Blood and Soil’ type of identity building process and pro-
moted experiential phenomenological approaches to design. Ideas about regional design gained
momentum in landscape architecture discourse in the 1990s, now including notions of sustain-
ability and the value of native planting for ecological and social resilience. Several landscape
architects wrote in the spirit of a response to the local landscape in design (e.g. Harkness 1990;
Hough 1990; Thayer 1994; Woodward 1997). Since then, this trend has gained momentum in
the context of accelerated threats to landscape and resentment to a perceived spatial homo-
geneity inflicted by globalisation (see Stewart et al. 2007 and Bowring et al. 2009). Asserting
local identity as a means of resistance to globalisation is extended upon in this volume in Jacky
Bowring’s chapter on landscape and globalisation (Chapter 23).
For many involved with landscape architecture education and practice, ‘landscape identity’ is
seen as part of the professional ethos; it is a particular valued issue that the profession has ethical
obligations towards (Thoren 2010). One example is the way this stance was advocated in the
2010 International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) regional conference of the
Americas in Santiago, Chile, which focused on ‘landscape architecture as a discipline cherishing
and protecting the geographical identity of a place’ (IFLA 2010). Identity is a term also referred
to in this century’s latest key document concerning landscape, the European Landscape Convention
(ELC), where it is stated in the preamble that landscape ‘contributes to the formation of local
cultures and … is a basic component of the European natural and cultural heritage, contributing
to human well-being and consolidation of the European identity’ (Déjeant-Pons 2006).
The many interpretations and lack of a clear definition of landscape identity have caught the
attention of Stobbelaar and Pedroli (2011) who address this challenge. Their conceptual model
‘The Landscape Identity Circle’ is based on axes of four types of identity: personal, existential,
cultural and spatial. Each one of these categories relates to the scientific disciplines involved in
landscape studies. Stobbelaar and Pedroli’s definition is that ‘landscape identity is the unique psycho-
sociological perception of a place defined in spatial-cultural space’. They conclude that land-
scape identity ‘is a multifaceted concept, which has implications for the way different stakeholders
are taken into account: individual inhabitants, pressure groups, experts and/or policy-makers, all place
emphasis on different parts of the Landscape Identity Circle’ (Stobbelaar and Pedroli 2011: 334).
Best capturing this relationship between landscape and identity is Huff’s proposition that
landscape is the reification of identity (Huff 2008). Indeed, this perspective resonates with the
way the discipline of landscape architecture has traditionally addressed identity by advocating a
study of the local/regional context: geography, geology, topography, botany, climate, history,
culture and architecture, and designing in response to those. The work produced in this spirit is
profuse, most of it echoing an ethical commitment to address identity in a local geographical
context. Nonetheless, there is more to landscape identity than the localised geography.
Tensions embedded in concepts of landscape and identity

There is no dispute that landscape is ‘a repository of memory both individual and collective …
[and] is a site of and for identity’ (Mitchell 2008: 42); this tight association between landscape
274
and identity is undeniable, but at the same time is also inherently knotty: both the terms
‘landscape’ and ‘identity’ have been recognised as elusive and ambiguous idioms. Landscapes
have been argued to be complex and dynamic entities, interpreted in different ways and
thus the potent subject of conflicts and repositories of power relations and ideologies. There is
an extensive body of theory describing these facets of landscape by leading scholars such as
Denis Cosgrove, James Duncan, Don Mitchell, J.W.T. Mitchell and Kenneth Olwig.
Discourse on identity in the social sciences, underpinned by a post-structuralist non-essentialist
approach, recognises the fluidity and dynamic nature of the notion, referring to ‘identities’ as
plural rather than a fixed concept. Attention was also drawn to the manipulative potential of the
concept or, in the words of Christopher Tilley, ‘[t]he manner in which identities are produced
and sustained needs to be understood within frameworks of power relations, dominance and
resistance, and their relation to different kinds of knowledge ‘western’ and ‘indigenous’ (Tilley
2006: 15). Peteet (2005: 99), in her description of the spatialising of identity in Lebanon’s
refugee camps, argued that ‘[i]dentity is apt to be contexualized as an always-in-formation cul-
tural product of sociospatial location and practices within a field of power’. Critics of national-
ism such as Gellner (1983), Bhabha (1990a, 1990b, 1994) and Anderson (1991) argued that
national identities are fabricated narratives, open to subversion, and dictated in a top-down
manner. It is worth mentioning, however, that not all scholars accept that view of an artificial
creation of national identity. Edensor (2004), for example, suggested that national identity is
formed through the mundane everyday activities in society.
In heritage studies and archaeology, scholars have acknowledged similar pitfalls highlighting
the complex, sometimes covert, agendas embedded in collective identity building (see Hobsbawm
and Ranger 1983; Zerubavel 1995; Elon 2000; Smith 2004, 2006; Harvey 2008). As such
landscape architects may be unaware of their active role in reinforcing nationalist narratives
while marginalising other stakeholders (see Egoz 2008; Egoz and Merhav 2009). It is this realm
of the exclusivity of landscape and identity that merits more attention in landscape architecture,
the discipline that engages with a ‘reification of identity’.
Landscape and identity in flux

Landscape architecture’s focus on the geography of place reflects a perception that landscape and
identity are asserted through rootedness in one place – a sedentary condition. Rootedness,
whether relating to grounding in physical place or a quest to belong, is predominantly a land-
scape metaphor (Egoz 2011b). The opposite of ‘to root’ is ‘to uproot’ – a word connoting
violence, traumatic displacement and destruction. Both the ideas of ‘rootedness’ and ‘uproot-
edness’ are potent identity builders. Political contestation in intractable conflicts over territory
and ownership often fuels profound emotional responses through landscape symbols of identity
(Braverman 2009). In conflicts such as the Israeli–Palestinian one landscape plays a prominent
role for both sides (Bardenstein 1998; Egoz and Williams 2010). The Palestinian narrative of
dispossession intertwined with yearnings for their home landscape is a powerful emotional
identity builder (Peteet 2005). Israeli Zionist identity-building is too charged with compound
landscape narratives: a return to an ancient ‘biblical’ landscape along with a modern day, pion-
eering ethos of building and physically rerooting in the landscape (Egoz 1997, 2008, 2011b;
Chowers 2002; Helphand 2002).
The concepts of rooting, uprooting and rerooting are gaining new dimensions in the twenty-
first century. The number of displaced populations is increasing with late-twentieth-century
mobility due to economic globalisation and a growing phenomenon of forced migration as a
result of climate change (Myers 2002; Gemenne 2011; OIM 2010). For the discipline of
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landscape architecture, these changes question the relevance of the centrality of a physical
response to landscape identity within a stationary geographical context. Leading thinkers in
cultural geography have already challenged essentialist assumptions about place. David Harvey
(1990) and Doreen Massey (1999) introduced the notion of ‘space–time compression’ shifting
directions in cultural geography. The ‘New Mobilities Paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006)
influenced a wide body of work on migration, diasporas and transnationalities (Blunt 2007).
The work of Tolia-Kelly, (2004a, 2004b, 2006), for example, includes considerable references
to meanings of landscape in that context; other studies centred on attachment to landscape,
grounding in place and geographies of belonging (Blunt 2007).
‘Out-of-place’ identity
Tim Cresswell (2006: 31) observed that, when place is perceived as ‘an essentially moral con-
cept, mobility and movement, insofar as they undermine attachment and commitment, are
antithetical to moral worlds’. Creswell’s assertion mirrors a historical and ongoing phenomenon
of discrimination against nomad communities often referred to pejoratively as ‘vagrant’ com-
munities. A perception of the inferiority of the so-called ‘landless’, some of which have different
traditional ownership systems to contemporary legal property laws, can be found internationally.
Studies about gypsies in Sweden (Montesino 2001), Roma in Europe (Bancroft 2001), nomadic
communities in India (Lim and Anand 2004) and the indigenous Bedouin in Israel (Abu-Saad
2006; Boteach 2008) all address the vulnerability and deprivation associated with nomadic life-
styles and the inflicted social injustices that result in poverty and its accompanying physical and
social impacts on general wellbeing. In contemporary nomadic cultures there is an inherent
tension between a right to self-determination underpinned by a particular cultural identity that
embodies movement in the landscape, and the need to sustain livelihood. In the modern world,
many indigenous populations’ traditional livelihood practices are no longer viable as access to
land resources is being restricted whether through urbanisation processes, colonial appropria-
tions or environmental conservation (Lim and Anand 2004). Settlement becomes the default
option for survival and, from the state’s point of view, ‘the solution’ for these ‘victims of social
development’ whose indigenous knowledge is deemed obsolete (Montesino 2001: 18).
Deborah Bird Rose (1996; see also the introductory chapter this volume) and Ingold and
Kurttila (2000) have defied this latter assertion, negating the notion that indigenous populations’
knowledge is no longer valuable. Ingold and Kurttila (2000) argue that the meaning of Finnish
Lapland farmers’ traditional knowledge of environmental management practices is in effect an
epitome of the notion of belonging to place. Local knowledge embodies a profound engage-
ment with the landscape – land, animals and plants. This knowledge represents their landscape
identity, hence any imposed western scientific methods to replace traditional land practices
means cultural displacement (Ingold and Kurttila 2000).
The human rights of indigenous peoples including the right to self-determination and cul-
tural identity are now recognised by the United Nations, with the Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted by General Assembly in 2007. Landscape is a critical
contributor to identity of indigenous people, but also potential glue for a common national
identity for both the indigenous populations and the settlers who colonised the territories that
had already been inhabited by people, as Rose (1996) maintained.
Landscape identity and indigenous communities

Deborah Bird Rose, in Nourishing Terrains, her report for the Australian Heritage Commission,
highlighted the opportunities for building Australian national identity embedded in the
276
confluence of Aboriginal knowledge and ‘Settler Australians concerns for the future of
the continent’ (Bird 1996: 83). She argued that land stewardship, ‘[t]he notion of “caring for
country”’, is ‘quintessentially Aboriginal’, and that, ‘[n]owhere in the world is there a body of
knowledge built up so consistently over so many millennia. Nowhere are there so many living
people who continue to sustain that knowledge and engage in associated land management
practices ‘ (Rose 1996: 83–4).
Indigenous people’s profound relationship with the landscape is also prominent in Aotearoa,
New Zealand. For the Ma-ori, ‘landscape is who they are and what shapes their identity’
(Menzies and Ruru 2011: 141). The bicultural society builds its common national identity from
the landscape through embracing many of the Ma-ori concepts (Stephenson et al. 2010). The
weight given to this theme is evident by the following statement of an interdisciplinary Land-
scape and National Identity research centre established at the University of Otago in 2007:
‘Landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand plays a powerful role in creating personal and collective
senses of identity’ (CRNI 2011). Landscape architects in New Zealand are committed to
responding to the indigenous peoples’ particular physical and cultural needs. The core curricu-
lum at the School of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University Christchurch
includes bicultural education with an option to focus on Design in a Ma-ori Environment
(Challenger 2008).
The relationship between the coloniser and the indigenous people in New Zealand is
grounded in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, which established, in principle, shared sovereignty.
While there are still many ongoing tensions regarding allocation of resources between the state
and the Ma-ori, New Zealand is internationally and locally perceived as one of the most pro-
gressive in the colonised world. In contrast, there are other places in the world where indi-
genous populations are overtly marginalised and deprived. One such example is the Arab
Bedouin in Israel, a population counting about 190,000 in 2010. This ethnic minority is one of
the most disadvantaged groups in the country (Molcho 2010). Since statehood (in 1948), the
Israeli authorities have been trying to settle the nomads (Leyne 2007). Bedouin tribes’ historic
ownership of the vast areas of land within which they would move seasonally was denied. This
perception by Israel that the nomads were landless is not unique; it was common in other
colonised geographies where indigenous inhabitants were dispossessed. During the late nine-
teenth century, land in New Zealand could be legally confiscated if its owners failed to cultivate
it. Ma-ori collective ownership of land and different values, such as taking on a guardianship
role and sustaining the resource of land unfarmed for the sake of future generations, were
interpreted by the colonisers as ‘neglect’, thus the Ma-ori were ‘undeserving’; this perspective
was a rationalisation for land appropriations by the colonisers (Brooking 1996).
Today, half of the population of Israeli Bedouin lives in poor conditions in seven settlements
established by the Israeli government, and the other half in what has been termed ‘unrecognised
villages’ on their historic land that had been appropriated by the state. The unrecognised villages
are an intriguing landscape. Deemed illegal, they are deprived of all infrastructure and vulner-
able to house demolitions by the authorities. Human Rights’ organisations in Israel have been
campaigning in favour of legalising the villages for many years. One of the initiatives, Photo
Azazmeh, was a project by Israeli designer Ilan Molcho and the Israeli NGO ‘Negev Coexistence
Forum for Civil Equality’ (NCF), who ran a participatory photography programme for children
of the Azazmeh tribe living in the unrecognised village of Wadi Al Na’am. Molcho was
inspired by the work of North American artist Wendy Ewald and her ‘visual literacy’, which
empowers children from deprived communities through encouraging them to use cameras to
articulate their dreams and hopes. By providing the young people of Wadi Al Na’am with
photography lessons and donated cameras, Molcho (2010) believes that ‘photography [is]
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Shelley Egoz
Figure 24.1 Azazmeh landscape by Abir Hamamda – age 14.
turning into a tool for realization of civic skills … and enable[s] children to participate in
building the common civil discourse’ (Molcho 2010). Rather than being the subject photo-
graphed, the young person becomes an active participant in forming and expressing her/his
identity. One of the themes the children chose to photograph was their unrecognised village
landscape (see Figures 24.1–4), illustrating how the landscape is an inseparable part of the
Azazmeh children’s identity. This type of activity forms an inspiration for the possibilities for
participatory research to understand landscape identity and use landscape as an empowering tool
in the spirit of the European Landscape Convention.
Twenty-first century challenges, landscape identity and research

directions
[C]itizenship and nationality need not be isomorphic
(Peteet 2005: 226)
Increasing mobility and the social and psychological tensions associated with migration also
necessitate new thinking about landscape architecture’s role in sustaining the universal right for
dignity. The nomad, the uprooted, the displaced, the migrant, and the refugee’s identities will
never be set in one static geography. The ethos of ‘[L]andscape architecture as a discipline
cherishing and protecting the geographical identity of a place’ (IFLA 2010) is no longer suffi-
cient to address twenty-first-century societal challenges.
The United Nations Human Rights Council recognised that climate change has serious
implications for human rights, in particular in its impact on the poorer countries in its Resolu-
tion 7/23 ‘Human rights and climate change’ from 28 March 2008. The statement indicates
that rights to life and dignity are being compromised:
278
Global warming will affect, and already is affecting, the basic elements of life for millions of
people around the world. Effects include an increasing frequency of extreme weather
events, rising sea levels, droughts, increasing water shortages, and the spread of tropical and
vector born diseases’
(UN 2008)
In considering such threats, Rixecker (2011) highlighted specific challenges that will need to
be addressed. For example, when small island nations, such as Tuvalo in the Pacific Ocean, have
to be relocated due to rising sea levels, should the relocation consider the traditional way of life
of that community? Would the need for a familiar sea landscape type, a source of livelihood and
identity to those people, be taken into account when addressing relocation of such nations? As
Rixecker argues:
A ‘human right to the environment’ might only provide protection of Tuvaluans right to a
healthy physical environment, whereas a ‘right to landscape’ would entitle them to secure a
home that is more meaningful and resonates with their cultural references and meanings,
thereby ruling out or seriously minimising their relocation to an arid, completely foreign
environment.
(Rixecker 2011: 31)
Rixecker’s pertinent questions open a whole new realm of thinking about the ethical role of
planners and designers, and the need to extend visionary and unconventional thinking to
address the right to landscape. This calls for solutions that go beyond functional needs of sur-
vival and requires addressing landscape as the confluence of physical subsistence and psycholo-
gical necessities, among them a right to live in dignity and freedom to define their own identity.
Figure 24.2 Azazmeh landscape by Suheib Ismail Gargawi – age 16.
279
Shelley Egoz
Figure 24.3 By Doa Abu Swheilem – age 14.
Figure 24.4 By Naim Muhamad Gargawi – age 14.
280
The involvement of landscape architect Jala Makhzoumi (2009, 2010) in the reconstruction
of the villages struck during the 2006 war in Southern Lebanon is but one example of the use
of the right to landscape concept in this way. Through semi-structured interviews with resi-
dents, Makhzoumi found that the ‘village landscape is an enabling medium through which
traditional culture is preserved, local identities constructed and rural heritage acknowledged’
(Makhzoumi 2009: 13). Design was thus addressed in this way.
In Malaysia, landscape architect Nor Atiah Ismail (2010) studied the rural migrants who set-
tled in urban environments. These communities altered the designed landscapes provided in
their neighbourhoods in order to recreate more familiar landscapes similar to those they had left
behind and to maintain their identity. Through documenting the landscape alterations and
conducting unstructured interviews with the residents, Ismail revealed the motivations that
drove the landscape changes. Such an understanding helps landscape architects gain tools to
accommodate migrants’ needs and assist with their social adaptation to new environments.
These two examples highlight how the theoretical body of work on landscape and identity is
able to support research and drive innovative designs that assist with migrants’ adaptation. The
key is to adopt a stance that focuses on people. While cherishing the character of a local land-
scape has ecological value, responding to the essential human need to belong without erasing a
rich body of memory that is part of both individuals’ and collectives’ identities is an ethos yet to
be embraced by landscape architects internationally.
The evidence of the beginning of a development of such an ethos is the European Federation
of Landscape Architects (EFLA) and their commitment to the UNESCO/UNHABITAT Right
to the City initiative, which addresses inclusive urban policies and innovative practices for migrants
(see Brown and Kristiansen, 2009). Recently, the EFLA advertised a photographic competition
entitled ‘Landscapes of Diversity’, ‘emphasising a fundamental role of external public space as
meeting point for all, indistinguishable in terms of race, generation and culture’ (EFLA 2011).
This initiative bears the flavour of the moral commitment of the European Convention’s to
values of democracy and equality (Egoz 2011a), embodied in the definition of landscape as ‘an
area, as perceived by people’ and the obligation to public participation in decision-making
about their landscape (ELC 2000). Adopting the stance that a driver of landscape design includes
people’s right to define their own identity resonates with the conviction that ‘Landscape and
identity are inherent components of culture, one informing the other’.
Epilogue: ‘A Man is but a mould of his native landscape’ and ‘roots in

two different lands’
A MAN IS BUT
By Shaul Tchernichovsky
… A man is but a piece of land
A man is but a mould
Of his native landscape …
(Translation from Hebrew, cited in Helphand 2002: 7)
PINE
By Lea Goldberg
Here I cannot hear the voice of the cuckoo.
Here the tree will never wear a cape of snow.
But it is here in the shade of these pines
my entire childhood comes alive.
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Shelley Egoz
The chime of the needles: Once upon a time-

I called the snow-space homeland,
and the green ice that enchains the stream,
and the poem’s tongue in a foreign land.
Perhaps only migrating birds know-
suspended as they are between earth and sky-
this heartache of two homelands.
With you, I was transplanted twice;
with you, pine trees, I grew,
my roots in two different lands.
(Translation by Rachel Tzvia Back 2005: 91)
These two poems epitomise the dilemma of identity and landscape:

Shaul Tchernichovsky (1875–1943), was a Russian-born Hebrew poet who, after arriving in
Palestine, his ‘home’ and emotional Jewish ancestral land, reverberates his longing for the native
landscape of Ukraine he has left behind.
PINE, by Lithuanian-born Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg (1911–70) who, like Tchernichovsky,
shared the Zionist passion for a homeland, mirrors the migrant’s split landscape identity even
when migration is a choice and a fulfilment of a dream. In PINE, however, Goldberg captures
the potent role of landscape to help ground one in two disparate landscapes.
The four images are from Project PhotoAzazmeh, courtesy of Ilan Molcho and the young
photographers.
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25
Landscape studies and
tourism research
Daniel C. Knudsen
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
Michelle M. Metro-Roland
WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY
Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd
INDIANA UNIVERSITY
J. B. Jackson wrote about his travels through Europe:
It was, to be sure, a cautious, uneventful, and at times a fatiguing and solitary way of
passing a summer vacation: tramping out to admire Baedeker’s list of three-star
monuments, conscientiously sampling the local food, taking lessons in conversational
French or German or Italian, and always trying not to resemble a tourist. But as I look
back on many summers of such European travel I wonder if they were not in fact an
excellent introduction to the different phase of tourism that I have learned to call landscape
studies.
(Jackson 1980: 9)
His observations should come as no surprise to those who study landscape, nor still to those
who study tourism. It is a fascination with places that are unique, places which seem to offer a
peek into a world other than one’s own that drive the tourist as well as the scholar of place,
and, as Jackson did, those skills of observation and engagement with these exotic sites help hone
the tools that can then be brought to bear on the places in our own backyard. With the spread
of landscape as a topic of intellectual inquiry far beyond the realm of geography in the last
several decades of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that the term has found resonance
among tourism researchers (Aitchison et al. 2001; Ringer 2002; Cartier and Lew 2005; Knudsen
et al. 2008). Tourism sites are place bound and this de facto entails that those involved, from
researchers and planners to the tourists themselves, pay attention to the uniqueness of place, and
hence landscape.
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Landscape studies and tourism research
The origin of modern tourism can be located in the opening up of the spaces of the Grand
Tour to the mass tourists, attracted by the offerings of Thomas Cook. Nineteenth-century lit-
erature is rife with passages that demonstrate the importance that the landscape, understood
broadly to include the natural elements as well as the built environment, held. But it is land-
scape that is multifaceted, at once an object, an idea, a representation, and an experience. E.M.
Forster, early in A Room with a View, writes:
Tears of indignation came to Lucy’s eyes partly because Miss Lavish had jilted her, partly
because she had taken her Baedeker. How could she find her way home? How could she
find her way about in Santa Croce? Her first morning was ruined, and she might never be
in Florence again. A few minutes ago she had been all high spirits, talking as a woman of
culture, and half persuading herself that she was full of originality. Now she entered the
church depressed and humiliated, not even able to remember whether it was built by the
Franciscans or the Dominicans. Of course, it must be a wonderful building. But how like a
barn! And how very cold! Of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of
whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her
which they were? She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monu-
ments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell her which, of all the
sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the
one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.
(Forster 1995 [1908]: 29)
In this brief excerpt we can see much of what engages tourism studies with landscape. The very
notion of Florence engenders symbolic meaning going beyond the mere artifacts that make up
the city, but these meanings do not emerge simply from the city itself, the city as a thing, but
are fostered and nurtured by the numerous representations of the city which shape its symbolic
meaning. And yet, even lacking the guide which will illuminate this particular object of the
city, the material manifestation of this place which Lucy Honeychurch is faced with still elicits
feelings and emotions of embodied experience. Cold, and despair, override the feelings of awe
she has been conditioned to expect based upon the representation and the idea. Touring is, in
the end, the intersection of the material, the ideal and the experiential landscape. Thus, taking
this as our guide, let us look at the way in which tourism research has considered landscape as,
one, a material object, physically manifest and created, two, as an idea and representation,
endowed with symbolism and meaning, and, lastly, as an experience, especially in the require-
ments for performing tourism. But of course the line between these three approaches is less hard
and fast.
Landscape as object in tourism

As the scope of what constitutes touring has expanded, the objects of interest have as well. The
beach resort, the mountains, the city, the farm have all become destinations but so too have
factories, wharfs, and mines (MacCannell 1976; Young and Kaczmarek 2008; William 2005;
Williams 2009). Lew (1991: 126) asserts that if the essential elements – tourist, site and marker –
are present, “virtually anything can become a tourist attraction.” From heritage to “kitsch,”
from tragedy to the general oddity, all can be found on tourist itineraries (Prentice 1994;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Pohlen 2002; Foote 2003). Tourism sites are creations carefully
nurtured and developed in order to become destinations. In some cases, this requires a great
deal of exertion, for example in the efforts of small towns to supplant their stagnant economies
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Daniel Knudsen, Michelle Metro-Roland, Jillian Rickly-Boyd
with the promotion of a native son or daughter, or a local festival (Koth 1993; see also Lane
2009). In other cases, the given landscape does much of the work, think white sandy beaches,
or sublime mountain peaks, but even here there is need for careful development in order to
ensure that the physical resources are managed (Butler 1980).
Commodification of place often trades on the notion of heritage. But as Ashworth and
Tunbridge (2000) note, this harkening to the past can entail a search for best-practices, the
result being rather an elision of the unique, and a homogenization of place. The result is a
proliferation of festival marketplaces, hip gentrified shopping districts, converted working wharfs
and beautified historical city centers, requiring expected heritage items, including cobblestones,
“gas” lights, and wrought iron benches. Along with the heritagization of places, there has been
a rise in heritage centers, open air and living museums (Aitchison et al. 2001). These places
sometimes mark an actual historic site or event, Colonial Williamsburg or Plymouth Plantation
for example, but sometimes they elide history and fiction or even recall an entirely fictional (i.e. based
in literature) past, such as Cannery Row (Norkunas 1993), the Ramona Trail (DeLyser 2005) in
California, or Santa Claus in Finland (Pretes 1995).
But of course much tourism takes place not in heritage parks and museums, or even enclavic
resorts, but in towns and cities, places which serve a multitude of activities, only one of which is
tourism. Although Selby (2004: 125) contends that “there are relatively few contemporary
studies of urban tourism which use an experiential approach concerned with the knowledge,
meanings, emotions and memories of urban tourists or residents,” a number of scholars have
been filling in the lacuna to look at what happens in urban space when residents and tourists
interact. Maitland and Newman (2008) make the argument that gentrification in central
London has created not so much a space given over to the outsider but a sense of conviviality
shared by the resident and the visitor in creating livable urban space. Other scholars have
described these locales as “heterogeneous spaces” (Edensor 2000) or “touristed landscapes”
(Cartier and Lew 2005), places which are frequented by tourists but which in the end are lived
spaces which support many other functions. Metro-Roland (2011: 38) talks about the
tourist-prosaic as a middle space “between the everyday of the cityscape and the festive
nature of the touristscape,” a space which includes both heritage sites such as museums
frequented by residents and visitors as well as the everyday spaces of tourism, such as the sou-
venir stands, and the quotidian spaces of the city, including parks and busy streets which tourists
find of interest.
Landscape as idea and image in tourism

While the landscapes that constitute the sites of tourism are materially constructed from both
the natural and the built environment, they are also ideas, symbolically constructed to convey
values, concepts and meanings. Part and parcel of this process are the images or representations
of landscape – in both words and pictures – that support the construction of destinations (as
noted above) and the construction of the act of touring (as we will see below). The tourism
literature treats the landscape as symbol as well as representation in a number of different ways
but one of the common factors is the notion of reading the landscape, and the focus on the
ocular, as opposed to what we will see in the next section with studies that move towards
non-representational theory.
Tourism studies is both relatively young and interdisciplinary as a field of study. Much of the
work originates outside of geography but nevertheless adopts geographic notions of landscape as
one can see in two of the foundational texts of tourism studies, Dean MacCannell’s (1976) The
Tourist and John Urry’s (1990) The Tourist Gaze. Both treat the spaces of tourism in ways that
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result in visual consumption, relying heavily on sight and image to understand just what makes
a site an object of interest. In other words, both are concerned with the representational qual-
ities of landscapes. Urry (1990), using Foucault’s theory of discourse as structuring knowledge,
suggests that what tourists do is “gaze.” The romantic gaze is that which should be performed in
solitude, for example gazing at an old master painting or a sublime sunset; it is compromised by
the presence of other unwanted gazers. The collective gaze, on the other hand, depends upon a
group of fellow travelers, the seaside English resort being the archetypal example. These gazes
are given shape by the structural expectations of the tourist industry, which is in turn organized
to satisfy the gaze of the tourists.
MacCannell (1976), returning to an earlier set of ideas about tourists (see Enzensberger 1996),
employs the figure of the tourist in order to speak about the condition of modern man,
attempting to escape the faux wood paneling and the alienation engendered by work. Ironically,
the worksites of others become attractions, though what marks something as worthy of attention
is the process of signifying. The tourist is a sightseer, looking at things which portray themselves
as other things, and things that represent things. Thus the hill upon which the Bonnie and
Clyde shootout took place is unique from other hills only by marking it as such, and the
worksite is a tourist site because it is marked as being of interest. Representations of places, both
through on-site and off-site markers (guidebooks, travel literature, advertising campaigns) give
meaning to the spaces under consideration.
As can be surmised from the above, tourism sites are seen as more than the sum of their
constituent elements and they are given shape by a whole set of ideas about what tourism is,
creating spaces that have been seen to function as a repository of metonymic and metaphoric
meanings. Images of tourism destinations found in brochures and other media help to
create mythic notions about place (Selwyn 1996). For example, Hopkins (1998) shows how
the myth of the “rural” is marshaled in promotional materials from diverse sources to shape the
experience of rural tourism. As Davis (2005) shows, the manipulation of mythic notions
about place can impact the uses and abuses of landscape in, for example, Bikini Atoll and
the recent attempt to replace the nuclear experiments of the 1950s with the myth of island
paradise.
In addition to the material objects and the ideas which give them meaning, tourism land-
scapes, like all landscapes, are heavily dependent upon the supporting structures of ideas which
shape them as destinations (Meinig 1979; Cosgrove 1984; Groth and Bressi 1997; Morgan and
Pritchard 1998). The heritage site and its manifestation in the form of museum (indoor, outdoor
or both) offers another way to see the intersection of the idea of place with actual space.
Especially in the industrialized world there is a tendency to create collections of the past—
buildings, tools, and other accoutrements—sometimes in reproduced/reconstructed spaces that
create a sense of place, while perhaps eliding historical authenticity. As Young (2006: 323)
argues of villages that never were, the genre (of the historical village) “lives with and off a
popular image of old-world charm.” These sites demonstrate a tension between the local/
particular and the national/general in presenting their stories so that “a shorthand … can be
employed by the designers of rural heritage sites … that is also brought to bear by tourists
when they visit” (Metro-Roland 2009: 146). Garden (2006) proposed the conceptual frame-
work of the “heritagescape” drawing explicitly from landscape studies in order to give coher-
ence to a set of disparate sites that have in common the presentation and preservation of
heritage, sites which are delineated as such and hence are recognized as such, even if they differ
in what they are depicting. The underlying argument is that these sites are a genre, marked off
as places of interest just like the festival marketplaces and gentrified tourist precincts in
urban areas.
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Landscape as experience in tourism

Just as in landscape studies in general, so too tourism studies has witnessed a shift toward non-
representational theory as a way in to understand how tourists perform tourism and by exten-
sion tourism spaces. Della Dora (2009) takes the very fundamental concept of landscape image
but focuses upon the materiality of these, as objects, and looks to what these objects do, other
than to just sit and look pretty. She writes:
I will call [these] “travelling landscape-objects”: portable graphic images embedded in dif-
ferent material supports that physically move through space and time, and thus operate as
vehicles for the circulation of places; worlds in miniature visually and physically possessed
by the beholder and yet able to exercise their own agency.
(Della Dora 2009: 335)
The apparati of tourism, postcards, photographs, guidebook images and souvenirs can all be
viewed in this light.
The photographic products of the tour are highly dependent upon the interaction with
tourism landscapes, and with moving beyond viewing to doing. The photograph gives proof
that one was there, and then functions as a souvenir of the experience. But part of the being
there is capturing the de rigueur image, the one seen in a thousand places with a thousand
different people, for example the tourist next to the Beefeater in front of Buckingham Palace.
Jenkins (2003) highlights this re-enacting of images they have seen before in the “circle of
representation” illustrating the discourse of being a tourist enacted in the process of capturing
the tourist experience in the photograph. So too Larsen (2005) highlights the importance of
“performing” as a tourist within the photographic record, and therefore moving beyond the
representational of tourism imagery to the non-representational (see Chapters 5 and 10).
Dewsbury et al. (2002) point out that non-representational approaches are not anti-
representational, but instead are intended to push beyond examinations of representations, to be
“more-than representational” (see also Lorimer 2005). The relationship between these earlier
representational notions of landscape and the non-representational concepts in tourism studies is
characterized by an increasing emphasis on investigating the ways in which tourists and tourism
spaces interact. In response to the spurious accusations that landscapes have been seen as inert,
meaning fully embedded in situ to be read and interpreted, the spaces of tourism have come to
be seen as products created through the interaction of place and participant (Crouch 2002;
Edensor 2000, 2001; Coleman and Crang 2002; Bærenholdt et al. 2004). Obrador Pons
(2003: 52) writes: “Identifying tourism as a way of being-in-the-world means, therefore, giving
priority to embodied practices before consciousness or structure … It is because we are doing
something in a particular way that we are tourists and we adopt tourist consciousness.”
Rather than meaning being pulled out of place, places are experienced in a much more
constructivist manner, so that embodied actions shape the meaning of the physical world.
Terkenli (2002: 203) employs theoretical notions of attraction and seduction to explore the
embodied experiences of landscape. Tourists, she contends, develop “bodily/sensual, emotional
and cognitive relationships” with the places in which they tour. In moving away from the
occularcentric approaches in both tourism studies and landscape, writers have focused on the
other senses and the role these play in our interactions with landscape. Porteus’s (1985) work on
smellscapes influenced Dann and Jacobsen’s (2002, 2003) investigations of the tourist smellscape.
Ironically this later investigation, while dealing with embodied experiences of landscape, is
grounded in literary representations of touring. But Porteus’s argument turns on the ability of
290
olfactory sensations to elicit memory. Chronis (2006: 283) makes a similar argument about our
understanding of landscape noting that, “the sensory understanding and the emotional response
brought about by objects links directly the narrative of the past with the human body in its
present actuality.” Thus while Jenkins’s (2003) enacting of iconic images through photography
helps tourists perform as such, the sensual experiences of being in place also operate in multiple
directions, allowing for us to bring experiences from our past to our touring and to bring those
touring moments back to our futures. Kruse (2005) illustrates these processes in regard to
the music of the Beatles and the experience of the Liverpool landscape (see also Gibson and
Connell 2004). Food also functions in this manner and that tourists eat as well as gaze has begun
to receive attention (Hall and Sharples 2003). Food “provid[es] an embodied experience of
place, perhaps more powerfully than many other commodities” argues Everett (2008: 341) in
considering tourist tastescapes.
Non-representational approaches understand landscape not as an “inert background or setting
for human action, nor is it understood as simply a pictorial or discursive form” (Macpherson
2010: 6), but as “perception in motion” (Wylie 2007). Thus, the tourism landscape is the cul-
mination of its physicality, perception, and experience. Belhassen et al. (2008) illustrate
this complexity in their study of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. They find that
landscape experience is a result of the collective journey, shared meanings associated with the
place, and the actuality of historic locations in which they move about (see also Buchmann
et al. 2010).
Tourism can be seen as a performative act influenced by the the expectations inherent in
what it means to be on tour. As Edensor (2001) writes:
particular tourist contexts generate a shared set of conventions about what should be seen,
what should be done and which actions are inappropriate. Such shared norms instantiate a
way of being a backpacker, a participant on a tour-bus or a member of a Club 18–30
holiday. Thus forms of tourist habitus are also determined by unreflexive, embodied,
shared assumptions about appropriate behaviour in particular contexts.
(Edensor 2001: 60)
Key to this line of thinking is that tourists often occupy spaces that are also used by locals.
Residents and even workers in enclavic spots have different sets of behaviours and expectations
even within the same context of place. Minca and Oakes’ (2006) self-exploratory essays
about their trip to Venice highlight the differences of being host and guest, even in the context
of the tourist landscape. As Oakes writes, the idea of “this is what Italians do” is used to explain
the things that Minca shows (Minca and Oakes 2006: 3). And while both writers eschew the
notion of authenticity, of discovering a “real” Venice, by traveling to “alleys where tourists are
seldom seen, where laundry hangs and where facades need rebuilding,” the question of differ-
ence in these spaces still emerges. Minca is working, stopping to give a radio interview, and it is
his home, whereas even the trips off the beaten path still do not make Oakes a local, even if he
does eat his croissant standing up just exactly as the Italians do.
Conclusion
The role of landscape in tourism studies can thus be seen to parallel the evolution of theoretical
approaches to landscape in general, that is, the movement from landscapes as objects, to repre-
sentations, to places co-created by the material and the experiential. As we have tried to make
clear above, though, the lines that separate these approaches are rather fuzzy, reflecting the
291
reality that landscapes and our interactions with them are complex, no more so when we are at
leisure than when we are at home moving through the spaces which are well known to us. As
Jackson (1980) observed, the investigative and questioning nature of the researcher mirrors that
of the curious tourist, keen on seeing all that makes a place unique.
In looking toward the future of landscape tourism research, there are several areas for which
more attention would benefit our understanding. In looking at the ways in which tourism
landscapes are crafted and defined, there has been little attention to the so called “linguistic
landscape”, that constituted by the material manifestations of language in place, including
notices, street names, shop signs, adverts, graffiti etc. (Shohamy and Gorter 2009). This raises
questions about power, cultural continuity, the role of indigenous versus world languages,
especially English, and the choices made about the presentation of the cultural heritage of
minority groups. This is linked closely to the need to consider more fully the material aspects of
representation. Within tourism, the guidebook has materiality and plays a role both in shaping
experience and in performing as tourist, and the images that are taken back in the form of
postcards and souvenirs do more than simply represent. While the writing of Della Dora (2009)
has begun the conversation more work is necessary.
The materiality of landscapes in general and the bringing to bear of research from the field of
material culture to tourism sites is another fruitful avenue. In particular, while much research
has been focused on the large-scale symbolic sites that consume the interest of tourists (Edensor
1998), within the theoretical literature there has been less attention on the materialilty of the
mundane aspects of destinations, both rural and urban (Rickly-Boyd and Metro-Roland 2010),
not to mention the mundane aspects of touring, such as eating and moving through space,
and how these are constituted as different than what occurs on a daily basis when at home
(see Larsen 2008).
The shift toward non-representational theory and the emphasis on sensual encounters with
landscape has made a very good start. More attention to emotion, and a continued emphasis on
the applied aspects of non-representational theory, would be a welcome addition to the litera-
ture. Dann and Jacobsen’s (2003) use of travel narratives to explore the smellscape might be
applied to informal travel writing on travel websites and blogs, but it would also be useful to
engage in fieldwork with actual tourists while on site to gauge their understandings of their
sensual engagement with tourism landscapes. Of equal interest would be understanding
the ways in which these sensual experiences are recalled and shape the narrative of the experi-
ence once back home (see Sather-Wagstaff 2008; Rickly-Boyd 2010). Lastly, the notion of
performing as a tourist in tourism spaces offers important insights into the ways in which land-
scapes are co-created. The literature would be enriched by empirical investigations with actual
tourists in order to understand the ways in which they recognize the performative aspects of
their visits.
Further reading
Aitchison, C., Macleod, N.E. and Shaw, S.J. (2001) Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and
Cultural Geographies, London: Routledge. (An excellent poststructuralist examination of landscape and
tourism.)
Cartier, C. and Lew, A.A. (eds) (2005) Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and
Touristed Landscapes. London: Routledge. (An examination of the prosiac attributes of touristed places.)
Coleman, S. and Crang, M. (ds) (2002) Tourism: Between Place and Performance, New York: Beghahn
Books. (An introduction to tourism as performance.)
Knudsen, D.C., Metro-Roland, M., Soper, A.K. and Greer, C.E. (eds) (2008) Landscape, Tourism, and
Meaning, Aldershot: Ashgate. (An introduction to touristscapes in their many varieties.)
292
Minca, C. and T. Oakes, (eds) (2006) Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield (An excellent treatment of authenticity.)
Ringer, G.D. (ed) (2002) Destination: Cultural Landscapes of Tourism, London: Routledge. (A cultural
geography approach to tourism.)
References
Aitchison, C., Macleod, N., and Shaw, S. (2001) Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural
Geographies, London: Routledge
Ashworth, G.J and Tunbridge, J.E. (2000) The Tourist-Historic City: Retrospect and Prospect of Managing a
Heritage City, Amsterdam: Pergamon
Bærenholdt, J.O., Haldrup, M., Larsen, J. and Urry, J. (2004) Performing Tourist Places, Burlington, VT:
Ashgate
Belhassen, Y., Caton, K. and Stewart, W.P. (2008) ‘The Search for Authenticity in the Pilgrim Experience’,
Annals of Tourism Research, 35(3), 668–89
Buchmann, A., Moore, K. and Fisher, D. (2010) ‘Experiencing Film Tourism: Authenticity and Fellowship’,
Annals of Tourism Research, 37(1), 229–48
Butler, R.W. (1980) ‘The Concept of a Tourist Area Cycle of Evolution: Implications for Management of
Resources’, Canadian Geographer, 24(1), 5–12
Cartier, C. and Lew, A. (eds) (2005) Seductions of Place: Geographical Perspectives on Globalization and Touristed
Landscapes, London: Routledge
Chronis, A. (2006) ‘Heritage of the Senses: Collective Remembering as an Embodied Praxis’, Tourist Studies,
6(3), 267–96
Coleman, S. and Crang, M. (eds) (2002) Tourism: Between Place and Performance, New York: Beghahn Books
Cosgrove, D.E. (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm
Crouch, D. (2002) ‘Surrounded by Place: Embodied Encounters’, in Coleman, S. and Crang, M. (eds)
Tourism: Between Place and Performance, New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 207–18
Dann, G. and Jacobsen, J.K.S. (2003) ‘Tourism Smellscapes’, Tourism Geographies, 5(1), 3–25
——(2002) ‘Leading the Tourist by the Nose’, in Dann, G. (ed.) The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social
World, Oxford: CABI, pp. 209–35
Davis, J.S. (2005) ‘Representing Place: Deserted Isles and the Reproduction of Bikini Atoll’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 93(3), 607–25
Della Dora, V. (2009) ‘Travelling Landscape-Objects’, Progress in Human Geography, 33(3), 334–54
DeLyser, D. (2005) Ramona Memories: Tourism and the Shaping of Southern California, Minneapolis, MN:
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26
Urban nature as a resource for
public health
Helena Nordh
NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF LIFE SCIENCES
Caroline M. Hägerhäll
SWEDISH UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES
Terry Hartig
UPPSALA UNIVERSITY
An increasing number of people around the world are coming to live in urban areas.
Urbanization and the lifestyle changes it entails are in turn contributing to the increased
importance of non-communicable diseases as causes of morbidity and mortality. This phenom-
enon is not limited to Western societies; chronic physical and mental health problems are major
problems in all parts of the world (Desjarlais et al. 1995). Moreover, urbanization is proceeding
in countries and regions of the world where households and societies have relatively few eco-
nomic resources to protect them from adverse consequences (Desjarlais et al. 1995; Vlahov and
Galea 2002).
How might societies deal with the problems posed by these developments? One strategy
receiving increasing attention involves the potential health resource values of contact with
nature in the everyday life of urban residents. This is of course not the first time that decision
makers, public health authorities and other responsible parties have turned to nature and public
green space to soften adverse health consequences of urban growth (Ward Thompson 2011).
During the mid-1800s, for example, public parks were developed in many European and North
American cities as a reaction to the poor living conditions faced by the people then crowding
into cities in search of industrial work (Hall 2002). The parks were meant to allow light and
fresh air into the cities, creating healthier residential contexts and preventing the spread of epi-
demics. Belief in the public health values of urban nature was also integral to the Garden City
movement inspired by Ebenezer Howard in Great Britain and the Parkway movement influ-
enced by Fredrik Law Olmsted in the USA (Ignatieva et al. 2011). The provision of light, air
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Urban nature as a resource for public health
and pleasant scenery are still important services expected of parks in today’s urban planning, as
with, for example, the development of green infrastructure plans. Today, however, the
public health challenges that parks and green spaces are used to address have shifted from the
prevention of epidemics of infectious diseases to the prevention of diseases related to physical
inactivity and psychosocial stress. And, with more people living in central areas, the need for
improved access to outdoor public spaces is increasing just as the available green spaces
are coming under increasing pressure from competing land uses. Thus, the practical challenge
today is not simply a matter of improving access by providing more space, but of making more
efficient and equitable provisions for access to the space that can be made available.
With increasing urban populations and available green spaces under pressure, research to
inform design and policy is important to protect these vulnerable areas while ensuring access to
the potential health benefits that such spaces can provide (Ode and Fry 2006; van den Berg
et al. 2007).
A rapidly growing body of research attests to the different ways in which urban nature can
promote health and well-being. In this chapter we cover some of the key lessons that have
emerged from the research to date. The chapter begins with an overview of the different
mechanisms through which access to green spaces and other urban nature can come to benefit
health. Those mechanisms include support for psychological restoration, physical activity, and
social interaction, as well as protection from harmful exposures to air pollutants and high
ambient temperatures (de Vries 2010). In discussing the different mechanisms, we cover pro-
cesses and outcomes that are connected to features of the urban landscape that can be modified
through planning and design. We then continue the chapter with a discussion of how different
mechanisms may interact. Finally, we discuss some of the major limitations in the available
knowledge base and we point to some future possibilities for research and application. Our
treatment of the topic here is not a comprehensive one, but it provides points of entry into key
areas within an expansive literature. A recent comprehensive review has been provided by a
large-scale international network with funding from the European Science Foundation (Nilsson
et al. 2011).
How are health and urban nature related?

Nature affects health in a number of ways. Those of interest here were emphasized by de Vries
(2010) due to their frequency and relevance in the literature concerned particularly with the
natural environment as a setting for health-related behavior. Psychological restoration, physical
activity, facilitation of social activities, and harmful environmental exposures are similarly central
concerns of landscape architecture. We therefore find these mechanisms compatible with our
aim to discuss urban nature as a public health resource in relation to landscape architecture
practice. On the basis of the evidence he reviewed, de Vries concluded that, of the four
mechanisms, ‘stress reduction and the facilitation of social cohesion are likely to be more
important than air quality and stimulating physical activity’. Although the relative importance of
the different mechanisms deserves further study, it is fair to say that there is considerable con-
sensus that all are relevant (cf. Nilsson et al. 2011). There are also other less studied mechanisms.
One of these, also mentioned by de Vries (2010), involves microclimate, a topic that has risen
on the planning and policy agenda in the past twenty years due to global warming projections
(cf. Lafortezza et al. 2009). In discussing each of these mechanisms here, we consider how it
operates in spaces that vary in terms of size and other design features with which landscape
professionals work. We also exemplify how environmental components and design may support
the operation of the mechanism.
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Helena Nordh, Caroline Hagerhall, Terry Hartig
Urban nature and restoration

The term ‘restoration’ refers to the recovery or renewal of resources that individuals use to meet
the demands of everyday life, such as the ability to concentrate (Hartig 2007; Hartig et al.
2011). Inadequate restoration can over time translate into problems with mental and physical
health as people find it progressively more difficult to go on meeting the demands they face.
The term ‘restorative environment’ has been used to refer to an environment that promotes
restoration, and not merely permits it; by virtue of aesthetic quality and other positive features,
the environment promotes faster and more complete recovery of diminished resources than
would occur in an environment that merely permitted restoration by not imposing demands at
the moment.
Most research on restorative environments has focused on restorative effects of contact with
nature. Two theories have guided most of this research, one concerned with recovery from
psychophysiological stress (Ulrich 1983; Ulrich et al. 1991) and the other concerned with
restoration from attentional fatigue (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Kaplan 1995). Both theories
emphasize the power of natural features to capture and hold attention. If a person is experien-
cing stress when this occurs, according to Ulrich’s psychoevolutionary theory, then the positive
feelings rapidly engendered by natural features may block negative thoughts and feelings and
promote reduction of physiological activation. If a person is experiencing directed attention
fatigue, according to the Kaplans’ attention restoration theory, effortless fascination with natural
features may allow the relaxation of the inhibitory cognitive mechanism, which is otherwise
effortfully employed when a person must direct their attention to some task.
Experiments guided by these theories typically have involved simple comparisons of one or a
few exemplars of urban and natural environments and found natural environments to be the
more restorative with respect to a variety of measures (e.g. Berman et al. 2008; Hartig et al.
1991; Hartig et al. 2003; Ulrich et al. 1991). Such studies provide evidence concerning the
plausibility of theoretical claims, but results concerning a simple urban/natural dichotomy offer
little specific guidance for the planning and design of restorative environments. Other studies
suggest that variation within the broad category of natural environments may also be mean-
ingful for restorative quality. For example, one recent experiment found indications of more
beneficial change in subjective well-being with a walk in a wild versus a tended forest (Martens
et al. 2011). Another study analysed ratings of small urban parks and found that ratings of the
likelihood that restoration would occur during a visit varied with proportions of different
environmental components such as grass, trees and bushes (Nordh et al. 2009).
Some built environments, such as historical urban centres (Scopelliti and Giuliani 2005), have
also received consideration for their restorative quality, which may be as high as that found in
many natural environments. Urban environments that include natural features such as water (see
Figure 26.1) may also be perceived as having relatively high restorative quality, at least in studies
using visual simulations (Hartig et al. 1997; Karmanov and Hamel 2008; White et al. 2010).
However, the amount and distribution of any single physical component that may support
restoration remains poorly understood, as is the way in which different physical components can
most effectively be combined (Nordh et al. 2009; van den Berg et al. 2003). To understand the
independent and interactive effects of built and natural environmental features on restoration, it
will be necessary to quantify content more systematically and consider different approaches to
relating the proportions of the components to restorative effects.
The restorative effects of urban green space can come from passively viewing natural ele-
ments as well as from activities such as walking or running. Studies that have documented
restorative effects of viewing images of nature (e.g. Ulrich et al. 1991) suggest that landscape
298
Figure 26.1 Water as a restorative natural component in the built environment.
architects can serve restorative functions by introducing vegetation in places that people can see
but not ordinarily move around on or in, as with green walls and green roofs. Even a rather
small amount of vegetation in a small area can provide a possibility for an active encounter with
nature and the aspects of experience that people often associate with nature, such as with-
drawing and finding solitude. For example, to children even a single tree can be important.
They climb trees not only for the physical challenge but also to be alone and think (Cele 2005).
Grass is another environmental component that can serve restoration in a variety of contexts,
such as small urban parks (Nordh et al. 2009; Nordh et al. 2011). It is aesthetically pleasing and
provides a suitable surface for sitting down and resting (see Figure 26.2).
Green spaces and social interaction

Natural settings are also thought to promote health by providing a context that invites and
sustains contacts between people, opening possibilities for shared positive experiences and the
development of social resources that in various ways can help people to better cope with the
demands of everyday life. This may have particular importance in growing and densifying cities.
A denser city means more people living in closer proximity, and that would in theory mean
more possibilities for positive social contacts. Many social activities are a direct consequence of
people moving around in the city and coming together in the same place at the same time
(Gehl 2003). Superficial contacts such as a smile from someone walking by may be more
important for well-being than some people may think (Ward Thompson 2002; Whyte 1980).
Still, social psychologists and others have long pointed to patterns of behavioural withdrawal
299
Figure 26.2 A grass lawn as a setting for restoration.
from others when forced to crowd together in urban public places (e.g. Milgram 1970). Parks
may have particular significance as urban settings where people may relax those norms and open
for positive contacts. As found by Nordh et al. (2011), people value having at least some other
people around in a park. Their presence may for example make it easier for them to feel safe
and so to better relax, rest and recover. However, as reflected in long-standing efforts to
describe the carrying capacity of different recreational environments (e.g. Sowman 1987), the
presence of even small numbers of other people in a park or green space can engender feelings
of crowding under some circumstances. Also, some people may disturb others, as with loud
music, littering, activities that may cause harm to those in the area, and so on.
People today may spend a greater proportion of their waking hours indoors than in previous
generations (Evans 2003). This fact, and the concentration of people in urban housing that
allows relatively little contact with natural features outdoors, may work together to promote the
use of parks and open spaces as a second ‘living room’. Those spaces may at the same time
serve as an important arena for developing relationships and trust among neighbours (Kuo and
Sullivan 2001; Mason 2010). To encourage and support social interaction, as through spontan-
eous meetings or possibilities for withdrawing to relax or talk with a friend, the design of a park
or other green space is important. The widths of paths, availability and arrangement of seating,
and forms of enclosure can all affect social interaction and possibly also the potential for
restoration. The location of the park in relationship to residences, workplaces and other settings
for mundane activity is also important, given the implications for accessibility. Jacobs (1961)
pointed out that popular parks are often located by a key crossroad. Such interaction between
use and location has for many years received attention in the environmental design and
300
Figure 26.3 The park as a meeting place.
planning professions, as with studies that have applied space syntax analysis (Hillier and
Hanson 1984).
Some groups use public space as a meeting place more frequently or for longer periods than
others. Teenagers, for instance, spend much time in public space because they have few other
options for spending leisure time with friends (Lieberg 1995). Youths’ use of public spaces is
also described by Seeland et al. (2009), who pointed to parks as places to make friends. For
people who spend much of their time at home, such as housewives or children, green areas in
close proximity to the home are essential for social interaction and well-being (see for
example Figure 26.3), (de Vries et al. 2003). Provisions made for parks and green spaces com-
monly take into consideration the special needs of such groups, as with play equipment and
large areas of grass where children can run. Different types of green spaces may target different
groups and/or functions. For example, community gardens provide a context in which neigh-
bours can interact, cooperate, and develop feelings of belonging that can in turn promote health
(Saldivar-Tanaka and Krasny 2004; Wakefield et al. 2007).
Green spaces and physical activity

As discussed by many researchers, parks and attractive neighborhoods can promote physical activity
(see for example Giles-Corti and Donovan 2002; Goličnik and Ward Thompson 2010). An
increase in activity is expected to hinder the development of obesity and related diseases such as
diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The awareness of health benefits of physical activity in green
environments has led to the promotion of what some have called ‘green exercise’ (Pretty et al. 2006).
301
Many researchers have considered aspects of the physical environment that promote physical
activity. One commonly studied aspect is accessibility. Numerous studies have found that use is
dependent on distance to the park or green space (Cohen et al. 2005; Giles-Corti et al. 2005).
The amount and kind of physical activity done in a park also depends to an extent on its size;
larger parks can provide more options for activities, though they may be attractive for only a
few activities if an undifferentiated design supports only particular activity forms, as with broad
expanses of lawn that support ball sports or running but little else. With densification, exercise
facilities have started to turn up in small public parks. It is important to remember, though, that
the term ‘physical activity’ does not only mean vigorous exercise or sporting activities such as
running and playing football. It can also be children’s play. For elderly people, the walk to the
park may itself be enough. In that case, the park becomes the goal, and the path to the park
gains relevance for physical activity.
A large part of people’s physical activity may actually be related to choice of transport mode
rather than recreational or sports activities (de Vries 2010). This means that urban planning
more generally plays an important role in joining parks and green spaces with other settings.
Safe biking lanes and walking tracks from dwellings to essential facilities such as schools, train
stations, and shops are all important planning tools to promote physical activity (see
Figure 26.4). Vehicular traffic is usually an important barrier to the use of self-powered trans-
portation. It is therefore important to maintain a separate biking and walking system with paths
suited to different levels of speed and congestion. Areas can to good advantage be left at the
Figure 26.4 Biking and walking paths along the water. Street hanging baskets: private pleasure in
giving public pleasure is a subtle economic value and motivator.
302
sides of these paths to allow for tree planting. Tree rows not only increase the amount of
vegetation but also function as an extension of the park, potentially reducing the sense of dis-
tance to the park. In addition, paths lined by trees can function as green corridors that link
multiple parks into a green network system.
Green spaces and exposures to environmental factors

The mechanisms described above have to do with choices that people can make to achieve a
healthier lifestyle. Another important aspect of urban nature has a more direct influence on
health; it has to do with the ways in which parks, trees and vegetation improve air quality (Lam
et al. 2005) and provide relief from hot temperatures (Lafortezza et al. 2009). For example, trees
may provide shade that allows people to go outside and remain in relative comfort, and they
may capture airborne particles emitted by vehicles in heavy traffic.
The importance of shade versus open exposure to the sun appears to vary substantially with
latitude. People living in warmer climes may avoid direct exposure to the sun during the
summer, while people in the higher latitudes may be hungry for sunlight in the summer months
after a long winter. Deprivation may have consequences; in one study, unseasonably cool
temperatures during July correlated with increased dispensation of antidepressants to the
Swedish population over an eight-year period (Hartig et al. 2007). Similarly, Thorsson et al.
(2004) found that Swedes preferred to sit in the sun when spending time in urban parks. The
availability of sunlight is related to the size of the park. Small parks may lie in the shadow of
surrounding buildings and so go unused unless those who use them are looking to escape the
heat. Other limitations related to park size include exposure to noise from traffic on nearby
streets (Zannin et al. 2006).
To maintain or improve air quality, the amount of vegetation and its arrangement around the
park edges is important. Due to space limitations and microclimatic conditions, it might be
difficult to establish vegetation in some rather stressful urban environments that are characterized
by high levels of dust, heat and wear.
Interacting mechanisms
We have so far presented restoration, social interaction, physical activity and environmental
exposures as individual mechanisms and presented some examples of how components of the
physical environment can come to work in the different mechanisms. Although researchers
ordinarily study the independent contributions of particular environmental components to the
workings of one or another mechanism, designers must deal with multiple components simul-
taneously while shaping spaces that can support the working of all of the mechanisms that we
have discussed. For example, restoration may take place in the context of physical activity
(Bodin and Hartig 2003; Hansmann et al. 2007; Hug et al. 2008). Similarly, in a small pocket
park it might be possible to seek stress reduction at the same time that one socializes with
friendly neighbours, even though space constraints might limit the possibilities for physical
activity.
A variable of general relevance is the aesthetic quality of these spaces. How important is an
aesthetically pleasing environment for physical activity, stress reduction and social contact? The
body of literature on environmental preferences is extensive and there are studies that suggest
that aesthetic preference judgements may involve implicit expectations of restoration at least
when it comes to natural environments (Hartig and Staats 2006; Staats et al. 2003; Staats and
Hartig 2004).
303
Some ways forward

It should be pointed out that to date much of the evidence is based on correlational data that
cannot confirm any causal relationships between contact with nature and health and well-being.
The fact that outdoor environments are multifunctional and hence provide multiple benefits
may make the relationships difficult to disentangle, but in an applied perspective it may at the
same time be a major strength that these environments have when it comes to promoting
physical, mental and social well-being. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that in a
time when public spaces are becoming increasingly commercialized, public green spaces are
among those settings that remain open for use by all groups in society; design efforts must keep
in mind the varying needs of many different kinds of people.
The various limitations in evidence and the challenges in application make apparent the need
for further research and the potential for creative solutions. Below we highlight two important
steps forward, the first concerning research and the second concerning application in urban
planning.
Addressing the limitations in environmental sampling

What types of urban green spaces and qualities provide what kind of health benefits and to
which groups in society? The complexity of this question is difficult to overview and many
recent reviews (see for example de Vries 2010; Hartig et al. 2011) have shown that research has
yet to fully explicate the mechanisms through which nature can affect health and those types of
green spaces that are optimal for those mechanisms to work successfully. Such knowledge will
be of tremendous value for policy, planning and design.
There is thus a need for research to focus on identifying the characteristics of green spaces
that are necessary to support the various mechanisms through which nature promotes health
and wellbeing for different population groups. In this work it is important to remember that the
optimal characteristics might differ by mechanism and by group (de Vries 2010); thus, the lim-
itation we address here is not only one of environmental sampling, but also of the sampling of
people. In landscape architecture, a number of researchers have been trying to classify or cate-
gorize urban green structure (Nordh 2010; Osmond 2010; Tyrvainen et al. 2007), but there is a
lack of literature that empirically tests park qualities in relation to health measures and measures
of the mediating mechanisms we have discussed. Approaches that could be fruitful include
quantification of image content (Nordh et al. 2009) and structural geometrical properties
(Hagerhall et al. 2004; Hagerhall et al. 2008), irrespective of scene type.
The benefits of focusing on green networks

Can societies provide the necessary quantity and quality of green spaces and at the same time
make cities denser to fulfill other sustainability goals, such as reduced traffic and energy con-
sumption? Some say that linking human health and ecosystem health is exactly what societies
need to do to move forward (James et al. 2009; Tzoulas et al. 2007). Due to an increased focus
on densification, researchers from countries around the world now suggest that urban planning
should focus on green structure and networks where ecology and sustainability are put in focus
(see for example Ignatieva et al. 2011; Jim and Chen 2003; Ward Thompson 2002; Thwaites
et al. 2005).
The notion of an ecologically sustainable city can have varying meanings for landscape
architects and ecologists (Ignatieva et al. 2011). While the ecologist thinks of biodiversity and
304
food webs, the landscape architect usually thinks of visual connections such as alleys represent-
ing the green corridors in the urban landscape matrix. One way of combining ecological con-
cerns with landscape architecture is to shift from single large parks to park systems with a large
number of small parks connected through green corridors. An increased focus on the green
transitions (e.g. biking tracks) and spaces will contribute to the health of both people and
ecological systems. In the literature on the city landscape, more attention has gone to large
parks, allowing for under-recognition of other types of urban nature, such as pocket parks,
alleys, and woodlands. We suggest that urban green structure that includes such small spaces,
linked by green corridors, should receive more attention in the literature on urban nature
and health. A well-developed green structure system will mean shorter distance to parks and
more visual access to nature from urban homes, workplaces and transportation modes. Parks
in proximity to where people live, work and play are important for all of the mechanisms we
have discussed – restoration, social interaction, physical activity and protection from harmful
exposures.
Conclusions
Urban nature can serve as a health resource in a variety of ways. Landscape architecture and
other design professions can maintain and enhance these health resource values; however, to
develop cities that promote public health, more research is needed on the characteristics of
urban spaces and environmental components that support the working of the different
mechanisms we have discussed. Responsibility will not lie solely with design professionals and
their researcher allies, but through creative design, regulations regarding property size, protec-
tion of green areas, extension of green structure, and in other ways, they can affect people’s
living environments and contribute to a more sustainable and healthier society.
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27
Researching the economics
of landscape
Colin Price
Landscape economics as a field of research

Economics is about satisfying competing human wants, within the limits set by scarce resources.
The wants, ranging from physiological necessities to transient psychological desires, are
embodied in demand – a relationship between amounts consumed and price willingly paid. The
limited resources determine supply – a relationship between offered price and amounts willingly
provided. Demand and supply interact in markets, which tend towards an equilibrium in
which amounts provided and consumed are roughly equal. However, because of landscape’s
nature as a publicly provided and involuntarily experienced service, demand and supply also
interact in alternative means of allocating scarce resources, such as political debate, pressuring
and trade-off.
This is the perspective from which economists see the creation, destruction, enhancement,
degradation and preservation of landscape. All these processes affect landscape understood as
territory – as a tract of land, which itself is a potential resource for other forms of production.
The processes also require, or alleviate requirements for, other factors of production: labour, raw
materials, capital (productive machinery, buildings, infrastructure etc.) and enterprise. The pro-
cesses have the purpose of, or substantial effects upon, availability of landscape understood as a
source of aesthetic experience.
Such a perspective on the interaction of resources and human perceptions accords with the
European Landscape Convention’s definition of landscape as: ‘an area, as perceived by people,
whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’
(Council of Europe 2000). Economics, then, is not a discipline straying outside its normal or
proper limits when applied to landscape: on the contrary, the discipline is deeply embedded in
thoughts on what to do about landscape. Once landscape debates move beyond appreciation
of what is, to contention about what might and what should be, economics is implicitly
involved. Even discussion about how, in the past, landscape came to be properly refers to the
forces of supply and demand, and their playing out in conflicts concerning the balance
between them.
The economics of landscape – in the aesthetic sense – ought not to include the economics of
all that happens in the landscape – in the territorial sense. But in practice it does so, because of
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Researching the economics of landscape
possible sacrifice of competing value of alternative, less aesthetic land uses (what economists
term the opportunity cost of land: that is, loss of productive potential imposed by pro-landscape
activity).
The origins of landscape economics

Implicit applications of economics to landscape date from when the productive potential of land
was first forgone or other resources were expended to modify that land, in order to create
aesthetic delight or stimulus, whether for private self-indulgence (the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon) or in public ritual or symbolic landscapes (stone circles and chalk downland figures).
While a formal discipline of landscape economics only emerged much later, undoubtedly the
landscaping enterprises of Versailles, Stourhead, Branitz and such would – must – have been
subject to formal costing (Figure 27.1).
Recent engagement of economists in the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (Watson and
Albon 2011) and associated enterprises has promoted a view of landscape economics as a sub-
discipline, recently emerged within environmental or even ecological economics. In this supply-
orientated view, landscape is just one ecosystem service (usually included under ‘cultural
services’), often catalogued and sometimes evaluated as a rationale for protecting natural or
semi-natural environments. With other services, it has been discussed under the fashionable
headline of ‘payment for environmental services’. This has reinforced a public misperception,
that economists care for things only if part of a cash transaction.
However, the formal discipline of landscape economics had existed for some decades (Price
1978, 2008), derived from interest in human demands upon landscape for its aesthetic pleasures.
Figure 27.1 Not as nature intended: Stourhead, wrought with much labour and loss of potential
production.
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Colin Price
In this perspective, landscape economics is characterized by several focuses: landscape as a public

good, a by-product of other productive processes, and an externality to the market system; the
importance of space, place and durability through time; a grounding in perceptual values and a
complex set of wants satisfied by its provision (Price et al., forthcoming). There was never any
presumption that landscape services have interest, importance and value only when transacted in
markets.
Costing landscape
In debating particular land use changes, objectors may argue that the developers’ case is flawed,
even in conventional economics terms. The development, it is often claimed, lacks financial
justification, being driven by misguided or outdated subsidy (such as agricultural support within
the European Union (Bowers and Cheshire 1983)), or by vested interests promoting public
actions, at public expense, but to public detriment. When this is agreed, public decision-making
is easy, since no trade-off is needed between financial and aesthetic desiderata. To this mix of
detrimental effects may be added – described or quantified, in physical units or monetized –
other environmental disadvantages and advantages. The current UK controversy over wind
turbines thus embraces not only raw financial appraisal, but wider effects: on carbon balance and
hence climate; on depletion of non-renewable resources; on landscape; and on wildlife as
through bird strikes. Given such controversies, skills in critical economic re-analysis inform the
competence desirable in landscape economists. This would require ability to scrutinize mone-
tary evaluations of other environmental impacts, and to include a bouquet of material, envir-
onmental and social effects within cost–benefit analysis. Much written within the broad ambit
of landscape economics does in fact concern itself with what is sacrificed when landscape is
protected or created (e.g. Whitby et al. 1998).
In other respects, landscape creation and improvement schemes are ordinary financial
investments, with direct costs for the usual factors of production, plus oncosts and overheads.
Budgets and accounts are needed, to track the financial health of the undertaking. Available
publications facilitate a recipe-book approach to such project costing (Langdon 2009).
The onus for further research in these areas should not lie with landscape economists, though
they need to keep abreast of developments in the relevant fields. In practice, however, research
by sectoral experts may show either an optimistic bias, or a tendency to ignore aspects contrary
to sectoral interests. Thus debate may be opened, and the conventional wisdom challenged, by
economists working in favour of landscape. Continuing and unbiased academic investigation is
needed of the economics of land use and land use change, not dependent for finance on private
interests.
Valuing the consequences of landscape quality

The most characteristic element of landscape economics – what most frequently defines the
activity of those called landscape economists – is monetary valuation of landscape. Of the papers
submitted to International Conferences on Landscape Economics in Vienna (2009) and Padova
(2011), nearly half were valuation studies.
Deriving demand, as economists understand it, is one end-point of a process generally called
‘landscape assessment’ (Countryside Commission, 1987): description, analysis, classification,
evaluation (in aesthetic terms), and valuation (in cash terms). Designating protected landscapes
has further clear economic overtones: how valuable should a landscape be, to justify special
treatment or absolute protection?
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Some valuation methods focus on downstream economic consequences of aesthetic condi-

tions. Landscape may for example affect the productivity of other human systems: through
a pleasant work environment, it might be said (though I know of no published evidence) that
‘a happy worker is a productive worker’; reduced psychological disorder and absenteeism might
also be expected. There is famous evidence (Ulrich 1984) that aesthetically pleasing hospital
environs speed recovery from surgery, thus returning workers rapidly to the work force, while
saving health service resources. The quality of intimate landscape also benefits mental health
(Grahn and Stigsdotter 2003) and has a socializing influence (Sullivan 2001), with saved social
costs via improved civil behaviour, reduced crime and lower opportunity costs resulting from
disaffection.
Much has been made of the benefits of green infrastructure – planned areas of trees and other
vegetation – in promoting inward investment, thus generating jobs and local tax revenue
(Ecotec 2007). Similarly, protecting, maintaining and enhancing holiday landscapes boosts
tourism earnings.
One should not, however, claim too much for such fiscal and financial effects. Some may be
secondary results of benefits already measured directly, and thus represent double-counting.
Moreover, attracting industry, business, residents and visitors into one area will divert their
attendant benefits from competing areas, or encourage strategic games among adjoining muni-
cipalities (Choumert and Salanié 2008). Additionality – the net advantage – is what matters,
and arguably this is better measured by more direct methods of assessing actual benefits (Anthon
et al. 2005).
Activities detrimental to landscape may entail financial cost in subsequent restoration of
aesthetic quality, as in reinstatement of mineral extraction sites. Sometimes permanent loss of
good landscape, as by motorway development, may be compensated through its replacement:
creating, or creating access to, landscape at another location (Bowers and Hopkinson 1996). At
a micro-scale, the system of Council of Tree and Landscape Appraisers (1983, with frequent
revisions; Scott and Betters 2000) for valuing amenity trees is based on the cost of replacing
them – ones lost to development, disease, etc. A particular difficulty for all replacement and
restoration involving trees is the time lapse required to achieve a mature effect. This needs
consideration of the different profiles through time of landscape quality, with and without such
intervention.
An entirely different line of argument derives from the assumed rationality of having incurred
past costs in order to protect landscape. Thus, during the catastrophic outbreak of Dutch elm
disease in Britain in the 1970s, some county councils injected trees with fungicide, incurring
expenditure equivalent to £1350 (at 2007 prices) as the long-term cost of saving each tree
(Price 2007a). This would have been rational only if the value each tree contributed to the
landscape exceeded £1350.
A problem is inherent, however, in assuming that future costs are inevitably incurred, or that
benefit inevitably exceeds past costs. For example, whatever the legal position, there is no logical
necessity to restore landscapes after mineral working: from an economic perspective, it should
only be done if benefits exceed costs. Nonetheless, given the legal position, such restoration
costs are inevitable. Thus these are genuinely economic losses associated with degrading
landscape; the opportunity costs of the required resources really are a net loss to society. The
assumed rationality of past costs is more tenuous: how did those spending public money to
preserve their own conception of valued landscape know that this expenditure was worthwhile?
And, given that the imputed benefit of any action would, under this philosophy, always equal
or exceed its cost, each action favouring landscape would have net value at least equal to zero. So
how would expenditure priorities be set?
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Assessing aesthetic benefits

Because of these logical shortcomings, and because it seems anyway useful, several other
approaches aim to assess directly the benefit of good landscape – or of better or worse landscape.
Each approach has accreted its own dialectical body of theory, in which the approach is
proposed, critiques developed, and identified weaknesses addressed.
To repeat: economic assessment of benefits makes no inherent assumption that a market price
should be paid for landscape services. In cost–benefit analysis, value is indicated, not necessarily
by actual payment, but by willingness to pay, possibly (in social cost–benefit analysis) modified
according to beneficiaries’ ability to pay. Willingness to pay is interpreted as a subjective valua-
tion, of whatever it is that landscape provides, in relation to whatever would be provided by
alternative purchases, or by goods and services for which willingness to purchase might be
expressed or elicited. That such valuations differ among individuals is no problem for
economists: so it is with all the goods and services that people buy to satisfy their various wants.
The real distinction is that market goods have a relatively uniform price at which small changes
in purchases may be made: for public goods change in availability may be on a large scale
within a local context, affecting those with both large and small willingness to pay. Welfare
economics theory (Little 1957) establishes a firm connection between price and willingness to
pay on one hand, and value to individuals on the other. Without this connection, the case for
cost–benefit analysis – not just for landscape economics – lacks credibility.
The approaches to valuation discussed below constitute an exhaustive list of those generally
deployed, and even perhaps those logically possible.
Market analogies
An indicative value for landscape generally, or for particular landscapes, might be set by analogy
with the price of comparable but marketed aesthetic goods; at the coarsest level, admission fees
to art galleries, botanical gardens or arboreta (Price 2007a): as a closer parallel, enclosed cliff-tops
(Figure 27.2) or waterfalls (Price 1994).
The evident problem lies in finding sufficiently similar experiences, accruing to similar
populations, especially as charging in itself filters the beneficiary population. This approach is
little developed, and hence little criticized.
Free-will payments
Voluntary subscriptions may be made to causes or campaigns favouring the desired state of
landscape or outcome of land use controversy. The National Trust in England and Wales
maintains collection boxes on some open-access properties, while campaign fund-raising is a
widespread if intermittent activity. The standard critique is that these provide at best a lower-
bound value, since beneficiaries of good landscape may free-ride on contributions to its upkeep
or preservation made by others. Marwell and Ames (1981) challenge this view of self-interested
rationality. Nonetheless, plausible evidence exists for it: for example, previous levels of volun-
tary donation were greatly exceeded, when financial exigency obliged cathedrals to charge for
admission (Price, 1994). Again, the approach is little developed.
Professional assessment
Expert judgement may, by consensus, gravitate towards a ‘reasonable’ value for landscapes
embodying specified characteristics. The best-developed example is Helliwell’s (1967) system
312
Figure 27.2 Landscape for sale: admission to Rügen’s cliff-tops costs €2.
for valuing amenity trees – possibly the first attempt to place monetary value on aesthetic
effects. It is easy to criticize the approach’s lack of foundations in economic theory, or reference
to real cash transactions. Nonetheless, it provides consistency and authenticity through repeated
expert discussion in a structured framework. Its frequent use in practical applications,
particularly compensation claims, evinces professional confidence.
Contingent valuation
Since willingness to pay is sought – for some environmental or social condition or some change
in it – the directest approach is through willingness-to-pay questionnaires (Mitchell and Carson,
1989; Arrow et al., 1993). Of all the approaches, this so-called contingent valuation has attrac-
ted the greatest and highest-prestige efforts. Contingent valuation has been much developed in
relation to nature conservation, but landscape applications abound too, for example: to open-
cast mining (Randall et al., 1978), land use in national parks (Willis and Garrod, 1993), forests
(Tyrväinen and Väänänen, 1998) and electricity transmission lines (Navrud et al., 2008). This
most widely applied approach is also the most vehemently criticized, both within the economics
profession (Kahneman and Knetsch 1992) and outside it (Sagoff 1988). Some general and
recurring issues are:
whether respondents understand what willingness-to-pay questions mean (Clark et al. 2000);
non-response bias – particularly through protest bids of zero, contending that the
question is not meaningful or relevant (Edwards and Anderson 1987; Ovaskainen and
Kniivilä 2005);
strategic bias, resulting from attempts to secure provision of a public amenity, or avoid
paying for it (Brookshire et al. 1976);
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Colin Price
start-point bias, whereby respondents to an unfamiliar form of question seek cues from
monetary sums suggested by the interviewer (Boyle et al. 1985);
whether answers embody a large symbolic content (Blamey 1996; Price 2001). Part–whole
bias exists when willingness to pay for a particular landscape expresses willingness to pay for
all similar landscapes. Information bias occurs when willingness-to-pay questionnaires head-
line a particular landscape, usually one subject to current controversy, thus focusing
respondents’ wider concerns onto that landscape (Bishop and Welsh 1993; Price 1999).
whether individuals answering questions which treat them as ‘purchasing consumers in an
environmental supermarket’ respond like they would as citizens of a polity (Sagoff 1988). A
variant of contingent valuation addressing this problem is contingent referendum: respon-
dents are asked whether they would vote for a pro-environment policy (for example), if that
was associated with a given tax increase. Imputed ‘citizen’ values typically exceed those
derived from contingent valuation (Ovaskainen and Kniivilä 2005). Why, however, would
people vote for something that compromises their best interest (Price 2006)? This ‘citizen’s’
value might simply be a less biased consumer’s value.
Value revealed by behaviour

Much scepticism among economists about contingent valuation and its variants results from
their being based on a stated willingness to pay unconfirmed by behaviour. It is natural to prefer
willingness to pay revealed by actually ‘putting money where one’s mouth is’. Purchase of some
market goods gives access to non-market goods (for example, houses commanding good views,
or recreation trips offering high quality landscape). Hedonic pricing (Griliches 1971) deploys
statistical techniques by which house prices or recreation trip costs are decomposed into frac-
tions attributable to landscape quality or (more usually) to its measurable constituents, as well as
to aspects of the ‘package’ such as size of house or scope for physical recreation respectively.
One theoretical advantage would be allowing an aesthetic value to be compiled for a particular
landscape or change of landscape, simply by summing the values attributed to each constituent.
House prices offer rich and serviceable data sets (Garrod and Willis 1992), on whose basis values
have been attributed to woodland views (Willis and Garrod 1992); water bodies (Luttik 2000);
agricultural land (Fleischer and Tsur 2009); and greenspace (Choumert and Travers 2010).
Nonetheless, important questions exist concerning what price differentials mean: for example
good view premia may be confounded with good neighbourhood premia arising because
wealthy residents have ability to pay for the good view; the differential may thus partly represent
the negative aspects of living in an alternative, bad, neighbourhood (Price 1995). By contrast,
recreational visits often entail different bundles of destinations, each offering a wide range of
aesthetic and recreational experiences. Hanley and Ruffell (1993) have described results for
forest characteristics as ‘disappointing’ by comparison with those of contingent valuation, and
the problems have perhaps dissuaded more widespread application.
Choice experiments
Recently choice experiments – sometimes called stated preference approaches (Adamowicz
1995) – have gained popularity. Potentially, they combine the powers of hedonic pricing and
contingent valuation, but also share their shortcomings. Respondents choose between packages
of experience which embody both different amounts of several environmental characteristics
and different sums of money. For example, Nielsen et al. (2007) investigated forest character-
istics, while Grammatikopoulou et al. (2011) included buildings and presence of grazing animals
314
in agricultural landscapes. This approach avoids headlining a particular issue, and – since both
environment and money are embodied in every package – avoids the stark polarization which
contingent valuation creates between money (with negative symbolic connotations) and envir-
onment (with positive ones). In landscape applications, the approach shares with hedonic pri-
cing the problem of separating the effects of aesthetic elements which in reality interact, as
discussed below.
Environmental branding
‘Environmental quasi-markets’ may be developed through premium prices for landscape-tagged
goods such as regional foods (Boatto et al. 2011). Although ethical premia are commonly
associated with socially just (fair trade foods) and ecologically sustainable (certified timber)
modes of production, they may also represent the landscape in which they are produced.
Because academic researchers cannot control the image and text denoting product provenance,
there are severe problems in determining what collection of factors the image represents in
consumers’ minds. Moreover, consumers are unlikely to relate a quantum of product to the
amount of environmental, social and economic space in which it was produced. Thus will-
ingness to pay remains symbolic: in these quasi-markets are purchased not particular environ-
mental and social gains, but warm glows and moral satisfactions, which relate only tenuously to
aesthetic reality (Price et al. 2008). This problem of interpreting the meaning of ethical
purchases remains unsolved and largely unresearched.
The last three approaches raise questions over whether an entire landscape’s value is mean-
ingfully decomposable into fixed values for its individual components, such as steepness of
topography, proportions of land cover, and presence of water or built intrusions. Which aes-
thetic components are relevant? In what units should they be measured? Above all, how is
composition incorporated in a consistent mathematical interaction between variables (Price 2012)?
None of these has been so addressed as to satisfy an aesthetic professional. An alternative phi-
losophy of hedonic pricing bases the overall value of views and visited destinations on house
prices and travel costs, then apportions their value by explicit consultation. Benson and Willis
(1992) asked respondents in a travel cost survey to allocate ten tokens among the trip’s com-
ponents. House prices have been related to subjectively but expertly judged view quality
(Henry 1994, 1999); and travel costs, to overall aesthetic quality of the visited area (Bergin and
Price 1994; Thomas and Price 1999).
Contingent valuation and related approaches avoid the decomposition problem, by assessing
landscape as a complete entity, to be valued as seen, or in relation to a specified change. This,
however, brings another problem: each case must be treated from scratch. Individual assessment
is costly and time-consuming, in a context needing quick decisions. Alternatively, a judgement
must be made, that the benefits of good landscape here are similar to those experienced else-
where generally, or in some particular elsewhere – sufficiently similar that monetary valuations
can be transferred among locations. This benefit transfer problem – often applied to other values
(Zandersen et al. 2007) – is particularly acute for landscape applications of contingent valuation,
because of the individual character – the genius loci – of each place, and of the population
experiencing it. Attempting to compile a value on the basis of values for landscapes with similar
components but different composition reintroduces the decomposition problem. Once again,
the best basis for benefit transfer would be comparison with landscapes of similar overall
aesthetic quality, before and after the specified change.
In all this, recall that much literature is concerned with defects of the methods described; and
that the literature dealing with remedies of defects has not done so to the satisfaction of all
315
Colin Price
parties. It is, moreover, easy to be beguiled, by the possibility of doing something that had
seemed impossible to do at all, into actually doing it without considering the improbability of
being able to do it well. Landscape economics tackles a necessary valuation task, but that task is
fraught with difficulties (for example, in distinguishing the variety of wants met by landscape,
and dealing with cultural and social associations): it needs all the support it can get from related
disciplines, and it must not become embattled, as though existing as a free-standing valuation
alternative to these disciplines. They, in turn, should accept the legitimacy of the economic
approach, rather than maintaining an aloof practical uselessness.
Time, discounting and sustainability

For all but the most ephemeral open-space art installations, investments in landscape improvement –
or those entailing landscape deterioration, or ones required to prevent adverse change – all
involve assessing not only present human response to a landscape, but how that response, and
the landscape itself, may evolve through time.
Without any human intervention trees grow and garden designs mature; asbestos roofs soften
visually (Figure 27.3) and concrete walls become offensively drab. Economic forces bring
obsolescence or displacement to housing, extractive workings, factories and infrastructure, with
subsequent removal or dilapidation. Demographic changes affect how many humans experience
a landscape, and the frequency of that experience.
Meanwhile human tastes alter. This may express a long-term social shift in aesthetic fashion,
as from formal to scenic to ecological aesthetics (Sheppard and Harshaw 2001). There is also
personal adaptation of behaviour and accustomization in the face of aesthetic affronts (Price
1993, Chapter 14).
Figure 27.3 Time changes these things built with hands, in fact and in the pliant mind, stark
asbestos roof becomes ecosystem.
316
Such processes have economic implications, but inform a wider aesthetic discourse. A further
crucial process, having financial origins though also reflecting human psychology, is that of
discounting the future: that is, successively reducing the importance ascribed to future events and
conditions, merely because of their futurity. At first sight this seems an extraordinary thing, at
diametric odds with sustainability – which implies treating future generations’ interests at parity
with present ones. Some justifications offered – for example, the potential productivity of
money and resources if made available early in time – are irrelevant to aesthetic experience.
Others, such as apparent human preference for immediate rather than delayed gratification,
have questionable normative validity (Price 1993, Chapter 7). Different approaches to landscape
valuation may match different rationales for discounting (Price 2007b), and different discount
rates for aesthetic and for material values can be defended. To accommodate the unease which
discounting has provoked, a recent stratagem tapers discount rates for long-term evaluations
(HM Treasury, n.d.). Even this insufficiently emphasizes sustainability, and may not change the
actual outcome of decisions (Price 2005).
Whatever view is taken, choice of discounting protocol and rate may affect the value attrib-
uted to landscape more than does the approach used for imputing an annual value. A low dis-
count rate may also have unexpected consequences, sometimes reducing the importance of
aesthetic values relative to material ones (Price 2010).
Research methodologies for this topic run from analysis of financial markets to interpretation
of psychological propensities. Again, while landscape economists cannot claim these as their
particular preserve, their concern with psychic values, non-market experiences, and enduring
preferences may give them a radically different perspective on discounting, which they should
bring to the wider debate. Fuller accounts of these processes and how they affect economic
valuation are given in Price (1993, 2007b).
Transacting landscape: the market and institutions of exchange

Because the most distinctive economic characteristic of landscape is its public goods nature,
spontaneous markets where supply and demand interact are patchy. This is why landscape
economics is so concerned with finding an equivalent of market prices. The current ethos of
‘payment for environmental services’ is dangerous if adopted ideologically: some things, of their
nature, are just not efficient to market, because excluding non-payers entails heavy costs.
Moreover, because enjoyment of landscape by one individual does not prevent its enjoyment
by another, maximum benefit is achieved by free access. Thus public and charitable subvention
is – and should be so expected – the major source of financial input to publicly available and
publicly enjoyed landscape.
This fiscal support might, in a narrow financial perspective, be set against positive macro-
economic effects. Although not captured in markets by its providers, the expenditure associated
with high quality landscape and greenspace nonetheless generates local income and regional
development. Improved landscape may also have distributional effects, supporting financially
impoverished regions, but in turn requiring support if it is to improve equality of aesthetic
opportunity in urban localities. Distributional issues presently exhibit a low profile in economic
thinking, but they never vanish, and become more important, the more they are ignored.
There are also policy issues to do with portfolios of landscape. Why and how do protected
landscapes become so (Price, 1977)? What contribution does a particular landscape or landscape
type make to the aesthetic experiences open to a population that – financial, resource and
environmental crises notwithstanding – sees international travel in pursuit of pleasure as a basic
human right?
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Colin Price
Figure 27.4 Street hanging baskets: private pleasure in giving public pleasure is a subtle
economic value and motivator.
Mechanisms for landscape enhancement may embody some political trading, as in planning
gain which requires improved public landscape as a condition of permitted private develop-
ment. But its being worthwhile for a developer to make concessions to landscape does not
prove that the concessions are worthwhile in a wider perspective: just that a planner believes
them worth extracting if it can be done at negligible public cost. This quasi-market mechanism
requires, once again, justification through independent non-market valuation.
To these provision mechanisms may be added the genuine goodwill and sense of obligation
of those who delight in providing pleasure to others, by enhancing, on private land, what is
publicly visible: whether by sympathetic design of forest coupes, or placement of hanging
baskets on urban streets (Figure 27.4).
This mixed bag of mechanisms supporting good landscape might promote appropriate provi-
sion, but one cannot assume that it inevitably does so. Landscape economists, through their
balanced treatment of various costs and benefits, have a potentially valuable input to the
political processes which determine the balance of factors.
Interdisciplinary concourse: conflicts and collaborations in

future research
Economists bring a different though – in a widespread misperception – alien perspective to
landscape studies. For many commentators, a stark choice exists between the aesthetic and the
material; the immaculate and the tarnished; the pure and the compromised; things of the spirit
and those of animal survival. These are mistaken dichotomies. It is only by association that
economists are identified as working for materialism. In fact their forebears include many
318
philanthropic thinkers whose dearest wish was humankind’s betterment. Their habits of thought
deal even-handedly with demands of many kinds, along the spectrum from nutritional
requirements to gastronomic pleasure to visual appreciation of formal art to aesthetic joy in still-
natural landscape. Their perspective and expertise should not be execrated by other landscape
professionals.
At the same time economists must not regard themselves as an objective and intellectual elite,
standing above the subjective and intuitive disputations of those seeing landscape with aesthetic,
psychological, political or sociological perspectives. Questionnaire design, interpretation of
decisions to purchase houses or to travel, the influence of local landscape on civil behaviour:
these are three obvious areas where the perspectives of other disciplines could enrich
economists’ deliberations. Profounder explorations may also be made, of what it is that people
seek from landscape experience. It is not just aesthetic quality, but conformity with cultural
norms, familiar backgrounds to living, visual stability in a world made threatening by too-rapid
change, matching of need for diversity and individual predisposition. Economists have the
capacity – not as far as I know yet deployed – to impute a value to such segregated aspects of
benefit; their insights allow them to speculate constructively about how such values
might change through time. But they need the collaboration – the respectful collaboration – of
other professionals in identifying and authenticating these components. In such collaborations
lies the greatest potential for constructive development of landscape economics in the coming
decades.
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28
Landscape and memory
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM
Landscape and memory are intertwined in the cultural geographies of being human. For Simon
Schama (1995: 10) ‘it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter
and landscape’. Thus by situating memory as a force of perception shaping our constructions of
landscape, this chapter outlines the complexities of the connections between landscape and
memory and figures these complexities through an account of the Nurturing Ecologies research
project run with landscape artist Graham Lowe in the English Lake District between 2003 and
2009. In the first part of this chapter my focus will be on the concepts of, and relationship
between landscape and memory. Here, I will follow this relationship through from landscape
iconography, emotional/affective landscapes, nostalgia and material memories. In the second
part of the chapter, I will exemplify how these conceptual accounts of landscape memory have
figured in my research fieldwork, in practice.
Iconography: memory and the visual landscape

In 1980, Durham geographer Douglas Pocock argued that the nature of seeing was at the heart
of making sense of human encounters with the world (Pocock 1980). Landscape too has been a
critical part of the ‘artist’s vision’ (Howard 1991), thus circulations, narratives and interpretation
keep the visual landscape a live reference point in contemporary society. Viewing embodies an
orientation that has a need for distanciation from landscape and incorporates a sense of owner-
ship of the landscape viewed. This orientation, historically traced by Cosgrove (1984) through a
materialist account, becomes a legacy of the rise of mercantile capitalism and the gaze of
objectification and calculation. Visualizing landscape orientates us towards a cultivated habit of
‘looking on’ or ‘over’ a space which functions within European visual grammars as being a
ready-made view for our evaluation, inspiration and awe (Cosgrove 1984; Cosgrove and
Daniels 1988; Matless 1998; Mitchell 1994). Iconography has historically been about the process
of remembering grand stories through the sighting of icons, based on Greek and Christian
church art, in the form of religious iconography. In turn, landscape iconography, has been
about the process of treating landscape imagery as an ‘icon’ of grand narratives about
national heritage, identity and the natural landscape of a nation. Within geographical research,
landscape images are considered as symbolizing geographical values, social relations, cultural
322
meaning, and political–economic power (Cosgrove 1988; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Mitchell
1994). This approach within landscape studies is founded upon the theories of Panofsky and
Cassirer (see Cosgrove and Daniels 1988: 1–8) and read through Raymond Williams’ cultural
materialism. In contemporary research, as argued by Bishop (1992), landscape studies are now
engaged with poststructuralist theory and have been focussed on the abstract (Bishop 1992). For
authors in the 1980s and 1990s, landscape iconography was seen to be part of the public sphere
in constant circulation (see Kinsman 1995). The effect of these circulations was to bolster a view
of national heritage and identity and consolidate elite landscape values. Daniels (1993) con-
textualizes the production and consumption of these images, unravelling the multifarious
historical narratives and meanings which are yielded by the visual representations he considers;
there is a focus, for example, on the canvases of Turner and Constable (Daniels 1993: 200–36).
Matless (1998) critiques the seemingly parochial understandings of English landscape to reveal
their inherent modernity; elided in the assumptions about the bucolic or indeed the picturesque
nature of English landscape. In these studies, landscape and Englishness have been theoretically
linked as a means of unravelling the iconographical function of visual imagery in the narratives
of nation, and their role in the relationship between social ‘structures of feeling’ in the country
and the city (see Williams 1973; Lowenthal 1975). Studies of landscape iconography have been
critiqued as being ocular-centred and reaffirming a masculinist (Nash 1996; Rose 1997) and
imperialist orientation towards the world (W.J.T. Mitchell 1994).
Landscape iconography, is a form of memory-work linked to landscape through the visual
field. In this mode, the bodily experience of the landscape is secondary to considering landscape
as a ‘way of seeing’. The iconographic landscape imagery that we encounter is carefully choreo-
graphed. The iconography of landscape is a process of picturing, the creating of an icon of a
place, unpeopled, dehumanized and often unreal, which then in its circulation becomes a
reference point for the landscape as if it is fact. Circulations of iconographic images, promised
connectedness with the ‘real’ but were orchestrated narrations of a framed, edited, account of
‘wild nature’ and place. John Ruskin prized the ‘wild’ qualities reflected in J.M.W. Turner’s
works, seeing them as representing the ‘natural fact’ of wild nature (Hewison et al. 2000: 28).
The paintings of Claude Lorrain also inspired Wordsworth in his engagement with the English
Lakes (Tolia-Kelly 2007a); the realism of nature’s textures were an inspiration for appreciating
beauty and led to the Romantic aesthetic in Wordsworth’s own art. An alternative account of
the value of landscape as a Romantic engagement is Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1979: 11) humanist phil-
osophy, which describes the relevance of landscape as being part of a universal desire for an
‘ideal and humane habitat … Such a habitat must be able to support a livelihood and yet cater to
our moral and aesthetic nature … landscape allows and even encourages us to dream’. For Tuan,
landscape is about human futures and the possibilities for the development of human conscious-
ness. For iconographical values of landscape, and a humanist account of landscape as foundational
to human senses of being and belonging, the role of memory is critical. Landscape provides the co-
ordinates for everyday memory work; a geographical plane from which to place and narrate the
past and situate present senses of identification with place. Place-histories and people-histories are
intertwined and rooted in textures of landscape ecologies and nature (Tolia-Kelly 2010). The
work of unravelling history-making memories is about ‘digging down through layers of memories
and representations toward the primary bedrock’ (Schama, cited in Ogborn 1996: 223).
Emotional, embodied landscape memory

The English Lake District has operated on the scale of the iconographic but has also been culturally
valorized as embodying a space where we can engage with a national landscape ‘sensibility’
323
(Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010), including the ways that it contributes to a ‘sense of place’
(Taylor 2011). An emotional experience of awe and terror is at the heart of the history of this
landscape’s cultural value. The scale of these has led this landscape to be seen as exemplary of a
sublime encounter with the higher realm of nature and thus a sense of greatness or Godliness.
The ‘national’ in this regard often slides between being British and English (Matless 1998;
Darby 2000); ‘other’ nations and cultures are exiled in the elisions made in landscape discourse.
The participants in this research and their responses to landscape are both situated within
England and their political citizenship is ‘British’. The cultural building blocks of experiencing a
national park that orientate the ‘senses’ towards a connection with what it is to be English are
made up of visual, aural and literary texts. The Lake District National Park has an identification
of a cultural landscape that is iconic through its historical connections with landmark visual
artists such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, and authors such as Wordsworth and
Ruskin. Poetry, painting, art and landscape merge into a textural palimpsest of a recognizable
iconographic source of connection with the sensory experiences that these artists responded to
and worked through in their art. This ‘iconography’ of Englishness is at once a ‘visual space’
that engenders a ‘structure of feeling’ which associates you sensually and artfully to a cultural
marker of belonging and being within the historically assembled, national sensibility (Cosgrove
and Daniels 1988). Since the ‘emotional’ and ‘embodied’ turn within the social sciences
(see Smith et al. 2009), there have been accounts of the sensory memory of this landscape in
contemporary engagements (Tolia-Kelly 2007a). Emotional and embodied registers of
encounter with landscape, shape the cultural values and meanings of this place. As Davidson
and Bondi (2004: 373) reflect, ‘[w]hether joyful or heartbreaking, emotion has the power
to transfer the shape of our life-worlds … Creating new fissures and textures we never
expected to find’.
Emotional registers shape landscape encounters and geographies of identification. Remembering
the moral orders of particular landscapes is critical to the social experiences of enfranchisement,
empowerment, occlusion, marginality, transnationalism, and alienation within a landscape.
There are multilayered occurrences of the memories of ‘fear’ and ‘joy’ which figure a sensitivity
towards landscapes. However, issues of power continue to shape our capacities and registers of
engagement. Questions of feeling enfranchised through race, gender, socio-economic posi-
tioning and/or physical ability are active in anybody’s experience of place and the memories
which are brought to bear (see Tolia-Kelly 2004). As Connerton states, reflecting on Halbwachs
(1992: 81):
Groups provide individuals with frameworks within which their memories are localized
and memories are localized by a kind of mapping. We situate what we recollect within
mental spaces provided by the group. But these mental spaces, Halbwachs insisted, always
receive support from and refer back to the material spaces that particular social groups
occupy.
(Connerton 1989: 37)
Nostalgia
Among the registers of emotional memory is the case of nostalgia which has a longer historical
tradition than most registers of embodied, emotional memory (Legg 2004, 2005). Social scien-
tists have been critical in thinking through relations between memory and identity, especially
the place of nostalgia in geographical identification. These identity cultures and relationships are
forged through the body, space and place (see Fortier 2000; Ahmed et al. 2003) particularly in
324
the case of diaspora societies which have a complex relationship with ‘home’ in a postcolonial
period (Tolia-Kelly 2006b). Blunt (2003) argues memory in diasporic context actively shapes
the process of identity formation and self determination for those sitting ‘outside’ British Indian
hierarchies of ethnicity and cultures. Nostalgia in the diaspora, is not the commonly identified
reductive desire for a lost ‘home’ through painful recollection, but one that contributes to a
creative process of making home. Productive nostalgia in this context is ‘orientated towards the
present and future as well as towards the past’ (Blunt 2003: 774). Lowenthal (1975: 2), in his
early commentary on nostalgia, argues that ‘[t]he nineteenth century transformed nostalgia from
a geographical disease into a sociological complaint’. Nostalgia has shifted from societal identity-
crisis when individuals were ripped from rooted living into the army or the city environment to
one where ‘locality’ or locales were less tangible than biographical loss of childhood, family or
indeed a place of belonging. He argues that ‘[f]or mobile modern man, nostalgia is not so much
being uprooted as having to live in an alien present’ (Lowenthal 1975: 2). Nostalgia is thus
without specific temporal or spatial coordinates, although it is a significant modern malaise
rooted in a post-industrial sensibility, featured in colonial societies. Overall, the experience of
nostalgia actively links a sensibility of mourning to a picturesque past, one that is intangible
and which evokes a sense of placelessness. Samuel (1996) traces this further to the practices of
collecting and making-home as ‘theatres of memory’ in a period where identities are insecure
and where the world is post-Imperial, resulting in shifts in power and increasing people’s
mobility.
Material memories: memorials in the landscape

The heritage of a nation is articulated through a sense of a nationally connected narrative, pri-
vileging sites and objects, giving them ‘symbolic power’ (Hoeschler and Alderman 2004).
However, national memory sites (such as museums) are places where, through the act of
affirming a memorial to nation, there is a process of annexing ‘other’ voices, peoples and
memories of nation and history (see Said 2000). Heritage in the context of the nation formally
consolidates accounts of links between memory and place at the national historical scale. As
Whelan (2003) argues, memorial icons of identity such as monuments, memorials, and buildings
that have been invested with meaning, carry conscious and subconscious messages and are
subject to competing interests. The fluidity of meanings and readings of these (Till 2005) is
the only constant, especially when we consider memory experiences at scales varying from the
individual to the collective. When issues of power are then factored into this mix, the cultural
values of landscapes of memory, including memorials, bolster the values of the ‘dominant’
group or class or indeed those with the power to impose such interpretations (Passi 1999).
Heffernan (1995) takes this further by stating that memorials do not bolster memory-scapes in
individual lives, but that the state deliberately reinforces public collective memory, through
memorials and sites. The state, through these sites, consolidates the moral ‘right’ to go to war
and a collective national identity. These discourses thus conform to particular politicized notions
of the past and sediment through time in the public consciousness. The invention of tradition
(Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) is highlighted as a set of practices which seek to inculcate sets of
values, invoking a seemingly consensual memory about the past. Embedded in this process of
sedimenting memories, an appropriate past remembered is a national identity discourse which
reflects a partial narrative account, materialized through the politics of preservation and con-
servation. Whenever memory is consolidated, solidified and affirmed, there are others that are
undermined, made ephemeral, forgotten. In the case of the Lake District National Park, it
stands as a globally recognized site of heritage both physically and culturally. It bids this year
325
(2011) to UNESCO for World Heritage status. The layers of memory that are incorporated at
this site include a memory of the sensibility of Englishness, of Wordsworth and the Romantics
and the lives and cultures of northern folk living on the land. The landscape of this ‘northern’
realm is part of a geographical and mythological cultural sense of location (Pocock 1982; Darby
2000; Thompson 2010). The heritage site occludes in its affirmation the international nature of
Wordsworth’s anti-Imperialism, and the communities of Cumbria and Lancashire, its connec-
tions internationally and the values of ‘other’ local migrants from Eastern Europe and the Indian
sub-continent (see Tolia-Kelly 2007a).
Landscape and memory in the field

To follow through on the theoretical accounts of landscape and memory, it is important to
understand how these relationships emerge in research practice and fieldwork. In the second
part of this paper I will outline research conducted in the English Lake District with artist
Graham Lowe and groups of visitors from Burnley, Lancaster and Cumbria. In the analysis,
I will use the conceptual categories laid out in the first part and work through the evidence
using these as ‘codes’ of analysis. The materials from the field make up a significant resource,
therefore only a partial account of the substantial research is represented here.
Methodology: visualizing landscape memories

The artist Graham Lowe and I have a mutual interest in memory, everyday values and the
material English landscape. We believed that there was a need to investigate other ‘visions’ and
examine alternative perspectives on the English Lake District, not normally encountered in the
canvases on sale in the Lake District or indeed exhibited in gallery spaces. The aim was to create
a methodology that would visualize participating people’s experiences of this landscape. On
viewing the resulting canvases we hope for a set of new visual grammars which would enrich
contemporary cultures of landscape which was attentive to embodied, material and affectual
registers of landscape values (e.g. Wylie 2002, 2005). This seeking of ‘other’ emotional experi-
ences challenged the usual articulator of landscape being sovereign negotiator. Here was a dif-
ferent iteration of landscape sensitive to a plural account of bodies of experience, set up against
‘a bounded universal body of mobile citizens freed of fear’ (Tolia-Kelly 2007a). Here,
acknowledgement of the place of difference and power in shaping the matrices within which
‘we’ can engage with landscape were privileged, counter to the humanist, phenomenologist and
non-representational orientations that had gone before (see Thien 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006a). In
the research design there is a political intention to record multiple cultures of engagement
of individuals and groups and their feelings of walking the pathways around Windermere,
through using visual sessions where participants drew and talked through their responses to the
landscape. The design aimed to provide a revisioning of the emotional values of the Lakes and a
reimaging of this landscape’s sensory registers, through the art of the participants. These repre-
sent sensory values, materially encountered, as they evoke memories of biographical landscapes,
not normally seen. In essence, paintings produced by these artists, have revealed an alternative
emotional citizenry, distinct from those sensory registers canonized within this cultural landscape
(for a comprehensive account of the research project findings see Tolia-Kelly (2007a, 2007b,
2008) and for the participatory politics behind this methodology see Tolia-Kelly (2008) and
Sara Kindon et al. (2007). To enhance the possibility of a trusting group dynamic we recruited
‘ready-made’ groups of people living in Lancashire and Cumbria. The first was from the
Pakistan Welfare Association, which welcomed opportunities for ‘activities’ and ‘trips’ and was
326
keen to be involved in something beyond research about ‘the negatives’ of post-riot Burnley.
The recruitment meetings attracted around forty participants; we recruited two groups of
twenty-two men (in age all were in their forties and fifties) and twenty-two women (all aged
in their late thirties up to their mid-fifties). We appointed translators, a male and female
respectively, to suit the requirements of the single sex groups. We then recruited an ‘art group’
that Graham had led at a community college. The art group was a mixed group of around five
men (aged 21 to 40) and twelve women (aged 38 to 60). Our workshops were held at Littledale
Hall and we took the groups on a short walk to Rydal Water overlooking the Lake, we had a
discussion session over coffee at Brockhole Visitors Centre, and then in the afternoon we had
lunch at St Martin’s College, situated at Ambleside. In these sessions we asked the groups to
record (using paint and paper) their biographies, relationships to landscape, the English Lake
District and responses to their experience of the Lake District. The aim was to gain insight into
how this landscape feels to the groups.
Iconography: nurturing ecologies

Producing ‘landscape iconographies from below’, i.e. everyday folk, is effectively what,
collectively, Graham Lowe’s sets of paintings from the project represent. Below (Figures 28.1–3)
are three images from the exhibition ‘Nurturing Ecologies’ at the Theatre on the Lake,
Keswick, in 2007. These are pictured as ‘collective’ deliberately to show the range of aesthetics
and grammar represented through the research. The set of paintings is a set of layers of memory.
Firstly, they collectively represent the body of work from the research for Nurturing Ecologies.
Secondly, they incorporate biographical memories. And, thirdly, they are symbols of the
landscape experience of the English Lake District of the participants. Finally, over time, through
their circulation and exhibition within the collections of which they are now part,
these paintings will contribute to the variation in landscape representations of the English
Lake District that are presently in circulation. They provide a counter to iconographic landscape
representations, as they represent folk from migrant, working class and everyday societies.
For individuals who took part and who produced the basis of each image, these images are
now in their lives (e.g. on bedroom walls, mantelpieces, and domestic archives) as symbols of
their landscape experiences and memories. They are iconic, continually accruing meanings and
memories through their circulation and recognition.
Embodied emotional landscape memories

One of the key ways of thinking landscape that emerged in the sessions was this notion of the
landscape being layered; strata of memory, individual and collective were recorded in the
research process. Katya, a Ukranian, was born near Sanok, now in Poland, in a village surviving
by growing corn, rice and sometimes cotton. She was born in a region where the ruling state
was intermittently shifting between Poland, Germany and Russia. The experience of walking
through the Lake District, particularly around Windermere, connected her with many
memories and landscapes in her life. The first set of memories she talked about, linked her to
the landscape of the Ukraine; vegetables, gardens, and ‘scenery you would not believe’.
The second set is about the layering of Argentinian photographs and her father’s biography.
When young, her father left for Argentina. ‘It was a custom in Ukraine and Russia that people
go and come back alive, yes’ (p. 13, Group L, 07/04). When her father came home, the
Second World War started, and he was conscripted, then murdered by the Germans in her
village, but she escaped. The third set of memories links Katya to the collective traversing of the
327
Figure 28.1 ‘Nurturing Ecologies’ Exhibition, Duke’s Theatre and Gallery, Lancaster 2006.
northern-European landscape of tundra. After wartime conscription, she remembers how

people from the Ukraine:
They go to America, or Canada … people for years they were going, some of them even
walked if they cannot afford … They walked with people who had been in prison in
Siberia and they break loose, no money, no clothes so they walked. And it took them a
year but they walked … Canada was closer from Siberia … they would stop somewhere
and do some work to get some money and then later they would move to somewhere else
until they get to Canada.
(p. 17, Group L, 07/04)
She says that the snowy landscape of the fells is a catalyst for both her and her children, a pro-
cess by which she takes herself and them back to a landscape of Ukraine, her father and the
328
plight of traversing village folk facing poverty. These layers of memory are recalled in the ses-
sions where we ask the groups to describe their responses to the walk around Windermere and
Ambleside. There is a complexity of geographical scales that are evoked, simultaneously Katya is
engaging with a patriotic account of life and culture of her village, but this is not explicitly
situated as a national landscape, as the state shifts in its territorial boundaries. The dynamism of
‘nation’ through boundary shifts is parallel to the ways in which the ‘national’ culture of Britain,
say, shifts in time, and circulates (Young 2008). On encountering the Lakes, Katya engages with
the iconic landscape through narratives of English landscape, but these are overlaid with land-
scape memories of other iconic landscapes of Buenos Aires, Siberia, Russia, Poland and
Ukraine. The landscape becomes a site for socializing younger generations of her family to their
genealogy and their cultural landscape.
Embodied landscape memories

In previous publications I have analyzed the ways in which sensory memories are presenced
through the encounter with memory (Tolia-Kelly 2007a). Fear, joy, awe, sadness and a feeling
329
of safety in dark places unravelled in the sessions. Taking this figuring of embodied experiences
there was also an experience of being ‘touched’ by the landscape; more than emotionally, but
spiritually. One of the participants was keen to share her view that the view of the Lakes is only
complete once you’ve seen it from Morecambe Bay. Jackie says that her connection with this
landscape is more than memory: ‘Of course, the spiritual side of this landscape for me is the sky’
(J, p. 17, F 07/04). A sense of connection with a Godliness comes through in other testimonies, too:
Being here, it’s an indulgence essentially. You know being Catholic I sometimes even feel
guilty … the more pleasure it gives me, I ask myself am I actually right to experience this
level of pleasure. ‘Cos it can be quite intense and its remarkable! I think you get little
Epiphanies every now and then.
(P, p. 19, F, A, 07/04)
Despite the emotional power of the Lake District, participants were aware of the constructed nature
of this National Park. Fay and Mark remark below on the contradictory nature of the heritage site:
I mean it’s a man-made place, do you know what I mean, you’re in the National Park the
whole thing is actually being maintained all the time you know, none of it’s really wild
untamed space.
(F, p. 5, A 07/04)
It’s manufactured … Yeah, there’s a little group of fir trees just there like in a diamond
shape, that is a plantation. To the right of that, there is a house, the surrounding trees have
been planted for ornamental value.
(M, p. 12, G 07/04)
330
The conversation shows how people intelligently engage with the landscape textures and
processes of cultivation at the Lake District.
Conclusions
The relationship between landscape and memory is complex. Yet, the relationship between
them is fundamental to a human sense of place, landscape and national identity (Schama 1995).
Both concepts and practices have complex genealogies and are understood through varying
philosophical and theoretical lenses. In this chapter I aimed to draw out the complexities, whilst
grounding these in accounts of British people’s lives, narratives and experiences on visiting the
English Lake District. Schama (1995: 7) argues that ‘[l]andscape is the work of the mind. Its
scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’. There is a gap created
between ‘research texts’ and a true account of feelings, responses and values; between narratives
collected in the field and the narratives edited ‘for’ the purpose of response. This dialogic
account of research ‘evidence’ mirrors the ‘gap’ between landscape experience, and any
memory experience and the communicated, recorded and eventual textual account. The
framing of my account of landscape and memory has been dominated by thinking through
iconography, cultural materialism, emotional and embodied landscape memories, ‘heritage’ and
national identity. The English Lake District has been chosen here as a site which embodies
connections to the ‘idea’ of landscape; through strata of memory, and the way in which vistas
and scenes of looking onto this landscape, a familiar ‘field of vision’ (Daniels 1993) are linked to
a national sensibility (Darby 2000), fissured with memories of other memory-scapes and spiritual
values.
Thoughts on future directions

One aspect of landscape and memory research that for me needs addressing, particularly in this
period of evolving theories on landscape, is the need to retain an academic memory of what has
gone before – a genealogy of the history of landscape studies. It is important to take a scholarly
path of citing the longer history of the research on landscape and memory. My second call
would be to think against simple European accounts of landscape. In this globalized
cultural landscape, where ‘landscape’ is truly pivotal to national cultures, it is necessary to think
against purely Western grammars and histories—thinking landscape using postcolonial
understandings and a memory of archaeological and anthropological scholarship that has gone
before (see Ahmed 2000; Forty and Kuchler 1999; Gosden 2004; Kuchler 2002; Spivak 1988;
Stewart and Strathern 2003; Young 1990, 2008). These authors challenge assumptions about
the nature of Western constructions of landscape histories, archaeologies, narratives and forma-
tions of national sensibilities. Through postcolonial theory, many of the bases of understandings
we have in the academy, of landscape are being stretched to include for example
different accounts of time and space, and a conscious unravelling of a ‘looking onto’ landscape
lens, towards an embodied account. New directions include for example thinking through
Aboriginal accounts of temporality and their alternative accounts of nation through ecology
rather than territory, these impact significantly in understanding the brittle universalisms that
landscape and memory are figured around in much of the literatures beyond this volume.
331
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29
Landscape and participation
Maggie Roe
The ancient Greek landscape of Athens provides some clues as to the concept of interaction
between landscape and people which is of key importance in relation to the focus of this
chapter. The Pnyx (the assembly) is often identified as the inspiration for democratic govern-
ment around the world. The Acropolis, on the higher ground, was regarded as a sacred site long
before the ancient Greek temple that still adorns it was built; it has provided a focus for spir-
ituality in the community, and is still the main focus of attention in the landscape drawing
thousands of visitors every year. Looking out from the Acropolis to the Pnyx, one can’t help
being struck by the landscape relationship between these two important aspects of ancient
Greek life (see Figure 29.1).
The enhanced natural auditorium of the oratory and open space on Pnika Hill was the offi-
cial meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly (ekklesia). No speaker could have
avoided looking both at the Acropolis and out towards the wider city and its inhabitants; the
onlookers would have seen the orator as a performer silhouetted against the sky. The concept
and practice of democracy is said to have become established through the practice of discussion
and decision making in this space. However, Sennett (1995) has suggested that democratic
ideas and practice developed primarily as a result of interactions that occurred in the ancient
Agora. This was a large open square situated at the foot of the Acropolis hill. It was surrounded
by public buildings and is a space often described as a market place open to a larger part of the
population than the Pnyx, which was only open to selected well-to-do native-born Athenian
men.1 The indication from such analysis is that the nature of spaces and places that people
inhabit can have considerable affect on how democracy develops in society. Landscapes can
provide opportunities – or ‘affordances’ – for interaction with other humans and activities
within the landscape, and with the landscape itself. It is these two aspects of human participation
or involvement with the landscape that are considered here.
Overall, participation and landscape as an area of theory is somewhat fragmented. In the past,
research into landscape participation fell fairly squarely in the bracket of social science research,
but is now emerging as a cross-disciplinary area of interest. Thus theory that is now drawn from
a number of disciplines is crossing over into the ‘hard sciences’ and much has emerged from
applied participatory work. There is an assumption that through the interaction with landscape,
ways of more sustainable and democratic living can be learned and achieved. This has in turn
335
Maggie Roe
Figure 29.1 The Athenian landscape: Looking towards the Acropolis from the location of the
Athenian democratic assembly on Pnika Hill
led to discussion about how participation can create more sustainable landscapes and about the
nature of democracy in the landscape (see Roe 2007). There has been a general assumption that
participation in landscape decision making is a ‘good thing’ with little questioning of an alter-
native view or robust assessment as to what difference participation makes in the longer term.
However, there is also a view that embodied within what we regard as ‘human’ is the need for
interaction with the natural world; that we are an integral part of the natural ‘system’, not
separate from it, and that our own nature, culture and many understandings spring directly from
this relationship.
This chapter provides an overview of the key theoretical areas relating to participation and
the landscape, and in particular highlights these two sub-areas of increasing interest which are
now, most importantly, recognized and supported by the European Landscape Convention
(ELC); that landscape is a reflection of human interaction with natural forces, and that people’s
participation in the landscape has a potential role in relation to democracy, decision making and
justice (see Figure 29.2).
Participation 1: landscape as a reflection of interaction

This concept supports the notion that landscape springs from interactions between culture and
nature or humans and the land. Humans are a part of nature and both the mental and material
aspects of exchange between humans and the land are important. This view is partially a reac-
tion to what has been seen as a dominant ‘mechanistic’ view of the world where humans are
regarded as masters of the environment and separate from it. The renewed interest in this
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Figure 29.2 Diagram showing aspects of the two key areas of participation as featured and
discussed in this chapter
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Maggie Roe
phenomenological approach to landscape is well set out by Wylie (2007). Ingold’s (2000)
‘dwelling’ theory has had considerable influence over the embodied approach where the mental
and material exchange between humans and landscape is seen as participation where interaction
and integration or exchanges are key characteristics. The influences of anthropological thinking
here are clear and these are now being expressed in various ways through experiential research
and practice approaches (e.g. Simkins and Thwaites 2008; Macpherson 2009; Scott et al. 2009).
Wylie (2007: 159) provides a useful summary of the development of Ingold’s theory which
‘involves a vision of nature and environment as active forces and participants in the unfolding of
life, as both agents of change and that which is changed – as simultaneously both the object and
subject of dwelling’. The concept of both human societal and landscape change underwrites this
theory. Wylie suggests that Ingold’s view of landscape is not a volume, or something quantita-
tive and physical as ‘land’ but qualitative; something with emotional investment, association and
meaning. Most importantly interaction with or ‘living’ the landscape removes all hint of a
separation between the physical landscape and its meanings. Such thinking also references eco-
feminist theories which see humans as having moved away from a strong connection with
nature as a result of industrialization and capitalism (Merchant 1980). Such theories were sti-
mulated partly as a result of environmental activist texts of the 1960s such as Rachel Carson’s
(1965) Silent Spring and Aldo Leopold’s (1968) Sand County Almanac.
Engagement is another term now commonly used to express the desirable participatory
relationship between humans and the landscape in both a socio-political and a cultural-knowledge
sense. This idea is about something more than being simply a spectator, but it does not seem to
have the transformative quality that is indicated by the term interaction. The idea of interaction
makes reference to the recent scientific concepts which identify non-linear feedback mechan-
isms as a means of correction in dynamic systems. Although Skrbina (2001) suggests that the
concept of participation lies primarily outside the bounds of conventional science, he uses
examples such as chaos theory and quantum theory which indicate the literal interconnected-
ness of matter itself, and superconductivity where particles are seen to ‘dance’ together or par-
ticipate in a common action. His thesis is that the universe is fundamentally participatory and
interconnection is thus always seen to be present. Skrbina observes that such examination shows
that ‘interaction becomes participation: such a complex process of participation evidently goes
far beyond what is meant by a merely mechanical interaction. It is therefore not really correct to
call what happens a measurement … Rather, it is a mutual transformation of both systems … ’
(Skrbina 2001: 124) or, in landscape terms, the mutual moulding (participation) that creates
cultural landscapes that are so highly valued (Roe 2012).
Following from these concepts, we can see the importance of thinking about the extent of
human ‘involvement’ and experience of landscape, of notions of cultural and social identity as
embodied within landscape and of landscape as cultural expression. Landscape Character
Assessment (LCA) methods and their spin-offs have become particularly useful tools to try and
understand how ordinary people’s way of life, experience and ideas are encapsulated within the
landscape. These assessment processes are also changing to include a more participatory and
consultative process. Such change reflects realization by politicians and policy-makers of the
need to widen participation in decision-making processes but also an increasing focus on the
value of local and indigenous knowledge which is gained from years of interaction
between communities and the landscape. The importance of such knowledge has been long
appreciated in other disciplines, particularly in anthropology and development work. For
example, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the poet and philosopher, is also regarded as a
pioneer of rural development in India. He placed considerable emphasis on the holistic under-
standing of the way of life of local communities, their traditions and their relationship with the
338
environment as the basis for rural development. He emphasized knowledge dissemination, and
cooperation and the use of traditional activities such as fairs and performances within the land-
scape to spread indigenous knowledge and promote democracy at grassroots level (Ray et al.
2005; Gupta 2008).
Cultural identity as expressed within and through landscapes is an area of increasing research
interest around the world, but has particularly had a boost following the enactment of the
European Landscape Convention which stresses the importance of recognizing ‘landscape in
law as an essential component of people’s surroundings, an expression of the diversity of the
their shared cultural and natural heritage, and a foundation of their identity’ (Council of
Europe 2000: Article 5a). Pedroli et al. (2007) provide a number of useful illustrations of this
relationship between sustainable landscapes, cultural and landscape identity and public partici-
pation in landscape decisions. These indicate the importance of identity in considering landscape
change, development and management. The two ideas of interaction are generally conflated in
this book as in many texts dealing with landscape issues. They are seen as symbiotic or depen-
dent upon each other: having a say in decisions about landscape and identifying and being
identified by it.
However, although ‘closeness’ or some kind of symbiotic relationship between humans and
the landscape is now often promoted as an ideology for more sustainable living, historical evi-
dence suggests that human communities may not naturally create sustainable relationships with
the land. Diamond (2005) documents numerous examples of the way communities fail as a
result of ecological crisis brought on by unsustainable practice, lack of care for the land and
exacerbating factors such as climate change. Archaeological and historical examinations of
landscape thus provide critique on the humans-as-part-of-ecosystem theories and the often
idealized picture of indigenous and nomadic hunter-gatherers’ relationship with the land.
However, there is also an increasing literature concerned with the way community values
relating to the landscape are embedded with the way of life and interactions with particular
landscapes, and how these are built up over generations. Such ideas are also helping to develop
new concepts of landscape management that help to conserve not only material heritage, but
associative heritage of landscape and the way of life that has grown up as a result of interactions
over many years. One such example is that concerning the potential of ecomuseums (e.g.
Perella et al. 2010; Davis 2011). Thus issues of group and individual interactions, place attach-
ment, reading the landscape and emotional attachment (Manzo and Perkins 2006) have become
increasingly important in landscape research. In applied research these ideas have had consider-
able influence over landscape planning approaches and landscape assessment techniques in par-
ticular (e.g. see Swanwick 2004; Ahern 2006; Fairclough and Møller 2008). Cantrill and
Senecah (2001) have extended the sense of place concept commonly discussed as important in
landscape to theorising about a collective community ‘senses of selves-in-place’, which can
affect the processes of landscape management practice. An important point is that sense of place
is ‘socially constructed upon an edifice of the environmental self that, in itself, is a product of
discourse and experience’ (Cantrill and Senecah 2001: 188). Thus local settings are important in
defining a sense of place, but this work emphasizes the complexity of the issue, particularly in
relation to group or communal perceptions and landscape interaction.
Much of the concentration on landscape and societal renewal in the 1980s and 1990s focus-
sed on urban areas and the belief that part of the problem lay with the disassociation between
urban humans and natural processes. This led to the idea of using landscape to help raise
environmental awareness and self-reliance within communities in a number of ways such as the
establishment of community gardens and forests, and signified by the growing popularity of
allotments. Coleman (1985) and Newman (1972) suggested that antisocial behaviour could be
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remedied through better design (‘design out crime’), indicating that the configuration and
nature of urban landscapes had something to do with the way people behaved, further fuelling
nature versus nurture arguments, which have often been on the boundaries of the landscape-
identity theoretical debate. Recent research related to genetic determinism indicates that
‘nature’ can now be considered to have more influence than previously thought in relation to
‘nurture’ in human behavioural terms. There has been considerable interest in the physical and
psychological health relationships of people and landscape, including obesity and stress recovery,
which emphasize the interaction aspects of human participation for the good of humans, not
necessarily the good of the landscape (Lake et al. 2010; Ulrich et al. 1991; Ward Thompson
et al. 2010). Thus the theories concerning methods by which communities become involved in
changing and improving the quality of their landscapes and their interactions with the landscape
have also encompassed ideas relating to changes in social learning and behaviour, and social
structure. The main issues perhaps in relation to research is that these are extremely complex
areas and have not been clearly delineated; there is much assumption concerning the way
humans connect with landscape at the emotional and psychological levels.
Participation 2: democracy, decision making and justice

This area of research relating to landscape and participation is characterized by strong links to
social sustainability theory, governance and democracy (political and social science theories)
(see Roe 2007; Wilson 1997). Much of the instigation for the theory has come from practice. A
key text in this regard is Arnstein’s (1969) ‘ladder’ of participation, which is still much-
referenced and, along with the Skeffington report (1969) People and Planning, had considerable
influence in the UK leading to the embedding of the principle of participation in the Town and
Country Planning Act of 1971 in the approval of structure and local plans (Barlow 1995). The
added value of participation was further recognized by the European Commission (1997) and
there was considerable exploration of the theory, particularly relating to methods at this time. In
the 1980s and 1990s much discussion was focussed on the nature of consensus and consensus
building, on the disagreements of stakeholders and the power relations between participants
(e.g. Renn et al. 1993). A more sophisticated view has now emerged which suggests that con-
structive or productive disagreement can lead to the revelation of the complexity and range of
issues that need to be addressed and should not necessarily be seen as a problem. Thus com-
munication is now seen as an important part of improving democratic processes and there are a
number of useful theoretical/methods texts that analyze relationships in participatory processes
(e.g. Kaner et al. 1996). Many scholars refer to both Dewey (1954) and Habermas’s (1989)
theories in theorizing the importance of communication. Much of the literature providing case
studies relating to participatory processes emphasize this as a way of achieving desirable out-
comes. Ventriss and Kuentzel (2005) review critical theory and the role of decision making in
the environment. They concentrate on social conflict and change and suggest that in spite of
the intuitive appeal of public participation in decision-making processes, such participation
under existing institutional and political conditions may simply reinforce existing boundaries
and barriers to change. They document the assumption that a more communicative, colla-
borative ‘turn’ in theory that incorporates concepts of reflexivity and communication (e.g.
Healey 1997; Dewey 1954) does not necessarily address the central issues of inequality in
decision-making processes concerning the environment.
The justice aspect has been examined in particular by Olwig (2007) and although much
relevant theory comes from social sciences in relation to social capital, empowerment, exclusion
etc. (e.g. Rydin and Pennington 2000), the cultural geographical concepts of ‘insiders’ and
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‘outsiders’ are also useful (Cloke and Little, 1997), and theories of social inclusion in the land-
scapes (e.g. Macfarlane et al. 2000; Rishbeth 2001; Sibley 1995). A considerable body of work
has built up around research relating to excluded groups such as children and disadvantaged
groups (Chawla and Heft 2002; Hart 1997; Matthews 2003; Roe 2006, 2007; Woolley et al.
1999). Some of this now overlaps with research that examines the different ways landscape can
be experienced, e.g. visually impaired groups (Macpherson 2009) and immigrant cultures
(Macfarlane et al. 2000). Research from development studies and developing countries has
surprisingly been somewhat slow to cross the disciplinary boundaries to the landscape field
but provides useful theories and methods relating to a range of different groups giving
opportunities for participants to express their relationships with landscape and gain empower-
ment over landscape decisions (e.g. Payton et al. 2002; Eade and Williams 1995). Other
important influences are from the planning field relating to partnerships, stakeholders,
governance and deliberative methods (e.g. Healey 1997; Fischer 2000) and in relation to
environmental management where the participatory process is often regarded as important as
the product, or outcome of the project (e.g. Margerum and Born 1995; O’Riordan and Ward
1997; Roe 2000b).
Thus the link between democracy and public spaces or landscapes is not simple or clear and it
is impossible to define the nature of a ‘democratic space’ or design a landscape that is truly demo-
cratic, although many landscapes have been identified as having characteristics which facilitate
democracy. Miles (2010) suggests that it is the idea of the Agora which is important – the idea
of facilitation of interaction creating better communication as the basis for democracy – rather
than a close examination of the physical space itself and its use in a particular societal context.
Power and control in the landscape

The increasing recognition of considerations of power and control in the landscape has con-
siderable importance for the study of landscape and participation. There is a new emphasis
on examining power and control embedded within the structures that determine participative
action, in relation to landscape issues. Arnstein’s ladder remains a useful way of thinking
about power structures and this concept of participation is still often used as the basis for
assessing the spectrum of participation. It has been reinterpreted many times (e.g. Davidson
1998; Hart 1997). There is still a debate on how to provide an inclusive participatory process
as well as the ethical dimension of who to include. The ladder says little about the character of
the required action itself since it does not take into account the nature of the landscape.
The ladder concept says nothing about participation in relation to interaction, attachment and
meaning as already described above. Such engagement with landscape is not about the organi-
zation of participation or the way participatory process may help to increase education, aware-
ness and self-expression in relation to landscape, but a more deeply embedded or intrinsic part
of the self which interacts with the natural world. But are these two aspects of participation
(organization and embeddedness) actually separate? Can power relations be separated from the
character of the landscape? Landscape develops law and law develops the landscape
(Olwig 2002). Landscape is a ‘substantive material reality, a place lived, a world produced and
transformed, a commingling of nature and society that is struggled over and in’ (Mitchell 2003:
792). Such difficult questions are often touched upon, but generally different disciplines tend
not to address the interactivity of humans and landscape and concentrate on one or other
aspect.
In democratic theory there is a fundamental belief in the goodness of the human individual
and the ability of individuals who come together to make decisions in choosing the right option
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for the communal weal. There is a similar assumption that decisions made on a democratic basis
about landscape will not only be beneficial to humans, but also by extension to the landscape.
There is, however, little or no evidence to support such ideas and there are a number of related
theories which contradict such assumptions. The well-known views of Dawkins (‘selfish gene’)
and Adam Smith (‘invisible hand’) suggest that humans simply make decisions on a personal and
individual basis. Smith’s suggestion is that such individual decisions are invisibly programmed to
benefit the whole community (in economic terms). However, Hardin’s (1968) classic paper uses
the example of the management of common land to describe how self interest leads to a
‘Tragedy of the Commons’. There are now many examples of instances where communal
participation has both destroyed the landscape (e.g. Diamond, 2005) and provided greater
sustainability (e.g. co-management regimes in developing countries and with indigenous
peoples).
Hardin’s metaphor along with other influential ideas such as the prisoner’s dilemma, and the
logic of collective action has been critiqued by the Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom (1990, and
Ostrom et al. 1994) who suggests that such theory cannot be easily applied in reality because of
the complexity of the problems and the interactions between people and renewable environ-
mental resources. Applying economic principles, Ostrom’s research indicates that individuals
working rationally for their own best interests may not always have the result of producing an
outcome that is not rational from a group point of view or would necessarily destroy group
resources such as fisheries, forests and freshwater systems. However, a number of impacts may
occur including resource depletion. Overcoming such problems requires the participation of
users of the resource in the establishment of co-operative institutions to manage the common
pool resource (CPR). Ostrom identifies eight ‘design principles’ from studies over many years in
a co-ordinated strategy to adopt contingent self-commitment of the users to resolve conflicts
and to alter the rules. This theory is important because landscape can itself be considered a
common pool resource, along with the components of the landscape (e.g. forests, rivers, pas-
tures). Many lands throughout the world are managed by local people who hold traditional
rights in common, but these are also being generally eroded as Queiroz (2006) shows in the
Portuguese uplands, and the result is impact on landscape dynamics, biodiversity loss and
changes in social and economic conditions. Ostrom’s theory is useful primarily in relation to
collective and participatory decision making about such resources. The key issue raised by this
kind of work is the importance of the relationships between the individual and the group.
Ostrom puts much emphasis on trust and communication to reach acceptable agreements to
share the resources. Learning and development are also important in individual and group
development which will result in improved CPR management, reflecting Tagore’s ideas behind
his rural development experiments of eighty years ago.
Empowerment is an important – although somewhat over-used – term which indicates how
communities gain the ability to act together and take on decision making. It is often used in
relation to decisions concerning local people and local landscapes and was particularly used in
relation to the Local Agenda 21 (LA21) initiative, which grew from the United Nations Con-
ference on Environment and Development (UNCED the ‘Earth Summit’, which took place in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (see UNCED 1992). Prior to global concern with climate change, this
was a key environmental initiative put forward as the way to achieve a new direction in local
government towards local sustainability. Many community landscape initiatives in the UK were
pulled under the LA21 umbrella. Empowerment was not seen as necessarily anti-traditional
democratic structures, but as a challenge to them and the objectives were to help open up the
decision-making processes and make those in power more accountable. Some of the earliest
useful examples of the empowerment of communities to participate in decisions with the aim of
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creating more sustainable residential landscapes from the 1970s include the middle-class residents
of Village Homes in California, USA (see Thayer 1994; Corbett and Corbett 2000) and
Byker in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The Byker design approach, led by Ralph Erskine, was
based on an understanding of the dynamics of the community and the strong connection local
people had with the physical landscape.2 A multi-disciplinary team of architects and landscape
architects set up office on the site and worked with the community to provide a network of
private, semi-private and public spaces which could be policed by the community and were
low-rise enough so that children could play within what was considered a safe distance from the
home.
Some of the interesting research questions here are about how you enable what is assumed to
be a group action that is beneficial to landscape and whether such action is actually more bene-
ficial than single or individual small actions which are assumed to be conflictual. There is no
clear evidence that a piecemeal approach is always less beneficial, but the general focus in the
literature is to gather examples of where communal and collaborative action provides solutions
to landscape change problems. Important considerations in this argument are:
landscape change scale (power over large landscape areas is often in the hands of more than
one person);
expertise (an individual may not have the kind of understanding of landscape issues that a
group can provide);
timeframes (landscape changes over many years).
Fischer (2000) suggests that although environmental or public interest groups have had con-
siderable impact in the past on policy and thus change in the landscape, they should not be
confused with citizens, from which they may be somewhat removed. The way landscape
becomes an enabler or focus for expression of power and protest is now apparent in the actions
that have been occurring recently in countries in the Middle East, as well as within Europe.
Miles (2010) identifies the importance of power and control within spaces which have osten-
sibly been used for democratic protest such as Trafalgar Square, but are on a closer examination,
spaces where protest can be controlled by ‘an enlightened state guarding what it perceives as the
public interest’ (Miles 2010). A recent analysis of the demonstrations that took place in a public
space in Seville indicated the importance of the development of interpersonal relations within
the crowd that enables democracy to exist (Canales 2011). Miles (2011) suggests the work of
Arendt indicates that ‘[i]n public, a growth to a mature self is possible through the self’s per-
ceptions of others and others’ perceptions of the self, and the continuous interaction, like par-
allel mirrors, this invokes.’ The landscape has long played the backdrop to the performance of
democratic rights, particularly direct action (e.g. ‘Swampy’ the environmental activist who was
involved in the so-called Third Battle of Newbury against the Newbury Bypass, UK, in
1996) and most recently the exertion of supposed human rights in the form of occupation of
land (e.g. the travellers at Dale Farm in the English Midlands, and protests around the world in
key collective spaces in capital cities).
The term ‘stakeholder’ has become commonly used to indicate those who have an interest or
stake in a particular issue. The literature on stakeholder participation in general is large and it is
suggested that stakeholders are primarily defined by their differences (Ventriss and Kuentzel
2005). It is suggested that by characterizing citizens as stakeholders, opposing ‘stakes’ in the
landscape are intimated and stakeholders are defined by whether they can see the view of others
who also hold a stake; a key problem being that not all stakeholders hold an equal stake
(see Roe forthcoming) and certainly not equal power within the decision-making process.
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Ventriss and Kuentzel (2005: 520) thus see the usual objective of achieving consensus as a
‘transitory mirage, contingent on the constellation of actors who happen to rise to the surface of
ongoing public conflict and debate’.
Social and landscape justice

This recent focus on democracy and justice in the landscape reflects wider issues of current
concern. Public participation in environmental decision making became a right in 1998 under
the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Convention on Access to
Information, Public Participation in Decision Making and Access to Justice in Environmental
Matters, commonly known as the Aarhus Convention. This provides for access to environ-
mental information, public participation in environmental decision making and access to justice
(UNECE, 1998). However, recent disillusionment with politicians and large institutions (banks
and newspapers), the so-called economic crisis, global warming and other problems test the
robustness of concepts of democracy in existing democratic structures and our willingness to
accept decision making based on representative democracy. Dewey (1954) describes how
democratic society has to rely on representatives to conserve and protect their interests and the
res publica or common weal, because not all people can be involved in all governance decisions.
Dewey’s analysis is one that seems particularly pertinent in the present political climate. He
suggests that there is a difference between people’s personal and private roles ‘[w]hen the public
adopts special measures to see to it that the conflict is minimized and that the representative
function overrides the private one, political institutions are termed representative’ (Dewey 1954:
76–7). While the focus of this chapter is not concerned with the wider structures of democracy,
Dewey provides an important and useful analysis of the structures of democratic institutions and
governance, both of which have relevance to the discussion relating to the demand and sig-
nificance of participatory movements in landscape. Olwig (2007) also refers to the res publica as a
political community shaped through discourse in his argument that a convention (such as the
ELC) does itself capture the idea of public discourse. He emphasizes the importance of delib-
eration in the process of agreement. In more recent work, Arler (2011) discusses the importance
of personal autonomy, which has been a basic tenet of western ideas of democracy since anti-
quity and whether aggregate values of those acting in the individual good can be as beneficial in
the landscape as those specifically acting in the common good. Arler, like Dewey, examines the
private–public interpretations of responsibility, and the implications for landscape management.
This is an important issue in participatory practice. Are those participating in the decisions
professing to act in their own or in the common good? Does the outcome of such involvement
make a difference in landscape sustainability terms? Arler’s analysis suggests there are considerable
difficulties relating to the importance of impartiality and respect for arguments.
His solution is for further deliberation, free exchange of arguments and mutual learning as the
key to problem solving and achieving democratic decision making on environmental issues.
Dewey emphasizes the need for better communication:
the ties which hold men together in action are numerous, tough and subtle. But they are
invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools of communication as never before. The
thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not
common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless,
seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance.
Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in
eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community.
(Dewey 1954: 142)
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There is still much criticism over the ‘top-down systems [which are] disguised under a gloss of
community-based rhetoric’ (Daugstad 2011: 77) in both developing countries and European
arenas. A difference has been identified between legitimization of an apparently democratic
process and ‘real’ participation in decision making over landscape.
Knowledge, communication and transdisciplinarity

Planning interests in participation primarily reflect governance and power aspects of public
involvement in decision making and environmental learning, while landscape interests include
those derived from more anthropological research areas such as the interaction aspects or that
related to the nature–culture debate, indigenous knowledge, meanings and significance. How-
ever, in relation to the implementation of landscape projects, landscape planning and design
depend on the character of social structures, institutions and systems which have control over
landscape change. Thus questions of democracy, governance and the individual versus the col-
lective responsibility for landscape change are under discussion and much of relevance can be
found in the planning literature. More participation and collaboration between professionals,
policy-makers and the public are seen as essential prerequisites for creating more sustainable
landscapes with an emphasis on partnership working, the theoretical basis for which comes from
collaborative planning such as Healey (1997) and the policy framework for the ELC. Fischer
(2000) relates how the practice of participatory research became prominent in developing
countries in the 1970s as a result of the failure of conventional approaches to relieve poverty
and address inequality. The Oxfam Handbook of Development and Relief (Eade and Williams 1995)
and Max-Neef’s (1992) ideas developed from experiences in the 1980s were both influential.
Research projects involved scientists, social scientists, agriculturalists, foresters and others work-
ing together with local people on agricultural projects. While, as Fischer (2000) notes, the
political objectives of participatory research have diminished somewhat, the label ‘participatory
action research’ is commonly used in relation to environmental projects where environmental
change with community participation is the objective. Fischer (2000: 191) raises important
questions in relation to knowledge in such research: ‘How do we analytically integrate empirical
and normative knowledge? How do we combine the professional’s scientific knowledge with
the citizen-client ordinary knowledge? … How do we actually know about the ability of clients
to collaborate intelligently in technical decision making?’
Some of the theoretical perspective for this work is based on social science which suggests the
desirability for researching with people as the subject rather than on people as the object of
research and that people have a right and ability to determine their own decisions in local
landscape matters, as they have the right and freedom to choose how they live their lives.
Sillitoe (2002) suggests that this bottom-up development paradigm has taken over from top
down ‘modernization’ approaches, characteristic of the political right, and ‘dependency’
approaches, characteristic of the political left within anthropological study. Sillitoe divides
the new approaches to the ‘market-liberal’ or ‘market-technical’ approach, associated with the
political right, and the ‘neo-populist’ or ‘populist-empowerment’ approach, associated with the
political left where local knowledge is given prominence in the participatory process. Both
feature technological and socio-political issues. Sillitoe expresses a view that is shared by many
working in the field: ‘participation, facilitated by outsiders, does not necessarily accommodate
cultural diversity but may rather encourage people to enter the contemporary capitalist world,
here sharing modernization’s assumptions, albeit shifting responsibility locally for decisions and
ultimately, project failure’ (Sillitoe 2002: 4). The diagnosis for these difficulties is differences in
values and priorities between the researcher and the researched. It mirrors the long-held tension
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in environmental projects between the ‘expert’ and the lay person, not only in relation to
expert versus lay knowledge, but also in relation to power in the political arena. Gorg (2007:
954, 964) develops a concept of ‘landscape governance’ that deals with the interconnections
between ‘socially constructed spaces … and the “natural” condition of place’, which he suggests
demands ‘intensive inter- and transdisciplinary co-operation’. While this begins to get at the
root of the lack of consideration of the holistic nature of landscape and emphasizes the local
rootedness of landscape issues, it still does not really acknowledge the importance of the
interactive aspect of humans and landscape.
Communicative action as the basis for more democratic decision making is much discussed in
the literature, particularly that based on Habermasian theory (Habermas 1989; Miles 2011). The
relevance for landscape is in decision making about landscape. However, the shape of the
landscape can be seen to facilitate non-verbal communication and Bridge (2005: 6) suggests
the importance of communication through performance and ‘bodies and gestures, as well as
speech and thought’. Arendt (1958) provides a picture of a public realm where interaction and
mutual perceptions are facilitated and ‘where a mature self arises and where freedom emerges
through the interruptive force of interaction’ (Miles 2010). Communicative thinking in parti-
cular has influenced the formation of transdisciplinary and collaborative theory and practice
where each party is assumed to share equal opportunity in the decision-making process. Fischer
notes that collaborative work has some resemblance to Glaser’s ‘grounded theory’ (Glaser and
Strauss 1967). Transdisciplinary practice is rapidly becoming highlighted as the desirable way of
working on participatory projects in many different disciplines (Sillitoe 2002; Tress et al. 2006;
Roe 2011). However, this raises questions, not only on whether disciplines have the skills to
work in different professional cultural contexts where group-working and communication are
essential, but also whether there is good evidence to show that better results are achieved from
such working. Each discipline, or each sector involved in landscape policy, research and practice
has a different framing of landscape, along with a different language. These can help reveal
the variety of emphasis that is given on different aspects of the landscape, but it can also make
achieving successful interdisciplinary working extremely difficult. There seems to be a long way
to go before such working is the norm. However, it is clear that the political context has much
to do with how participatory working has developed, and is still developing (see Roe 2007).
Toolkits and participatory methods

There are now innumerable guidelines for participatory working that have emerged from a
number of different disciplines. Much of this has been influenced by anthropological experience
which aims to reveal indigenous knowledge and has been adapted, for example, by planners
who are more concerned with democratic ideals of decision making. Participatory Rural
Appraisal (PRA) and associated methods provide a variety of ways to involve people in projects
(e.g. Pretty 1995; Eade and Williams 1995; Sillitoe 2002; Roe and Rowe 2007) and there have
been numerous similar initiatives such as parish mapping in England. The use of such tools
depends on the nature of the project and the characteristics of the community involved. In
landscape projects the most successful seem to be those that combine the landscape experience
with participatory methods such as participatory mapping, photograph mosaics etc. (e.g. the
Kent Downs Jigsaw Project; Bartlett 1999). Feedback is considered a particularly important part
of such processes, as is self-evaluation. The ability of communities to organize and run such
projects themselves with minimal involvement of ‘outsiders’ is regarded as an indicator of true
empowerment. There seems to be an ongoing thirst for the reporting and refinement of parti-
cipatory action research tools by both doctoral candidates and practitioners from various
346
disciplines who seem often to reinvent the wheel in the production of guides to participatory
working. This may be partly because much participatory research is not commonly published
within the standard academic literature (Fischer 2000) although the advent of the European
Landscape Convention encouraged the writing up of case study approaches primarily in relation
to participatory decision making (e.g. Jones and Stenseke 2011). In Swaffield and Deming’s
(2011: 40) review of research strategies, they identify a number of categories of engaged action
research in landscape architecture including ‘Pedagogy, Participatory Action Research, Service
Learning and Transdisciplinary Action Research’. Such research, they suggest, ‘is one of the
most controversial of research strategies because it accepts and legitimates the subjectivity of all
experience, including the experiences of learning knowing and doing’. This remark perhaps
captures why the recognition of the two aspects of participation within the development of
theory and practice-led tools is generally so thin.
Participation as an unstable process

In a review carried out ten years ago there appeared to be an assumption in the literature that
participation in landscape change decisions could achieve a stable and ultimately beneficial
outcome and that processes that are more inclusive would provide numerous other benefits in
terms of social structure and social learning (see Roe 2000a). However, the present global
environmental and social uncertainty has led to a rise in theories and methods which hope to
explain and deal with ambiguities. Resilience theory indicates that perhaps ‘basins of attraction’
or semi-stable states may be achieved in complex systems, but that natural processes will then
mean that these become unstable and further change occurs until a new semi-stable state is
achieved. This concept can be useful in various ways in relation to landscape. Responding to
such ideas suggests that participatory processes in landscape need to be flexible, long-term and
that a single solution may not be achievable; concepts of participation in landscape need to
develop in response to risk and uncertainty in both process and outcome, whether it is about
the interaction that communities and individuals have with landscape, or participation in
democracy, decision making and justice in the landscape.
Conclusions
There are a number of areas within research relating to landscape and participation where evi-
dence is still lacking. A gap would seem to be in the theoretical development of what is peculiar
to landscape participation and in the integration of the two key areas of interaction identified in
this chapter. For example, does participation actually provide more sustainable landscapes? As
awareness of the critical environmental impacts grow, particularly in relation to climate change
(see Holstein 2011), it becomes clearer that whole populations need to be galvanized into action
if any serious response is to make a difference to the speed of degradation in the landscape.
Continuing efforts to engage communities in taking action on this most critical of problems has
reinforced the understanding of the considerable problems that participation in landscape has
always had, that individuals have lost and continue to lose any connection with local landscape,
that communities often do not feel empowered to take action, and they have difficulty in
visioning a long term future for landscape where such action may have an impact.
Fischer suggests that citizen participation can contribute to environmental sustainability through
three goals: first to give meaning to the practice of ‘strong’ democracy, secondly to legitimize
policy development and implementation particularly by transforming ways of organizing and
knowing through collaborative process (see Healey 1997), and thirdly as a contribution to science
347
Maggie Roe
or knowledge. My own research has indicated there is still a considerable problem in relation to
knowledge deficit which can be described as a participation inhibitor. Such a deficit means that
the knowledge and the skills to participate do not presently lie within communities and thus
the potentially useful indigenous knowledge cannot be liberated, and interaction with (or
participation in) the landscape cannot be built. These, in addition to the constantly changing
structure and composition of communities, the changing values in planning practice, which
remain rooted in a protectionist stance in the UK, and a low potential degree of influence
(Holstein 2011; Selman 2004, 2007) provide rich areas for the researcher to examine.
Participation in landscape has to be seen in the wider context of participation in the political
system and in relation to cultural experience and understandings. The research focus on land-
scape is under considerable threat throughout the world from the political concentration on economic
growth and financial development where landscape tends to be regarded as a simple resource to
be exploited. While understandings of landscape participation can become more sophisticated
through cross-disciplinary working and experience from practice, there are many pitfalls to
transdisciplinarity and the remedies to these are not yet well articulated in theoretical perspectives.
The fashion is to gather examples of where communal action provides solutions for landscape
change problems, but do such solutions address really large scale problems such as climate
change enough to make a real difference? Are the timescales and problems with expertise really
addressed? What evidence is there that such initiatives actually provide more sustainable
communities or landscapes?
There seems to be a growing recognition that any system is imperfect and perhaps this is a more
useful starting point for examining participatory theory and practice. There is no ideal or single
solution and the key to considering landscape issues is about trying to deal with complexity.
While we need the outcomes that provide us with more sustainable landscapes and com-
munities, the process of participation has for some time been recognized as at least as important
and more difficult to measure (e.g. Margerum and Born 1995; Roe 2007). It is important when
researching landscape participation that both the aspects identified in this chapter are considered
in order to gain the more holistic understanding of landscape as a ‘nexus of community, justice,
nature and environmental equity’ proposed by Olwig (1996: 630–1). In doing so, the scholar
will find enormous opportunities to explore new areas of research interest.
Notes
1 Athens was a slave economy (Miles 2011) and the democracy demonstrated there can be described as
proto or partial. The relationship between democracy and the spaces that encourage or restrict demo-
cratic interaction is much discussed (e.g. Sennett 1995, 1999; Miles 2011). The idea that the Athenian
Pnyx was the seat of democracy is contested since it was a space where activity was highly disciplined;
a space for oratory where the public had to wait patiently to take turns to speak. The Agora was a
place of much more varied activity (commerce, legal affairs, religious rites and amorous encounters)
(Canales 2011). Here the free Athenians were expected to participate in everyday or ‘common’ activ-
ities as a duty, a privilege and an honour, with those not taking part described as ‘idiotis’. The term can
be translated in various ways to indicate someone who acted on his/her own (a private individual) and
was not concerned predominantly with public affairs; to denote an unskilled worker; to indicate an
individual, someone who was not educated as was a ‘citizen’.
2 See images by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, the Side Photographic Collection at http://www.amber-online.
com (accessed 10 May 2012).
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Design and planning for landscape
30
An ontology of landscape design
Susan Herrington
UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
What makes it landscape design?

What makes something a landscape design? Answering this ontological question reveals an
auspicious moment in the history of landscape architecture and Western aesthetics. During the
eighteenth century key features of landscape design emerged – that it was a category of artistic
practice in its own right (not to be confused with architecture or manual gardening), it
demanded creative vision beyond practical skills, and that it was conceived through drawing or
other representational means. In part this development can be attributed to philosophers in
Germany, France, and England who included landscapes and gardens in their speculations on
the nature of art. In fact, in 1790 Immanuel Kant added the practice of landscape gardening to the
modern system of arts, a genealogy of the fine arts that philosophers and art critics struggled to
define between 1680 and 1830 (Shiner 2001, 148). Kant’s division of the fine arts sought to
distinguish art from craft by classifying it as a product of imaginative genius, elevated from the
acts of manual labour, and with a purpose to spark our aesthetic appreciation.
Moreover, it is not surprising that Kant’s addition is predated by the appearance of designers,
such as William Kent (1685–1748), who were increasingly distanced from the toils of manual
gardening. Kent did not possess a great deal of horticultural knowledge; rather his genius
emerged through the process of drawing and a careful handling of a landscape’s formal prop-
erties. This is evidenced by one of his most effusive proponents, Horace Walpole. In Walpole’s
portrayal of Kent he surmises ‘the pencil of his imagination beflowed all the arts of landscape on
the scenes he handled. The great principles on which he worked were perspective, and light and
shade’ (Walpole 1894: 57). Thus, we can call something landscape design when it is a landscape
that has been intentionally arranged using the imagination and with some form of representation –
and this sense of the term owes much to these developments in the eighteenth century.
This is not to say that those engaged in the manual practice of gardening have not con-
tributed knowledge to landscape design. During the nineteenth century the Irish gardener
William Robinson introduced concepts, such as the ‘wild garden’, that were immensely popular
with landscape designers (Robinson 1994). Likewise, small-scale gardens also contributed ideas
to landscape design. John Dixon Hunt (2000: 11) argues that gardens function as the poetry of
landscapes. They can provide an experimental space where conventions of landscape design can
be tested and questioned. For example, during the twentieth century Gilles Clement (2006)
urged landscape designers to notice the movement of plant material in the garden, over their
fixed placement in specific locations. Indeed, Clement’s observations of the way plants move by
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themselves in the garden prompted us to appreciate the subtle and sometimes disquieting
narratives of survival that they make visible in their struggle for air, light, water and space.
With the professionalization of landscape architecture in the twentieth century, landscape
design became more codified as educational programs, apprenticeship requirements, and licen-
sing emerged to regulate practice. The act of design continued to be conveyed through two- or
three-dimensional mediums, while design processes, such as site analysis, became more system-
atized as they were influenced by the natural and social sciences. Regardless of these develop-
ments, a continual problem facing those designing landscapes has been its status as an art,
particularly given that designs were increasingly commissioned for public clients. Consider
Fredrick Law Olmsted, who is thought to be the founder of landscape architecture in the
United States. He struggled to have his artistic genius recognized, eventually quitting his posi-
tion at Central Park with a letter of resignation entitled The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves
from the Deep-laden Note-books of ‘A wholly Unpractical Man’ (Olmsted 1882).
Moreover, the physical material of landscapes confused matters regarding its status as
something designed. Landscapes often contain and are subject to natural processes that change
the designer’s original plan. There are also landscape designers who intentionally seek to
obscure the human act of design. These concerns deepened with the development of modern
landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Borrowing many of its tenets from modern
architecture, which distrusted allusion and stressed honesty of expression and truth of materials,
modern landscape architects considered how their work could be a true evocation of
modern times. This thinking is evident in the writing by one of its earliest proponents,
Christopher Tunnard. For Tunnard (1948), gardens and landscapes that appeared to be the act
of natural processes were not only old fashioned, but also deceiving. In his appraisal of the work
of Swedish Garden Architects at the First International Congress of Garden Architects in Paris
in 1937, he chided this Association for clinging to a romantic conception of nature when they
suggested that planting should ‘give the impression that they have grown there spontaneously’
(ibid.: 77). Tunnard cautioned, ‘the imitation of nature is a long perpetuated fraud’ (ibid.: 80).
Over the course of the twentieth century the extent to which designers thought that people
should recognize a landscape as designed varied wildly. Ian McHarg argued that design must take
its cues from the natural sciences and thus mimic natural processes; an idea that captivated many
landscape architects. On the other hand, Martha Schwartz built her career on the premise that
people should know that landscapes are designed and they should not confuse them with
nature. Alternatively, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe posited that people should be aware of a landscape’s
design through their subconscious. Studying the psychology of Carl Jung and Taoism, Jellicoe
sought to ‘sublimate’ his design work by ‘inserting within it an invisible idea that only the
subconscious could comprehend’ (Jellicoe 1983: 124). Likewise, with the work of J.B. Jackson
(1984) there was also a belief that studying vernacular landscapes, which are created by non-
designers and have accrued over time, would be useful to landscape designers because they
might reveal people’s unaware needs and desires.
Explanatory, normative, and resistant theories in landscape design

Conceptual thinking about landscape design has always borrowed from a range of disciplines –
geography, psychology, natural sciences – to name a few. Three types of theory – explanatory,
normative, and resistant – characterize this borrowing and its integration with design. These
theories subscribe to different value judgements and in turn they highlight both acceding and
competing beliefs about its merits. Of course these categories overlap, but what is important
356
here is to tease out the underlying justifications for certain design approaches because they are
powerful motivators for those designing landscapes.
Explanatory
Explanatory theories explain why something is the way it is and while they are often
employed to assess landscape design, they also feature in the design process. Classic examples are
evolutionary theories, such as Jay Appleton’s concept of ‘prospect and refuge,’ which links our
contemporary movement in space with our hunter-gatherer past. His theory implied that we
seek prospects in a landscape in order to see any imminent threats, and we look for refuge to
hide from them. Together, landscapes that offer prospect refuge are places where we can see
without being seen, undoubtedly important for survival. Appleton’s theory has been used to
evaluate landscapes, particularly where safety is paramount. However, it is frequently used in the
design of resort landscapes or for therapeutic purposes. For instance, a ‘dementia-sensitive’
landscape was built in New South Wales, Australia, for elderly residents. The designer incor-
porated ideas from prospect/refuge theory by creating an elevated picnic area that affords
prospect, but is also sheltered to provide refuge.
Typological classifications are another explanatory theory that facilitate the design process by
defining a set number of variables to design with. Primarily borrowed from the identification
and assessment of characteristics in landscape planning, landscape typologies help classify land-
scapes that share common traits. For example, William R. Moorish (1996), in Civilizing
Terrains: Mountains, Mounds and Mesas, illustrated numerous landscape archetypes in order to
build a vocabulary of universal types that link geological formations with contemporary spatial
patterns. This kind of descriptive typology has also been used in the process of landscape design.
Robert Dorgan, for example, created a series of small-scale wooden blocks of quarter-acre lots
that represented different rural landscape types, such as an orchard, and he used these blocks
with children to design landscapes (Figure 30.1).
Normative
Normative theories are based on what should be and they feature heavily in discourse regarding
landscape design. That landscape design should accommodate functions is a traditional example
of a normative theory and it was given great weight in modern landscape designs of the twen-
tieth century. Norman T. Newton proposed the most comprehensive account of how functions
should be addressed in landscape design. According to Newton ‘functions’ can be broken down
into two categories, Natural and Assigned. Natural Functions are biological, such as plants
filtering water, or mathematical, such as the changing angles of the sun, and they operate
without human intervention (Newton 1951: 113). Assigned Functions involve conscious human
intent, where ‘we assert our stature as designers’ (ibid.: 122) and he divides these into use-functions,
such as the concrete patio which is big enough for a table and chairs, and affective functions, such as
appreciating the scoring required to prevent cracks in a concrete patio as beautiful.
Preference theories are founded on the belief that landscape designers should know people’s
penchants for certain scenes and satisfy these likings in their design responses. Many preference
theories borrow from ideas forged in environmental psychology, which often enlists evolu-
tionary theories to explain preferences. For example, landscape designers relying on preference
theories often argue that we innately prefer certain landscapes because they recall an ecosystem
that contributed to our prehistoric survival. For example, the savannah is commonly invoked as
a landscape that people prefer because the sparsely treed grassland ecosystem allows for prospect
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Susan Herrington
Figure 30.1 Typological classification of landscape types for designing with children by Robert
Dorgan for the 13-acres competition, 2002. (Photo: author)
and refuge (Orians and Heerwagen 1992). While much of the research in environmental psy-
chology uses two-dimensional images to gain insights on three-dimensional landscapes, and its
critics charge that it omits cultural influences, designs that evoke a savannah-like image have
been imported into places as diverse as urban plazas and residential lawns (Kaplan et al. 1998).
Universal design or accessible design is another normative theory. It posits that a landscape’s
design should accommodate as many types of people as possible, with special emphasis on
designing landscapes that are accessible to people with limited mobility. It is forged from one of
the most powerful ideals in Western thought since the Enlightenment – that of natural right
and the moral assumption that there is and should be equality among all human beings. Given
its connection to rights, the instruments of justice have been used to reveal inequalities in
designed landscapes. The European Union recently moved to eliminate inequalities as a
response to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In the
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United States, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibited discrimination on the
basis of disability, and specifically noted equal access to new public accommodations and com-
mercial facilities as a mandate. This led to a spate of state and local regulations that mandated
ADA compliance in parks, public gardens, schoolyards, campuses, urban plazas, and other
environments that fall under the category of landscape design.
Design with nature, as espoused by Ian McHarg, stresses that landscape designers
should design in the same way that nature designs. This normative theory implies that if land-
scape designers employed ideas from scientific theories, such as Darwin’s natural selection, in
their design methodology the resulting landscape would evoke a natural condition – a state
without human intervention, greed, pollution, or anthropocentric sentiments. Unfortunately,
some of McHarg’s theories were built on a rather shaky understanding of nature and science
(Herrington 2010). For example, many things in the world that are the result of natural selec-
tion, the beautiful symmetry of a butterfly, appear to have been intentionally designed by an
intelligent being, but they are not. According to Richard Dawkins (1996: 21), ‘Natural selection is
the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no
purpose in view’. Thus, basing a conception of landscape design on an illusion of design poses
problems for those who really want to base their designs on science. Nonetheless McHarg’s charge
that we must design with nature was hugely popular and placed landscape design and planning at
the forefront of the environmental movement in the 1970s. Importantly, McHarg’s theories also
laid the groundwork for the normative theory of sustainability.
Given landscape designers’ work with natural elements and ecological systems, sustainability
has been a compelling dictate for many. While the exact definition of sustainability remains
elusive and variable among different groups, landscape architects were early adapters of its
language and missions; often citing the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report and Agenda 21, the Rio
Declaration on Environment and Development. Ecological and social sustainability also became
a core objective of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). When these
directives were conjoined with an awareness of global warming, every move in the process of
landscape design became value laden as it related to enhancing sustainability at local and global
levels. As a consequence, numerous performance standards and assessment packages were
developed to measure sustainability in landscape design. Movements such as Landscape Urbanism
were keen to exploit this association between landscape and ecology, galvanizing architects as
well in the sustainability cause. At the same time enthusiasm for sustainability also prompted the
formation of numerous subgroups among landscape designers, such as xeriscape associations,
each pledging to promote sustainability.
Resistance
Resistance is a type of theory that challenges the status quo. The philosopher John Dewey
thought that resistance was crucial to our experiences with art because it challenges what we
believe. For Dewey (1958: 60), if our beliefs are never tested and evaluated our ‘appreciation is
transient and overweighted with sentiment’ and ‘can lack significant meaning’. Landscapes that
are considered avant-garde are a type of resistant theory. Avant-garde landscapes defy conven-
tions in the practice of design and seek to challenge people’s conceptions of landscape design.
So it’s not surprising to find resistance in garden design, particularly at festivals and garden
shows, such as Les Jardins de Métis in Quebec, Canada, where visitors are confronted with tem-
porary gardens that use unusual materials to expand what a garden can be (Figure 30.2).
Some landscape architects have made resistance a central feature of their work. Claude
Cormier, for example, seeks to make connections between landscapes and culture that are often
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Susan Herrington
Figure 30.2 Hip Hop garden by Susan Herrington at Les Jardins de Métis in Quebec Canada,
2005. (Photo: Louise Tanguay)
overlooked by sentimental views of landscapes. Time-honoured definitions of landscapes hold

that they are remote scenes; however, they are also visceral and commercial, thus, driven by
market demands and acts of consumption. In Cormier’s design for Lipstick Forest at the
Montreal Convention Center, he created a grove of giant tree trunks rendered in resin to
mimic the forms of trees in a nearby park. Referring to the Montreal Lipstick Kiss logo, the
trunks were painted glossy shades of pink. Collapsing two seemingly distant phenomena, the
dignified beauty of trees with the allusive marketing of cosmetics, and the viscous qualities of
resin with that of lipstick, Lipstick Forest reveals that landscapes are not merely the distant
pleasures of sight, but also are subject to as much niche-marketing as lipstick.
Participatory design can also fall under the theory of resistance. During the 1960s many
landscape architects challenged the autocratic nature of design itself and the legitimacy of a
genius artist. They sought to make the process more democratic, particularly for disenfranchised
people. Invoking the normative theory that designers should know what people prefer and
satisfy these likings in the design, they attempted to integrate non-designers into the design
process in a myriad of ways, such as group drawings, mapmaking, and model building. To gain
insights from the public at large they enlisted methods borrowed from planning like mailed
questionnaires and focused interviews. Landscape designers have also imported consensus
approaches, such as the Delphi method, in which several rounds of questions are given to a
focus group (see Turoff and Linstone, 2002). Participants in the group respond by using index
cards, which are then shared. By using written instead of vocal responses, views are more
anonymous; limiting the influence that personality and social dynamics play in shaping decision-
making. Another approach, popular in the United Kingdom, has been Planning for Real
where community members build a model of their local landscape as the starting point for a
participatory design process.
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Evaluations of designed landscapes

In addition to this conceptual thinking in the process of landscape design, designed landscapes
have also been evaluated for their significance, use, and value to society. Like the design process,
assessments have borrowed from other disciplines, such as philosophy, art history, cultural stu-
dies, and the social and natural sciences. Interestingly much of this work has been instigated by
people from these disciplines rather than by landscape designers themselves.
Philosophy
Returning to the eighteenth century in England, landscapes were part of the philosophical
discourse concerning aesthetic appreciation. A key object of appreciation was taste and during
this time taste was thought to be variable and dependent upon cultural exposure, such as par-
ticipating in the Grand Tour. Thus, a person’s memory became key in the cultivation of taste
and landscapes were often judged for their ability to invoke the past for aesthetic experience.
Also, by modelling philosophical judgements of art, many aspects of landscape designs pre-
viously considered undesirable could now be prized for their ugly, melancholy, and even gro-
tesque attributes (Osborne 1970: 869). In fact ruins, classical and vernacular, featured heavily in
the landscape designs from this period because they were thought to spark associations with the
past. Unfortunately, the subsequent centuries saw a ‘decline of landscape as a paradigm object of
appreciation’(Carlson 2005: 542). Philosophical evaluations of landscapes in the twentieth cen-
tury fell under the umbrella of ‘environmental aesthetics,’ which for Allen Carlson includes not
only natural environments, but also our ‘various human-influenced and human constructed envir-
onments.’ (ibid.: 541). Nonetheless, there are some philosophers, such as Stephanie Ross (1998), who
have been speculating on the nature of our aesthetic engagement with gardens and land art.
Figure 30.3 Villa Lante, Bagnaia, Italy, 2010. (Photo: Susan Herrington)
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Susan Herrington
Art history
Evaluations of landscape design were also of interests to art historians. Art history, which
developed as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, sought to bring a scientific rigor
to the study of artworks from the past. Art historical practices relied on comparing works of a
similar kind as an indication of their formal qualities, style, and national origin. Marie Luise
Gothein was an early adapter of this method. In her seminal work of 1913, History of Garden Art
(Gothein 1928) she applied art historical analyses to gardens and landscapes from ancient times
to the nineteenth century. By using the framework of art history she was able to align the
evolution of landscape design with the development of stylistic categories, cultural expressions,
and nationhood that mirrored the art historical canon. Gothein selected examples to serve as
models for these groupings. For example, in her chapter on the Italian Renaissance and
Baroque, she states that Villa Lante, ‘stands next to the Villa d’Este in Tivoli in expressing the
true spirit of this period’ (ibid.: 268, Figure 30.3), a status it still enjoys today. In using this
method, she also evaluated the significance and relative artistic value of landscape designs com-
pared to others of comparable styles, time periods, and location. Years later, Newton published
Design on the Land (Newton 1971), which loosely follows Gothein’s narrative structure. How-
ever, undoubtedly influenced by Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture (Giedion
2008), Newton clothes this structure with detailed accounts of the spatial import of landscape
design from history, and the contribution of design to his spatial experience, an important
currency in modern landscape architecture. In his eight-page account of Villa Lante he marvels
at the ‘handling of space in a wonderfully comfortable rhythmic sequence from level to level,’
‘the imaginative water treatments’ and ‘detailed, excellence of scale’ (Newton 1971: 106–7). Sir
Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe also contributed significantly to this evaluative process in The
Landscape of Man (Jellicoe and Jellicoe 1975).
Social and natural sciences

The evaluation of landscape design has also been influenced by the social sciences and
natural sciences. Evaluations from the social sciences often pillory assumptions made by land-
scape designers regarding how people really use a landscape design. For example, William
Whyte’s (2008) classic study, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, examined how people actually
used outdoor public spaces. With direct observations and videotaping, he and his team per-
formed an exhaustive study of the detailed behaviours of humans in the urban landscapes of
New York City. The findings from this study, such as the fact that people enjoy sitting and
watching other people, greatly influenced the design of urban landscapes throughout
North America. Whyte’s study also inspired the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) a non-profit
planning and design organization. PPS has developed an on-line opportunity to post evaluations
of designed landscapes. People can promote landscapes and other environments to the category
of Great Public Spaces or the Hall of Shame. While the actual criteria are not clear, this form of
assessment has clearly taken advantage of the power of the Internet as part of evaluation.
With the development of sustainability, scientists and engineers have attempted to objectively
identify the ecological performance of designed landscapes. Consider the rooftop landscape on
top of Library Square in Vancouver. Designed by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, she intended to
create a beautiful visual pattern to be seen from the surrounding office towers and she also
sought to reduce the storm-water runoff of the building. Her landscape was composed of
16,000 blue and green fescue grass plugs in a meandering swath (Figure 30.4). The blue fescue
refers to the nearby Fraser River and outlying bands of the green fescue reference the River’s
alluvial grasslands. A third band was composed of 26,000 kinnikinnick ground cover plants
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Figure 30.4 Rooftop landscape by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Vancouver, Canada, 2011. (Photo:
Susan Herrington)
representing higher ground (Scott 2007: 88). The plants provided a tapestry of color and texture
that can be seen from the surrounding towers – and it also reduced runoff. From 2003 to 2004
engineers and Public Works and Government Services Canada monitored the runoff from
Oberlander’s rooftop landscape and found a 48 per cent reduction in runoff volume and a
reduction of peak flows during summer storm events’ (quoted in Velazquez 2008).
Cultural studies
During the 1980s designed landscapes received an unprecedented level of critique from cultural
geographers and other academics in the humanities. This was significant as they brought
methods such as Marx’s historical materialism and Freud’s notion of sublimation into their
interpretations of landscapes. Since landscape designs have often been the product of patronage
and have served to symbolize nature, they provided a rich subject for scholars who sought to
uncover their role in maintaining, elaborating, and concealing power, particularly as it related to
class interests and colonial dominance. Denis Cosgrove, for example, helped forge the bur-
geoning field of new cultural geography by employing Marxist analyses, and designed land-
scapes feature heavily in his writings. Consider Cosgrove’s interpretation of Victorian gardens as
an expression of colonial power: ‘Park and garden represented not so much control over land as
control over the very process of nature, a control which reached its clearest expression in the
ultimate “gardenesque,” the Victorian conservatory which displayed the green and blossoming
treasures of colonial territories’ (Cosgrove 1998: 236). Thus, with Marxist influences the beau-
tiful Cape cowslip in a Victorian garden, a plant introduced from Cape of Good Hope, was no
longer a flower to be appreciated simply for its pretty yellow bell-shaped blossoms, but as one
of the exploits of colonialism, serving as a sign of its far-reaching power and control.
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Susan Herrington
In a similar vein, Freud’s notion of sublimation has been employed in evaluations of land-
scapes and gardens. Sublimation is a process where unconscious or repressed desires, often sexual
in nature, are translated into more socially acceptable forms of cultural expression. These
expressions can take the form of dreams, allegories, art, or even designed landscapes. As in
Marxist thought, much emphasis is placed on uncovering hidden connotations of the designed
landscapes and the deeper intent of the designer. Dean MacCannell writes how walkways in a
landscape are more than what they appear. In his description of formal gardens, he notes ‘The
first type of power appears in landscape design in the form of walkways … It does not merely
represent power, it is power; it splits the landscape, keeping apart the elements on either side,
and assumes full directive power over those who follow it. It is also called a ‘drive.’ The grande
route, or superhighway, goes on endlessly like a dream of phallic omnipotence’ (MacCannell
1990: 94). In this sense, the straight walk becomes an encoded form of sexual power – of the
designer or the owner. According to Freud, this type of cultural expression is necessary because
if everyone acted on their desires and wants, instead of sublimating them, they would threaten
established social orders (Harrington 2004: 138).
Once landscapes were subjected to these cultural analyses, they became accomplices to a host
of hegemonic practices related to class, gender, race, ethnicity, and human rights. For example,
racial relationships in society are characterized by prejudice, segregation, and marginalization.
Since these relationships are spatial and territorial, landscapes have often helped maintain and
elaborate disparities in these relationships. Much of this scholarship has concerned housing
patterns in US cities, such as Los Angeles (Harris 2007), but landscape’s supporting role in
maintaining power relations has been identified in places of work, entertainment and leisure.
Consider the US playground movement, which began in the late nineteenth century. Early
playgrounds offer a wealth of knowledge regarding, class, ethnicity, human rights, race, and
gender. Regarding class, many of these spaces were created by the upper class to help and
improve the lower classes, which included children from immigrant families. In cities like
Boston, playgrounds were viewed as spaces where competing ethnic groups might reconcile
their difference through play (Cavallo 1981). Moreover, playgrounds were deemed essential to
protecting children’s rights to play and develop physically and socially – an extension of their
moral rights (Herrington 2011). As playgrounds were created throughout the country in the
early twentieth century, many of these spaces were segregated racially, with playgrounds for
non-African American children and separate playgrounds for African Americans. Lastly, while
male landscape architects, such as the Olmsted Brothers, have often been credited with
designing some of the first playgrounds in the United States, many early urban playgrounds
were made possible by women’s organizations (Spencer-Wood 1994).
Back to philosophy
In conclusion, promising approaches to evaluating landscape design involve the revival of their
role in aesthetic appreciation. During the past two decades, the sub-field of aesthetics has grown
rapidly within philosophy (Gaut and Lopes 2005) and there has been interest in applying the-
ories of aesthetic appreciation to contemporary, designed environments (Berleant and Carlson
2007). For example, an appreciation of ruins continues to play a role in the growing interest in
post-industrial landscapes. In the 1990s Peter Latz + Partners’ design for a 200-hectare park,
Duisburg North, integrated as part of their design the abandoned railway scaffolding, blast fur-
naces, and foundry walls of the defunct Thyssen steel factory, which occupied the existing site.
Treading upon the aesthetic category of the picturesque, which values subjective interpretations
over objective standards of beauty, these industrial remnants spark our memory and enhance
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our appreciation of the park. Indeed, Duisburg North demonstrates that the structures of the
industrial age are now distant enough in time and memory to serve as ruins (Herrington 2009).
References
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Carlson, A. (2005) ‘Environmental Aesthetics,’ in Gaut, B. and Lopes, D. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Aes-
thetics, London: Routledge, pp. 541–55
Cavallo, D. (1981), Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920, Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press
Clement, G. (2006) Le Jardin en movement, de la Vallee au champ via le parc Andre-Citroen, 5th edn, Paris: Sens et Tonka
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31
Landscape planning: reflections on
the past, directions for the future
Sue Kidd
UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
The European Landscape Convention (ELC) defines landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by
people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human
factors’ and landscape planning as ‘strong forward-looking action to enhance, restore or create
landscapes’ (Council of Europe, 2000, Article 1). Signed in Florence in October 2000, the
Convention reflects the now internationally recognised view that landscape is to be found and
planned for everywhere and that given the accelerating pace of landscape change (associated
with for example rising human population, growing levels of urbanisation, increasing resource
demands and human induced climate change) proactive, future orientated and democratically
informed landscape planning is urgently required. Although landscape design and landscape
planning have been regarded as being part of the same continuum informed by common
understandings, perhaps a key distinction that needs to be noted at the outset relates to matters
of scale. While the former tends to be focussed on the detailed delivery of landscape interven-
tion on a particular site, landscape planning is more strategic in its view and application and may
relate to whole neighbourhoods, cities or regions and increasingly to national and transnational
scales. Distinctions are also evident in terms of the types of intervention involved and methods
used, and in the types of client and their motivations (Stiles, 1994).
This chapter aims to provide a critical review of current landscape planning theory and
practice and to offer a reference point for future interdisciplinary research and research/practice
exchange in this field. The account is inevitably rather partial and personal. It comes from a
European spatial planning viewpoint and draws upon the author’s research and practice
experience of integrating landscape planning perspectives into the theory and practice of spatial
planning and vice versa.
In order to set the context for the discussion, the chapter starts with a sketch of the evolution
of landscape planning from the early twentieth century to the present day, highlighting shifts in
understanding and approaches over time. A key message here is that landscape planning has
evolved from being a fragmented and at times schizophrenic field of activity to one which now
can integrate a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives. This is followed by an
exploration of the opportunities and challenges presented by integrated landscape planning
approaches and associated research priorities with reference to protected area planning, urban
landscape planning and landscape governance.
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Landscape planning: past and future
A discipline of diverse perspectives

The clear definition of landscape planning set out in the ELC belies the long-standing and
ongoing debates related to its scope, with the history of landscape planning revealing quite
contrasting perspectives on what it entails. Although the existence of simple dualisms can be
overstated, there is no doubt that the field is rich in different interpretations (Seddon, 1986).
Key lines of division that have been the recurring focus of discussion include aesthetic v. eco-
logical; preservationist v. functional and productive; special area v. whole landscape; rural v.
urban; qualitative v. quantitative; and expert v. participatory interpretations, with the balance in
landscape planning theory and practice shifting over time. The different disciplinary inputs to
the development of landscape planning have been a stimulus to these debates and it has attrac-
ted a surprisingly wide range of interest (Conrad et al., 2011). Arts and social science con-
tributions have come from areas such as landscape design, human geography, anthropology,
history, archaeology and public health. Here the principal focus has been the aesthetic, cultural,
social and personal significance of landscapes and associated concerns to protect and develop
landscape beauty, and the cultural, historic, social and personal value of landscapes. Natural
science contributions have also been prominent including physical geography, earth sciences,
biological sciences and ecology. Here the concern traditionally centred upon the protection of
species, habitats and significant geological features, but more recently has extended to a wider
concern for ecosystem functioning and ecosystem health. As we shall see below, inputs from
town and country planning and landscape ecology have been particularly significant in the
theoretical and methodological development of the discipline.
Nineteenth-century roots
Implicit in the ELC is the idea that landscape planning is a form of publically orientated activity
undertaken in support of wider societal objectives. If this is taken as a key characteristic, then its
modern foundations lie in the development of anti-urban sentiments that emerged in western
Europe and North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Influenced by
the idealised notions of the ‘rural idyll’ and associated aesthetics presented by the Romantic
Movement, together with developing concern for public health, two interconnected areas of
landscape planning began to evolve.
The first was focussed upon rural areas and saw the development of preservationist approa-
ches to landscape planning. These sprang from the new appreciation of natural beauty and
natural history inspired by the Romantics. In Britain, for example, the works of John Ruskin
and William Morris were paralleled by a growing band of influential and well connected
interest groups, such as The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty
(now the National Trust) and the Council for the Preservation of (now the Campaign to Pro-
tect) Rural England (Newby, 1988; Bishop and Phillips, 2004). These aroused public concern
about the rapid encroachment of the countryside by urban development and lobbied for new
legislation to protect the natural beauty and natural history of special sites and places for the
quiet enjoyment of the wider population. Their efforts culminated in the landmark National
Parks and Access to the Countryside Act of 1949, which saw the establishment of the frame-
work of protected area designations and which is still the focus of much UK landscape planning
activity today. This included the designation of National Parks and smaller Areas of Outstanding
Natural Beauty where the principal concern was (and still is) stringent control of development
to preserve natural beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest and National and Local Nature
Reserves where designation relates to particular nature conservation considerations. In the
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Sue Kidd
United States, the works of Thoreau and activities of John Muir among others similarly
reflected growing disenchantment with development patterns of the day, and a particular con-
cern about the destruction of untamed wilderness through rapidly expanding forestry and
farming activity. In response the world’s first national parks were created here and the particular
style of landscape planning that emerged for these areas set the tone for similar initiatives in
many parts of the world. These were founded upon notions of environmental stewardship and
an aesthetic appreciation of the sublime qualities of apparently untouched lands, which it was
felt should be preserved in their pristine state by excluding human activity as far as possible
(Selman, 2010).
The second strand of early landscape planning was urban focussed and saw the development
of a proactive urban greening tradition flowing from a concern about the unsatisfactory state of
the towns and cities that expanded rapidly from the nineteenth century onwards in the wake of
increasing industrialisation and population growth. A series of urban surveys of the period
shocked the middle classes with reports of intense overcrowding, lack of light and inadequate
sanitary arrangements, poor health and low life expectancy, together with all the social ills that
accompany such situations. These prompted the introduction of planning controls to ensure
acceptable standards of new development, and initiatives aimed at urban improvement became
popular. In this context connections were increasingly being made between health and access to
light and fresh air and to the importance of opportunities for exercise presented by green open
space. As early as 1682 the benefits of rus in urbe were being advocated in William Penn’s
‘Greene Country Towne’ plan for Philadelphia. By the mid-eighteenth century London’s
parks were labelled as the ‘lungs of London’. However, few cities were so fortunate in their
provision of open space and even in London population growth was making the historic legacy
of the royal parks inadequate. So developed the urban greening movement which saw the
creation of new public parks in towns and cities across Europe and North America (Ward
Thompson, 2011).
Early twentieth-century pioneers

Pioneers of the new discipline of town and country planning were among the first to indicate
ways in which these twin strands of early landscape planning might come together, and also to
develop practice that helped to inform landscape planning methodology. Ebenezer Howard’s
Garden City concept, set out in his classic text of 1898 To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
(Howard, 2010), remains a useful starting point for reflection on landscape planning approaches.
Based upon an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the town and the country, Howard
presented a vision for future development which, he argued, would bring the best attributes of
each together in the form of carefully planned green and spacious new garden cities. These
would be surrounded by a ‘green belt’ where development would be restricted and the needs of
the community in terms of farming, forestry, water and outdoor recreation would be provided
for. His vision therefore connected rural and urban planning and combined preservationist and
interventionist approaches in both contexts with the quality of the landscape setting acting as
the essential backdrop to his proposals. Far from being a blueprint or master plan, his ideas were
highly conceptual and pointed towards a general direction for development rather than indi-
cating its precise form, allowing for interpretation to fit particular contexts. Such thinking was
complemented by Patrick Geddes, another pioneer of the period, who was significant in the
promotion of regional scale planning, planning methodology and modern ecology (Geddes,
1915). Geddes believed that a detailed understanding of a region’s environmental context
should be an essential part of the panoramic regional surveys upon which plans for future
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development should be based. Interestingly his efforts to put his ideas into practice in various
parts of Scotland saw not only some of the first detailed scientifically based vegetation surveys in
Britain, but also included innovative methods of more qualitative assessment of an area’s aes-
thetic and cultural attributes drawing upon the interests and insights of an enthusiastic band of
survey volunteers (Allen, 1976). Other early applications of these ideas and approaches are evi-
dent in Olmsted’s ecologically informed ‘emerald necklace’ of parks and wetlands in Boston,
and in Patrick Abercrombie’s famous Greater London Plan of 1944, which, following a sys-
tematic landscape survey, provided for the establishment of the London Green Belt and the
development of a network of parks, green spaces and river corridors which continue to be key
features of planning for the city today.
Landscape ecology inputs

By the mid-twentieth century landscape planning was maturing as a distinct area of activity
within the wider field of landscape architecture (Stiles, 1994), and the subsequent decades have
seen major strides forward in its conceptual basis and in its methods. Two important areas of
input are highlighted here. First, Ian McHarg’s (1969) seminal work Design with Nature
heralded a new era of scientifically informed landscape planning (e.g. Hackett, 1971; Hough,
1984; Laurie, 1986) and the development of landscape ecology as an important field in its own
right (Forman and Godron, 1986). Landscape ecology has drawn upon an increasingly sophis-
ticated understanding of ecosystem functioning and the role of human activities in shaping
landscape change which has been revealed by the application of systems thinking and the
rapid development of information technology including GIS. It has exerted a powerful influ-
ence on the theory and practice of landscape planning because it can both explain the reasons
behind the continuing decline in ecosystem health and provide clear principles for more effec-
tive ecosystem protection, management and improvement. In so doing, it has spurred experi-
mentation with normative models of landscape planning which focus upon achieving defined
goals based on notions of how things ‘ought to be’ from an ecological health perspective.
Hawkins and Selman have identified three normative approaches which they consider to be in
widespread use:
the landscape stabilisation approach, which emphasises the role of landscape elements in con-
serving and enhancing biodiversity and scenery, and places particular emphasis on their
‘hygienic’ functions such as water and soil protection, air purification, and soil erosion
control;
the focal species approach, which seeks to create conducive environments for key species and in
so doing protect the ecological dependency webs with which they are associated. Both these
approaches place particular emphasis on defragmentation of the landscape. Connectivity is
also an underlying principle here;
in the greenway approach, connectivity becomes centre stage. Here ecological understanding is
woven together with social and economic considerations and a multi-functional view of
landscape planning emerges with greenways being promoted not just for species dispersal
and hydrological purposes, but also for recreational, visual appreciation, pollution buffering,
and heritage and cultural resource protection (Selman, 2006).
Landscape ecology has played an important role in promoting more rigorous landscape planning
methods in other areas too. On the one hand, it has encouraged more systematic data collection
(for example in terms of landscape character mapping) and innovative use of new technology
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Sue Kidd
including modelling to support a more evidence based approach to landscape planning. On the
other, it has encouraged the development and application of more systematic methods of
planning analysis and appraisal such as Environmental Impact Assessment and Landscape Impact
Assessment and systematic approaches for determining the focus of landscape management
action (e.g. Warnock and Brown, 1998; Wood and Handley, 2001).
Collaborative planning inputs

However, while landscape planning has become an increasingly scientifically informed activity,
the latter years of the twentieth century saw growing public distrust of ‘experts’ and criticism of
rationalist approaches to planning more generally, in line with the wider attack on modernism
and the development of postmodern lines of thought. These highlight the inherently value-
driven and therefore political nature of any form of public planning activity and have prompted
calls for greater public engagement and the adoption of more deliberative and collaborative
approaches to decision making. Such perspectives have profoundly affected the development of
spatial planning theory and practice (Healey, 1997; Innes and Booher, 1999) and have been
reinforced by insights from Implementation Theory (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Berman,
1980; Weale, 1992). This highlights the importance of considering implementation issues at all
stages of the planning process and emphasises the link between levels of public engagement in
planning and effective implementation. These ideas have had particular resonance for land-
scape planning and not just for ethical and implementation reasons. As we have seen, landscape
planning embraces concerns that extend beyond ecosystem health and that aesthetic, cultural,
and social motivations are also deeply embedded. A key concern is peoples’ enjoyment of and
engagement with landscapes and from this perspective, participatory approaches to landscape
planning can be regarded as fundamental for at least two reasons. Firstly they facilitate under-
standing of the different ways in which people view and use landscapes and clarify what their
needs and aspirations are for particular places. Secondly they provide a mechanism for public
engagement and re-engagement with landscapes, and can foster associated social learning and
capacity building (Selman, 2006). As a result, collaborative approaches have also become firmly
embedded in landscape planning theory and practice and this is reflected very clearly in the
European Landscape Convention, which has been formulated as a response ‘to the public’s wish
to enjoy high quality landscapes and to play an active part in the development of landscapes
(Council of Europe, 2000, preamble). The ELC requires signatory states to establish procedures
for the participation of the general public, local and regional authorities, and other parties with
an interest in the definition and implementation of the landscape policies’ (Council of Europe,
2000, Article 5). As with landscape ecology, collaborative planning ideas have also spawned
developments in landscape planning methodology. These include methods for stakeholder
mapping and analysis and structured approaches to partnership development and partnership
working, as well as imaginative engagement techniques such as storytelling and various methods
associated with visualising landscape futures (Jacobs, 2011).
Integrated approaches to landscape planning

From the above discussion it is apparent that landscape planning today benefits from a rich
amalgam of different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Figure 31.1 provides an
overview of some of the key inputs to the more integrated view of landscape planning
that pertains today. The following discussion develops this notion of integration further and
highlights some of the opportunities and challenges presented by the adoption of more
370
Figure 31.1 Theoretical and Methodological Traditions Encompassed within Landscape Planning.
integrated landscape planning ambitions before illustrating what these might mean for practice
and research related to protected area planning, urban landscape planning and landscape
governance.
The arguments in favour of integrated approaches to landscape planning have long been
voiced but they have gained increasing support from both landscape ecology and town and
country planning where spatial planning perspectives now hold sway, as well as from other
arenas. In particular they have been encouraged by an intensifying focus upon sustainable
development which is now, as revealed in the preamble to the ELC, the overarching objective
of most landscape planning activities. This integrated view is reflected in various conceptual
models of landscape (see Figure 31.2) that were produced in the early years of the twenty-first
century (e.g. Countryside Council for Wales, 2002; Swanwick and Land Use Consultants,
2002; Countryside Agency, 2006) and in the development of ideas related to landscape multi-
functionality (Brandt et al., 2000; Gallent et al., 2008) and ecosystem services (Haines-Young
and Potschin, 2008) (see Table 31.1).
The impact of such thinking is potentially very significant for the future of landscape plan-
ning. Firstly, it helps to move beyond the divisions that have been a feature of the activity for
much of the twentieth century and which have arguably dissipated its influence in the world by
presenting confusing and at times conflicting messages. Secondly, it provides a firm grounding
for more coherent and ambitious landscape planning approaches. Although there are recent
signs of some retrenchment in the research community (Conrad et al., 2011), there is also
encouraging evidence of a renewed vigour and sense of experimentation in this regard, illus-
trated for example in the uptake of green infrastructure planning in the UK and elsewhere
(Mel, 2008), development of socio-ecological frameworks for planning sustainable landscapes in
Australia (Bohnet and Smith, 2007) and in the ideas related to landscape ecological urbanism
put forward by Steiner (2011). However, implementing an integrated approach to landscape
planning also brings its challenges as experience from spatial planning indicates (Kidd, 2007).
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Sue Kidd
Figure 31.2 Landscape as an integrative concept

Source: Swanwick and Land Use Consultants, 2002.
Importantly it extends beyond matters of substance to include matters of governance and issues
related to sectoral, territorial and organisational relationships. Table 31.2 provides a framework
for considering what an integrated approach to landscape planning may mean from this
perspective.
Firstly, it implies better sectoral integration, including joining-up economic, social and envir-
onmental policy agendas. Too often it seems that landscape planning is pursued in isolation of
other, more politically prominent policy areas and, potential conflicts and synergies are given
insufficient attention. To encourage this joining-up inter-agency integration is required
between public, private and voluntary sector organisations and individuals who use and shape
landscapes in different ways. In the UK context, for example, organisations like the National
Trust and the Royal Society for Protection of Birds are increasingly large land owners and they
are often at the cutting edge of managing landscape change. They are therefore in a good
position to inform landscape policy development and also to deliver landscape policy objectives.
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Table 31.1 Multi-functionality as an integrative concept
Brandt et al. 2000 Gallent et al. 2008 Hanines-Young and Potschin, 2008
Multiple Functions of Landscape Multi-functional Green Infrastructure Ecosystem Services
Ecological Functionality Ecological Functionality Regulating Services

‘an area for living’ for human Carbon Sink Air Quality, Climate, Disease,
and non-human life Pollution Control Erosion, Fire, Natural Hazard, Pest,
Air Conditioning Pollination, Water Flow, Water
Micro-climate Control Quality
Flood Prevention
Soil Protection Supporting Services
Wildlife Refuge Nutrient Cycling
Wildlife Corridor Primary Productivity
Sediment
Soil Formation
Economic Functionality Economic Functionality Provisioning Services

‘an area for production’ Direct and indirect setting for Fibre
business activity Food
Direct and indirect setting for Freshwater
property Genetic
Direct and indirect employment Medicinal
Other
Socio-cultural Functionality Socio-cultural Functionality Cultural Services

‘an area for recreation and Formal and Informal Recreation Aesthetic
identification with socio-cultural Promotion of physical and Heritage
attributes’ mental well-being Jobs
Interaction and community Recreation
Historical Functionality cohesion Scientific
‘an area for settlement and Education Spiritual
identity which offers a sense of
socio-cultural continuity’
Aesthetic Functionality
‘an area for experiences’
Table 31.2 A framework for integration in landscape planning
Sectoral Cross-sectoral Integration of different public policy domains

Integration
Inter-agency Integration Integration of public, private and voluntary sector activity
Territorial Vertical Integration Integration between different spatial scales of planning

activity
Horizontal Integration Integration of planning activity between adjoining areas or
areas with some shared interest
Organisational Strategic Integration Integration of planning strategies, programmes and initiatives

Operational Integration Integration of delivery mechanisms in all relevant agencies
Disciplinary/Stakeholder Integration of different disciplines and stakeholders
Integration
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Sue Kidd
Equally, the framework draws attention to issues related to territorial integration including vertical
integration between different levels of plan making. This is a particularly problematic issue for
landscape planning where plans may be very informal and where significant weaknesses and
gaps in the statutory landscape planning hierarchy may exist. Similarly, horizontal integration
involving the alignment of landscape planning activities between neighbouring areas is impor-
tant, for example to ensure consistent delivery of catchment management measures or coherent
greenway networks. Finally, there is a need to promote better organisational integration. This
means not only achieving greater consistency and synergy in the landscape content of plans,
but also ensuring that different organisations play their part in the delivery of landscape
planning objectives by adopting appropriate day to day working practices. It also means
encouraging different disciplines/stakeholders to come together to develop a better appreciation
of varying perspectives on landscape matters and develop a stronger consensus about future
directions. The challenges involved are clearly immense and these together with some of the
opportunities to make positive progress in the current context are now illustrated.
Integrated landscape planning for protected areas

As discussed previously one of the earliest landscape planning interventions was designation of
protected areas covering places (mainly in rural areas) judged to have ‘special’ landscape qualities
either for aesthetic/cultural or ecological reasons, or both. Although such approaches have
generated a considerable body of criticism over the years, they tend to be enshrined in law and
attract significant levels of popular support at least from some quarters. As a result they have an
enduring quality and indeed are still growing in number and extent as a result of international
obligations and activities, such as UNESCO’s rolling programme of World Heritage Site
Designations and responses to the United Nations Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), as
well as through national- and local-level initiatives. Interestingly landscape protection is a core
feature of the ELC. Advocates of this approach, argue that the scale and pace of human devel-
opment is leading to both a homogenisation and fragmentation of landscapes and that protective
designations are a legally defendable way of holding the line and therefore of passing on cultural
and biological diversity to future generations. On the other hand critics of the approach argue
that such designations fail to recognise that landscape is fundamentally a dynamic entity and that
protective measures designed to preserve what is there now are deeply flawed for a number of
reasons. First, given that today’s landscape is in itself the product of change over millennia, why
should the current state be regarded as more worthy of retention than any previous state? In
relation to biodiversity for example, would it not be more appropriate to look back to an earlier
era and recreate the ‘natural’ habitats that once occurred in an area rather than maintain
potentially biologically impoverished landscapes that are the product of ways of life that are
economically and socially redundant? This approach is being advocated as a response to the
enhancement and restoration objectives of the CBD. However, approaches based on retention
of the present or recreation of the past can both be accused of displaying a Disneyland or
‘zoolike’ qualities. Not only are they likely to contribute to a loss of meaning (Rackham, 1986)
or authenticity as they become increasingly divorced from the economic and social realities of
the present era, but they are also likely to incur considerable effort and cost at holding the forces
of change at bay. Equally significant, understanding derived from landscape ecology reveals that
a policy which focusses upon the protection of ecologically rich islands is likely to be doomed
to failure without supporting policies in the wider environment.
However, despite the arguments for and against protected area designations and their
limitations in terms of more integrated landscape planning perspectives, it seems that that they
374
are here to stay and importantly, in the context of this chapter, will continue to be a key focus of
legally required landscape planning activity. If this is to be the case, then it is important
that the opportunity is grasped to showcase approaches that exemplify how integrated landscape
planning perspectives can deliver more sustainable patterns of development. They are particu-
larly well placed to do this as the special emphasis on landscape considerations implicit in their
designation, means that there is scope to demonstrate what a landscape informed planning
strategy for an area might look like. It is very rare that landscape (as opposed to economic
growth, for example) is used as the grounding for plans in other contexts at the present time.
An appreciation of this ‘showcasing’ role is already evident and there are some helpful
examples of more holistic and integrated plans for designated landscapes emerging. For example,
national parks are a fairly recent designation in Scotland and it is informative to contrast their
statutory purpose with the more longstanding national parks in England and Wales. It can be
seen from Table 31.3 that Scottish national parks and their associated plans are not only
required to be cross-sectoral in focus by integrating environmental and economic and social
concerns, but also to encompass a broad view of environmental considerations. The objective of
sustainable resource use is significant because it makes sustainability considerations a statutory
requirement for UK national park practice for the first time. This is reflected in the content of
the Cairngorm National Park Plan which covers issues related to energy, water and air alongside
more traditional areas of concern. The plan starts from a broadly defined landscape perspective
and sets out a wide-ranging framework for many aspects of life in the park which interconnect
with its central concern with landscape quality (see Table 31.4). Similar examples of holistic,
landscape led plans for designated areas are also emerging in the UK’s Areas of Outstanding
Natural Beauty such as the Wye Valley AONB (Gallent et al. 2008).
So there is some evidence that more integrated landscape planning approaches are being
developed for designated landscapes but what other ideas might such strategies incorporate
taking account of the discussion above? Two examples are put forward.
Taking the ELC definition of landscape planning as a starting point, it can be argued that it is
important at the outset to establish an orientation that is based upon strong forward-looking
action that addresses economic, social and environmental change. In protected areas such an
orientation may seem out of step with the spirit of the designation and particular efforts may be
needed for stakeholders to engage with this idea and think creatively about the future, critically
assessing the balance to be struck between protection and landscape change. Various strands of
landscape planning research, however, indicate potentially useful paths to explore. One that
seems to merit further attention is the use of landscape history as a tool for forward planning.
Marcucci (2000) for example argues that landscape planning tends to underplay the dynamism
Table 31.3 Statutory purpose of national parks in the United Kingdom
England and Wales

To conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage;
To promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities (of the parks) by
the public.
Scotland
To conserve and enhance the natural and cultural heritage of the area;
To promote sustainable use of the resources of the area;
To promote understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of the area by the public;
To promote sustainable economic and social development of the area’s communities
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Sue Kidd
Table 31.4 Strategic objectives of the Cairngorm National Park plan 2007
Conserving and Enhancing the Park
Conserving and Enhancing the Natural and Cultural Heritage

Landscape, Built and Historic Environment
Biodiversity
Geodiversity
Culture and Traditions
Sustainable Use of Resources

Energy
Water
Air
Integrated Land Management

Farming and Crofting
Forest and Woodland Management
Moorland Management
Deer Management
Fisheries Management
Living and Working in the Park
Sustainable Communities
Economy and Employment
Housing
Transport and Communications
Waste Management
Enjoying and Understanding the Park
Sustainable Tourism
Outdoor Access and Recreation
Learning and Understanding
of landscape and often fails to set current planning activity against the backcloth of ecological
stages, cultural periods and key stone processes related to the specific landscape setting. An
examination of landscape history he suggests has the potential to improve description, predic-
tion and prescription in landscape planning, and be a focus of more meaningful exchange with
citizens about future directions for protected areas. An alternative and possibly complementary
approach would be to focus upon landscape aesthetics and use an exploration of the different
aesthetic appreciations of stakeholders (for example scenic and ecological aesthetics) as an entry
point for understanding the multi-functionality of places and for exploring alternative perspec-
tives. Authors such as Meyer (2008), Jacobs (2011) and Jorgensen (2011) suggest that aesthetic
appreciation is a neglected area in landscape planning and that a focus upon this has the
potential to challenge, expand and alter conceptions of beauty and open up new aesthetic
appreciations reflecting current understanding of future circumstances. These might include for
example new aesthetic appreciations related to necessity, resilience or sustainability. Given
that aesthetic appreciation is often central to the designation of special landscapes this seems like
a particularly fruitful avenue to explore further (see Chapter 9 in this volume for a fuller
discussion of landscape aesthetics).
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Integrated landscape planning for urban areas

In contrast to the strength and continuity of landscape planning for designated (mainly rural)
landscapes, activity related to ‘urban greening’ has had a much more chequered history (Spirn,
1986). A low point seems to have been reached in the early 1970s, reflected in Nan Fair-
brother’s seminal text on landscape planning New Lives, New Landscapes. Here she sets out a
comprehensive vision of landscape planning for rural uplands, rural lowlands and the urban
fringe but she says ‘the built up cities are not discussed, this is the realm of town planners and to
join in their internecine battles is to perish on alien ground’ (Fairbrother, 1972: 58). Thankfully,
this position has not been shared by all landscape planners and those with landscape ecology
interests have been particularly influential in gaining recognition of the value of greenspace and
blue space networks within urban areas (e.g. Hough, 1984; Spirn, 1984) and re-establishing
policies for their protection and enhancement as a core feature of urban planning (EU, 1994;
Pauleit, 2003; Birch and Silver, 2009). This work has gone from strength to strength, with
research on multi-functionality and ecosystem services translated into notions of green infra-
structure presenting an increasingly coherent and persuasive case for effective planning of these
critical urban assets (Benedict and McMahon, 2002). Reflecting back on the framework of
integration in landscape planning set out in Table 31.2, there is much to be praised in these
developments. They have been highly successful in promoting a cross-sectoral approach by
indicating the ways in which landscape planning can contribute to ecological (Ahern, 2007),
climate change (Gill et al., 2007), social cohesion (Benedict and McMahon, 2006), health and
well-being (Tzoulas et al., 2007) and other agendas. They have also achieved some degree of
organisational integration with support from different disciplinary groupings increasingly evident
(e.g. Frumkin, 2001; Gibson et al., 2003). In addition, examples of more holistic multi-
functional approaches to urban greenspace design and management are beginning to emerge,
although there is still a long way to go in this regard (Landscape Institute, 2009). There are also
some good examples of territorial integration illustrated by efforts to join up greenspace net-
works, across local authority divides particularly at the city region level such as the Glasgow and
Clyde Valley Green Network and the Green Infrastructure Strategy for Leeds City Region.
However, in Britain this is perhaps one of the weaker areas of achievement so far, with links to
planning for the urban fringe and wider countryside often poorly developed, and com-
plementary regional, national and transnational landscape planning often weak or absent. The work
of the University of Massachusetts in proposing an ideal network of greenways and greenspaces
for the USA shows what could be achieved here (Fabos, 2004). So how can this work on
multifunctional urban greening be built upon drawing on the breadth of experience and
insights that landscape planning can now bring to bear. Again two examples are put forward.
The first relates to the matters of landscape character and the potential for greater sensitivity
to landscape diversity, distinctiveness and cultural heritage within urban areas. This tends to be a
neglected aspect of urban greenspace planning at present. It is notable, for example in the UK
context that landscape characterisation work is as yet very crude for urban areas in comparison
to the position for rural landscapes. This situation is not unique to the UK, with similar situa-
tions being reported in areas as diverse as Taiwan (Yeh and Huang, 2009) and Norway
(Swensen and Jerpasen, 2008). Conclusions from the Taiwan research indicate that urban
development can significantly alter landscape patterns and landscape diversity and suggests that
sensitivity to these matters is important from an ecological perspective. The case study research
in Norway indicates that while municipal planners were aware of specific cultural objects, there
was little appreciation of cultural distinctiveness of the wider environment and that cultural
landscapes were seldom recognised as a resource in their own terms. Without this understanding
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it was concluded that cultural interests tended to lose out to more tangible and functional areas
of landscape concern such as recreation and nature conservation. Fuller engagement with the
distinctiveness of urban landscapes therefore seems to be a key area for future development. A
second area concerns developing the potential of urban greenspace as a productive and working
environment. There is already a groundswell of interest and activity related to the promotion of
urban agriculture (Viljoen et al., 2005) including thinking creatively about the use of city
roofscapes for this purpose (Hui, 2011). Similarly interest in the green energy generation
potential of cities is growing (Girardet, 2004). Imaginative connections are also being made
between this potential and concepts of leisurely work for ageing and economically faltering
societies such as Japan (Yokohari and Bolthouse, 2011). From many perspectives therefore this
seems another very timely area for future work.
Integrated landscape planning and governance

Designated landscapes and to a lesser extent urban areas are two examples of where landscape
planning has gained a foothold and where there is a relatively solid basis for applying the inte-
grated landscape understanding and practices that have developed over the past 100 years.
However, landscape planning generally remains something of a ‘Cinderella’ activity and with a
few notable exceptions, such as in Germany and the Netherlands, it is not well integrated into
statutory planning processes. For example, the conclusions of a review of UK experience
undertaken in the late 1990s (Punter and Carmona, 1997) remain broadly reflective of current
UK statutory planning practice. Although there are signs of a supportive, more integrated and
broad based view of landscape planning matters in government policy, the application of this
thinking is increasingly the responsibility of local authorities and here despite some good work
on local landscape character assessment for example, there is patchy evidence of landscape per-
spectives being formally incorporated into statutory development plans or influencing develop-
ment control decision making. Beunen and Opdam (2011) and Conrad et al., (2011) conclude
in different ways that this pattern is by no means unique to the UK, and they suggest that the
research community is at least partly to blame for this situation. They believe that researchers
have been too inward looking and that an increasing gap is emerging between research and
practice. Beune and Opdam argue the case for more active engagement of researchers with
those directly involved in landscape planning practice believing such engagement will encour-
age the uptake of scientific understanding in decision making. Conrad et al. on the other hand
advocate increased involvement of stakeholders within research projects and context specific
research related to landscape planning and its implementation. The value of this type of inves-
tigation is highlighted by experience from spatial planning where there is already a useful body
of research of this type. For example, distinct legal and administrative families have been iden-
tified in Europe which are seen to influence the style and form of statutory planning practice
across the continent and enable more generic ideas about spatial planning to be tailored to
specific contexts (see Figure 31.3).
Research of this nature together with an assessment of the opportunities and barriers related
to the effective delivery of statutory landscape planning in different country contexts seems to
be a key are for future attention. However, integrated landscape planning (and indeed spatial
planning) perspectives unfortunately make the picture much more complex than this. The
sectoral, territorial and organisational dimensions of integration referred to earlier are reflective
of the new era of governance which is taking hold in most parts of the world. This means that
landscape and spatial planning interests increasingly extend beyond statutory processes and
encompass many other ‘softer’ planning arenas. One expression of this is revealed in the
378
Figure 31.3 Legal and administrative families of Europe.
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Sue Kidd
establishment of an ELC related information system where no fewer than 26 government

departments are identified as possible contributors in each country. Each will have its own
particular ‘take’ on landscape planning matters and particular contribution to make to the
delivery of landscape planning ambitions. The same is true for many other stakeholder groups
and disciplinary interests. Teasing out what role each might play and how these interests could
come together in different contexts is potentially a very rich seam of research which has been
barely touched upon, but which is clearly core if integrated approaches to landscape planning
are to effect change on the ground. The ELC provides a valuable touchstone for encouraging
more active engagement from all parties in landscape planning in the 33 countries that have so
far signed the convention. There are proposals for a Global Landscape Convention which in
time might raise the profile of landscape planning in many other parts of the world as well. This
means that research relating landscape planning and governance will be central to developments
over the coming years.
Conclusion
In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned the discussion by Stiles (1994) where he
explored the differences between landscape design and landscape planning and considered
whether they could be envisaged under the umbrella of landscape architecture as a single uni-
fied discipline. At that time he concluded that they could, but I wonder whether he would
come to the same conclusion today. Landscape architects, through their education and activities
are clearly vital to the future of landscape planning and are uniquely placed to advocate the
integrated landscape planning understanding that has emerged from over a century of research
and practice. However, the integrative framework that they have played a large part in devel-
oping deserves wide dissemination. As Selman (2010) suggests it brings together so many aspects
of sustainable development, positioning an understanding of landscape character, distinctiveness
and resilience at the heart of place making and the integration of multiple planning goals. If
this vision of landscape planning is to realise its potential it has to be taken on board by many
others who lie beyond the landscape profession. The same is true of spatial planning, which in
its own way has come to the same conclusion about the need for integrative planning approa-
ches to promote more sustainable patterns of development. This is a challenging point to have
reached for academics and professionals in both fields, as it requires a loosening of disciplinary
and professional divides and a reaching out in research, education and practice on a scale that
has not been seen so far. In addition to the previous suggestions about fruitful avenues for
investigation these considerations must also be high on the future research agenda.
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32
(Re)creating wilderness:
rewilding and habitat restoration
Steve Carver
UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
In wildness is the preservation of the world

(Thoreau, 1979 [1862])
It is 150 years since Henry Thoreau penned these words, words that resonate perfectly with our
time. Despite a broader awareness of environmental issues and the threat to society posed by
climate change, we ride roughshod over the planet’s last remaining wildernesses. Rainforests
continue to be logged, the Arctic tapped for its fossil fuel reserves, the deserts mined for their
mineral wealth and the oceans overfished. All of this is being driven by population growth and
the wholly understandable desire for a better life. Malthus, Hardin and the Club of Rome aside,
it seems that there might be no place for wildness in the landscapes of tomorrow where every
little bit of the Earth will be settled, farmed, logged, fished, mined or otherwise exploited for
human benefit. While such a world might just be sustainable, it will be poorer for it and highly
susceptible to external forces of climate change and natural disasters, as well as those of our own
making such as economic boom–bust cycles and war. A better vision of the landscapes of
the future is that which is based around a much closer relationship between humans and nature,
one that is mutually beneficial and one where, as Thoreau’s dictum suggests, life depends on the
continued existence of wild places and the buffer they provide against the worst excesses of man
and nature.
The human relationship with nature and landscape is a long one. It has shaped who we are as
a species and we in turn have shaped it. This is well expressed in Cicero’s De natura deorum
where he talks about second nature as the bountification of wilderness: ‘We sow corn, we plant
trees, we fertilize the soil by irrigation, we dam the rivers and direct them where we want. In
short, by means of our hands we try to create as it were a second nature within the natural
world’ (Cicero, trans. Hunt, 1996). By implication, first nature is wilderness, the jumble of stuff
from which landscapes are made, while the building blocks of the planet, including the geo-
sphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and atmosphere, have been called zero nature
especially in the work of Charles Jencks on contemporary garden design (Spens, 2004). Third
nature is often taken to refer to the development of a designed aesthetic, usually expressed
through formal/informal gardens, landscape architecture, the arts and the appreciation of
wild nature that evolved during the Romantic movement of the mid-nineteenth century, of
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Figure 32.1 The cycle of nature–culture.
which Thoreau was of course a part (Castree, 2005; Whatmore, 2005). Today, we are seeing
something of a shift in the nature paradigm towards a fourth nature based around the (re)creation
of wildness through the process of ecological restoration or (re)wilding. While this does not
entirely abandon the values and ideas of second and third nature, it does seek to redress the
balance and bring us back full circle to first nature (wilderness) by reducing the human influ-
ence within selected landscapes, and in some cases removing it altogether, such that the primary
dynamic is that of natural processes leading to natural form and function (see Figure 32.1). Part
of this new movement is founded around the understanding that human survival is predicated
on the existence of functional natural systems that provide us with ecosystem goods and services.
De Groot et al. (2002) categorised these into provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural
services. The first three categories provide goods and services such as timber and fresh water,
regulate processes such as flooding and carbon sequestration, and support a functioning planet
through crucial systems such as the carbon and hydrological cycles. The fourth links back to our
place as human beings within, and to our appreciation of, landscapes through cultural services
such as the provision of high quality recreational environments and spaces in which to
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Rewilding and habitat restoration
appreciate and experience wild nature. The concept of ecosystem goods and services is currently
very much in vogue among the conservation industry as a means of justifying their own existence,
as well as their actions and policies. Landscapes that have previously been conserved and pro-
tected on purely aesthetic and wildlife grounds now have added economic value as providers of
essential life-maintaining services such as water supply and flood water retention. Of course, this
has long been known among landscape ecologists who always understood the connection
between landscapes and the range of services they provide. This perhaps is best summed up in a
quote from John Muir, founding father of the US National Park system, where he proclaims
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that
going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and
reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains
of life.
(Muir, 1901)
Some fifty odd years later, Aldo Leopold (1949), in his influential collection of essays A Sand
County Almanac, suggests that the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts. Since
the establishment of the world’s first national parks, conservation has largely focused on doing
just this … protecting nature and ecosystems within the confines of relatively small areas of land
set aside to protect them from the worst impacts of human activity. Some of the earliest known
protected areas were forest reserves, or Ra-hui, created by the Ma-ori in New Zealand in a vain
attempt to protect the huge flightless Moa bird from over-hunting and extinction. Many other
species have since gone the way of the Moa, largely due to over-exploitation and destruction of
their habitat by forestry, agriculture, extractive industries and urban expansion. Such habitat loss
results in fragmentation and leads to the unsustainability of the remaining areas because of the
lack of interactions with other populations, limited gene pool and the physical restrictions on
natural processes. Without connectivity of natural habitat, these smaller isolated pockets of wild
land are in danger of falling into irreversible decline without active and expensive human
intervention. Although Leopold is correct in his assertion that we must keep all the component
parts of the world’s many and varied natural ecosystems, keeping them connected and in the
correct order is the key to a fully functioning and resilient system and likely to be our greatest
challenge over the coming years. This brings us to the second paradigm shift in modern land-
scape conservation, that of connectivity management (Worboys et al., 2010). Here the global
conservation community is lobbying hard to get governments to think at the landscape scale
and support large scale habitat restoration through the creation of transnational habitat networks
based around the cores, corridors and carnivores model (see Figure 32.2). This recognises that
protected areas (cores) can be reconnected utilising a system of protected wildlife corridors and
stepping stones (smaller refugia between larger protected areas) that act as conduits for the
movement of species. Where physical corridors are not possible, wildlife-friendly land man-
agement practices can be used to create landscapes that are more permeable to wildlife move-
ments. The top predators in an ecosystem are often cited as barometers of general ecosystem
health, so if large carnivores are present in sufficient number and in good condition and,
critically, they are able to move freely across the landscape and between cores utilising these
corridors and stepping stones, then this is indicative that the rest of the ecosystem must be in
good health.
Here we look further at some of these developing trends and paradigms in nature conserva-
tion, see how they relate to landscape studies and how, ultimately, they may change the
human–nature relationship in the medium to longer term.
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Steve Carver
Figure 32.2 Cores and corridors connectivity (after Worboys et al., 2010).
Giving back the land

Google the term ‘rewilding’ and you’ll get multiple hits, many linking back to the work
of Dave Forman, Michael Soulé and Reed Noss who first coined the term and its meaning
within conservation biology: to return a landscape to a natural state, often at a large
scale involving restoring wilderness conditions to core areas, connecting these with wildlife-
friendly corridors and reinstating lost keystone species (Soulé and Noss, 1998; Foreman,
2004). Essentially, rewilding is about giving back the land to a state of nature after possibly
millennia of human control and modification. Vegetation patterns will have been massively
changed through forest clearance, agriculture and urbanisation, keystone species will have
been extirpated (often deliberately and usually because they were seen as a threat or in
competition to human livelihood) and even the shape of the land could have been extensively
modified by river canalisation, coastal defence works, mining and quarrying, dam building
and other large earthworks. Climatic conditions are likely to have changed as well, and
as such ‘rewilding’ is a somewhat misleading term in that returning the landscape to the way
it looked before is often a biophysical impossibility. ‘Wilding’ is therefore perhaps a more
accurate term and indicates a forward-looking process of moving on to a new state of
wild nature. Nevertheless, the (re)wilding process is underpinned by a raft of new
scientific developments in the field of ecology and conservation biology including
extinction dynamics, island biogeography, metapopulation theory, natural disturbance
ecology, top-down regulation by large carnivores, and landscape-scale ecological restoration,
all of which come together in (re)wilding to say that without large-scale habitat restoration
and joined up natural landscapes, the current human induced extinction event will
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continue and the very ecosystem services on which we as a species depend will be under threat
of collapse.
While the model of cores, corridors and carnivores outlined in Figure 32.2 is the backbone of
(re)wilding at the whole landscape scale, exactly how it is achieved can vary. Two basic
approaches are ‘letting go’ and ‘wild by design’ (Council for National Parks, 1998). In the letting-
go approach it is maintained that if a landscape is left unmanaged for a long enough period,
nature will fill the gap left by removal of human management, take over and produce its own
entirely natural landscape. While this may not necessarily be the same landscape that existed
before human modification, it will be natural because it will have been shaped entirely by
natural processes. The wild by design approach, on the other hand, maintains that we may need
to actively ‘design’ wild landscapes by assisting the regeneration of native species and selectively
removing human elements to recreate a more natural looking landscape, but one which may
still contain limited economic activity in the form of low-intensity grazing and recreation. Both
approaches have advantages and disadvantages, most notably there could be problems with
‘unwanted’ or unforeseen outcomes with the letting go approach (e.g. competition by exotic
species over native flora and fauna leading to ‘unnatural’ landscape mosaics) and overdesign of
presumed natural patterns or desire to maintain some level of management (e.g. through
‘naturalistic’ grazing by semi-domesticated livestock) in the wild by design approach. In prac-
tice, complete abandonment of land to natural forces is rare and when it does happen the
rewilding is often unintentional such as in disaster zones (e.g. the exclusion zone around
Chernobyl) or where a land use is completely withdrawn without replacement (e.g. the
European Green Belt of the former east–west military zone from the Cold War Europe and
Eastern Bloc military training grounds). In most projects a range of management actions
have been adopted to try and arrive at either semi-natural or near-natural landscapes. These
include:
reducing grazing pressure to allow vegetation to develop more naturally;

restructuring specific landscape elements such as conifer plantations to give a more natural
outline;
complete removal of obtrusive human features or structures such as access tracks, bridges and
redundant buildings from the landscape so as to provide a wilder feel to visitors;
assisted and non-assisted regeneration of native vegetation patterns;
enhancing and restoring natural features such as river restoration schemes and coastal
realignment;
allowing natural processes to develop landscapes through natural succession and interruption
devoid of human control and interference such as in floodplain rewetting schemes;
reintroduction of native species (and removal of exotics) from plant species up to and
including top-level predators.
These may take place over a range of spatial scales from small local sites to whole landscapes
spanning entire continents. As a basic rule of thumb, the bigger the better as this allows greater
room for natural processes to operate, species to occupy and move about, and mosaics, seres and
ecotones to develop. Smaller rewilding projects are still important, but tend to be limited in
scope and need to be carefully connected to the broader landscape through corridors and
habitat networks. Time is also an important factor as rewilding cannot happen overnight,
although given the space and freedom of self-determination it is often surprising how quickly
nature can take over (again, the Chernobyl example is apposite here, see Mitsch and Mander,
1997). In general, rewilding represents a long term commitment to removing human influence
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Steve Carver
and control for time scales spanning not just tens but hundreds of years, indeed many rewilding
projects do not have end dates, rather open-ended, long-term objectives.
Whatever the scale and how ever the rewilding is carried out, the intention is usually to
create landscapes that are self-willed, that are masters of their own destinies and subject only
to the ecological rules governing succession and interruption, competition, symbiosis and
biocenosis. Outside of wilderness areas such landscapes are few and far between, and where they
do exist they do so largely by some accident of fate. As such, the few rewilding projects
that exist are important demonstrators for what the landscapes of tomorrow could and should
look like.
The justifications for rewilding are perhaps as wide and varied as its theoretical and practical
underpinnings. We might broadly classify these under two headings: anthropocentric and bio-
centric. Anthropocentric arguments in support of rewilding take the ‘what’s in it for us’ view-
point by stressing the benefits accruing to us as humans, be they economic through direct or
indirect support of local economies and livelihoods, or environmental in terms of ecosystem
goods and services provided as part of the wild or rewilded commons. A coherent argument in
favour of rewilding can be made around a simple cost–benefit analysis. In marginal lands the
economic subsidies from the government (paid for by taxpayer contributions) to support local
agricultural production can mean that the real price of produce is far higher than its market
value. Of course there are social arguments for helping maintain local economies, traditional
agricultural practice and the landscapes they have created, but the wider costs may far outweigh
the local benefits. From this wider spatial perspective, it may make more sense to divert the
subsidies from unprofitable agriculture into land stewardship schemes based on rewilding
wherein far greater benefits are accrued from the improved package of ecosystem services such
as improvements in water quality (less treatment costs), better water retention (less downstream
flooding and greater groundwater recharge), maintenance of carbon stores and increased carbon
sequestration through reduced soil/peat erosion, restoration of bog/mire and woodland com-
munities, improvements in nutrient cycling, better wildlife habitats, more aesthetically pleasing
landscapes and increased recreational opportunity (greater tourism potential and healthier
population) and so on.
The biocentric arguments in favour of rewilding stem largely from Leopold’s Land Ethic that
‘enlarges the boundaries of the (social) community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals,
or collectively: the land’ (Leopold, 1949: 204). Here, Leopold rails against the worst excesses of
land ownership: ‘To sum up: we asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save his
soil, and he has done just that and only that. The farmer who clears the woods off a 75 percent
slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the commu-
nity creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society … Obligations (to the
land) have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the
social conscience from people to land’ (Leopold, 1949: 209). Thus Leopold is saying we owe a
duty of care to the land, and there is a strong ethical imperative to put back the wildness we
have removed from our countryside, to create the notion of a fourth nature developed here.
Of course, rewilding is not without its problems and there are many detractors, not least from
the land owning and farming lobby. The ecosystem services argument is not a popular one in
many rural communities since while the benefits accrue to the many (e.g. urban populations
living some distance from the point of supply) these are usually at the cost of a few (e.g. local
populations whose way of life and livelihoods need to change). Rewilding may also be seen as
contrary to the whole idea of second nature, that of making the land fruitful and productive.
Thus, land ownership presents something of a barrier to large-scale rewilding, at least where the
bulk of the land is in private ownership and where the imperative is to make money. Payment
388
schemes, tax breaks and other financial incentives together with local business opportunities
arising from rewilding schemes could redress the balance. The case with public lands is some-
what different and the opportunities for rewilding are greater with fewer constraints imposed by
the money-making imperative, though perhaps there are still more in terms of policy con-
straints, multiple use and lack of funding. Looking at the bigger picture, rewilding provides
opportunities to create landscapes that are more resilient to climate change, so benefiting
everyone and everything in the longer term.
Lessons from around the world

Having outlined the theory and practice behind rewilding, it is perhaps useful at this point to
look at a few international examples where large-scale rewilding has gained widespread accep-
tance and several networks are in existence. The work of the Wildlands Network and the
Rewilding Institute in North America has been instrumental in developing the scientific
thinking behind continental-scale rewilding networks. Examples include Y2Y linking the
Yellowstone and Yukon ecosystems along the Rocky Mountains and the proposed network of
multiple Wildways© across North America from north to south and east to west being devel-
oped by the Wildlands Network. The recent WILD9 conference (9th World Wilderness
Congress) in Mexico supported the creation of the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Corridor (CBM)
to link North and Central America to help extend these networks south into South America.
This is conservation thinking on a very large scale and will ultimately allow wildlife to travel the
distances required to find a mate, to breed and to keep genetic variability strong. They will be
constructed using the cores, corridors and carnivores model to connect public and private lands
in such a way as to provide suitable habitat and safe passageways for wildlife to travel freely from
place to place. Mixing human and wildlife habitats is a difficult issue and so these corridors will
be routed around towns and cities and make extensive use of eco-bridges to span barriers where
major roads cross wildlife corridors. All this work will be based on scientific principles using GIS
and related mapping methods to identify the best routes.
A similar programme of wildlife cores and corridors is under development in Australia
including the 2,800km long A2A (Australian Alps to Atherton) corridor. This is a long-term
plan to improve the resilience of Australia’s flora and fauna in the face of climate change and
human land use pressure, in an extensive area of significant biodiversity (the terrestrial equiva-
lent of the Great Barrier Reef). The Australian government has recently announced AUS
$10 million in funding to help create a National Wildlife Corridor Plan that will link national
parks and reserves with well-managed private land and guide future Government investment in
projects that support and conserve biodiversity, water resources and build resilience to climate
change. Following the North American example, this is an example of conservation thinking on
a grand scale.
The Netherlands has an impressive and ongoing plan to create a national ecological network.
The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe and this has
created the need for a highly planned and managed landscape. Few of us would therefore
normally associate Holland with wild nature, yet in between the fields, houses and factories
exists a remarkably dense network of national parks, nature reserves and wildlife corridors. The
Dutch nature ‘planners’ are currently engaged in a bold programme of nature creation, the
flagship of which is the Oostvaardersplassen in Flevoland. Here, an area of polder of around
5,600 ha, has been developed into a natural wetland landscape of open water, reed beds and
grasslands populated by a diverse range of bird life and an introduced population of large
herbivores, including Konik ponies, Heck cattle and red deer. There are other such areas within
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Figure 32.3 The Dutch EHS (after Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality, 2004)
the Biesbosch National Park, and along the Waal, Maas, and Lower Rhine rivers where
previously agricultural land is being returned to a natural state by a combination of hands-off
management, promotion of natural processes and introduced grazers. The intent of the
Dutch nature planners is to create a highly connected network to join up with similar
networks in neighbouring Belgium and Germany (see Figure 32.3). This is the Ecologische
Hoofdstructuur (EHS or National Ecological Network), and is itself intended to link to the
390
wider Pan European Ecological Network (PEEN) via core ecological areas, ecological
development areas, preservation areas, and buffer zones with strategic ecological connections
(Carver, 2006).
A wilder landscape in the making?

The UK, like the Netherlands, is a relatively small country with a large urban population.
Despite these similarities, the UK is somewhat behind its European neighbours in developing a
more joined up and integrated thinking on rewilding and nature connectivity. There are perhaps
useful lessons to be learnt from the Dutch EHS that could be applied to the UK. Better linking
up of existing designated areas within the UK with new network of rewilded cores and corri-
dors could be a good starting point. Efforts could be made towards mapping the linkages
between our natural areas, improving those that already exist (whether notionally or on paper)
and identifying gaps and the opportunities for bridging these. Many of the UK’s protected areas
show the makings of good connectivity, whereas others do not, such as the ‘Black Hole’ of the
Midlands area. There are in fact more than 40 individual rewilding projects across the UK
(Ward et al., 2006) although some prefer to use the term ‘habitat restoration’ for what they are
trying to achieve. These span the length and breadth of the country from JMT’s Sandwood
Estate in the north to the work of Moor Trees on Dartmoor in the south-west and the coastal
realignment scheme in the east at Wallasea, Essex, to the National Trust’s Marloes Coastal heath
land restoration, Pembrokeshire, in the west. A small selection are described here as good
exemplars.
Wild Ennerdale is an example of upland rewilding on a 4,300 ha valley site located in the
north-west of the Lake District National Park, Cumbria. It is a partnership between the
National Trust, Forestry Commission and United Utilities with a vision to ‘allow the evolution
of Ennerdale as a wild valley for the benefit of people relying more on natural processes to
shape its landscape and ecology’. The valley is unique in the Lake District in having no public
through road and was heavily forested by sitka spruce and other non-native species in the
1940s. The partnership sees wilding as a process of change that involves reducing the intensity
and type of human intervention and allowing natural processes greater freedom to operate
(Browning and Yanik, 2006). Wild Ennerdale is not trying to recreate some past state but allow
the valley to develop into the future over a open-ended time period. A suite of management
actions are in place. These include:
allowing areas where conifer has been clear felled to regenerate naturally with no specific
preference towards what habitat develops;
controlling spruce regeneration by planting juniper and native broadleaves to provide an
alternate seed source;
allowing natural regeneration of all species, reducing sheep grazing and replacing this with
extensive cattle grazing by semi-domestic Galloways;
removing physical and administrative boundaries;
restricting vehicle access;
removing/reducing modern human artefacts such as bridges and concrete revetments; and
exploring the social aspects of how people are involved in landscapes.
Extensive monitoring at all landscape levels is an important part of the project and an extensive
survey of the valley has been completed mapping over 80 separate national vegetation habitats,
including nationally important mires, upland oak woodland and sub-alpine heath. The
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Steve Carver
River Liza is considered to be one of the top three geomorphologically most natural river
systems in England.
Trees for Life is an organisation dedicated to restoring the Caledonian Forest to a target area
of 150,000 ha in the Scottish Highlands working in partnership with the Forestry Commission,
RSPB and private landowners. Trees for Life recently purchased the 4,000 acre Dundreggan
Estate. Their vision is to restore a wild forest, which is there for its own sake, as a home for
wildlife and to fulfil the ecological functions necessary for the wellbeing of the land itself
focusing on a target area of 230,000 ha centred on Glen Affric, Glen Cannich and Glen
Strathfarrar west of Inverness. Much of the old Caledonian forest has been felled for fuel and
building material since Neolithic times and only a few tiny remnants remain scattered across the
Highlands. A major restriction to regeneration is over grazing by red deer. The first stage of the
project has been to fence out deer to allow existing trees and seeds to grow and reach maturity.
The second stage is to assist natural regeneration by planting thousands of native tree seedlings
(especially pioneer species such as birch, rowan and aspen) sourced from local seed, with the
final third stage of removing non-native trees (Watson-Featherstone, 2004). Trees for Life
have now planted nearly 1 million trees and set up enclosures across the target area with
remarkable results.
A good example of lowland restoration more akin to the example of the Dutch EHS, albeit
on a much smaller scale, can be found in the National Trust’s 550 ha nature reserve at Wicken
Fen near Cambridge. Restoration of the fen wetland is underway utilising careful rewetting and
naturalistic grazing ‘to secure the future of Cambridgeshire’s fenland wildlife and to re-establish
lost species’. The site was originally drained for agriculture in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries by Dutch engineers but still retains odd fragments of old fen (alder carr, sedge and
reed swamp) and wildlife-rich habitat. The project has been expanded into a vision for a land-
scape-scale nature reserve for the benefit of people and wildlife across 5,300 ha of land between
the Wicken Fen nature reserve and Cambridge and so is thinking big and trying to deliver
nature conservation on a large scale beyond the existing site (Warrington et al., 2009).
A final example is Abbots Hall Farm on the Blackwater Estuary along the Essex coast. This
arable farm was purchased by Essex Wildlife Trust in 2000 and the protective seawall breached
in five places to create an area of new salt marshes, coastal grazing, reed beds and saline lagoons
with the remainder of the farm devoted to sustainable agriculture methods and habitat
improvement. This is an example of coastal realignment with wide-ranging benefits for flood
alleviation, water quality, wildlife, recreation, tourism and fisheries. Seawalls are costly to
maintain and salt marsh is a rare habitat and getting rarer as they are eroded by sea level rise and
squeezed between the sea and artificial seawalls. Coastal realignment is a rewilding approach
that creates both habitat and provides sustainable coastal defences (May et al., 2007).
Although the UK conservation industry has already started to experiment with rewilding as a
conservation strategy, a wider overview of the functionality of the natural areas in England,
their connectivity and resilience has recently begun with the publication of the Lawton Report
‘Making Space for Nature’ and the subsequent government natural environment white paper
‘The Natural Choice: securing the value of nature’. Significantly, the Lawton Report recom-
mends that planning policy should plan for biodiversity at a landscape-scale and identify and
map components of ecological networks. In line with EU targets, the report suggests that
planning should promote the preservation, restoration and re-creation of priority habitats, eco-
logical networks and the recovery of priority species populations. This all sounds pretty much
like rewilding and indeed the report makes reference to the concept, along with species
re-introductions, and recommends the setting up of a network of Ecological Restoration Zones
(ERZs) that operate over large, discrete areas within which significant enhancements of
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ecological networks are achieved, by enhancing existing wildlife sites, improving ecological
connections and restoring ecological processes. Of course, the ecosystem services argument
provides the underpinning rationale of ‘what’s in it for us?’
The UK government’s response was published in June 2011 and took on board some of the
recommendations for new ERZs but changing the name to Nature Improvement Areas (NIAs).
A competition has been launched to identify sites for twelve new NIAs that will contain all
the components that Lawton set out for an ecological network that fit around existing wildlife
sites using the cores and corridors model shown in Figure 32.2, and which should aim to
achieve significant and demonstrable enhancements of the ecological network over large areas
by improving the management of existing wildlife sites, increasing the size and number of
wildlife sites, improving connectivity between sites and creating wildlife corridors. With only
£7.5 million of funding expected to deliver twelve new NIAs over a four-year period it
remains to be seen what will come to pass. Nevertheless, these are all steps in the right direction
and we should see the development of a wider rewilding policy across the country over the
next few years.
Further reading
Fisher, M. (2011) ‘Self-willed land’, available at http://www.self-willed-land.org.uk/ (accessed 11 May
2012). (A compehensive set of resources on rewilding and wild land together with several forthright
opinion pieces relevant to rewilding.)
Foreman, D. (2004) Rewilding North America: a vision for conservation in the 21st century. Washington DC:
Island Press. (Good overview of the development and status of rewilding concept as applied in north
America.)
Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (The classic text on land-
scape ecology that everyone should read. A beautiful book.)
Taylor, P (2005) Beyond Conservation: a wildland strategy. Oxford: Earthscan. (The single best reference for
issues on wildland and rewilding in the UK to date.)
References
Browning, G. and Yanik, R. (2006) ‘Wild Ennerdale: letting nature loose’. ECOS 25(3/4), 34–8
Carver, S. (2006) ‘Connectivity of nature in the Dutch landscape’. ECOS 27(3/4), 61–4
Castree, N. (2005) ‘De-naturalisation: bringing nature back in’, in Castree, N., Nature. London: Routledge,
pp. 108–76
de Groot, R.S., Wilson, M.A. and Boumans, R.M.A (2002) ‘A typology for the classification, description
and valuation of ecosystem functions, goods and services’. Ecological Economics 41(3), 393–408
Foreman, D. (2004) Rewilding North America: a vision for conservation in the 21st century. Washington
DC: Island Press
Hunt, J.D. (1996) ‘Paragone in paradise: translating the garden’, in E.S. Shaffer (ed.) Comparative Criticism:
an Annual Journal, Vol. 18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lawton, J.H., Brotherton, P.N.M., Brown, V.K., Elphick, C., Fitter, A.H., Forshaw, J., Haddow, R.W.,
Hilborne, S., Leafe, R.N., Mace, G.M., Southgate, M.P., Sutherland, W.J., Tew, T.E., Varley, J. and
Wynne, G.R. (2010) Making Space for Nature: a review of England’s wildlife sites and ecological network.
Report to Defra, available at http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/biodiversity/documents/
201009space-for-nature.pdf (accessed 10 May 2012)
Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press
May, A., Hall, J. and Pretty, J. (2007) ‘Managed retreat in Essex: rewilding the coast at Abbots Hall’.
ECOS 27(3/4), 36–43
Mitsch, W.J. and Mander, U. (1997) ‘Remediation of ecosystems damaged by environmental contamina-
tion: applications of ecological engineering and ecosystem restoration in Central and Eastern Europe’.
Ecological Engineering 8(4), 247–54
Muir, J. (1901) Our National Parks. Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin
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Soulé, M., and Noss, R. (1998) ‘Rewilding and biodiversity: complementary goals for continental
conservation’. Wild Earth 8(3), 18–28
Spens, M. (2004) ‘The garden at Portrack designed and created by Charles Jencks (1986–2004): entrap-
ment and release’, in M.Conan (ed.) Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Ward, V., Fisher, M. and Carver, S. (2006) ‘Rewilding projects in the UK: the database’. ECOS 27(3/4), 5–7
Warrington, S., Soans, C. and Cooper, H. (2009) ‘The Wicken Fen Vision: the first 10 years’. ECOS 28
(2) 58–65
Watson-Featherstone, A. (2004) ‘Rewilding in the north-central Highlands: an update’. ECOS
25(3/4), 4–10
Whatmore, S. (2005) ‘Culture-Nature’, in Cloke, P., Crang, P. and Goodwin, M. (eds) Introducing Human
Geographies, London: Hodder Arnold, pp. 8–17
Worboys, G.L., Francis, W.L. and Lockwood, M. (2010) Connectivity Conservation Management: a global
guide, Oxford: Earthscan
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33
Landscape and ecology: the need
for an holistic approach to the
conservation of habitats and biota
Louis F. Cassar
UNIVERSITY OF MALTA
The rationale for landscape ecology

The relationship between people and the natural world is, to say the least, complex. On the one
hand, people depend for their very existence on a healthy natural support system. Nature pro-
vides us with a suite of goods and services which enable human survival. These include provi-
sioning of food, water and materials, climate and water regulation, nutrient cycling, pollination,
primary production, and aesthetic, spiritual and recreational benefits, amongst many others
(De Groot et al. 2002). The value of these ecosystem services is indisputable, even if difficult to
quantify, and contributes to fundamental constituents of human well-being, including security,
basic material needed for a ‘good’ life, health, and good social relations (Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment 2005). Indeed in the overall balance of nature, man is far more dependent on other
species than they are on us; as eloquently put by E. O. Wilson, ‘If all mankind were to dis-
appear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten
thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos’
(Wilson 1985 cited in Jarski 2007: 269).
Notwithstanding, the power of the human species to alter its environment is undeniable. No
other living being has had as large an effect on the natural world. Sadly, much of that effect
appears to have been negative. Homo sapiens sapiens was the first species to induce a wave of
extinction (Ceballos et al. 2010); the previous five major extinction episodes were all the result
of natural factors (primarily related to climate change, tectonics and cometary collisions). Even if
precise extinction rates are hard to calculate – given that several millions of species remain
unidentified and as a result of problems with extrapolation (He and Hubbell 2011) – there is
little doubt that losses are highly significant. Perhaps this human propensity to impact heavily on
other species has much to do with the way in which anthropogenic civilizations evolved. Early
hunter-gatherer societies had no option but to work ‘with’ nature, adjusting their lives to the
patterns of the seasons, and planning their movements in line with the availability of resources.
With the advent of agriculture, people developed the capacity to settle in a single location,
made possible by the ability to produce a steady supply (and even a surplus) of food (as opposed
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to merely harvesting whatever was available). This in turn enabled populations to grow to
unprecedented levels, and facilitated the development of conurbations. Whilst present-day cities
have undoubtedly come a long way from the earliest riverine civilizations, the fundamental
trends established then remain pertinent – people settle in a location, populations grow, and
corresponding resource demands increase, with the result that people need to expand their
spatial footprint – and so a vicious cycle ensues. Natural landscapes have historically been big
casualties of this process, with resource exploitation coming at a heavy cost to the ecosystems
that ultimately sustain us.
Perhaps a significant underlying driving force of this unhealthy dynamic between people and
the natural world can be found in people’s environmental ethic (or lack thereof). One could
argue that as our ability to control and exploit nature increased, so correspondingly did our
respect for nature decline. The use of natural resources is nothing new; in keeping with the
maxim of ‘survival of the fittest’, humans need to utilize other species to survive. However,
contrast a modern-day commercial livestock breeding operation (including high-density inten-
sive breeding of species, extensive use of antibiotics and pesticides, and eventual mass slaughter
at an abbatoir), with the limited hunting kills of an indigenous culture, often accompanied by
rituals to pay tribute to the animal which gave its life to sustain human survival. Our western
lifestyle arguably perpetuates a conception of nature as a commodity, to be used and discarded
at will, and lying beyond the remit of our moral concerns. As a result, we now have a gap
between ‘people’ on the one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other, with the former depending on
the latter but often failing to acknowledge the limited capacity of nature to provide
resources and absorb waste. In this gap, lies perhaps the key constraint to (and challenge for)
sustainability. Bridging the gap requires, first and foremost, acknowledging that humans and
nature are not two separate entities, but exist together interdependently as elements of a wider
Earth system. It is this conception of social–ecological systems that underpins the discipline of
landscape ecology.
The emergence of landscape ecology as a discipline

In ‘traditional’ ecology, the spatial remit of concern is the ecosystem, in itself an ambiguous
concept which has been defined in a multitude of different (and not necessarily identical) ways
(Naveh 2010). Broadly, ecologists are interested in the biotic and abiotic factors that influence
the relations that organisms have with each other and with their surrounding environment, and
in related biophysical feedback mechanisms. However, the boundaries and limits of ecosystems
are not easily defined, leading biologist Robert O’Neill (2001) to argue that it may be time to
bury the ecosystem concept altogether, given two fundamental spatial limitations of the
concept:
the implicit assumption that interactions and feedback loops are necessary and sufficient to
explain dynamics occur within the ecosystem boundaries, while in fact the spatial distributions
of component populations may be much larger; and
the assumption of spatial homogeneity within an ecosystem, which rarely holds true.
Landscape ecology was essentially born of this recognition that influences on ecological pro-
cesses originate from, and extend beyond, the boundaries of the ecosystem itself, and are
embedded within a much wider landscape framework. In terms of ecological studies, this can be
framed as a distinction between an area of study and an area of influence. The area of study of
conventional ecology is limited by ecosystem boundaries (which are fuzzy at best), whilst
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landscape ecology makes a case for expanding the area of study to more accurately reflect
the entire area of influence. In the case of the latter, the area of influence encompasses
entire landscape areas, with all their natural and anthropogenic dimensions, and including the
action of man.
The term ‘landscape ecology’ was first coined in the 1930s by the German biogeographer
Carl Troll, who defined landscape as, ‘the total spatial and visual entity of human living space,
integrating the geosphere with the biosphere and its noospheric [of knowledge] man-made
artifacts’ (Troll 1971), and advocated a landscape-based approach that would effectively ‘marry’
biology and geography (Zonneveld 1995). The Landscape Research Group was founded in
1967, and initiated the publication of Landscape Research, and the first scientific society for
landscape ecology (Werkgroep Landschapsecologisch Onderzoek – Working Group Landscape–
Ecological Research) followed in 1972 in the Netherlands (Antrop 2005). It was in the 1980s,
however, that the discipline started to come into its own. This is no mere coincidence. The
decade of the 1980s was pivotal in highlighting the relevance and significance of broad-scale
environmental issues to human well-being, and in confirming the interlinkages between natural
systems and people. The first World Conservation Strategy was published by the then Interna-
tional Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (1980), followed by the UN
World Charter for Nature (1982), and later in 1987, by the Brundtland Report (of the World
Commission on Environment and Development) (which established what is probably the most
oft-quoted definition of sustainable development). More sobering incidents also contributed to
the stimulus of the fledgling pro-environment movement, including the Bhopal fertilizer plant
disaster (1984), the nuclear accident at Chernobyl (1986) and the Exxon Valdez oil spill in
Prince William Sound, Alaska (1989). Less dramatic but no less significant developments during
the same decade, included the discovery of the ozone ‘hole’ over Antarctica by British scientist
Joe Farman (1985), providing the stimulus for the adoption of the Montreal Protocol two years
later. Concurrently, the 1980s also underlined the strongly social and political aspects of natural
resource issues, with, for example, the assassination of Brazilian rubber tappers Wilson Pinheiro
and Chico Mendez and the murder of conservationist Dian Fossey in Rwanda. By the end of
the 1980s, it was amply clear that people impact on nature but also that they stand to be
affected by the health of natural systems, and that environmental concerns cannot be separated
from their wider social, cultural, political and economic context.
In parallel to these developments, major paradigmatic shifts were also occurring within the
discipline of ecology, as alluded to above. In particular, traditional models of homeostatic sta-
bility and equilibrium, where ecosystems are seen to function in a clockwork, machine-like,
predictable manner, began to be questioned, with a recognition that many ecosystems fail truly
to reflect these traits. The possibility (and likelihood) of non-equilibrium ecosystems started to
be acknowledged, and the very concept of an ecosystem began to be characterized more by
consideration of dynamics than by aspects of stability (Wu and Loucks 1995). Developments in
other fields, such as systems theory and chaos theory, served to further reinforce these altered
perceptions. Additionally, the notion that ecosystems are not isolated, neither in space, nor from
human activities, began to emerge more strongly, and brought with it an understanding that
ecology needs to consider the reality of open systems, with due attention to the flow of energy
and material across fuzzy ecosystem boundaries. Real-world issues such as acid rain, where
source and effect were found to be separated in space and time, provided further confirmation
of this ‘new’ conception of ecosystems. The practical implications of these intellectual shifts
included a realization that ecosystems must thus be understood as embedded within a wider
landscape mosaic, and affected by a range of forms, functions and processes occurring at many
different scales. Fortunately, the emergence of this conceptual base for landscape ecology was
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Louis F. Cassar
accompanied by technological advances in computing power and in fields such as Geographical

Information Systems (GIS), satellite imagery and geo-statistics, thus providing the practical
means by which to start evaluating this ‘new’ ecological model.
Key principles of landscape ecology

Landscape ecology is perhaps best defined by a number of characteristics, including
its focus on spatial patterns, functions and processes;

broader spatial extents than those traditionally considered in ecology; and
the acceptance of humans as agents of landscape change.
Space has, strangely perhaps, been described as ‘the final frontier’ for ecological theory (Kareiva
1994). This is not, however, as surprising as it might seem because for much of its history,
ecology was concerned with inherently non-spatial problems: predator–prey dynamics, for
example, or population trends, nutrient cycling, or other functional dimensions that are not
geographically determined. However, ecosystems cannot be isolated from their spatial context,
as illustrated by the following quotation from Richard Forman, one of the key initiators of the
discipline of landscape ecology:
Look carefully at the big picture out an airplane window or on an aerial photo. The land
mosaic displays a distinctive spatial pattern or structure. It works or functions, that is, things
flow and move through the pattern. The pattern is dynamic, changing over time. The
structure or pattern is normally composed entirely of patches (rounded/elongated, large/
small, etc.), corridors or strips (wide/narrow, straight/curvy … ), and background matrix
(continuous/discontinuous, perforated or not … ). Such simple but rigorous attributes
opened up the concept of a landscape, well known in other disciplines, to scientists as a
research frontier. More to the point, landscape ecology focuses exactly at the scale of
human activity.
(Forman 2011)
Landscape ecology is fundamentally concerned with this notion of spatial heterogeneity – what
it is, how to describe and measure it, what it implies for ecosystems, what it is influenced by,
how it changes over time, how humans manage it. Simply put, landscape ecology involves the
study of landscape patterns, the interactions amongst the various elements making up a spatial
landscape pattern, and how these patterns and interactions change over time. Patterns are
understood in terms of different landscape patches, connected through corridors and non-linear
linkages, and interacting with a general landscape matrix (McGarigal 2004). Amongst the var-
ious themes of the discipline are identifying and describing agents of pattern formation,
detecting pattern and the scale at which it is expressed, quantitatively describing patterns and
change through landscape metrics, understanding the ecological implications of spatial landscape
patterns, understanding the influences of disturbances (both natural and anthropogenic) on
landscape patterns, and exploring the implications of landscape patterns for management
objectives derived from the demands humans place on landscapes (e.g. Dover and Bunce 1998;
International Association for Landscape Ecology 2011; Wiens et al. 2007).
Given this emphasis on landscape patterns, it is then perhaps not surprising that landscape
ecology is distinguished by its focus on broader spatial remits than those that have traditionally
been the domain of ecology. This is also a result of initial influences on the field from
398
geographers; aerial photography, for example, played a strong part in the formulation of
the early landscape ecological ideas of Carl Troll (Antrop 2005), and the discipline approaches
the study of landscape patterns from a similar coarse-grained perspective, rather than zooming in
on the micro-scale. Landscape ecology is also defined by its focus on the role humans play in
creating and modifying landscape patterns and processes. Human beings, as major agents
of landscape change, influence practically all types of landscape patterns, whether in pre-
dominantly natural, semi-natural or built landscapes, but whilst this fact was recognized early on
in ecological theory (e.g. Tansley 1935), it was often overlooked by the main thrust of
ecological research. Human influence is now known to be extremely widespread and pervasive –
processes of global climate change, for example, impact on even the most seemingly pristine
landscapes and there is not a single extensive ecosystem left that is free of this influence (Alberti
et al. 2003; Naveh 2010). As a point of interest, it should be noted that two main ‘schools’ of
landscape ecology exist. On the one hand, the American school focuses primarily on natural
systems and on heterogeneity within the landscape. It puts emphasis on organism-environment
relationships, without necessarily invoking anthropogenic factors into the equation (McIntyre
2001), and is concerned primarily with the ecological consequences of larger spatial patterns of
biotic and abiotic resources. The European school, on the other hand, places greater emphasis
on typology, classification and nomenclature, and is largely concerned with the cultural
dimension and human application of the landscape, reflecting the long history of human mod-
ification of the terrain within the European landscape (Cassar 2007; Cassar 2010).
Forman (1995) summarizes twelve main principles of landscape ecology, which establish the
premises and remit of the discipline; these are listed in Box 33.1 below:
Box 33.1: General principles of landscape ecology

(from Forman, 1995)
Landscapes and regions

1. Landscape and region: A mix of local ecosystem or land use types is repeated over the land
forming a landscape, which is the basic element in a region at the next broader scale com-
posed of a non-repetitive, high-contrast, coarse-grained pattern of landscapes.
2. Patch-corridor-matrix: The arrangement or structural pattern of patches, corridors and a matrix
that constitute a landscape is a major determinant of functional flows and movements
through the landscape, and of changes in its pattern and process over time.
Patches and corridors

3. Large natural-vegetation patches: These are the only structures in a landscape that protect
aquifers and interconnected stream networks, sustain viable populations of most interior spe-
cies, provide core habitat and escape cover for most large-home-range vertebrates, and
permit near-natural disturbance regimes.
4. Patch shape: To accomplish several key functions, an ecologically optimum patch shape
usually has a large core with some curvilinear boundaries and narrow lobes, and depends on
orientation angle relative to surrounding flows.
5. Interactions among ecosystems: All ecosystems in a landscape are interrelated, with movement
or flow rate of objects dropping sharply with distance, but more gradually for species inter-
actions between ecosystems of the same type.
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Louis F. Cassar
6. Metapopulation dynamics: For subpopulations on separate patches, the local extinction rate
decreases with greater habitat quality or patch size, and recolonization increases with
corridors, stepping stones, a suitable matrix habitat or short inter-patch distance.
Mosaics
7. Landscape resistance: The arrangement of spatial elements, especially barriers, conduits, and
highly heterogeneous areas, determines the resistance to flow or movement of species,
energy, material, and disturbance over a landscape.
8. Grain size: A coarse-grained landscape containing fine-grained areas is optimum to provide for
large-patch ecological benefits, multi-habitat species including humans, and a breadth of
environmental resources and conditions.
9. Landscape change: Land is transformed by several spatial processes overlapping in order,
including perforation, fragmentation and attrition, which increase habitat loss and isolation,
but otherwise cause very different effects on spatial pattern and ecological process.
10. Mosaic sequence: Land is transformed from more to less suitable habitat in a small number of
basic mosaic sequences, the ecologically best being in progressive parallel strip from an edge,
though modifications of this pattern lead to an ‘ecologically optimum’ sequence.
Applications
11. Aggregate-with-outliers: Land containing humans is best arranged ecologically by aggregating
land uses, yet maintaining small patches and corridors of nature throughout developed areas,
as well as outliers of human activity spatially arranged along major boundaries.
12. Indispensable patterns: Top-priority patterns for protection, with no known substitute for their
ecological benefits, are a few large natural-vegetation patches, wide vegetated corridors pro-
tecting watercourses, connectivity for movement of key species among large patches, and
small patches and corridors providing heterogeneous bits of nature throughout developed
areas.
Applying landscape ecology: relevance to contemporary issues

The spatial concerns of landscape ecology are highly pertinent to several present-day concerns,
in particular those relating to the challenges involved in managing multifunctional landscapes,
on which we place multiple, often conflicting, demands. One area of thematic interest, for
example, is the impact of land-use change. Habitat destruction is now widely recognized as the
leading cause of biodiversity loss worldwide, but issues of concern relate not only to the
quantity of habitat being lost (which is very substantial), but also to changes in the spatial pat-
terns that result. In particular, there is much concern about the formation of habitat patches,
isolated from other similar habitats, by fragmentation. The characteristics of these small habitat
patches vary from those of larger habitat areas, not only because there is a lower extent of
continuous habitat cover, but also because of disproportionate exposure to edge effects, i.e. the
different biophysical conditions found on the margins of a habitat area, which in turn influence
the composition and functioning of biotic communities. Such notions have many practical impli-
cations for conservation planning and management. A long-standing debate in protected-area
400
design for example, which was highly prevalent during the 1970s and 1980s, concerns whether
it is better to have several small reserves rather than one single large reserve of equivalent size;
this is termed the SLOSS (Single Large or Several Small) dilemma (Diamond 1975). The stan-
dard species-area relationship, where larger areas support more species, provides evidence in
favour of a single large site, with an additional argument in favour being the minimization of
edge effects. However, critics point out that this assumes a nested species composition, where a
large area would include all species from smaller areas, an assumption that often does not hold
(Simberloff and Abele 1982). Additionally, a single large site may be disproportionately vul-
nerable to natural disasters or disease. Landscape ecology provided the means to add flesh to the
bones of these concepts, through empirical research to understand the nesting and flows of
species within a landscape.
The SLOSS debate also brought to the fore another key consideration of landscape ecology,
i.e. connectivity. Even where habitat areas are small, there are benefits to be had from linking
these to one another, to enable flows of matter and energy. Such benefits include genetic
exchanges and the facilitation of species movements as these migrate in search of more favour-
able environmental conditions (Bennett 2003). The latter consideration is particularly relevant
in the context of global climate change, which brings about a real risk that protected areas will
no longer provide suitable habitat for the species they were designated to protect (Klausmeyer
and Shaw 2009). The movements of faunal species are contingent on the availability of suitable
linkages, which can take various forms, including corridors and stepping stones (Bennett 2003).
Conversely, when seeking to manage issues such as the spread of pests or disease, an under-
standing of the spatial patterns and features which are facilitating such dispersion comes in
extremely useful. Such applications of landscape ecology incorporate biodiversity conservation
planning, but also extend to areas such as forestry management, agricultural production and
other forms of rural development.
Landscape ecology has also influenced other disciplinary areas, including landscape design and
architecture and land-use planning. For example, landscape ecology can provide a strong basis
for landscape architecture, guiding and inspiring designers towards landscapes that are both
environmentally sustainable as well as culturally and aesthetically appropriate (Makhzoumi
2000). Dramstad et al. (1996) provide several illustrations of the practical applications of
landscape ecology in architecture, ranging from the design of road and windbreak barriers, to
the shape of boundary areas. Similarly, landscape ecology can provide a solid foundation for
strategic land-use planning, based on a holistic review of the multiple functions that a landscape
needs to serve, and an understanding of the most efficient and effective spatial patterns that can
achieve the relevant planning objectives. In a case study on the island of Gozo (Malta), Cassar
(2010) outlines a regional land-use planning model that is based on landscape ecology princi-
ples, which juxtaposes and integrates multiple land uses, ranging from urban sites to agricultural
areas to conservation core zones, buffer areas and sites with the potential to be ecologically
restored.
Future directions
The discipline of landscape ecology has strengthened tremendously over the past years. The
International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) now has thousands of members and
hosts chapters in Africa, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark,
Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic,
Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States of America and
Vietnam, in addition to a general European chapter. The field has indisputably made great
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progress in learning to understand, characterize and describe the mechanisms of spatial dynamics
at the landscape scale. However, several challenges remain. I focus here on three key issues:
rigorously enhancing our understanding of spatial dynamics;

integrating anthropogenic aspects into the discipline; and
effectively linking landscape ecology to real-world policy concerns.
Starting with the first, notwithstanding the significant strides of the last few years, landscape
ecology still needs to better understand the various aspects of spatial dynamics and the linkages
between these and ecosystem processes. The ‘brief’ of the discipline is certainly no walk in the
park. Landscape ecology needs to effectively link work in traditional ecology with the wider
landscape scale, establishing connections between population and ecosystem processes, and
understanding the relationships of many different types of organism to the spatial context in
which they exist. The discipline must seek to do this, working within systems that are changing
continuously – spatial patterns are characterized first and foremost by their propensity to
change – and that exist at multiple nested scales. As per established scientific methods, experi-
mentation is often sought as a means for quantifying and communicating these various aspects,
but experimentation is far more challenging at the landscape scale than on a controlled 1 m2 plot
of land. Landscapes are, by their very definition, large all-encompassing spaces, including within
them many different natural elements and, more often than not, also including a strong human
footprint. Research must continue to address the challenges involved in obtaining scientific
knowledge at this scale.
The second major challenge is perhaps an issue of worldview. As noted above, ecology has
traditionally been concerned with how natural ecosystems function, ‘in spite of’ humans, with
efforts often being made to exclude human influences in the study of ecosystem processes.
Landscape ecology made a quantum leap forward in acknowledging, within its conceptual basis
and through its methods, the fact that humans are part of nature and that the study of ecosystem
dynamics must proceed accordingly. However, a review of landscape ecology publications will
quickly reveal that much research in landscape ecology is biased towards its origin in the natural
sciences (Conrad et al. 2011), providing a somewhat one-sided perspective on one of the stated
themes of the field which is ‘the relationship of human activity to landscape pattern, process and
change’ (International Association for Landscape Ecology 2011). This is a matter of concern,
not only because social systems cannot be effectively analyzed without an acceptance that these
are inherently different from natural systems (and thus require different concepts and methods),
but also because of the rationale outlined at the start of this chapter. If landscape ecology is to
make an effective contribution to sustainability, then it should also work to bridge the people-
nature gap, and embed its work within a broader environmental ethic – this cannot be done
without truly interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary work.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, landscape ecology has been criticized for existing in
something of an academic vacuum. Notwithstanding its huge potential contribution, it has
played little role in significant policy developments of the past decades, such as the formulation
and adoption of a European Landscape Convention, or the drafting of the European Union’s
Birds and Habitats Directives. In a seminal review of the field, Hobbs (1997: 5) noted by its
very nature landscape ecology is an applied science, but concluded that the extent to which it
really is applied is ‘very little’, pointing to little cross-fertilization between landscape ecology
and other disciplines as a major flaw, and noting ‘there is a perception among many in other
disciplines that, although the landscape may be the relevant scale at which to study and manage
things, landscape ecology has not come up with much that can help’ (ibid.: 6). Concerns
402
include the failure of landscape ecologists to move beyond technical jargon to communicate
effectively with people outside the field (perhaps Box 33.1 provides an illustration of this), and a
lack of emphasis on addressing pragmatic management problems. Whilst fifteen years have
passed since these observations were made, they are arguably still relevant. Landscape ecology,
despite its potential, still languishes in relative obscurity, exalted by those involved in the field,
but largely overlooked by those outside it. The real potential of landscape ecology will only be
achieved when the discipline takes a leading role in mainstream efforts for the protection,
planning and management of landscapes – and in this aspect, there is still some way to go.
Further reading
Bennett, A. (2003) Linkages in the Landscape: the role of corridors and connectivity in wildlife conservation, Gland:
IUCN. (A primer on concepts of connectivity.)
Farina, A. (2007) Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology: toward a science of the landscape, Dordrecht:
Springer. (An exposition of the state-of-the-art in the discipline.)
Forman, R.T.T. and Godron, M. (1986) Landscape Ecology, London: Wiley. (One of the first publications
to specifically address the distribution patterns of landscape elements and ecosystems.)
References
Alberti, M., Marzluff, J.M., Schulenberger, E., Bradley, G., Ryan, C. and Craig, Z. (2003) ‘Integrating humans
into ecology: opportunities and challenges for studying urban ecosystems’, Bio-Science 53, 1169–79
Antrop, M. (2005) ‘From holistic landscape synthesis to transdisciplinary landscape management’, in Tress,
B., Tress, G., Fry, G. and Opdam, P. (eds) From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning: aspects of inte-
gration, education and application, Wageningen: Springer, pp. 27–50
Bennett, A. (2003) Linkages in the Landscape: the role of corridors and connectivity in wildlife conservation, Gland:
IUCN
Cassar, L.F. (2007) ‘Landscape Ecology’, in Conrad, E. and Cassar, L.F. (eds) Training Manual: Coastal
management and conservation: applications in the Mediterranean region, Msida: International Environment
Institute, pp. 27–33
——(2010) A Landscape Approach to Conservation: integrating ecological sciences and participatory methods, Msida:
Institute of Earth Systems
Ceballos, G., García, A. and Ehrlich, R. (2010) ‘The sixth extinction crisis: loss of animal populations and
species’, Journal of Cosmology 8, 1821–31
Conrad, E., Christie, M. and Fazey, I. (2011) ‘Is research keeping up with changes in landscape policy? A
review of the literature’, Journal of Environmental Management 92(9), 2097–108
De Groot, R.S., Wilson, M.A. and Boumans, R.M.J. (2002) ‘A typology for the classification, description
and valuation of ecosystem functions, goods and services’, Ecological Economics 41, 393–408
Diamond, J.M. (1975) ‘The island dilemma: lessons of modern biogeographic studies for the design of
natural reserves’, Biological Conservation 7(2), 129–46
Dover, J.W. and Bunce, R.G.H. (1998) Key Concepts in Landscape Ecology, Aberdeen: International Association
for Landscape Ecology
Dramstad, W.E., Olson, J.D. and Forman, R.T.T. (1996) Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape
Architecture and Land-Use Planning, Washington, DC: Island Press
Forman, R. (2011) ‘What is Landscape Ecology?’, available at http://usiale.org/what-landscape-ecology/
forman (accessed 25 October 2012)
Forman, R.T.T. (1995) ‘Some general principles of landscape and regional ecology’, Landscape Ecology
10(3), 133–42
He, F. and Hubbell, S.P. (2011) ‘Species-area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from
habitat loss’, Nature 473, 368–71
Hobbs, R. (1997) ‘Future landscapes and the future of landscape ecology’, Landscape and Urban Planning
37(1–2), 1–9
IALE (2011) ‘Landscape ecology: what is it?’, International Association for Landscape Ecology, available at
http://www.landscape-ecology.org/index.php?id=13&no_cach=1&sword_list%5B%5D=it
(accessed 10 May 2012)
403
Louis F. Cassar
Jarski, R. (2007) Words from the Wise, London: Skyhorse Publishing

Kareiva, P. (1994) ‘Space: the final frontier for ecological theory’, Ecology 75, 1
Klausmeyer, K.R. and Shaw, M.R. (2009) ‘Climate change, habitat loss, protected areas and the climate
adaptation potential of species in Mediterranean ecosystems worldwide’, PLOS ONE 4(7), e6392
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Ecology, UK region, available at http://iale.org.uk/files/pdfs/Introduction-to-landscape-measurement.
pdf (accessed 10 May 2012).
McIntyre, N.E. (2001) Landscape Ecology and Advanced Landscape Ecology, Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical
University
Makhzoumi, J. (2000) ‘Landscape ecology as a foundation for landscape architecture: application in Malta’,
Landscape and Urban Planning 50(1–3), 167–77
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Synthesis, Washington, DC:
Island Press
Naveh, Z. (2010) ‘Ecosystem and landscapes: a critical comparative appraisal’, Journal of Landscape Ecology
3(1), 64–81
O’Neil, R.V. (2001) ‘Is it time to bury the ecosystem concept? With full military honors of course!’,
Ecology 82, 3275–84
Simberloff, D.S. and Abele, L.G. (1982) ‘Refuge design and island biogeograpic theory: effects of
fragmentation’, American Naturalist 120, 41–56
Tansley, A.G. (1935) ‘The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms’, Ecology 43, 284–307
Troll, G. (1971) ‘Landscape ecology (geo-ecology) and its bio-ceonology: a terminology study’,
Geoforum 8, 43–6
Wiens, J.A., Moss, M.R., Turner, M.G. and Mladenoff, D.J. (eds) (2007) Foundation Papers in Landscape
Ecology, New York: Columbia University Press
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management and conservation, Oxford: SPB Academic Publishing
404
34
Post-industrial landscapes:
evolving concepts
Wolfram Höfer
RUTGERS, THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW JERSEY
Vera Vicenzotti
After two centuries of industrialization, the adaptive reuse of brownfield sites is a major topic
for landscape architecture and landscape planning worldwide. Brownfields show great simila-
rities internationally, because industrial production was primarily shaped by economic oppor-
tunities and technologies that were not related to local population or the characteristics of a
region. By way of a cross cultural comparison between North America (with a focus on the
United States) and Europe, this chapter brings to the fore the ways in which the discourses on
post-industrial landscapes differ considerably in different cultural contexts. Although the chal-
lenges of brownfield sites are similar, the perception and definition of the problems at hand –
the ‘facts’ – are culturally determined. We demonstrate this following three lines of argu-
mentation. First, we will argue that even though the sites themselves resemble each other, their
perception as landscapes may differ considerably, and consequently the approaches within
landscape architecture and planning on how to reuse and develop former industrial sites also
differ. Hence this chapter reviews conceptual changes and paradigm shifts in both the North
American and the European discourses (taking the German discourse as representative). Second,
the heuristic frame of our argument is the thesis that these different interpretations and
approaches are a consequence of historically diverse concepts of ‘landscape.’ Finally, we touch
on the impact of landscape ideologies on the design and planning of post-industrial sites and
sketch the impact of this phenomenon on landscape theory. As one can observe the evolution
of a new vernacular character in post-industrial landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic, our text
develops the question whether this development leads to a congruence of the different concepts
of landscape in North America and Europe.
This analysis is motivated by the belief that a critical understanding of the cultural context
allows a certain freedom from traditional and long-established perspectives. It therefore aims at
interpreting hermeneutically the cultural meaning of design elements and approaches, and only
refers briefly to other highly relevant aspects for the adaptive reuse of brownfield sites which are
405
Wolfram Höfer, Vera Vicenzotti
dealt with in a growing body of literature from different disciplines: e.g. contamination (e.g.
Hollander et al., 2010), social aspects (e.g. Cross, 1992; Kühne, 2007), economic matters (e.g.
Jochimsen, 1991), legal issues (e.g. Guglielmi, 2005; Sattler et al., 2001) or questions of historic
preservation (e.g. Falconer, 2007). Furthermore, this chapter deals mainly with a specific type of
post-industrial site found in urban and peri-urban situations. For a discussion of such sites in
rural areas and the cultural interpretation of, for example, derelict strip mines, see Berger (2002);
Mindrup and Elberling (1997); Pütz (2002); Schwarzer (2009). An additional fruitful approach is
the discussion of old industrial sites as ruins (Edensor, 2005). Considering Europe, we will focus
on Germany because it has brownfield site issues which are comparable to those in North
America (Guglielmi, 2005; for a more comprehensive analysis of urban regeneration and
development of old industrial sites in England, France and Germany, see Couch et al., 2011;
Hauser, 2001).
Different answers to a global challenge – strategies for post-industrial

landscapes in Germany and the United States
It has been shown in numerous studies how the ideas of ‘landscape’ in Europe and Germany
differ from those in the United States (Cosgrove, 1984; Mauch and Patel, 2008; Olwig, 1996;
2005; Stilgoe, 1982). While the diversity within North American as well as European cultural
heritage makes it difficult to speak of a general ‘North American’ or even ‘US-American’,
‘European’ or ‘German’ approach, we can identify some general patterns concerning the pop-
ular conceptions of designed (and not-designed) landscape. Those patterns reflect sets of values
that are at times in conflict, but refer in general to the common narrative of the USA as an
immigrant nation (landscape as a presumably virgin land that needs to be conquered) and are
thus distinctively different from the European cultural heritage – where landscape is most
commonly read as a homeland inherited from the ancestors, demanding stewardship. Taking
these different notions of ‘landscape’ as a heuristic, the next two subsections illustrate different
perceptions and ways to deal with post-industrial sites in Germany and the US.
Idealized industry, urban-industrial nature and Wildnis

In Germany, brownfield site redevelopment has been discussed since the 1960s. During this
time, different strategies of how to deal with these sites have been developed in different phases
(cf. Hauser, 2001). These developments have been accompanied by a conceptual change: old
industrial sites (Altindustriestandorte) have turned into post-industrial landscapes (postindustrielle
Landschaften). In the following, we will identify three discursive traditions that can also be
understood as three different strategies that have fostered the perception of old industrial sites as
post-industrial landscapes:
the idealization of industry;

the discovery of the specific nature of brownfield sites; and
the idea of wild nature.
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, ‘landscape’ has played a role as a counter-
weight to an urban and industrial society (cf. Eisel, 1982; Joachimides, 2002; Olwig, 1996).
Since the late twentieth century an interesting change can be observed, which has resulted in an
interpretation of industry not as the destroyer of landscape, but as a harmonious part of it. This
change has become possible because of the powerful economic structural changes that have
406
Post-industrial landscapes: evolving concepts
reduced the presence of industrial production. This development has facilitated an idealization of
industry and industrial work ‘as concrete work, no longer just farming and craftsmanship, but
also coal and steel become a determinant for culture and a good life’ (Höfer, 1998: 674), for a
harmonious ‘land and people unit’ (Riehl, 1990 [1854]). In such an ‘objectivistic under-
standing’, these values of a good life are related to the physical object of a (post-industrial)
landscape (Kirchhoff and Trepl, 2009: 25 ff.; cf. Wylie 2007). It also became possible to look at
these sites with a Kantian distanced view, free of any interests, which has often been described
as a precondition for the aesthetic perception of landscape, occurring within the creative mind
of the observer (‘subjectivist understanding’, Kirchhoff and Trepl, 2009: 25 ff.; cf. Cosgrove,
1985; Wylie, 2007). The idealization of industry has been the underlying and guiding notion in
the design of the Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord in Germany. The park was a key project of
the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscher Park, a programme of the Land
North Rhine–Westphalia between 1989 and 1999 which was designed to initiate restructuring
a part of the Ruhr region which has been suffering from economic, environmental and social
decline for many decades (Shaw, 2002; Weilacher, 2008). It was the explicit goal of the
exhibition to transform the Ruhr region into a ‘cultural landscape for the future’ (Ganser,
1999: 11; cf. Dettmar and Ganser, 1999). In Duisburg-Nord, this aim has been successfully
realized by the designers of the park, Latz and Partners. For Peter Latz, industrial relics are
not just decorative historic elements but are understood as complex systems originated in the
technical and economic demands of the bygone production process. These existing
structures are considered as one layer of information in the design process, overlaid with
new uses and structures, producing a creative tension and allowing new meanings to emerge
(Latz, 2008).
A second strategy that facilitated the change in perception of old industrial sites has been the
scientific discovery of a specific urban-industrial nature which has taken place since 1960 in
conjunction with the establishment of urban ecology as a sub-discipline of ecology, leading to
comprehensive surveys and mapping of the urban-industrial vegetation, in particular in Berlin
(e.g. Sukopp and Hejný, 1990; cf. Hauser, 2001). Many of these studies confirmed unexpected
species richness on urban and industrial sites, challenging the hitherto existing criteria of nature
conservation, which had focused almost exclusively on traditional cultural landscapes. As a
reaction to these surveys, botanists, nature conservationists and landscape architects began to talk
about nature ‘specific’ and ‘typical’ for urban and industrial sites (e.g. Dettmar, 1999; Kowarik,
1992; Rebele and Dettmar, 1996; cf. Hauser, 2001). Very influential in this regard has been
Kowarik’s concept of four kinds of nature in the city, comprising not only remains of pristine
nature, nature shaped by agriculture, or intentionally designed nature such as in parks, but also
‘nature of the fourth kind’, i.e., ‘specifically urban-industrial nature’ (Kowarik, 1992). This
perception of the vegetation and the industrial sites themselves marks a fundamental change,
since it has opened the possibility of perceiving them as unique places with a specific character,
i.e. as cultural landscapes.
The third strategy differs from the other two, as it does not aim at enhancing a perception of
the old industrial sites as a new form of cultural landscape. Rather, the brownfield sites are
conceived as Wildnis, i.e., wild nature or wilderness. Within European nature conservation and
landscape architecture in general, there is an influential discourse interpreting urban brownfield
sites and even smaller areas with spontaneous vegetation as Wildnis (e.g. Diemer et al., 2003;
Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007). This interpretation was successfully transferred to old industrial
sites (Dettmar, 1999; Hülbusch, 1981; Kowarik and Körner, 2005), expressing fascination for
and acknowledgement of the uncommon aesthetics, the messiness or even the sublime qualities
(cf. Körner, 2003) of the old industrial sites. Studies that argue for a reading of post-industrial
407
Figure 34.1 Pictures like this have been used frequently to raise awareness for the uncommon
aesthetics of the ‘urban industrial nature’. (source: Dettmar, 1999: 142)
sites as a new form of wild nature often combine floristic surveys with what could be called
phenomenological studies illustrating that ‘[w]e have to learn to see before the beauty of the
industrial nature opens up’ (Dettmar, 1999: 141; see Figure 34.1).
A common feature of all three strategies is that post-industrial landscapes are conceived as a
counterpart to the traditional agrarian landscape. Either, as in both the idealization of industry
and the discovery of the unique character of the industrial vegetation, the former industrial sites
are interpreted as a new form of cultural landscape, or the brownfield sites are conceived as a
kind of Wildnis, thus in explicit opposition to cultural landscape in general (Vicenzotti and
Trepl, 2009). Structurally, however, it appears that the cultural interpretation of post-industrial
sites is primarily linked to a heritage formed by aspects that shaped also the traditional cultural
landscape – idealization of human activity in response to natural resources, a celebration of
evolved systems of ‘land and people’ (cf. Höfer, 1998, 2000). Another trait of the German
discourse is that it has focused on the cultural meaning of the recultivation of former
industrial sites (cf. Guglielmi, 2005). This becomes obvious when analysing the contributions to
one of the earliest conferences dealing with post-industrial landscapes, which took place in
1992 (DGGL, 1992). It is even more significant considering that this conference was happening
in the context of the IBA Emscher Park, that is to say those existing contamination issues of
the Ruhr area were not overshadowing the discourse on cultural meaning. In this regard,
Latz (2004: 150) states that the ‘fear of historical contamination has given way to a calm
acceptance of the structures’. This calm acceptance, in accordance with an appreciation of the
new aesthetics of post-industrial landscapes, is an invitation to understand (contaminated)
old industrial sites as systems from an ecological, cultural or economic perspective. Such
understanding informs the design and planning process at both regional and site scales and
408
Figure 34.2 Calm acceptance of the old industrial structures in accordance with an appreciation
of their unusual aesthetics can lead to surprising solutions. Berne Park in Bottrop,
Germany by the Scottish landscape architect Eelco Hooftman. (source: Wolfram
Höfer)
it is now common praxis to explore the visual, spatial and cultural issues of such a site,
considering how industrial production has shaped the character of a neighbourhood and
how that character can inspire the design of meaningful places for new activities to come (see
Figure 34.2).
Clean slate approach, smoke stack nostalgia and Landscape Urbanism

While the German discussion is a continuation of the discourse around the cultural interpreta-
tion of landscape and wilderness, and thus follows established paths of academic argument, the
American discussion is less focused on the cultural meaning of these sites, but more on their
potential economic use and the engineering challenges that come with them. This pragmatic
perspective is related to one American cultural interpretation of landscape that regards landscape
as a resource for industrial society and not as an idealized counterweight to it. Olwig (2005)
describes two fundamental perspectives on American landscape. First, the pragmatic view evi-
dent in the rectangularly organized Midwest and, second, the New England landscape which
gathers around a ‘common’ with the iconic white wooden chapel rooting back to an early
group of settlers who shared religion and ideals, an ideal vision of the American society. Today
such architectural elements allow for a nostalgic view of past times, even if placed arbitrarily in a
shopping mall. The Midwestern juxtaposition to that is the abstract rationality of equal spaces.
Based on the abstract Renaissance idea of natural law, the rectangular spaces provide equal
opportunity for everybody; land outside settlement is an open resource for individual economic
success (Olwig, 2005). Having both perspectives in mind, we will outline three main strategies
towards post-industrial landscapes:
409
landscape as opportunity and how that is limited by environmental hazards;

a romanticized view of historic industrial relics; and
a comprehensive approach to post-industrial landscapes in the context of Landscape Urbanism.
Under the first perspective, land as resource, brownfield sites are considered as one main
opportunity for economic development in metropolitan areas, although afflicted with significant
safety concerns. The pursuit of economic success in relation to the limitations of possible
liabilities resulting from unsolved contamination issues has a much stronger role in the design
and planning discourse than in Germany (Kirkwood, 2001). Comparing brownfield laws and
policies in Europe and the USA, Guglielmi (2005) points out that the focus of brownfield
remediation in Europe is to foster economic development through urban renewal. In the USA,
however, the focus is to improve public health through the reduction of possible exposure to
contaminants. These are two significantly different approaches, the first sees derelict land as
potential for development; the latter considers brownfield sites mainly as health hazards. ‘Due to
the fact that U.S. brownfield policy grew out of the Superfund program, with an emphasis
originally on environmental cleanup and remediation, the spatial planning aspects of brownfield
redevelopment were to a large extent ignored’ (Guglielmi, 2005: 1288). Under the liability
perspective of present and future landowners, remediation efforts had to be as complete as
possible, leading to a clean slate approach. The effect was that not only cultural heritage but also
spatial qualities of old industrial ensembles were erased. In 1998, Niall Kirkwood (2001) initi-
ated a conference at Harvard addressing the transformation of former industrialized landscapes,
defining them as ‘manufactured sites.’ Compared with an earlier German conference
(DGGL, 1992), which was much more focused on cultural meaning, the American discussion
provided larger space for environmental law and remediation issues. This reflects the pragmatic
perspective on landscape mentioned above.
The second perspective on American landscape, referring to cultural meaning in a rather nostalgic
light, can be discussed using the Gas Works Park at Seattle as an example. Although the late
1960s and early 1970s brought the potential dangers of contamination hazards to the attention
of the general public (and with that the introduction of brownfield laws and the creation of the
US Environmental Protection Agency), that period also sparked a new awareness of the aes-
thetic potentials of post-industrial sites. The 1975 design of the Gasworks Park in Seattle by
Richard Haag was a turning point for the interpretation of brownfield sites in North America.
Against the original proposal, favoured by the Seattle community, completely to clear all
remaining structures and to transform the site into a Victorian-style park, Haag preserved
industrial equipment and celebrated it as the centrepiece of a new post-industrial park (Heyman,
1999). ‘Haag’s aestheticization of the gas works effectively produced an obsolescence narrative
that succeeded in winning unanimous approval for his master plan from the city council
with the support of the public’ (ibid.: 121). At first glance, this seems very similar to develop-
ments that occurred later all over Europe, but a closer look reveals a significant difference.
Although Haag had originally intended to integrate industrial elements on several layers into the
future uses of the park, gradually revealed contamination issues forced the reduction of the Gas
Works towers to just decorative elements, fenced in and without any visual connection to the
new context of the site (ibid.; Weilacher, 2008). This illustrates how the above-mentioned
perspective of land as resource triggered the need for an as-complete-as-possible remediation that
would protect investors from any future liability. In contradiction to Haag’s original intention,
it was difficult to maintain the comprehensive industrial heritage. Historic elements, however,
were considered useful when transforming old industrial sites into shopping malls and other
commercial uses. Cowie and Heathcott (2003) criticize the way in which historic elements like
410
smokestacks are often just used to decorate the ‘postmodern retail landscape’ with no compre-
hensible relation to the historic context and are thus devoid of meaning. In fact, the nostalgic
New England view of landscape described by Olwig is recurring in smokestack nostalgia. This
may appear similar to the ‘celebration of evolved systems’ mentioned above, however, the difference
is that this approach is looking at complex systems rather than at single decorative elements.
Recently, a much more comprehensive approach is revealed in the discussion of American
drosscapes. This term, coined by Alan Berger (2006), does not make a distinction between
abandoned industrial sites and other under-utilized urban areas. Berger takes a rather pragmatic
position, stating that any healthy economic development produces dross – spaces out of use –
even more in a post-Fordist situation. While the Fordist industrial economy, globally inter-
acting, already demanded long-term concentration of capital through large-scale industrial
production facilities, a more flexible, transportation-oriented economy creates significantly
changed landscapes with large spaces occupied by infrastructure and in-between waste lands (see
Figure 34.3). The drosscape approach marks a major shift in the American discussion: the dis-
cussion of hazards and liability is no longer the dominant topic and aesthetic appreciation and
design is not anymore concentrated on a single object but on the design process. This much
more comprehensive approach shows parallels with the recent discussion around Landscape
Urbanism (see Chapter 37) and Ecological Urbanism (Mostafavi, 2010). In fact, the regional
planning approach of IBA Emscher Park is mentioned as a significant exemplar for the
landscape urbanist approach (Shannon, 2006; Waldheim, 2006).
For a long time, the American discussion was dominated by liability issues, but progress in
research on appropriate remediation techniques and more comprehensive planning approaches
(Hollander et al., 2010) provides the opportunity to push the theory discussion beyond these
topics.
Figure 34.3 The fenced-in industrial relics at the Seattle Gas Works Park. (source: Daniel Winter-
bottom)
411
Synthesis and outlook: the vernacular character of

post-industrial landscapes
This brief overview of the discourse on post-industrial landscapes does not claim to be com-
plete; however, it reveals the relevance of the discourse for research on landscape theory in the
context of de-industrialization. Future enquiry may develop in several directions: it may
explore different types of post-industrial landscapes, such as railway lines (Foster, 2010;
Qviström, 2012) or waste landscapes (Berger, 2002, 2006; Engler, 2004; Hauser, 1997,
2001);
investigate case studies of adaptive reuse, focusing on the interplay of economic, land use
aspects and the cultural meaning of landscape (Hollander et. al., 2010; Qviström, 2012); or
building upon our comparison of German and American discussions of post-industrial
landscapes explore further how the interpretation of and approaches to them are influenced
by the general cultural understanding of landscapes.
A fruitful new question would be:
if and how does the discourse around post-industrial landscapes, including their perception,
design and use, influence in turn the cultural interpretation of landscapes in general?
Launching two theses in response to this question, we wish further to illustrate possible
directions for future research. In the German discussion, brownfield sites became post-industrial
landscapes because historic industrial elements were idealized and understood as complex
structures supporting present uses. The interesting twist is that such elements of industrial
production were primarily shaped by forces of global economy, scientific research enabling
technological progress, the availability of resources, and efficient transport routes. In the con-
servative German perception of landscape those elements were not considered to be related to
the traditions of local population that shaped the characteristics of a specific region; rather those
industrial elements were considered an ugly disturbance of the aesthetic harmony of landscapes
as unique places with specific character (Eisel, 1982). The idealization of historic industrial
Figure 34.4 Post-industrial landscape as possible point of convergence between the historically
different concepts of ‘landscape’.
412
elements transforms the perception of the same elements from ugly disturbance into appropriate
design elements. The post-industrial landscape is becoming a new form of cultural landscape. In
the USA the discussion is still dominated by liability issues. However, the frequent use of
industrial elements as decorative features suggests that there is also an idealization of such
relics evolving. Further, recent discussions in the context of Landscape Urbanism suggest a more
contextual approach. Hence, starting from the observation that in both Germany and the
United States relics of the industrial past are not only valued as architectural pieces, but
are increasingly understood in a larger context as landscape elements, one could explore the
thesis that post-industrial landscapes might be a conceptual point of convergence for the his-
torically different notions of ‘landscape’ (see Figure 34.4). Further, we propose the thesis that it
could be fruitful to explore this convergence with the notion of the ‘vernacular’. Instructive in
this regard is the definition of the term ‘historic vernacular landscape’ by the US National Park
Service as a category for the protection of cultural landscapes as:
[A] landscape that evolved through use by the people whose activities or occupancy shaped
it. Through social or cultural attitudes of an individual, a family, or a community, the
landscape reflects the physical, biological, and cultural character of everyday lives. Function
plays a significant role in vernacular landscapes. This can be a farm complex or a district of
historic farmsteads along a river valley. Examples include rural villages, industrial complexes,
and agricultural landscapes.
(National Park Service, n.d.)
Although the National Park Service relates the historic vernacular landscape still to local attri-
butes, i.e. ‘an individual, a family or a community’, ‘industrial complexes’, which can be
understood as representing the globalized economy, are mentioned explicitly as examples of the
historic vernacular landscape. This seeming contradiction calls for further research exploring this
new relationship between the global and the local as well as the economic and cultural factors
shaping our landscapes. However, it is evident that evolving planning and design concepts both
in North America and Europe consider brownfield sites no longer as nuisances but as potential
elements of the public realm, as meaningful post-industrial landscapes. Further research in the
post-industrial vernacular may contribute to the ongoing development of landscape theory and
may provide insights into the interdependence between economic development, the use of the
space and the cultural meaning of landscape.
Further reading
Berger, A. (2006) Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
(Impressive collection of areal images making the case how widely land is wasted in America.)
Cowie, J. and Heathcott, J. (eds) (2003) Beyond the Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialization. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press. (Collection of essays exploring the process of deindustrialization, considering
worker narratives, commemoration, environmental activism and so forth.)
Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford: Berg Publishers. (Compre-
hensive study and passionate plea for acknowledging the aesthetic, social and cultural qualities of
industrial ruins, focus on Britain.)
Genske, D.D. and Hauser, S. (eds) (2003) Die Brache als Chance: Ein transdisziplinärer Dialog über verbrauchte
Flächen, Berlin: Springer. (Overview of different research topics in the German discourse on brownfield
sites and related topics.)
Hauser, S. (2001) ‘Derelict Land in European Cities: Concepts and Designs’. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte
(2), 55–64. (Overview of the history and main paradigms towards post-industrial landscapes in Germany,
England and France.)
413
Hollander, J., Kirkwood, N. and Gold, J. (2010) Principles of Brownfield Regeneration: Cleanup, Design, and
Reuse of Derelict Land. Washington, DC: Islandpress. (‘How to do it’ handbook on techniques and
policies of remediation with case studies.)
Kirkwood, N. (ed.) (2001) Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape. London: Taylor and
Francis. (Case studies and exploratory essays examining international approaches on post-industrial sites
with a focus on remediation technology and the legal landscape.)
Kowarik, I. and Körner, S. (eds) (2005) Wild Urban Woodlands: New Perspectives for Urban Forestry, Berlin,
Heidelberg and New York: Springer. (Overview of ecological features and potential social functions of
urban forests with case studies from England, Germany and Japan.)
Weilacher, U. (2008) Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners, Basel, Boston
and Berlin: Birkhäuser. (Illustration and interpretation of design projects of post-industrial landscapes by
Latz and Partners that have greatly influenced the German and the international discourse.)
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35
Visualizing landscapes
Lewis Gill
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
Eckart Lange
UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
History of landscape visualization

For reasons of artistic merit or decision making, people have always striven to capture the
essence of both natural and built environments that surround them. Wall paintings created by
the ancient Egyptians capture long lost gardens in pictorial form, such as the garden of
Sebekhotep found on a tomb wall in Thebes (Carroll 2003: 17). These early images mix
together plan, elevation and bird’s eye viewpoints, making it hard for the modern eye to
interpret (Gothein 1966). However, the acceptance and consistent usage of perspective in the
Renaissance period contributed to more accurate depictions of landscapes, leading to the crea-
tion of images that resemble the real world rather closely. Audiences in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries were amazed by the creation of Eidophusikons, ‘moving’ pictures
created by eighteenth-century English painter Philip James de Loutherbourg, dioramas or large-
scale panoramic paintings. These can be seen as the equivalent of IMAX cinemas of today.
Related to these developments is a more abstract form of landscape visualization; cartography,
which also has a long and rich pedigree (Ehrenberg 2005).
Historically, capturing landscapes in images was driven by artistic, political or martial
needs, but it is also possible to impart how landscape may come to look through these
methods. Important early examples of this are the ‘Red Books’ of landscape architect Humphry
Repton (1752–1818), who created water colours of existing landscapes and his future vision of
changes, utilizing a system of painted overlays on flapped hinges (Repton 1980). These pro-
vided his clients with an easy to use ‘before’ and ‘after’ comparison of a proposed change to
their estates.
As photographic technology developed and became affordable at the turn of the twentieth
century, it became possible to capture existing landscapes far more rapidly than via drawing or
painting. As a technical refinement the photomontage technique allowed new landscape features
to be overlaid on to existing photography through manual etching or drawing on the
photograph.
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Lewis Gill, Eckart Lange
Figure 35.1 1:1200 scale model, Yantai, China; note the size of the person in the door at the top
left corner.
In addition to the two-dimensional representation of landscapes, physical scale models, con-

structed from wood, card and so on, have been used to capture the spatial relationships of
landscapes (Figure 35.1). They have been used to simulate journeys through landscapes using
microscopic cameras, e.g. to record on video tape. While scaled models are normally used in
practice, on occasion even a 1:1 representation – that is, a real world model – is produced, as
shown in Figure 35.2.
Towards the end of the twentieth century the availability of desktop computers allowed
digital techniques of landscape visualization to become more pervasive in presenting and
Figure 35.2 Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, 1:1 scale model.
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conveying change to landscapes. Rather than hand-drawing plans, landscape architects began to
employ computer software to draw, display and print their designs. With the advent of digital
photomontage software photographs could be composited together (Lange 1990), and this
technique has flourished since.
Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software tools
have had a significant effect on the visualization of landscape, allowing the creation of 3D
landscape models on computers. Initially, due to the constraints of computer processing power,
these models were used to support the creation of more accurate photomontages as well as to
create pre-rendered animated walk-throughs of places, which give the viewer a sense of motion
through a landscape (Lange 1994). Also, with the ability to create and analyze complex spatial
data, it became possible to deliver consistent high quality plans and maps of landscape change.
The maps and plans output from this style of software are now commonplace in planning
proposals. As remote sensing techniques have developed, vast data sources for mapping and
aerial photography have become more common. Within the past decade, these data sources
have become accessible via the internet, such as Google Maps, Google Earth and Microsoft
Bing Maps.
Although the digital revolution had led to a radical change in the techniques and tools that
could be used to create landscape visualization, the results still present snapshots of
landscapes. These stylized representations of landscapes are useful to communicate information
about landscape change, but they do not mirror the way people experience the real world.
People rarely take a bird’s eye view of a landscape and landscapes are not static, they are
experienced dynamically and they change over time. For non-specialists, abstract and fixed
representations can prove difficult to interpret and the choice of viewpoints and what is
visualized in them may not be entirely representative of a scheme, especially if the visualizations
are designed to market an idea. For example, Tufte (1997) highlights that Repton altered
scales and added unnecessary embellishments to some of his before and after drawings. So,
there exists two possible forms of disconnection from a portrayed design; visualizations con-
structed in a misrepresentative way (deliberate or not), or a failure of viewers to interpret
the visualization correctly. This applies to the whole range of analogue or digital landscape
visualization.
In recent years, there has been a conjunction of specialized computer hardware and com-
puting methods dedicated to the provision of real-time graphical environments, driven by the
need for higher fidelity visualization and simulation. This has allowed people to create 3D
landscape models that are becoming more visually complex and interactive, finally allowing
people to move freely around virtual spaces taking any viewpoint they wish to observe in future
landscapes, giving rise to detailed real-time eye level walk-throughs (Morgan et al. 2009). These
provide far more in-depth exploration of the spatial nature of future designs.
So, a major question is how best to incorporate these interactive 3D technologies as
suitable visualizations into existing practice and workflows to better support design of and
communication of landscape change.
Creating interactive 3D landscape models

Construction of an interactive 3D landscape model requires three basic elements: a 3D model of
an area; software that can take this model and display it in real-time; and computer hardware
that allows the software to operate efficiently.
Whilst there are an increasing number of software packages available (Simmetry3D, Lumion,
Biosphere3D) or converted computer game engines (Herwig and Paar 2002) that allow real-
419
time interaction with 3D models and the requisite computer hardware becoming cheaper, a
major difficulty for creating interactive 3D visualizations is that of model construction
(Paar 2006).
When creating a 3D model, it is necessary to collect enough data that will allow the creation
of the model to the level of detail required. Ervin (2001) suggests that a digital landscape model
can be broken down into six elements: landform; vegetation; water; structures; animals; atmos-
phere. To elaborate, ‘structures’ include all built form and infrastructure, such as roads, while
the ‘animals’ category includes humans.
Landform data can be acquired from a variety of sources, but the more detailed the source
the more accurate the resultant model will become. Ribarsky et al. (2002) noted the increasing
availability of aerial and ground based Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) capture systems
that allow the acquisition of accurate location and physical form datasets that can be used to
generate urban models. Data derived from the LIDAR data can provide a starting point for
interactive modelling techniques.
A common practice is to overlay terrain models with the relevant aerial photography to
present contextual information on the landform, as happens in Google Earth. This works well
when the viewpoint of the terrain is far away, but has its limitations as the viewpoint gets close
to the terrain. The foreground of visualizations is noted as being important for the degree of
realism (Lange 2001). This implies it is important to add as much foreground detail as is possible
to landscape visualizations, especially if the interactive 3D visualization is to provide eye-level
walk-throughs.
Atmosphere can be defined using simple effects, such as placing a ‘sky box’ of appropriate
textures that surround the landform model. Boulanger et al. (2008) demonstrated dynamic real-
time lighting of natural scenes, where lighting can be interactively changed to provide realistic
conditions. Vegetation, structures, water and animals can be placed on top of the landform
model in their corresponding positions in the model, which can often be derived from vector
mapping data.
The most traditional approach to the construction of a digital landscape model is to assemble
all the elements of a model by hand using software to create generic 3D models (Baumann
2005). However, the cost of modelling in this fashion is linked to the complexity of the model:
as the detail increases, the amount of construction time required also increases (Müller et al.
2006). This has led to the drive for the development of methods that reduce the time to create
models of landscapes.
Hoinkes and Lange (1995) developed an automated process of creating 3D models from 2D
data sets. Such a system requires a library of suitable 3D models to be available, e.g. vegetation
elements and structures, like power lines, as well as built form. In recent years, commercial
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) programs, such as ArcGIS 3D Analyst (ESRI n.d.) have
also begun to contain such functionalities.
Procedural generation of models, or procedural modelling, is the process of algorithmically
constructing models. In other words, a computer uses a pre-defined set of rules to take an input
set of data and transforms this to the resulting model as an output. It is often used to create
individual elements of models, such as built form (Wonka et al. 2003), or whole virtual envir-
onments, such as the IMAGIS system (Perrin et al. 2001), which generates large-scale 3D
landscape models based on geo-referenced data.
Animals or humans in interactive 3D landscape models tend to be static or at most animated
in simple fashion. Typically, real world movement patterns are not accurately represented.
Animation of animals and people in interactive 3D landscape visualizations and the perception
of these elements remains an area to be researched.
420
Landscape design and landscape planning

Lynch and Hack (1984) referred to ‘virtual worlds’ in the context of exploring change and
designed alterations to a landscape:
designers need to construct ‘a virtual world’, a model of what they know about a site and
program, which allows possibilities to be tested quickly.
(Lynch and Hack 1984: 128)
Lynch and Hack speak of the construction of ‘a virtual world’ (for clarification purposes, refer-
red to subsequently as the mental model ), within the mind of the designer. They propose that
diagrams and physical models, traditional forms of landscape visualization, aid the construction
of this mental model. However, since this quotation was written, there have been many
advances in technology which have led to the possibility of using real-time 3D models within
the design processes for landscapes (Bishop 2005). In essence, it is now possible to create digital
virtual worlds that support Lynch’s mental models, using interactive 3D landscape models.
Also, interactive 3D visualization techniques fit well in Steinitz’s (1990) model of Landscape
Change which breaks the process of design down into several passes through defined stages of
modelling. At the level of Steinitz’s Representation Models and Change Models for analysis of
spatial alterations, 3D landscape models help designers answer the questions of ‘How should the
landscape be defined?’ and ‘How may the landscape be altered?’
Kibria et al. (2009) state that when viewing visualizations, people bring their education and
experience to bear on the model. By collecting together designers, experts and stakeholders in
collaborative design workshops and providing interactive 3D landscape visualizations, there is
potential to improve the mental models of each participant through discussion. The ability
to freely explore the spatial nature of landscapes gives interactive 3D visualizations the power
to support discussion revolving around a mental model of a participant, which in turn may
increase the comprehension of the other participants. By creating discussion, design trade-offs
can be explored, which should lead to better design decisions and more transparent planning
processes.
Currently, interactive visualizations of landscape are seen at the end of the design process
rather than as a design tool for communication between the designer and the stakeholder. As it
becomes easier to create and visualize 3D models, it becomes possible to include interactive 3D
techniques that allow models to be easily altered as part of the design process. These flexible
models allow designers to edit and change the underlying 3D landscape model, such as in the
Smart Terrain system (Buchholz et al. 2006).
Landscape planning processes are methods for legitimizing and controlling anthropogenic
impact on the environment (e.g. Lange and Hehl-Lange 2010). These processes have become
more organized and prescriptive over time but supported by international initiatives, such as
the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, some of these process and planning
authorities are becoming increasingly democratic, thereby attempting to take account of differ-
ent views of people and organizations that would be affected by any proposed changes.
Therefore, as people with less exposure to the interpretation of spatial plans are increasingly
being consulted, interactive 3D visualizations will be able to play an increasingly important
supporting role.
Consultation in landscape planning has long been supported by the more established visuali-
zation techniques, such as plans, sections, and photomontages. However, with interactivity in
landscape models, comes the ability for people to take control over the visualization, such as the
421
Figure 35.3 Interactive landscape model providing the ability for stakeholders to take control
over the visualization.
ability to move anywhere within the model (Figure 35.3). Therefore, there is the potential to
deliver far more meaning to the user than a two dimensional image created by someone with
their own perspective and agenda. Schroth (2007) concludes that interactivity in visualizations
contributes to better understanding of scenarios by participants and to building credibility and
consensus within a collaborative planning process.
Nonetheless, interactive models are not necessarily going to replace other forms of visualiza-
tion, but can be used in conjunction with more traditional forms of landscape visualization to
support the planning process. If some people find it difficult to interpret plans, one of the most
common forms of visualization of landscape change, but are comfortable looking at 3D images,
then providing easy to navigate links between these two forms of visualization may improve
understanding of designs.
Just as the previously mentioned Egyptian garden art contains a confusing mix of perspectives
which may obfuscate meaning within a drawing, so there is a danger of misrepresentation using
modern visualization techniques. A longstanding goal of real-time computer graphics is to
increase the realism of the images created. However, the more realism there is in an image, the
more likely it is to be accepted as final and, therefore, in a landscape design process, it is advi-
sable to adapt the degree of realism to adequately represent the progress of the design process
(Kibria et al. 2009). Computer-based models should take this visualization of uncertainty in
designs into account. Therefore, despite having the technology to show visualizations that are
increasingly photo-realistic, it should not be used simply because it is possible (Bishop and
Lange, 2005).
Where next?
A possible avenue to take for mitigating ‘over realism’ in visualizations is that of Non
Photo-realistic Rendering (NPR). This is a set of computer rendering techniques that offer a
way of presenting 3D landscape models in more abstract form. Images can be automatically
422
generated from one model to look like they have been sketched, or drawn in a cartoon
style amongst other effects (Coconu et al. 2006; Lesage and Visvalingam 2002; Nienhaus
2005). However, despite their resemblance of hand-drawn sketches there is little understanding
of how these representations of landscape may be perceived by participants of the planning
process.
There are also a number of interesting uses for these interactive 3D models beyond that of
representation of spatial change. Increasingly, non-visual data is being included with these
models to increase the amount of information that can be communicated to the viewer. Thus,
with the addition of context specific information into the visualization it is possible to utilize the
same models in other stages of the Steinitz (1990) model. For example, if a model was created
that, when altering a river channel to improve flood protection, could display new flood levels
visually, then this would allow the interactive visualizations to support the Process and Impact
Model stage.
One approach to this is to overlay a 3D landscape model with coloured geo-spatial data sets.
This visualization of non-visual elements allows the viewer to consider observed data within a
3D context, which may provide more insight into the data. Hehl-Lange (2001) demonstrated
this technique with the overlay of ecological data, such as bat flight paths, within a landscape
model. Isaacs et al. (2008) used falsely coloured built form to indicate individual building energy
usage sustainability assessment within their interactive tool, S-City VT. Morgan et al. (2012)
false coloured a 3D landscape model with a density function derived from bird sighting surveys,
which was taken a step further by adding bird calls to the model with the frequency of calls
based on the same density function. As the user performed an eye-level walk-through, they
would experience bird calls based on observed data. Gill et al. (2010) demonstrated the incor-
poration of the results from a Bayesian Network that predicted the danger and enjoyment of a
weir design for canoeists, into a 3D weir design tool that operated within the context of an
interactive 3D visualization, shown in Figure 35.4.
Agent-based modelling computes the behaviour of independent rule-based units. The inter-
action of these individual units can produce overall emergent behaviours that are otherwise
difficult to model, such as animal flocking and crowd simulation. Cavens et al. (2007) applied
this technique to predict recreational behaviour of hikers in the Alps using a 3D landscape
model, allowing agents to react to their physical environment.
In the field of architecture, there has been a movement from traditional 2D and 3D CAD
techniques (Eastman 1976) to Building Information Models (BIM). These create a single
Figure 35.4 Interactive weir model in context within a larger existing landscape model.
423
repository of information about a building, which supports the lifespan of a building from
design conception, through construction to ongoing maintenance. A BIM is built from basic
components, such as walls and windows, which know how to draw themselves in both 2D and
3D. To create the BIM, these components are combined in 3D using parametric constraints,
which form a structure to reflow elements when designs are altered. As each component can
also hold non-visual information, analytical tools have been developed that can operate on the
BIM, such as creating costing schedules. One of the stated advantages of creating this form of
3D model is that spatial design errors are reduced at the planning stage, rather than propagating
to the construction stages. Ervin (2006) has suggested a similar approach is taken to landscape in
the form of Landscape Information Models. The idea being that there would be one central
model for a landscape that could be used for visualization, analysis and simulations. Whilst
Laycock and Day (2003) suggested further work should take place integrating procedural
modelling with more standard techniques to create a ‘memory efficient realistic urban model’,
all of these approaches are still working towards the development of an integrated system. This
system would not only generate the 3D landscape models and render real time views of a large
area of landscape, but also have ability to zoom into detailed areas and provide functionality for
editing at site level or strategic scale.
If interactive 3D landscape models that can be changed easily are married with predictive models
and simulations, then it will be possible to develop LIMs that are capable of analysis and simu-
lation of the effects of change and the visualization of the results of these in 3D stereo vision.
Bishop et al. (2009) suggest an interactive visualization interface for forest management scenar-
ios. It would allow the user to simulate different management strategies for forest management
over long time periods whilst seeing the visual effects on forests in the landscape.
New opportunities arise for transmission of landscape visualization with the advent of
‘smartphone’ technologies that can derive their location, have high resolution screens, internet
Figure 35.5 Tablet device displaying a planning proposal on site.
424
connectivity and enough computing power available to render complex graphics. These devices
are becoming more commonplace and present an opportunity to push landscape visualization to
the public in an easily accessible manner. This has been demonstrated with ‘apps’ that can overlay
information on video feeds, presenting augmented reality (Layar 2012) and apps that can present
visualizations of future scenarios whilst walking through the area that would change (Lange
2011), as shown in Figure 35.5. It would seem for landscape architects, architects and planners that
the ability to disseminate interactive 3D visualizations of their proposals via smart phones would be
highly advantageous in reducing costs of delivery and increasing inclusiveness in decision making.
In summary, it seems that now more than ever it is possible to create detailed imagery of
proposed changes to our environment through interactive 3D landscape models. With the
mobile device method of dissemination becoming available, these will be consumed by more
interested parties in more ways. Interactive 3D LIMs may aid creation of visually attractive,
sustainable environments and these visualizations will serve as a historical record of our world
and our values. Therefore, it seems that landscape visualization is more vibrant than ever and
will continue to develop long into the future.
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36
Peri-urban landscapes: from
disorder to hybridity
Mattias Qviström
SWEDISH UNIVERSITY OF AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES
Town and country may show us the surface of life with which we feel comfortable, but the
interface shows us its broiling depths.
(Shoard 2000: 89)
With increasing urbanization and the rise of the private automobile, peri-urban development
accelerated in the Western world in the early twentieth century. Today, peri-urban landscapes
are a global phenomenon spurring land-use conflicts and challenging centuries-old ideas and
ideals of city and country. Peri-urban landscapes were mainly regarded as a problem within
research and planning during most of the twentieth century, but a paradigm shift occurred
during its last decade with the acknowledgement of the potential of hybrid landscapes.
Although the study of peri-urban landscape is an interdisciplinary and scattered field (compare
the literature examined in reviews by Meeus and Gulinck 2008, Simon 2008, Taylor 2011), this
chapter aims for a comprehensive overview. The chapter discusses the peri-urban concept,
introduces the peri-urban discourse in (primarily) Western countries, presents key recent works
in landscape studies and, finally, argues the fruitfulness of detailed and critical studies of hybrid
landscapes.
The concept
With its global and interdisciplinary scope, it is scarcely surprising that the peri-urban concept
has been defined in various ways. However, several common traits can be found in the defini-
tion and the intertwined characterization of the peri-urban. Peri-urban is usually defined as the
interface between rural and urban within the ‘urban shadow’, i.e. the zone of influence of the
city measured for instance as the commuter belt, or as a spatially defined girdle around the city
outside its suburbs (Allen 2003, Buxton et al. 2006, Simon 2008, Marshall et al. 2009). Whereas
some describe the interface only as a mix of rural and urban land uses, others emphasize con-
stant interactions and conflicts, as well as the occurrence of rural–urban hybrids, as a marker of
the peri-urban. Expectations of coming development and land speculation are equally important
features and the successive transition from rural to urban land-use is normally included in the
definition, particularly for the zone closest to the city, if not the more peripheral areas often
427
Mattias Qviström
described as being affected by hidden urbanization (i.e. increasing numbers of urban commuters
and increasingly urban lifestyles) and transitions from productive to post-productive land use.
Suboptimal institutional structures and poorly developed infrastructure (e.g. roads and sewerage)
are frequently mentioned, both of which are partly due to recent and often scattered develop-
ment (Allen 2003, Simon 2008, Marshall et al. 2009). Apart from a number of concepts partly
overlapping with peri-urban (e.g. exurbia, urban sprawl and counter-urbanization), rural–urban
fringe stands out as a synonym and is treated as such in this chapter (compare definitions offered
by Pryor 1968, Bryant et al. 1982, Audirac 1999, Gallent et al. 2007 with the characterization
above).
Ironically, concepts such as rural–urban fringe and peri-urban are based on a dichotomous
urban–rural divide that denies any middle ground, and a closer look at discourse and models
illustrating the phenomenon reveals an implicit historiography of rural–urban separation.
Outdated models of centripetal growth patterns and monocentric cities with an urban hinter-
land are used as a backdrop to explain the new phenomena of sprawling cities. In these models,
the city is generally described as the driving force, whereas the country is portrayed in terms
of illustrating its passivity and inevitable decline. As an alternative to these outdated models, the
concept Zwischenstadt (between-city) captures the more complex situation of metropolitan
regions (Sieverts 2003), as does the concept porous landscapes (Busck et al. 2008), which
emphasizes the amorphous character of the fringe. Rather than defining the peri-urban vis-à-vis
the location of the city centre, a focus on rural–urban interactions is more appropriate. Such a
definition describes a relational space with a cartographical pattern that can vary substantially
from city to city and between countries. However, since dichotomous interpretations of the
phenomenon remain common, the risk of reiterating or even enhancing outdated ideas of
differences between urban and rural is still present. The cosmology of city and country needs to
be handled with great care when seeking a deeper understanding of the peri-urban: on the
one hand, researchers can benefit from going beyond this divide in the study of the peri-urban,
on the other, they have to acknowledge the importance of these categories in planning, land-
scape representations, statistics, etc., which to a large extent frame our interpretations of the
landscape.
A characterization of the peri-urban which acknowledges such an interplay between ideals
and their contested materialization (or between land and life) is offered by Audirac (1999) who
describes the urban fringe as:
a rural–urban battleground for water and land, loss of farmland, wildlife, and
countryside, and a refuge of the geographically mobile, who by fleeing the city, trade
commuting for a mythical piece of Arcadia only to leave behind thinning central cities and
inner suburbs.
(Audirac 1999: 7)
Audirac describes a relational phenomenon, which cannot be classified as place or process, as

spatial category or lifestyle (see for instance the conceptual discussion in Taylor, 2011). The price
we have to pay for such a relational understanding of landscape is a multi-faceted definition of
phenomena such as peri-urban. Furthermore, national differences such as population density,
institutional structures, socio-economic driving forces, etc., affect not only the character, but
also the very idea of peri-urban: such local conditions need to be acknowledged and made
explicit in landscape studies. Thus, the definition above is merely a point of departure for an
inevitable examination of concepts, hidden ideologies and place-specific circumstances needed
in a peri-urban landscape study (see Figure 36.1).
428
Peri-urban landscapes: disorder to hybridity
Figure 36.1 The peri-urban landscape of Scania, Sweden. Former farms within the commuting
belt are turned into residences for commuters dreaming of a peaceful life in the
countryside, or aiming to fulfil their ambition to pursue hobby farming. Sometimes
labelled ‘hidden urbanization’, the transformation of the countryside is in some pla-
ces nevertheless detectable due to the pastoral iconography of fences, signs, gar-
dens, etc. (Photo: the author)
From disorder to hybridity: 100 years of peri-urban discourse

we should secure some orderly line up to which the country and town may each extend
and stop definitely, so avoiding the irregular margin of rubbish-heaps and derelict building
land which spoils the approach to almost all our towns to-day …
(Unwin 1909: 163–4)
The wish for a clear divide between city and country characterizes early discourses within
planning on the urban fringe. Although thoroughly planned garden cities were cherished as the
‘marriage’ between city and country, informal development in which rural and urban activities
actually blended has been regarded as a problem within modern planning for more than a
century. In 1928, Benton MacKaye, a spokesperson for regional planning at a time when the
new mobility and settlement patterns threatened the very basis for regional geography and its
rooted landscape characterizations, provided a telling illustration of urban development:
Its movements here as elsewhere we may liken to a glacier. It is spreading, unthinking,

ruthless. Its substance consists of tenements, bungalows, stores, factories, billboards, filling
stations, eating stands, and other structures whose individual hideousness and collective
haphazardness present that unmistakable environment which we call the ‘slum’. Not the
slum of poverty, but the slum of commerce. … rural villages … are welded together into a
common suburban mass without form or articulation … not city, not country, but
429
Mattias Qviström
wilderness – the wilderness not of an integrated ordered nature, but of a standardized,

unordered civilization.
(MacKaye 1962: 160)
The urban structure as such had predecessors: large-scale, scattered semi-urban settlements are
an ancient phenomena (Yokohari et al. 2000, Simon 2008) and the existence of a wealthy
population with summerhouses at the urban rim goes back centuries (Bunce 1994, Hayden
2003). However, the peri-urban landscape described by MacKaye has a decisively modern
character. A crucial part of modernity is belief in the need for constant progress and the simul-
taneous lament of the loss of nature; in the case of MacKaye and numerous others in the peri-
urban discourse, this is expressed in a deterministic belief in the expanding city and a crumbling
countryside. This idea, rather than the mix of rural and urban or the existence of scattered
urban settlements, distinguishes the peri-urban landscape from the pre-modern phenomenon. In
the 1920s and 1930s, the emergence of a welfare society, new means of transportation (in par-
ticular the spread of the private car) and social reforms (such as statutory holidays) led to an
increasing number of people in Western countries searching for peaceful and scenic places for
leisure. This movement came to threaten the very same values they were looking for and (in
combination with growing cities, road constructions, gravel pits, etc.) caused an increasing
number of peri-urban conflicts. This nurtured a public debate on the right to the landscape and
by the mid-1930s the planning debate was underway in a large number of Western countries
(arguing for stronger planning, regional planning and nature or landscape protection), and the
concept urban fringe was launched (Pryor 1968, Matless 1998, Qviström 2010).
The early twentieth-century planning debate fostered several schemes aiming for a separation
of city and country, of which the green belt planning in Britain and several of its former colo-
nies is the most important (Amati 2008, see Figure 36.2). In other countries, liberal planning
facilitated escalating sprawl which triggered further criticism. In 1964, Blake published God’s
Own Junkyard, the Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape, with aerial photographs illustrating
the bulldozing of the urban fringe and the rise of monotonous residential areas in its place
(Blake 1964). According to Rome (2001), these powerful pictures of farmland despoliation
came to influence a growing debate and resistance to suburbanization, which for instance was
adopted in the seminal work on landscape planning by McHarg (1992 [1969]). Despite the
dramatic growth of metropolitan regions with a porous or hybrid character, representations of
peri-urban landscapes as anomalies are still part of contemporary planning, and the attempts to
stigmatize these areas are usually supported by arguments echoing Unwin, MacKaye or
McHarg, calling for orderly separation of nature and culture, city and country, according to
modern cosmology.
The land-use conflict which has received most attention to date is that between farming and
urban expansion, partly because most major cities are situated amidst highly productive farmland
(Bryant et al. 1982). Arguments concerning a future lack of arable land appeared already in the
1950s, but developed into an international concern that made an impact on planning policies in
the 1960s and early 1970s (Bunce 1998). This led to a vivid debate on urban sprawl and the
need for urban growth boundaries, as well as urban fringe studies focusing on the impact of
urban expansion on agriculture due to the clash between urban and rural land economy, spec-
ulation and land-use changes (Lawrence 1988, Hart 1991, Daniels 1999), which until recently
has dominated the perspective on urban agriculture (see Freidberg 2001 and Condon et al. 2010
for another perspective). Bunce (1998) examines the ideologies of thirty years of farmland pre-
servation discourse in North America, arguing that an odd combination of environmentalism
and agrarianism lies behind the debate, with the local interest in preserving landscape amenities
430
Figure 36.2 The green belt of Sheffield maintains a clear divide between city and country,
although intersected by new roads and other infrastructure. Green belt planning is
probably the most famous response to peri-urbanization, with a peak in popularity
between the 1950s and 1970s (Amati 2008). Today, new models for the urban
fringe with a less clearly pronounced rural–urban divide are being sought. (Photo:
Ingrid Sarlöv Herlin)
as a ‘subtext’ of increasing importance. Characteristically, the discourse is driven from an urban

perspective, while ‘mainstream farm voices are barely detectable in the farmland preservation
movement’ (Bunce 1998: 244).
Contemporary research captures a wide span of environmental conflicts due to peri-urbanization,
with for instance von der Dunk et al. (2011) identifying no less than 45 different categories of
land-use conflicts in a case study area in Switzerland. Frequent themes for examination are the
fragmentation of biotopes, loss of landscape amenities and negative impacts caused by sub-
optimized infrastructure systems, not least transportation and the management of water resour-
ces (see Buxton et al. 2006, Meeus and Gulinck 2008 for a review). The sheer number of land
uses in need of a peri-urban location (gravel pits, waste dumps, water supplies, space-using
industries, external shopping centres, truck centres, golf courses and other space-requiring
facilities for outdoor recreation) could explain why the zone is primarily regarded as a problem
within research (e.g. Piorr et al. 2011). However, examinations focusing exclusively on conflicts
could be misleading, since opportunities and conflicts are frequently entwined. For instance,
weak institutional structures open the way for global capital to derive benefit from the urban
fringe, but simultaneously facilitate informal settlement by local actors (Freidberg 2001).
Marshall et al. (2009: 5) conclude that ‘[E]xclusions and opportunities are thus often Janus-
faced: it is through the exclusion of services, of regulation, of conservation and so forth, that
opportunities are created’. Even though this statement primarily concerns developing countries,
the contemporary critique of modern planning in general and green-belt planning in particular
indicates the more general relevance of their conclusions.
431
Mattias Qviström
The above-mentioned paradoxes of planning at the fringe have been examined within
planning research. With the seminal studies on the English green belt by Peter Hall in the 1960s
and 1970s, the model for green-belt planning began to be criticized (Amati 2008). Inspired by
actor–network theory, Murdoch and Lowe (2003) illustrate how attempts to keep city and
country apart nurtured a paradoxical development, ‘once the planning system acted to differ-
entiate urban from rural areas, it was noticed that the population was moving in increasing
numbers from urban to rural areas to take advantage of the preserved countryside’ (Murdoch
and Lowe 2003: 323). In particular, people in favour of a clear divide are those most prone to
transgress the divide by moving to the countryside. Similar studies illustrating the paradoxical
consequences of implementations of rural–urban division have added to the criticism of former
planning and the arguments for a new, hybrid approach to the urban fringe (e.g. Qviström
2007, Cadieux 2008, Condon et al. 2010), whereas Yokohari et al. (2000) and de Block and
Polasky (2011) offer historical examples beyond this divide, suggesting these examples could
provide knowledge for future planning.
Ex-urban migrants and the push-and-pull mechanisms leading them to the countryside have
been studied since the early 1960s (Pryor 1968, Taylor 2011). Among the pull mechanisms, a
set of landscape-related values stand out: opportunities for outdoor leisure, a ‘natural’ environ-
ment, peace and quiet, rural lifestyle, picturesque views, a benign environment in which to raise
children, more ‘space’ and freedom (Swaffield and Fairweather 1998, Millburn et al. 2010, see
also Mahon et al., 2012). Following Swaffield and Fairweather (1998), these arguments reveal
the dream of an Arcadian landscape (cf. Marx 2000). The dream is to a large extent realized
with second homes, which in some countries have played a crucial role in peri-urban devel-
opment (Hall and Müller 2004). Research on amenity migration have contributed to an
understanding of the driving forces for this development as well as of the conflicts between
different lifestyles caused by this movement (see Gosnell and Abrams 2011 for a review). Ghose
(2004) illustrates how the new population causes escalating house prices and thus rural gentri-
fication, with commodification of space, displacement of previous residents, new land uses and,
in the long run, a landscape with a new identity. However, recent research questions the idea of
‘two cultures’ (i.e. the collision between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ population), and aims instead to
diversify the picture of the peri-urban considering the economic base of the agricultural sector
in peri-urban areas, as well as the differentiated socioeconomic pattern due to commuters living
in the countryside (Busck et al. 2008, Robbins et al. 2009).
During the last decades of the twentieth century, alternative interpretations of the urban
fringe evolved, arguing for the recognition of specific values in the vernacular, messy or mul-
tifunctional landscapes (Shoard 2000, Gallent et al. 2007, Meeus and Gulinck 2008). Outdoor
recreation has been proffered as one of the main arguments, and, whereas urban forestry has
provided successful models for multifunctionality or land-use strategies combining production
and consumption (Terada et al. 2010), the recent interest in urban agriculture, together with
various art projects, has facilitated a critique of the normative rural–urban divide and its related
aesthetics (e.g. Blauvelt 2008). This shift in focus is related to a general criticism of modern
planning (e.g. mono-functional land use) and to the post-modern interest in marginality,
in-between spaces and ruins (e.g. Gallent et al. 2007). Studies of this liminal landscape and its
unplanned development could help locate models and interpretations of the peri-urban beyond
the modern divides of nature and culture, and thus provide the seeds of sustainable development
(e.g. Terada et al. 2010).
As part of the turn towards an interest in the values of the peri-urban landscape, a rich flora
of new concepts has developed, clinging to the idea that new metaphors offer new ways of
seeing and thus new ways of understanding this elusive landscape (Hayden 2004, Blauvelt
432
2008), although Hayden (2003) argues that this jungle of new concepts obscures the history of
their development, and thus limits our ability to reveal the complexity of hybrid landscapes.
Whereas some authors settle for the invention of a new concept, Rowe (1991) and Sieverts
(2003) offer fully fledged stories, or cosmologies, of the new landscape, aiming for principles for
planning and design beyond the rural–urban divide. Sieverts (2003) in particular illustrates how
a new metaphor when combined with investigations and stories about the new landscape can
make a substantial impact on planning discourse.
The peri-urban debate was dominated by a Western paradigm during the twentieth century,
but alternative views have now emerged. In the late 1980s, Terry McGee (in collaboration with
Norton Ginsburg) coined the term desakota, based on the Indonesian words desa (village) and
kota (town), in order to capture an Asian form of semi-urban landscape defined as ‘regions of an
intense mixture of agricultural and non-agricultural activities that often stretch along corridors
between large city cores’ (McGee 1991: 7). Although McGee differentiates between desakota
and peri-urban regions, the concept has been helpful in conceptualization of the urban fringe
beyond the rural–urban divide imposed by colonial planning (Yokohari et al. 2000, Marshall
et al. 2009).
In recent years studies within political ecology have contributed a much needed critical
approach to the politics of the peri-urban (Robbins et al. 2009). Walker and Fortmann
(2003) provide a detailed account of the political struggle over the right to the landscape in a
peri-urban county in California, with conflicts between nature preservation and land use
at its centre. Arguing that ideas of landscape are key to an understanding of the complex
conflict, they explore tensions between different actors in their way of valuing scenery and
wildlife, traditional culture and property rights, and their attitudes towards spatial planning
and rural gentrification. Their paper also illustrates the complex power relations characterizing
the peri-urban landscape, with global actors influencing both sides of the conflict (see also
Freidberg 2001).
Challenges for the future

As Crankshaw (2009: 219) argues, ‘exurban development is most often defined critically, not by
its internal character as a landscape but externally, as something that destroys a preferred land
use’. The preoccupation with a rural–urban divide has nurtured studies of urbanization and the
loss of farmland rather than studies of the peri-urban landscape as such (Qviström 2007).
However, the peri-urban landscape is an everyday environment for a large and increasing pro-
portion of the population. Landscape research has the responsibility to examine this vernacular
landscape, and inform policy-makers of conflicts as well as opportunities for new land-use
regimes. Historical and ethnological studies are needed to gain an understanding of recent his-
tory and everyday life in order to capture peri-urban cultural heritage and identity (e.g. Mahon
et al., 2012). Furthermore, inspired by Marx (2000), Rowe (1991) argues the need to develop a
poetic of the middle landscape, i.e. a thematic framework for the design of the peri-urban
landscape. Not until a nuanced discussion on the aesthetics, ethics and identity of the peri-urban
has developed will a thorough analysis of its potential be possible.
This chapter emphasizes the contested character of peri-urban landscapes, which needs to be
taken into account when searching for a middle landscape. Despite the recent fascination with
hybrid landscapes, the city edge remains an ‘irregular, discontinuous zone of dissonance’ and
‘a jumble of contradiction’ (Hart 1991: 35), with land-use conflicts that need to be addressed.
Due to the limited number of previous studies of the peri-urban landscape on its own terms,
studies prying beneath the ‘surface’ of the vague or arbitrary land-use categories offered by
433
Mattias Qviström
Figure 36.3 Lake Stoibermühle, a former gravel pit next to Munich airport. The noise from a
motorway and aircraft accompanies that of birds and children. Landscape research
has gone from lamenting the mix of rural and urban to attempts to understand and
explore the everyday peri-urban landscape as such, to reveal its values as well as its
contested character and power relations. (Photo: the author)
434
cartographical studies or superficial observations are particularly needed. Studying the

tensions between the dreams of the countryside and everyday life or the partial materialization
of an Arcadian ideology is one way to capture the contested character. By triangulating
different methodologies or sources, a complex and contested image of the peri-urban can be
achieved (e.g. Crankshaw 2009). If dualisms such as the idea of ‘two cultures’ are avoided,
rich case studies could provide local knowledge of the complexity of driving forces and
power relations shaping the land (see Robbins et al. 2009 for suggestions on themes for critical
studies beyond this divide). Furthermore, as Walker (2007) puts it, city and country develop in
tandem. Hence, a symmetrical analysis is needed that not only considers the city as a driving
force but also, for instance, the dramatic restructuring and globalization of agriculture and
forestry.
Peri-urban landscape studies are also needed in order to assess the environmental con-
sequences of modernity in general and modern planning in particular. As Shoard (2000) notes,
this is a perfect entry point into the ‘broiling depths’ of modern society. The wish for a
separation of nature and culture, city and country, has created hybrid landscapes which have
largely been disregarded within research and planning to date. Although thorough studies have
been carried out concerning green belts, the impacts of implementing the dichotomies of
modern society through planning warrant further examination. We will never understand peri-
urbanity unless we acknowledge the central role of modernity, including the effects of modern
categories and ideals, on peri-urban development and landscape imaginaries.
The contestation, the driving forces and the assets of the fringe, is to a large extent related to
landscape, provided that the breadth of the concept is recognized and applied (Qviström, 2010).
Amenity migration is closely related to landscape values and countryside ideals, while conflicting
landscape ideals and arguments concerning the right to the landscape are at the epicentre of
peri-urban conflicts. With tensions between different interpretations of, and claims to, the
landscape as a focal point, an intricate weave of discourse, everyday practice and materiality can
be revealed. A shift from studies of rural–urban conflicts to contests over the right to landscape
would facilitate a far wider understanding of the complexity of the conflicts (Walker and
Fortmann 2003). If both the production and consumption of landscape are taken into con-
sideration, further exploration into the landscape theory of the peri-urban is a fruitful path, not
only in order to gain a deeper understanding of the middle landscape but also to extend our
understanding of the modern landscape in general (see Figure 36.3).
Further reading
Amati, M. (ed.) (2008) Urban green belts in the twenty-first century. Aldershot: Ashgate. (An introduction to
international studies of green belt planning, with some illustrations of the attempts to go beyond the
rural–urban divide within planning.)
Bryant, C. R., Russwurm, L. H. and McLellan, G. (1982) The city’s countryside: land and its management in
the rural–urban fringe. London: Longman. (A classic concerning land-use conflicts and planning of the
rural–urban fringe.)
McGregor, D., Simon, D. and Thompson, D. (eds) (2005) The peri-urban interface: approaches to sustainable natural
and human resource use. Oxford: Earthscan (An introduction to peri-urban studies of the global south.)
Murdoch, J. and Lowe, P. (2003) ‘The preservationist paradox: modernism, environmentalism and the
politics of spatial division’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, 318–32. (A base for
examinations of the contested character of the peri-urban landscape.)
Robbins, P., Meehan, K., Gosnell, H. and Gilbertz, S. (2009) ‘Writing the new West: a critical review’,
Rural Sociology, 74, 356–82. (A review of critical studies with suggestions on future research.)
Walker, P. and Fortmann, L. (2003) ‘Whose landscape? A political ecology of the “exurban” Sierra’,
Cultural Geographies, 10: 469–91. (Theoretical inspiration on the role of landscape and a detailed case
study of power relations shaping the peri-urban landscape.)
435
Mattias Qviström
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37
On landscape urbanism
Peggy Tully
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, NY
Over the past decade, Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a robust alternative to the failures of
modernist urban planning. Its followers, a collective of landscape architects, architects, urban
designers and others, believe that the medium of landscape, because it necessarily privileges
ecology over form, is the most able organizer of a healthy, post-industrial urbanity. Addition-
ally, they hold that the city, the region, indeed the entire world should be understood as a kind
of a landscape, not in the nineteenth-century understanding of landscape, i.e. pastoral, pictur-
esque “nature,” but as an organization of complex, discreet, scalable systems that combine to
make one unique environment. Furthermore, Landscape Urbanism employs the term “land-
scape” in several ways: as metaphor; the city is like a landscape: as model; the city will function
like a landscape: and as a literal organizer; the design of the city will be driven by landscape as
opposed to architecture. The result is a landscape-based urbanism that seeks to radically realign
traditional disciplinary boundaries in the design professions while it breaks down the established
dualisms between the synthetic and the natural, the urban and the wild. This is different from
the ancient concept of rus in urbe, transferring the ‘countryside into the city,’ in that it is not
simply erasing the city in favor of the country.
This chapter introduces the reader to Landscape Urbanism by describing its emergence,
conceptual framework, how research is carried out, major works, recent developments, and also
briefly touches on its critics. In design disciplines such as architecture or landscape architecture,
innovatory practice is often considered as a form of research, to be evaluated through
critical review, an equivalence that has been recognized, for example, through the creation of
design-based PhD programs in the UK and the US. Through a review of seminal thinking by
its leading theorists, the chapter will trace the development of Landscape Urbanism’s
overarching theories and its major themes as they relate to the innovatory practices that char-
acterize the professional landscape urbanist. A review of some influential Landscape Urbanism
projects – both built and un-built – is used to the help describe the practical expression of
the sometimes dense theoretical framing that characterize Landscape Urbanism. Furthermore,
examination of the speculative urbanism of emergent studios will help articulate Landscape
Urbanism’s unique approach to urbanity and its primary method of research, i.e. innovatory
practice.
438
The emergence of an emergent theory

The public event that signified the shift from modernist planning to the systems based approach
that would become Landscape Urbanism, appears to be the 1982 Parc de la Villette design
competition (Barzilay et al., 1984). Though Bernard Tschumi’s winning design was indeed
influential for its innovative program grounded in “culture” rather than “nature” (Meyer, 1991:
16–26), Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s (2009) second-place proposal, which allowed for inde-
termination and flux by privileging landscape and natural systems over architecture and fixed
program, was the scheme that most vigorously repudiated the form-driven architecture of the
time, by using program and event instead of vertical structure as the driver. By the late 1980s
and early 1990s, a few short years after these designs debuted, the gestalt of Landscape Urbanism
was already having a radical impact on urban design education, especially at the University of
Pennsylvania where then architecture and landscape architecture students such as Charles
Waldheim and Alan Berger were pushing the limits of traditional design practice under the
guidance of professors James Corner and Mohsen Mostafavi. In 1997 Landscape Urbanism’s
formalization as a unique theoretical framework began with the Grahame Foundation sponsored
International Landscape Urbanism Exhibition, held in Chicago at the University of Illinois
(Shane, 2004: 3). The event included speakers such as James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, and
Mohsen Mostafavi. Charles Waldheim, who coined the term Landscape Urbanism, organized
the exhibition to describe the forces and events which he and others had seen coalescing over
the course of the previous decade to form this new brand of urbanism, which was being practiced,
at that time, by a small cohort of North American and European designers including Stan Allen,
James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, and Rem Koolhaas. Almost immediately following the Interna-
tional Landscape Urbanism Exhibition, design schools in North America and Europe began
offering studio-based masters and post-professional programs in Landscape Urbanism studies,
including the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Toronto, Harvard Graduate
School of Design, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an influential program
at London’s Architectural Association, developed under the direction of Mohsen Mostafavi and
chaired by Ciro Najle (NB: the University of Illinois no longer offers an independent Landscape
Urbanism program).
Almost from the beginning, writing has been a primary vehicle for identifying and sorting
out the tenets of this evolving form of urbanism. One of the earliest contributions was James
Corner’s Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, soon followed by his Recovering Land-
scape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Theory. Shortly thereafter other writing and critique of
the Landscape Urbanism approach style, including CASE: Downsview Park edited by Julia
Czerniak, Stan Allen’s Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D, and Charles Waldheim’s Stalking Detroit,
was received by an enthusiastic but small, largely academic audience. But with the publication
of Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape Mostafavi et al. (2003) launched the
first of several books on Landscape Urbanism that would, for a much larger audience, document
and codify the evolving theoretical framework of this unique form of urbanism as it relates to
practice. Landscape Urbanism was followed by the widely read Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited
by Charles Waldheim (2006), a sweeping anthology that provided an overview of the theory
and field of practice as it had been defined to that point. Following a conference of the same
name, Mostafavi (2010) published Ecological Urbanism, an anthology that sought to further
Landscape Urbanism’s landscape-based approach to urbanity from a ‘way of thinking’ into a
coherent, cross-disciplinary doctrine for practice at multiple scales. Other important writing on
the subject of Landscape Urbanism includes Alan Berger’s Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban
America, KERB, and Topos 71.
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Peggy Tully
A definition of landscape urbanism and its theoretical

framework
The theoretical roots of Landscape Urbanism come from two distinct sources. First, there are
the early 1980s post-modernist critiques of modernist architecture and planning advanced by
Charles Jencks and others, which “indicted modernism for its inability to produce a ‘mean-
ingful’ or ‘livable’ public realm, for its failure to come to terms with the city as an historical
construction of collective consciousness, and for its inability to communicate with multiple
audiences” (Waldheim, 2006: 38–9). Landscape Urbanism contends that it is different from, and
better than, modernist forms of planning and design because it recognizes that an urban setting
is in constant flux and that, in order to respond to such a condition properly, the design pro-
gram must be grounded in a flexible indeterminacy, as opposed to rigid verticality. This allows
“any shift, modification, replacement, or substitutions to occur without damaging the initial
hypothesis” (Waldheim, 2006: 41). Within this framework, Landscape Urbanism contends that
the medium of landscape offers the best possible means for producing highly responsive, flexible
urban settings that can adapt to the ever evolving demographic, environmental, political, and
social needs of the contemporary city (Waldheim, 2006: 37).
The second root of Landscape Urbanism is found in the writings of planners such as Patrick
Geddes, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, and especially Ian McHarg (Waldheim, 2006: 39).
However, even though Corner recognizes that Landscape Urbanism directly benefits from the
“canonical texts of regional environmental planning,” he is insistent that landscape urbanism
remains distinct from that tradition, acknowledging the importance of McHarg’s Design with
Nature but rejecting the “opposition of nature and city implied in [McHarg’s] regionally scaled
environmental planning practice” (Waldheim, 2006: 38). Landscape Urbanism instead supports
a condition where nature and the city are not separate but interwoven, at times indistinguish-
able. This blending of conditions is (theoretically) achieved through application of the four
major themes of practice, discussed below.
While the premise of using landscape as the primary medium for organizing urbanity may
seem straightforward, defining Landscape Urbanism has proven to be elusive, and iterations and
interpretations abound. One of the most carefully nuanced is Julia Czerniak’s:
landscape urbanism, a phrase taken here to be the conceptualization of and design and
planning for urban landscapes that draw from an understanding of, variously, landscape’s
disciplinarity (history of ideas), functions (ecologies and economies), formal and spatial
attributes (both natural and cultural organizations, systems, and formations), and processes
(temporal qualities) impacting many scales of work. Landscape urbanism also suggests a
particular culture of and consciousness about the land that refrains from the superficial
reference to sustainability, ecology, and the complex processes of our environments in
favor of projects that actually engage them. Embedded in landscape urbanism is concern
not only with how landscape performs … but how it appears …
(Czerniak 2001: 108)
At the other pole there is the more straightforward definition provided by Ruth Durack
(2004: 1): “the concept is elegantly simple. It’s a call to turn the traditional practice of urban
design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems to structure urban form, instead
of buildings and infrastructure systems.”
In A Reference Manifesto, Charles Waldheim (2006: 11) says that as much as anything else
Landscape Urbanism signifies “a disciplinary realignment … [in] which landscape replaces
440
architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.” Importantly, James Corner
(2003: 58), notes that “landscape urbanism is more than a singular image or style: it is an ethos,
an attitude, a way of thinking and acting.”
In perhaps the most thorough critical reading of the Landscape Urbanism canon thus far,
critic and researcher Ian Thompson (2012) identifies “Ten Tenets for Landscape Urbanism,”
distilling and collating the essence of the theoretical framework that supports Landscape
Urbanism in a powerful, but easily understood list, as follows:
1 Landscape Urbanism rejects the binary opposition between city and landscape.
2 Landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of cities.
Corollary: Landscape Urbanism involves the collapse, or the radical realignment, of
traditional disciplinary boundaries
3 Landscape Urbanism engages with vast scales – both in time and space.
4 Landscape Urbanism prepares fields for action and stages for performances.
5 Landscape Urbanism is less concerned with what things look like, more with what they do.
6 Landscape Urbanism sees the landscape as machinic.
7 Landscape Urbanism makes the invisible visible.
8 Landscape Urbanism embraces ecology and complexity.
9 Landscape Urbanism encourages hybridity between natural and engineered systems.
10 Landscape Urbanism recognizes the remedial possibilities inherent in the landscape.
The complexity of the task at hand – exploding the disciplinary boundaries within the design
professions while prescribing a flexible method for designing complex urban projects – is the
reason for this glut of interpretations, but all conceptions of Landscape Urbanism agree that
landscape, as a model, is uniquely suited to tackle increasingly complex, contemporary urban
dynamics (Architectural Association, 2010; Waldheim 2006: 43), especially when dealing with
the so called “meta-narrative of ecology”(Weller 2008: 265) and, in general, also insist on the
following: there are political, environmental, cultural, economic, and social dimensions to
urbanity; foregrounding the performative, or infrastructural is essential (Corner, 2003); an urban
site is in constant flux, therefore place construction must remain flexible and adaptable; urbanity
exists at many scales simultaneously; there is a temporal element to consider when designing
urban places, i.e. change happens over time, design must recognize this and respond accordingly
(Steiner, 2006: 247). Additionally, implicit in all attempts to define Landscape Urbanism is a
critique of:
architecture and urban design’s inability to offer coherent, competent, and convincing
explanations of contemporary urban conditions. In this context, the discourse surrounding
landscape urbanism can be read as a disciplinary realignment in which landscape supplants
architecture’s historical role as the basic building block of urban design.
(Waldheim, 2006: 37)
The main themes of landscape urbanist practice

As seemingly difficult as it has been to definitively identify the theoretical basis of Landscape
Urbanism, in his contribution to the Landscape Urbanism Reader James Corner (2006: 28–32),
himself a theorist and practitioner, very clearly outlines four “themes from which to organize
the emerging landscape urbanist practice: ecological and urban processes over time; the staging
of horizontal surfaces; the operational or working method; and the imaginary.”
441
Peggy Tully
The first of these four themes for the emerging landscape urbanist practice addresses processes
over time. This means that instead of ignoring, erasing, concealing, or relocating the processes of
urbanization, i.e. “capital accumulation, deregulation, globalization, environmental protection,
and so on” (Corner, 2006: 28) the designer allows them to inform and create spatial urbanism.
This is in direct opposition to modernist planning which sought “to contain the dynamic
multiplicity of urban processes within a fixed, rigid, spatial frame that neither derived from nor
redirected any of the processes moving through it” (Corner, 2006: 28). This flexible urbanism,
Corner contends, will create a “more organic, fluid urbanism” that privileges process over form.
In order to do this, Landscape Urbanism insists that a universal shift must happen, replacing the
vertical object (architecture) with the landscape-based urban system as the central organizer of
future urbanisms. For Corner (ibid.: 29). and other landscape urbanists, the so-called “soft
world” of ecology offers the best model for understanding the complexity of the modern city
Corner (ibid.: 30) says that “the discipline of ecology suggests that individual agents, acting
across a broad field of operation, produce incremental and cumulative effects that continually
evolve the shape of an environment over time.” With this, ecology becomes not only the
analogy for reading urbanity but also the basis for intervention.
But, instead of the “natural” interventions that landscape architects have developed over time
(Ian McHarg’s 1967 Design With Nature, for example), Corner and other landscape urbanists are
calling for a intervention which treats the urban condition itself as another aspect of ecology, so
not only do sites have commonly understood ecologies of water, air, vegetation and so forth,
they also have ecologies of the political, social, economic, demographic and so on. As Corner
(2006: 31) puts it “The promise of landscape urbanism is the development of a spacetime
ecology that treats all forces and agents working in the urban field and considers them as
continuous networks of interrelationships.”
The staging of horizontal surfaces

The second theme that Corner outlines for landscape urbanist practice is the staging of horizontal
surfaces. Simply put, Corner (2006: 31–2) is referring to an understanding of the multi-scaled
ground plane of cities that allows it to be viewed and considered as the primary element of
urban infrastructure, largely because it “sows the seeds of future possibility, staging the ground
for both uncertainty and promise.” Corner uses the street grid of upper Manhattan as an
example of a surface staging that is legible, flexible, scalable, and open to change over time. This
understanding allows a treatment of horizontal surface that permits a higher incidence of
indeterminacy and future possibility, while giving the literal landscape renewed significance.
The operational or working method

The third theme of landscape urbanist practice is the operational or working method which, in
terms of pure representational language, asks the designer to reconsider the picturesque focus of
land design and the techniques by which he or she characterizes and interprets the vast scope of
urban systems and functions across a range of scales. It is from the dictates of the operational/
working method that the design “terra firma” of the traditional landscape architect – the pic-
turesque and the pastoral – are relegated to sorry seconds, in favor of the performative “beauty”
of infrastructure, urban flux, and ecology. This requires a complete overall of representational
language as well: the landscape architect’s traditional water-colors and marker renderings of
mature landscapes in the best of weather are replaced with complex diagrams, views that
represent temporal and seasonal changes, conceptual phasing that spans generations, and so
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forth. Here the visual and analytic tools of the planner, the landscape architect, and the urbanist
get combined and married to methods completely outside the design professions, such as com-
puter programming, music, physics and modern art. All of these areas, and more, can provide
the landscape urbanist with the means to tell the story of contemporary urbanity. Additionally,
the working method calls upon practitioners to embrace interdisciplinary collaboration, with the
landscape urbanist leading the design team. It is within the operational or the working method,
therefore, that the realignment of the design professions is codified (Corner, 2006: 38).
Imagination and speculation

The first of the three practical themes of landscape urbanist practice, together recommend a
path for a practice-based approach to indeterminacy that allows for flexibility in preparing for
the complexity of urbanity, and better ways of expressing analyses and solutions, but are, in
Corner’s estimation, meaningless without the fourth theme, the imaginary. The imaginary is
where all of these mechanisms unite to creatively solve problems and join the practical to the
fantastical, the natural to the synthetic. This is primarily (but not exclusively) what differentiates
Landscape Urbanism from the McHargian approach to designing with nature, and from a
“bureaucratic and uninspired” (Corner 2006: 31–2) contemporary planning practice which,
Corner says, is entirely lacking in broad understanding of the complexity of modern urbanism
or the creativity needed to join the disparate but still related ecologies that make it up.
Forms of research: the university and innovations in practice

In many ways Landscape Urbanism is still in its infancy and therefore lacking a large portfolio of
built work for testing, proving, or disproving any of its theoretical assertions. Currently research
into Landscape Urbanism is, for the most part, taking place at either the university level or
through innovative design practice. At the university level, research is primarily happening in
studio-based masters and research PhD programs, however, despite a number of prominent
Landscape Urbanism focused programs at schools such as the Harvard Graduate School of
Design, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – both in the United States – and the
Architectural Association in London, to date only one PhD dissertation that tests the proposals
or outcomes of Landscape Urbanism has been published in North America and only one in
Europe (Shannon 2004; Bouras 2010: from a Proquest thesis and dissertation database search
15 November 2011). These papers, to various extents, question and test theories in the abstract,
neither examines a built work as a test case. The fact that only a small amount of academic
research has been published thus far indicates that there are major opportunities for novel
academic research into the promises and performance of Landscape Urbanism.
At the level of innovatory practice, Landscape Urbanism research is more abundant but less
rigorous. Through the act of designing, practitioners explore materials, systems, and the theo-
retical framework of Landscape Urbanism, and much like the research done by visual artists,
often the completed design and the design process itself are essential aspects of the research.
Additionally, commissions for public park lands often have research feedbacks built into the
design requirements. For instance, because the City of New York wishes to use the new
Freshkills Park as a “platform for generating knowledge applicable to a broad range of urban
environmental issues” it intends to study the success of Field Operations’ interventions for their
impact on habitat, soil production, and water quality, as well as their impact on visitor’s
experience. However, the 30-year timescale of the park project means that the results of this
research will not be known for the foreseeable future. As stated on the Freshkills website:
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The City hopes to capitalize on this available land by collaborating on research plots and
permitting access that is restricted to scientists, technicians and students. Initial projects are
already underway with the United States Forest Service and CUNY Hunter. The
Department of Parks & Recreation continues to seek partners in academia, museums,
government and the private sector in the interest of refining and targeting research
questions toward the advancement of study and the pursuit of funding opportunities.
Freshkills Park, NYC, website
The products of practice-based research consist variously of built and un-built design work
with some of the most robust and innovative design research coming from North American
practices such as Stoss Landscape Urbanism in Boston, Massachusetts and James Corner Field
Operations, in New York. These firms, which are collaborative by nature, generally employ
architects, graphic designers, and horticultural experts, but are led by landscape architects who
are resolute landscape urbanists and who practice a landscape-based urbanism for which, culture,
ecology, infrastructure, and imagination are the systems driving their design work.
The most well-known built project adhering to the Landscape Urbanism framework is the
High Line Park designed by a multi-disciplinary team led by James Corner of JCFO. The
High Line Park design takes an abandoned elevated rail structure on the West Side of Man-
hattan (New York) and “retools [the] industrial conveyance into a post-industrial instrument of
leisure, life, and growth. By changing the rules of engagement between plant life and pedes-
trians.” By blending the synthetic with the organic the design strategy for the Highline, dubbed
“agri-tecture,” offers “flexibility and responsiveness to the changing needs, opportunities, and
desires of [this] dynamic context” and “is designed to remain perpetually unfinished, sustaining
emergent growth and change over time”(High Line, 2004).
Other firms that embrace Landscape Urbanism as an aspect of their practice, without making
it the driving force behind it, have found great success in adopting some of Landscape Urban-
ism’s tenets, and, like the pure Landscape Urbanism firms, have won major design competitions.
Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates, for example, while not nominally a Landscape
Urbanism firm, have adopted Landscape Urbanism principles into an established practice.
Recent major competition wins by Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates – including Arc
Wildlife Bridge Competition (Colorado), the St. Louis Gateway Arch Competition (St. Louis,
Missouri), Brooklyn Bridge Park Competition (Brooklyn, New York), and the Allegheny
Riverfront Park (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) – unmistakably employ fundamental themes of
landscape urbanist practice, such as process over time and the operational method, while com-
bining them with a more traditional kind of landscape architecture that summons the picturesque
and the idyllic (Van Valkenburgh and Associates, 2010).
As of 2011, all speculative and built Landscape Urbanism has been in the form of parklands.
The next realm of innovatory design research will come with the change in scale required to
build a new city using the themes of Landscape Urbanism. In mid-2011 James Corner Field
Operations won the International Competition for the Planning of the Qianhai Region of
Shenzhen, a 4,500 acre site on the western coast of Shenzhen, China, with their design called
Qianhai Water City. When completed, Qianhai will link Hong Kong to Shenzhen and
Guangzhou and will serve as “a major new urban center – a ‘Manhattan’ – in the Pearl River
Delta” mega-region. The scheme produced by James Corner Field Operations, offers a brand
new, super-dense, hyper-sustainable city for a 1.5 million, where “water fingers” connect the
city and function as infrastructure and recreation land while providing developable frontage.
Here James Corner Field Operations uses the block structure of the Shenzen grid to stage
the ground plane for a diverse range of uses, from the recreational to the infrastructural (2011
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The International Competition for the Planning of the Qianhai Region of Shenzhen. Invited
competition sponsored by the Urban Planning Land and Resources Commission of Shenzhen).
Public space and landscape urbanism: the design competition

Over the past decade the practical and theoretical themes of Landscape Urbanism have been
presented to the public through a series of international design competition entries. Unfortunately,
many of the most influential competitions, all of which took place in North America, remain
either unbuilt or are only in their initial construction phases, even years after the winners were
announced, so it is not yet clear if all of the assumptions made by the designs will be realized.
The following are amongst the most influential competitions featuring some of the most well
known Landscape Urbanism designs:
1999 Downsview Park, Toronto, Canada An international competition to design Canada’s first
national urban park in the city of Toronto, with a stated goal “to promote innovative design
proposals that would respond to the social and natural histories of the site while developing
its potential as a new landscape”(Downsview Park, 2011). The five finalists were all inter-
disciplinary teams led by a landscape urbanist. The winning entry Tree City, led by Rem
Koolhaas and graphic designer Bruce Mau, with Landscape Architect Petra Blaisse and architect
Oleson Worland, offered a program driven by process and event rather than by architecture.
Bernard Tschumi was placed second with his technology driven design that promised
“everything is ‘urban,’ even in the middle of the wilderness.” The winning scheme was an
early exploration of the themes of Landscape Urbanism practice – interdisciplinarity, hor-
izontality, process over time, the imaginary – and though it is still in its initial construction
phases, which includes soil regeneration and a reforesting of a significant portion of the site,
the influence of the designs on paper – from the winners and the runners up – has been far
reaching (Czerniak, 2001).
2001 Fresh Kills Park Competition The Fresh Kills competition called for a design that would
transform a Staten Island New York landfill into public parkland. James Corner Field
Operations’ winning entry, LIFESCAPE, proposes to regenerate the former garbage dump
into a place for emergent ecologies, recreational facilities, and landscaped public parkland.
The competition finalists were again a host of interdisciplinary teams with designs that pri-
vileged indeterminacy and process over architectural heroics. The three-phased construction
of the park, which is expected to take 30 years to complete, began in 2008. Ideas and
especially graphic language seen in the winning entry and the finalist entries have had a
major impact on the approach that newer designers have chosen to take to brownfield
projects (Fresh Kills Park Project, 2011) (see Figure 37.1).
2007 Governor’s Island Design Competition In 2007 the Trust for Governor’s Island launched
the first stage of a design competition that sought to transform Governors Island, an historic,
decommissioned military base in New York City, into the city’s “2nd” extraordinary public
park (as the competition brief put it – the first extraordinary park was, of course, Central
Park). After the initial entrants were narrowed down to five interdisciplinary teams, the team
led by Netherland’s based landscape architects West 8 was selected. West 8’s competition
entry simultaneously recognizes the island’s unique cultural and historic character while
embracing its extraordinary ecological diversity and the design’s potential for future adapt-
ability. Using a network of overlapping systems to maximize impact and keep cost low, the
park design is developed in phases over many years. Construction is scheduled to begin in
2012 (Trust for Governors Island, 2011).
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Peggy Tully
Figure 37.1 The High Line Park, New York, New York, as built. James Corner Field Operations,
with Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, Olafur Eliasson, Piet Oudolf and Buro Happold
(source: image created by author).
Other important competitions that have served as practical showcases for the theoretical ideas
of Landscape Urbanism include: 2007 Lower Don Lands Master Plan Competition, Toronto,
Canada (won by Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates), 2007 Eire Street Plaza Competi-
tion, Milwaukie Wisconsin (won by Stoss Landscape Urbanism); 2010 The ARC International
Wildlife Crossing Infrastructure Design Competition, Colorado USA (won by Michael Van
Valkenburgh and Associates), and 2010 Lansdowne Park Competition, Ottawa, Canada (won
by Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg).
The importance of the competition format to the public understanding of Landscape
Urbanism cannot be overstated; it is within the competition that the freedom to experiment
with the specific combination of ideas that constitute Landscape Urbanism is given free
reign. Without the competitions, the support they provide to explore new ideas, their
public visibility, and the notability they provide for young design firms, it is unlikely that
the ideas behind Landscape Urbanism would ever have moved from the academy to the real
world.
Criticism of Landscape Urbanism

Landscape Urbanism is not without its detractors, modest criticisms from within the academic
world exist: Witold Rybczynski (2011), a professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsyl-
vania, famously criticized the High Line Park as a “landscaping” project amidst the great
architecture of New York City. Thompson (2012), though sympathetic to many of the
446
aspirations of Landscape Urbanism, has questioned its commitment to working with real com-
munities, and its apparent disregard for existing landscape character and heritage values, while
also criticizing the off-putting jargon in which landscape urbanist proposals are often couched.
But the most vocal opposition has come from leaders of the Congress of the New Urbanism, an
organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, sustainable commu-
nities and healthier living conditions, whose critique stems mainly from their conviction that
major works of vertical architecture are the most appropriate organizers and promoters of urban
space, not landscape. In the extreme, the founder of the New Urbanism, Andres Duany (2010)
has asserted that Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism promote sprawl by privileging
extant environmental features over density (Steuteville 2011). In June of 2011 Charles Waldheim
gave a measured presentation about Landscape Urbanism to the 19th Congress of the New
Urbanism, in Madison, Wisconsin during which he assured the assembly that landscape urbanists
support “dense, low-carbon, low-emission development” and are “not apologists for sprawl”
(CNU, 2011).
What’s next?
Charles Waldheim (2006: 16) acknowledges that the thinking documented in the Landscape
Urbanism Reader begins to: “describe emergent conditions before they fully clarify themselves
while simultaneously document[ing] their various sources and referents,” leaving open the
possibility that not only could landscape urbanism continue to evolve and grow in scope, but
that it could morph into something else entirely; this is where Ecological Urbanism comes into
play. A conference and exhibition held in 2009 at Harvard GSD called Ecological Urbanism:
Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future may have set the stage to allow Landscape
Urbanism to expand its purview from a smaller scale, systems-based design theory, with prac-
tical implications relevant mainly to public parklands and former industrial sites, into a more
coherent, truly cross-disciplinary doctrine, appropriate across a wide range of scales. In the book
of the same name, Mohsen Mostafavi (2010) asks, “why ecological urbanism, why now?” the
answer seems to be two-fold: while the environmental, political, and social state of the world
has devolved over the last two decades, the theories and themes articulated by Landscape
Urbanism have evolved to the point that their relevance to the larger scale of “the city” and
“the region” is ready to be examined. In general the themes and concerns of Ecological
Urbanism overlap with those of Landscape Urbanism to a large extent, but there are a few key
differences: first the scale and scope of the undertakings has expanded to include not only dis-
creet interventions in existing urbanities, but also full scale master planning of cities and regions.
Second, the scope of the collaborative nature of practice has expanded to include not just the
“big three” design professions with a few tangential consultants, but now fully enlists econo-
mists, public health specialists, sociologists, geographers, artists and others who can help syn-
thesize a kind of urbanism that not only understands the disparate systems that make up urban
places but attempts to humanely and compassionately integrate the needs of the people who
occupy those places.
In his contribution to the Landscape Urbanism issue of Topos magazine, Stoss Landscape
Urbanism principal Chris Reed (2010: 91) says “Many questions remain, for us and for others,
relative to how landscape urbanism as a set of ideas and practices is played out – and refined, or
even reformulated.” And, with only a few projects completed, it remains to be seen if the broad
environmental, social, political problems that plague large metropolitan areas and small cities
alike can be addressed by Landscape Urbanism or if Ecological Urbanism will fill this role. What
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does seem clear is that Landscape Urbanism has had a tremendous influence on both students
and practitioners of urban design, while improving the visibility and importance of ecology as
an essential aspect of urbanism.
References
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38
Landscape and
environmental ethics
Ian Thompson
One might expect the field of environmental ethics, which has developed over the past forty
years, to have much to say to landscape architects, environmental planners and all those, such as
foresters, engineers, land managers, developers, etc., whose professional practice has often very
direct impacts upon land and environment. As will be shown, an argument over anthropo-
centric versus non-anthropocentric theories of value and a fixation upon non-humanized
environments (supposed wildernesses) has, until recently, pushed consideration of landscapes and
the built environment to the periphery of ethicists’ concerns. However, as the latter part of the
chapter will show, new lines of thought from pragmatism, continental philosophy and virtue
ethics are taking the subject in promising new directions, as ethicists engage with the humanized
places where we work and dwell.
A new ethic
In 1973 the Australian philosopher Richard Routley (who later changed his name to Sylvan)
published a paper entitled ‘Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?’ (Routley
1973), which picked up the call, made over two decades earlier by Aldo Leopold, Professor of
Game Management at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for a ‘Land Ethic’ which would
cover ‘man’s relationship to land and the animals which grow upon it’ (Leopold 1949). Routley
argued that traditional ethical theories, even if extended, would be incapable of saying what was
morally wrong about the harm which human activities were causing to the environment. This
was so, Routley argued, because they assigned intrinsic value and moral standing to human
beings alone. This criticism could be levelled at both consequentialist theories (concerned with
the outcomes of our actions) and deontological theories (concerned with rights and duties). Out
of these beginnings, alongside the work of other pioneers such as Holmes Rolston III (often
regarded as the founding father of the subject in the United States), grew a whole sub-branch of
philosophical ethics known as environmental ethics. When I surveyed the ethical beliefs of
British landscape architects (Thompson 1998), I suggested that, unlike the majority of envir-
onmental ethicists, most were anthropocentric in their thinking and that this was under-
standable, even inevitable, in a profession whose raison d’être was to intervene in the landscape
on behalf of a client or users.
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Landscape and environmental ethics
Routley’s paper contains a now-famous thought experiment in which we are invited to

consider the behaviour of the last person surviving the collapse of the world. Before he dies, the
Last Man lays about him, killing and destroying every living thing within his reach. His
imminent death means that there will soon be no one left to appreciate or assign value to
whatever remains, so a human chauvinist might think he has done nothing untoward, but
anyone with environmental leanings would be inclined to say that such behaviour must be
wrong. Routley’s point was that his actions could only be wrong if things like plants, animals or
ecosystems had intrinsic value, as opposed to any instrumental value they might have in meeting
human needs.
This opened up a debate about the sorts of things which could have intrinsic value, a list
which variously included individual plants or animals, species, ecosystems, the biotic community
and the whole biosphere, but interestingly landscapes did not generally appear in this literature
and it is not difficult to see why. Whether ‘landscape’ is taken in the sense of ‘a view over land’
or in the sense of ‘a tract of land’, it is clearly something which involves both natural processes
and human interventions. Landscapes were compromised in the eyes of those philosophers who
emphasized the moral qualities of naturalness in the sense of untouchedness.
Anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric

Those ethical theories which attribute moral standing and intrinsic worth to non-human
entities can be described as non-anthropocentric and in the early development of environmental
ethics the majority of environmental philosophers identified themselves as non-anthropocentrists.
Some of the earliest critics of a purely human-centred ethics were those, such as the utilitarian
Peter Singer, who argued for the moral considerability of all sentient animals (Singer, 1975,
1993). Then biocentrists, such as Paul Taylor (1986) and Gary Varner (2000), argued that all
living things have a good of their own which should be respected, and thus that they all count
for something in moral terms. Expanding moral considerability still further, others, such as Rolston
(1975, 1986), thought that individual sentience or life was not the limit of what should be
valued and proposed that whole ecosystems or the biosphere itself were morally considerable.
The idea of ‘deep ecology’ promoted by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (Naess, 1973;
Naess and Rothenberg, 1989) is also ecocentric, as are various interpretations of Buddhist and
Native American beliefs. For deep ecologists there is no ontological distinction between humans and
nature, so that in some sense for humans to harm nature is to harm themselves.
This emphasis upon non-anthropocentric theory was inevitable given that environmental
ethics arose in response to a conspicuous lacuna in traditional ethics, which seemed to pay little
attention to non-human nature at all. However, not all environmental philosophers have been
non-anthropocentrists. In Man’s Responsibility for Nature, John Passmore (1974) argued that
nature should be valued in terms of what it contributed to the flourishing of sentient creatures
(including humans) and advocated an ethic of human stewardship. The role of steward, it is
worth noting in passing, was a role which the landscape architect, Ian McHarg, thought
belonged uniquely to homo sapiens. Humans were, for McHarg, uniquely perceptive creatures
who were thus able to act as ‘agents of symbiosis’ (McHarg,1969). To some social theorists,
meanwhile, environmental problems went much deeper than might be addressed through any
notions of stewardship or environmental management. The polemical social ecologist Murray
Bookchin (1980, 2005) argued throughout his life that environmental devastation was the
unavoidable consequence of the hierarchical organization of human society and that the only
way to escape our ecological nightmare was to reform society on saner, more egalitarian and
more sustainable lines.
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Ian Thompson
Not everyone has been happy with the anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric terminology,

or seen much purpose in the struggle between these points of view. Mary Midgley (1994)
objected to the pejorative use of ‘anthropocentric’, saying that we should not try to get rid of
the sense that we are at the centre of our own lives. The failings that have led to environmental
destruction have been ‘human chauvinism’ and ‘narrowness of sympathy’. She also suggested
that ‘the measures needed today to save the human race are, by and large, the same measures
that are needed to save the rest of the biosphere’. Echoing this thought, Bryan Norton (1997:
99) advanced his convergence hypothesis which stated that policies designed to protect nature
from an anthropocentric point of view will ‘do as much good in protecting the moral com-
mitment of deep ecologists as any other policy that could be undertaken given what we know
now’. This did not end the debate between non-anthropocentrists and anthropocentrists, but it
did take much of the heat out of it. Many could see that this dispute was not doing much to aid
the environmental cause. Philosophers began to look for other approaches which did not lead
to such an impasse, and found them in continental philosophy, pragmatism and virtue ethics.
We will return to these.
Nature and wilderness

By focussing upon nature – and what they took to be, but perhaps were not always, natural
places – environmental philosophers were reacting against the dominance of human-shaped
environments. They hoped to bring about a radical decentring, a change of consciousness
whereby, to employ a quotation from Leopold (A Sand County Almanac), the role of Homo
sapiens would change ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of
it’. This move involves the capacity to respect nature as it is, rather than as we have altered it,
and this explains the attention paid by these philosophers to the concept of wilderness. Con-
versely, it is by no means a coincidence that the three most important geographical locations for
the development of environmental philosophy have been Scandinavia, North America and
Australia, all places where there are large areas with little or no human population. Although
Bill McKibbin argued in The End of Nature (McKibben 1989) that nature could no longer be
thought of as independent of human influence because it is now directly affected by human
actions, it still remains easier to believe in such independence and to dream of wilderness in
places where very few human beings actually live.
For some philosophers, nature remains foundational. It is something which predates and is
more powerful than human civilization. Eric Katz thinks that the idea that humans can restore
natural systems demonstrates hubris, based on false assumptions of ability and power. Once we
begin to restore natural environments we impose anthropocentric purposes on areas that exist
outside human agency. From this he goes on to argue that a restored habitat is an artefact and
will remain one forever, thus it will have lesser value than undisturbed nature. Restoration is
driven by anthropocentric concerns and thus is a symptom of human domination, i.e. part of
the problem, not part of the solution. In ‘Faking Nature’, Robert Elliot (1982) argued that
what make wildernesses important is their provenance, an uninterrupted continuity with the
past. No constructed or restored landscape, he argued, can have this quality of naturalness.
Elliot’s frequently cited paper makes specific reference to the role of landscape architects, along
with other professionals such as engineers and biologists, in restoring nature after human
disturbance. He asks us to imagine situations where such restoration is successful (though he
thinks it often is not); even in these best-case situations, says Elliot, the restored environment
cannot have the full value of the original. Drawing parallels with the art world, he suggests that
at best the restored landscape is a replica or a good fake. Elliot and Katz oppose restoration
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because it seems to give comfort to those who would cause disturbance in the first instance
and open the way to a managerial approach to the environment which is fundamentally
anthropocentric.
Thinking of wildernesses as places that are untouched and unaltered, however, raises the
question of whether they should, in any sense, be managed. As Michael Soulé (2001) has
pointed out that a concern for wild nature can lead both to passionate demands for wilderness
to be actively managed and, from ‘wilderness purists’, a complete prohibition on any form of
intervention, even if ecologically informed and well-meaning. As Glenn Deliège (2010) has
observed, this debate between managers and purists seems exotic from a European point of
view, since there are no wildernesses in Europe and all nature is humanly mediated – and it has
mostly been that way for more than two millennia (for a macroscopic view of human
development see Diamond, 1997 and Morris, 2010):
The need for nature management is more or less self-evident to most European conserva-
tionists, few have problems with the enormous amounts of mowing, burning, cutting, and
grazing that go on in European nature reserves. Indeed, it is precisely the lack of traditional
management that is lamented, as that lack leads to the loss of species, habitats and
characteristic landscapes.
(Deliège 2010: 18)
The degree to which nature should be allowed to run its course, and the extent to which it can
be offered a helping hand is still hotly debated, even in Europe, as Deliège’s paper goes on to
show. He objects to practices which reduce the management of nature reserves to a kind of
gardening or zoo-keeping, and opposes the reintroduction of species unless a ‘material bond’
exists between the restorations and their originals (as might be provided, for example, by the use
of authentic seed-banks).
Donna Ladkin (2005) takes issue with Katz’s assertion that restoration is a form of domina-
tion. No one, she says, is suggesting that the ability to restore land is an argument for its being
degraded in the first place. Developing an argument first made by Sylvan (1994) she says that
the restoration of a landscape is different from the replication of an artwork because in the latter
case humans are entirely responsible, which in the former case they are not – they can only help
the process along. Following Alastair Gunn (1991) she argues that those undertaking the
restoration do not intend to deceive. Landscape restoration is more like art restoration than
forgery. In art restoration, the original is still the basis for the restored piece.
Ladkin, following Sylvan, suggests the word ‘rehabilitation’ rather than ‘restoration’ for pro-
jects where humans attempt to heal damaged land and she sees this as a co-operative venture,
between rehabilitators and nature, with nature entirely essential and doing much of the work.
She also quotes, with approval, Stephanie Mill’s alternative concept of ‘re-inhabiting’, which
implies an intimate relationship between humans and nature (Mills, 1995).
Ladkin’s paper suggests four touchstones for a non-dominating approach to restoration. First,
humans should see themselves as facilitators or co-creators. Their role is to assist nature’s own
healing process; indeed, not to do so would amount to gross negligence. Second, humans must
commit themselves to learn from the land. This means paying attention to evolving patterns of
flora and fauna, not making decisions of the basis of pre-formed ‘scientific’ ideas of what
‘should’ be happening. Third (which perhaps amounts to the same thing), nature has its own
agency, its own projects, and its human helpers must become attentive to these. Fourth, the aim
of any restoration should be to achieve healthy land, i.e. an ecosystem with the capacity to
regenerate itself. Historical accuracy should not be the overriding determinant.
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Ian Thompson
This debate about wilderness was part of, or overlapped with, a larger debate about the place
of humanity in nature. On one view, humans are a part of nature, which makes it difficult to
say that anything they do is unnatural. For humans to build motorway flyovers is as natural as
for ants to build ant-hills. Others take the opposite line and say that everything human beings
produce is artefactual, which is to say unnatural. William Cronon (1995: 69–90), however,
upset many environmentalists when he published ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting
Back to the Wrong Nature’ in which he suggested that wilderness itself was something unna-
tural, a product of civilization which ‘could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which
it is made’.
He traced the history of the idea of wilderness, showing that it had meant different things at
different times. Going back 250 years, Europeans were describing wildernesses as wastelands,
using adjectives like ‘savage’, ‘barren’ and ‘desolate’ – and the thought that these useless wastes
included such places as the English Lake District or the Scottish Highlands, which would one
day be valorized by poets and crowded with tourists, might here prompt an ironic smile. In
the United States the list of places that underwent this transformation includes Niagara Falls, the
Catskills, the Adirondacks, Yosemite, and Yellowstone. The central paradox, for Cronon, is that
the notion of wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the
natural. Thus, says Cronon,
the place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so – if by definition
wilderness leaves no place for human beings, save perhaps as contemplative sojourners
enjoying their leisurely reverie in God’s natural cathedral – then also by definition it can
offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us.
(Cronon 1995)
Cronon thought that McKibben had got it wrong. His ‘end of nature’ depended on the
premise that nature had once been pristine, remote and unsullied by contact with humanity,
whereas all the evidence suggested that ‘people have been manipulating the natural world on
various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing.’ Idealizing a distant wilderness
takes our attention away from the landscapes in which we actually live, which are the places
where our environmental problems actually begin.
Continental Philosophy and the idea of nature

Some philosophers, notably Steven Vogel, have drawn upon continental philosophy to critique
the view that nature is foundational, that it represents a stable pre-human world, a sort of sub-
stratum which both supports and can be contrasted with the human world (Vogel: 1998). Vogel
would find himself in sympathetic company with cultural geographers in thinking that when
our ideas of nature are taken apart, they are revealed to be linguistically and socially constructed.
Moreover, when so-called ‘natural’ landscapes are scrutinized, it often turns out that they are
cultural landscapes which are being managed by humans. While this must be upsetting for
anyone committed to a foundational account of nature, Paul Keeling offers a Wittgensteinian
argument which salvages our use of the terms ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ by showing how they are
used in various language-games (Keeling, 2008). The word ‘nature’, says Keeling, does not
name an ontological category. We do not need to know what wildness is, just how to use the
word ‘wild’. We use it, for example, in those cases where we want to contrast human agency
with non-human agency.
Nevertheless all of this troubles many environmental philosophers who are uneasy with the
idea that, though humans are clearly the product of nature, nature is both conceptually and
454
physically our product too (Vogel, 1998). If this is how things are, they worry, it will not be
easy to rein in human hubris. Keeling, however, suggests that nature’s separateness and other-
ness is part of its meaning, and that this otherness can be affirmed in our language games
(Keeling, 2008). Vogel, drawing once again on deconstruction, suggests another possibility, that
nature is a name for the ‘otherness’ of the world. He finds this more congenial, because on this
view nature always avoids or eludes complete human control. Whenever humans intervene in
nature there will be unforeseen side-effects and this should teach us humility. However,
Vogel, in turn, is worried lest this view of nature might lead to the sort of quietism that pre-
vented Heidegger from formulating environmental policies because to do this would have
presupposed a project of managing nature, of treating nature as a ‘standing reserve’, which
would have been at odds with his philosophy of ‘letting-be’ (Vogel, 1998: 262; Stone, 2005:
288). For those whose profession involves intervening in the environment, such passivity is
not an option, though humility is certainly a virtue worth enshrining in any professional code of
ethics.
Like Cronon, Vogel wants to direct our attention away from the problematic concept of
wilderness in favour of an engagement with the built environment, ‘which for most of us is the
environment’, recognizing that the world we inhabit is the result of our own practices. Our
environing world is something we build for ourselves, but we do not build it from nothing.
Vogel calls this a ‘philosophy of practice’ and he reflects that:
the realness and resistance of the world, the difficulty of labor, call us toward a modesty
with respect to our practices, deriving from them a sober and even chastened recognition
of the inevitable limits to planning and of the essential unpredictability of the consequences
of our actions.
(Vogel, 1998: 265)
This account, which grasps the active nature of the relationship between humans and the
environment, is one which – I suggest – easily commends itself to environmental professionals,
including architects, landscape architects, planners and managers. The significance of the rela-
tionship between the natural and built environments and the need for an ‘ethics of building’
was recognized by the agenda-setting collection Ethics and the Built Environment (Fox, 2000).
Environmental pragmatism and pluralism

‘Pragmatism,’ says Anthony Weston (2003), ‘sounds like just what environmental ethics is
against: short-sighted, human-centred instrumentalism.’ Some philosophers, such as Callicott
(1989, 1999), want to ground environmental ethics in incontrovertible theory. They are value
monists who believe that a coherent environmental ethics must be built upon a single moral
philosophy or value theory, usually involving non-anthropocentrism, holism and a belief in
some form of intrinsic value in nature: for Callicott the one true approach is a version of
Leopold’s Land Ethic. This sort of purist view requires us to develop a strong theory to support
the moral consideration of nature and then stick to our guns. However, a number of philoso-
phers, particularly Weston, Norton, Andrew Brennan and Andrew Light, have objected that
this approach is dogmatic and limits the influence which environmental ethics can have on
policy and practice, where a plurality of values is to be found. In ‘Beyond Intrinsic Value:
Pragmatism in Environmental Ethics’, Weston (2003) argues that ‘the experience of nature can
awaken respect and concern for it’ citing the lives of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold as exemplars.
Such feelings, says Weston, are essential starting points for a defence of environmental values
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Ian Thompson
and they are not ‘second-best’ weak anthropocentric1 substitutes for the sort of foundational
intrinsic value sought by the monists.
Light (2003) suggests that, ‘as long as our different moral frameworks are oriented toward the
same environmental priorities, we can ignore for the time being, many of the issues of the truth
about which reason for valuing nature is actually right.’ He gives the example of saving old
growth forests in the United States for the spotted owl. A non-anthropocentric argument
would invoke direct duties to the owls based upon their intrinsic value, but a weak anthro-
pocentrist would wish to protect the owls on the basis of the benefit their continued existence
would have for future human generations. Both arguments would be helpful to the owls. ‘We
don’t have time to wait for agreement all the way down,’ says Light. ‘We should work within
traditional moral theories and direct them to environmental ends.’
Support for the pragmatic approach comes from experimental philosophy (the controversial
movement which suggests that philosophical problems might be amenable to resolution
through the methods of science and social science). Van den Born (2008), for example, inves-
tigated the ‘folk-philosophy’ of lay persons in the Netherlands and asked how these related to
professional philosophical discourses. He found that people held four basic images of the human
relationship to nature, which he labelled ‘master’, ‘steward’, ‘partner’ and ‘participant’, of which
the most favoured were ‘steward’ and ‘participant’. Respondents thought that human beings
should not stand above nature – the notion of mastery was unpopular – but that while they
were part of nature, they also had a responsibility for it. While there is clearly a tension here,
this widely held view of the nature-human relationship is consonant with Passmore’s argument
in Man’s Responsibility for Nature and also with many of the attitudes expressed in McHarg’s
Design with Nature. When Van Den Born asked about reasons for valuing nature he found only
one – ‘space for animals and plants’ – which could be considered ecocentric. The rest were
overwhelmingly anthropocentric and instrumental, including such things as human recreation
and enjoyment. People found the idea of ‘intrinsic value’ difficult to understand. Some philo-
sophers would baulk at the idea that philosophical truth could be discovered by sociological
survey, but this research does show the obstacles that any environmental ethics based purely
upon the intrinsic value of nature would have in influencing the world outside the academy.
Hargrove (2003: 177) doubts that the attempt to persuade people that environmental values
exist independently in nature is a ‘wise long-term environmentalist strategy’. Although some
environmental professionals who take decisions regarding the planning, design or management
of landscapes might espouse non-anthropocentric values, many would not (my research in the
late 1990s found very limited non-anthropocentric thinking among British landscape architects
of that period). If we adopt a pluralistic and pragmatic approach to environmental values, then
this is not, I would argue, a cause for concern and indeed it might be seen in a positive light
because a mixture of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric values is likely to be more
effective in guiding policy and practice.
Responsive cohesion
Perhaps, though, there is something unsatisfying about the pragmatic compromise. Warwick
Fox has developed a theory of general ethics based upon the ways in which things can be
structured which seeks to overcome the anthropocentric–non-anthropocentric divide (Fox,
2006, 2011). He identifies three basic forms of organization, fixed cohesion, responsive cohesion and
discohesion. In his axiology it is responsive cohesion which is mostly to be valued, as this is
manifested by structures which are flexible, flowing, adaptive, organic, or indeed alive. Rigid
cohesion, on the other hand, can be described as stuck, frozen, forced, mechanical or dead,
456
while discohesive structure can be portrayed as chaotic, anarchic, out of control, exhausted,
decaying or dead. There is some correspondence here with Ian McHarg’s idea that the value of
human creativity lies in its power to resist entropy, or, as McHarg put it, to produce negentropy
(McHarg, 1969). Fox’s theory is interesting because it is intended to apply not just to the tra-
ditional sphere of interhuman ethics, nor indeed to the expanded field of environmental ethics
including the ethics of ecosystem integrity, but also specifically to the built environment where
value judgements must often be made between new buildings and an existing context. It is a
theory which has aesthetic implications as well as ethical significance. Fox believes that his
theory is:
tailor made for application to landscape issues, whereas those approaches that are limited to
animals, living things in general, or ecosystems qua ecological self-renewing systems won’t
make the grade because landscapes per se are not sentient, alive (in any straightforward
biological sense), or limited to ecological self-renewing functions.
(personal communication)
Virtue ethics
During the course of the past forty years much effort has gone into the search for a reliable
ethical touchstone which would give us the basis for deciding which actions are right and which
are wrong in our dealings with the environment. This search has included both consequentialist
approaches and deontological approaches, but perhaps, if human beings were habitually vir-
tuous, they would not need rules to keep them on the right track and they would not need to
worry all the time about consequences. This is a central contention of what is called ‘virtue
ethics’. What offends us as preservationists, says Harley Cahen, ‘is that anyone who would
damage an ecosystem for inadequate reasons falls short of our “ideals of human excellence”’
(Cahen, 2003). This is why we recoil from the despoliation carried out by Routley’s hypothe-
tical Last Man: we are shocked not just by the actions themselves, but that anyone would have
the character and inclinations to carry them out. Virtue theory suggests that people should be
encouraged and trained to develop good moral character, because such people will act morally,
in which case there will be less need for ethical rules, and presumably less need for coercive
legislation. Ronald Sandler (2010) observes that an ethic of environmental virtue would be
concerned with norms of character rather than norms of action. How should one live? What
sort of person ought one to be? Virtue ethics are far from new, indeed this was the prevalent
way in which moral matters were considered in both ancient and mediaeval philosophy.
Non-anthropocentrists, says Hargrove, often look for rules because they fear that anthropo-
centric values are entirely dependent on culture. Any society might, for example, decide to
value plastic trees over real ones. This is not such a far-fetched idea: in Dogs and Demons, jour-
nalist Alex Kerr (2002) laments current Japanese attitudes towards nature and landscape, citing
examples of city trees being pollarded because of complaints about messy leaves, pressure on the
authorities to kill croaking frogs in paddy fields, and huge public projects to ‘tidy up’ hillsides
and riverbanks with expanses of concrete. This is happening, he points out, in a culture which
once paid great respect to nature. However, the virtue ethics response would recognize that
values are formed collectively and that the appropriate response to the situation described by
Kerr would be to seek reform of these values, in this case, perhaps, a revival of the attitudes of
an earlier age.
What might restrain the Last Man or the Japanese local authorities would be their preserva-
tionist intuitions and their ecological consciences, and, if they currently lack these faculties, they
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Ian Thompson
might yet be cultivated. Sandler (2010) suggests four ways in which we can discover environ-
mental virtues. The first is by extending the familiar interpersonal virtues. So, for example, if
compassion is the appropriate response to a suffering human, by extension should we not also
be compassionate to a suffering nonhuman animal? If gratitude is the appropriate response to a
human benefactor, should we not also feel gratitude towards the natural environment for all it
provides? Sandler’s second approach plays on enlightened self-interest by asking what disposi-
tions allow their possessors to gain benefit from the natural environment. For example, the
natural environment – and similarly the humanized landscape – offer opportunities for aesthetic
appreciation, but only to those who have the disposition to appreciate such aesthetic
benefits. His third strategy is to ask what makes a good human being, noting that humans are
social animals and that individuals who disrupt social cohesion and poison relationships are not
usually held up as virtuous. By extension, human beings can be located not only as members of
a human community, but also as part of a larger ecological community. It follows, Sandler
argues, that those who endanger species or destroy habitats are not behaving virtuously and
that a disposition to oppose such harms can be regarded as virtuous. Sandler’s last strategy
resembles Weston’s approach (mentioned above) whereby the lives of exemplary figures such as
Carson, Muir and Leopold can be examined and learnt from. The possible environmental
virtues he identifies from this source include: ‘fortitude, compassion, wonder, sensitivity,
respectfulness, courage, love, appreciation, tenacity and gratitude’ (Sandler 2010: 252). Sandler
believes that in many situations the sort of prescriptive action guidance given by sets of rules
will often prove to be inadequate, because such rules can never cover all eventualities, How-
ever, amongst an indefinite set of environmental virtues, one would certainly include wisdom
and sensitivity and these are indispensible virtues for the identification of environmentally right
action.
In similar vein, Dale Jamieson (2003), after casting doubt on the efficacy of a managerial
(i.e. economic) approach to environmental issues, suggests that we should shift our attention
from calculating the probable outcomes of our actions towards the cultivation of good char-
acter. Economics can never tell us what our values should be. Although Jamieson shies away
from providing a recipe for the values that are needed, he does indicate some of the virtues
which need to be revived if we are to tackle such problems as climate change, and his list
overlaps with some of Sandler’s suggestions: ‘we need to nurture and give new content to some
old virtues such as humility, courage, and moderation and perhaps develop such new virtues as
those of simplicity and conservatism’ (Jamieson 2003: 378).
Implications for practitioners

Environmental ethics matter to everyone, and the sort of virtue ethics approach outlined in the
preceding section has implications for everyone alive. However, in terms of scale and impact, it
is those who take managerial decisions about land, whether they are politicians, policy-makers,
farmers, planners, landscape architects, property developers or foresters, who ought to examine
their characteristic values and reflect on their actions the most closely. Those ethicists who have
argued in favour of plural sources of values and who have been willing to embrace anthropo-
centric reasons for protecting the environment, are surely closer to the thinking of the majority
of such professionals, as well as to that of the wider public. Recognizing this however, we
should never allow ourselves to slip into the sort of resourcist thinking which sees the envir-
onment with its multitude of component landscapes as a warehouse of reserves solely for the use
of human beings, a point made powerfully by Heidegger in his later writings. The main mes-
sage of environmental ethics is that environmental problems are not just managerial or resource
458
problems but are moral issues, which, as Jamieson observes, ‘brings them into the domain of
dialogue, discussion and participation’ (Jamieson 2003: 377).
Note
1 Weak anthropocentrism is a position advocated by Bryan Norton, Eugene Hargrove and others, and
can be regarded as the forerunner of environmental pragmatism. Whereas a strong anthropocentrism
only recognizes values that are related to the satisfaction of human appetites and preferences, a weak
anthropocentric theory recognizes values which are based upon human experiences in nature. Such
experience contributes to the formation of values, giving sense to the idea of nature as teacher.
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39
Landscape and climate change
Catherine Leyshon
Hilary Geoghegan
In this chapter we review the current and future trajectories of landscape in the study of climate
change across the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. There are three main chal-
lenges of writing such a review. First, as noted elsewhere in this volume, there are multiple and
sometimes competing definitions of landscape. The intractability of these definitions is com-
pounded by the fact that they do not always map neatly onto conventional academic disciplines.
Landscape is a unit of analysis well understood in the natural sciences as a particular scale of
spatial analysis which has featured heavily in the literature on climate change (Brierley 2010).
Landscape, in this instance, comprises all the physical, biological and cultural phenomena
interacting in a region, exhibiting historical ‘depth’ in the shape of the residues of antecedent
landscapes. This landscape is the object of study for geomorphologists, palaeobotanists, ecolo-
gists, archaeologists and others interested in examining the interactions between human and
biophysical elements. In addition, landscape has also been theorized as explicitly cultural, the
product of human agency, imagination and socio-spatial relations. Much depends on the
epistemological and ontological status of landscape in any given study.
A second challenge lies in the enormous size and motility of climate change as a topic,
which, like landscape, exhibits cross-disciplinary appeal, its study located in everything from
physics and biology to sociology and literature. Climate change as a global problem has moved
relatively swiftly into high profile political debates over the past twenty years or so, with a
concomitant diffusion from the natural sciences into the social sciences (Batterbury 2008). The
study of the human dimensions of climate change has been growing in momentum through
research which attempts to describe and evaluate perceptions of climate change, understand
more about risk and assess the construction of policy. Nevertheless, the work of social scientists
in respect of climate change is clearly felt to be incomplete, judging by recent calls that
important work still needs to be done to understand how individuals and communities respond
to climate change based on ‘their needs, values, cultures, capacities, institutional forms and envir-
onmental features’ (Barnett 2010: 314). This offers the possibility of enriching scientific research
and policy development, creating improved knowledge of the complexity of human-environment
461
Catherine Leyshon, Hilary Geoghegan
systems and providing a more nuanced and effective response to global challenges, such as
climate change.
Finally, not only are the scholarly realms in which landscape and climate change come
together very diverse, there is also a significant area of policy to consider as governments and
agencies strive to manage current landscapes for future change. For example, the publication of
The Natural Choice Natural Environment White Paper (Defra 2011; see also Lawton et al. (2010)
Making Space for Nature) in the UK puts landscape-scale working squarely at the heart of a vision
of environmental management that uses an ecosystem services approach. A range of institutional
strategic documents attempt to both identify how climate change will affect each institution’s
operations, priorities and mission, and communicate this in a way that attempts to build a
consensus around a shared vision of the future, grounded in the management of landscapes.
These include the Wildlife Trust’s (2008) A Living Landscape; Natural England’s (2008) The
Natural Environment: Adapting to Climate Change; the National Trust’s (2005) Shifting Shores; and
the National Association for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty’s concept of ‘Landscapes for
Life’ which has at its heart ‘acceptance of the need to factor climate change resilience into
decision making’ (AONB 2011).
Fortunately these challenges are offset by some significant gains when thinking about land-
scape in relation to climate change. Landscape grounds the study of climate change, lending a
materiality to the arcane and frequently incomprehensible science of models and predictions. It
connects disciplines by operating as the site at which multi-, trans- and inter-disciplinary con-
versations might be had, drawing in policy makers and landscape management professionals
charged with protecting landscapes valued for their productivity, fragility, beauty or habitat.
Finally, landscapes feature in the collective imaginaries of people and communities across the
planet, for whom senses of place and purpose are located in the familiar surroundings of their
everyday lives.
We begin by identifying the definitional problems of climate change, followed by a discus-
sion of how landscape has been used to examine climate change in recent academic research
across the natural sciences, applied contexts and the social sciences and humanities. We then
examine how a focus on the concept of ‘climate and the ways it might change’ (Brace and
Geoghegan 2011) enables a fuller consideration of the importance of landscape to studies of,
and adaptation to, climate change. We conclude with some directions for future research on
landscape and climate change.
Defining climate change

Despite the Herculean efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to
‘provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate
change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts’ (IPCC 2011: unpaginated),
there is still a lack of:
international consensus on adaptation and mitigation;

compelling policy or legislation; and
strong personal or financial incentives to work or live differently.
Because atmospheric emissions are seen as a problem affecting the climate system of the whole
planet (Demeritt 2001), climate change has been decoupled from the social and political con-
texts of its material production and cognitive understanding (Agrawal and Narain 1991). Even
the most sophisticated climate model is a form of abstract reasoning that reduces reality ‘to the
462
terms of its own analytical abstractions’ (Demeritt 2001: 314). Indeed, the IPCC define climate
change as a ‘statistical description’ (IPCC 2007: 78). For the majority of people it is the cir-
cumstantial, suggestive, remembered and observed changes to weather and seasons that form the
basis of an understanding of what is changing, if not why. In the following section, we consider
how climate change has been discussed across the full repertoire of research utilizing landscape
as its organizing principle.
Landscape in studies of climate change

Landscape has long been understood as both spatial and cultural, the relative importance of
these shifting with theoretical fashion (for a review, see Colten (2010)). Given the disciplinary
breadth and the various temporal and spatial scales at which both concepts operate, a review of
the ways in which landscape has been used in studies relating to climate change will be necessarily
partial. Below we focus on examples from:
the natural sciences;

applied contexts; and
social sciences and humanities.
Natural sciences: pattern, scale and time-depth

At the risk of simplifying a diverse field, in the natural sciences landscape is defined as the
‘combined, interacting effects of multiple environmental controls and forcings’ (Phillips 2007:
160; see also Behringer 2009; Crumley 1994), offering a scale of enquiry over which pattern
and processes can be studied (Levin 1992). Although landscape has been mobilized within many
different scientific disciplines studying climate change, we review cross disciplinary work on
landscape evolution and ecosystems.
Geomorphic responses to climate change can be understood via a process-oriented focus on
landscape evolution, wherein the geological record preserves the nature and variability of ero-
sion processes over different temporal and spatial scales, ranging from a few decades to millions
of years and a few metres to entire landscape assemblages. Field observation and lab analysis
contribute to evermore sophisticated modelling techniques in which the interactions between
surface processes, climate and tectonics can be understood (Gallagher et al. 2008). One lasting
question for this group of scientists – which includes geologists, geomorphologists and sedi-
mentologists – surrounds the relative roles of catastrophic versus continuous processes of land-
form evolution, an issue which echoes the concern of climatologists with the identification and
likely outcomes of crucial ‘tipping points’ in the climate system.
Landscape ecology also promotes working across disciplinary boundaries to understand the
interactions, across space and time, between the structure and function of the physical, biolo-
gical and cultural components of landscapes. Indeed, one of the key challenges in predicting the
ecological causes and consequences of global climate change is understanding phenomena that
occur on very different scales of space, time and ecological organization (Levin 1992). This is
addressed through the concept of spatial resilience which ‘focuses on the importance of loca-
tion, connectivity, and context for resilience, based on the idea that spatial variation in patterns
and processes at different scales both impacts and is impacted by local system resilience’ (Cumming
2011: 899). For example, it is now widely recognized that one of the main threats to biodi-
versity rests in the conjoined effects of a changing climate and habitat fragmentation, largely
from human modifications to land-cover (Opdam and Wascher 2004). Pearson and Dawson
463
(2005) argue that, as species will be required to disperse rapidly through fragmented landscapes
in order to keep pace with the changing climate, an important challenge for conservation will
be to manage landscapes so as to assist species in tracking the optimum environmental condi-
tions. Landscape ecology draws on various types of computational ecological modelling to
simulate the likely effects on soil, climate and species of a changing climate, but these struggle to
visualize change over large spatial extents. Combined with landscape models, ecological
models can, however, examine ecological processes that occur over much larger spatial
extents and are influenced by landscape heterogeneity, such as wind and fire, or seed dispersal
(He et al. 1999).
As these examples suggest, the study of climate change and landscape within the natural
sciences remains frustrated by the internal dynamics of ecological and geomorphic systems.
The response of non-linear systems to a change in landscape dynamics is likely to be complex,
inhibiting our ability to predict how landscapes may respond to climatic perturbation
(Reinhardt et al. 2010). What is required is the explicit modelling of the coupling between
physical and biological processes at the appropriate spatial scale, rather than the finest possible
scale. Notwithstanding these problems, modelling and prediction remain at the heart of
many policy and management decisions on the ground. It is to these applied contexts that we
now turn.
Applied contexts: visualization and landscape management

The management of, inter alia, habitats, ecosystems, agriculture and renewable energy produc-
tion is undertaken at the scale of the landscape and is frequently driven by the need for climate
change adaptation. At that scale, many different stakeholders, agencies and levels of government
may be involved in navigating competing demands and priorities whilst at the same time seek-
ing consensus for management plans or developments. Landscape offers planners and decision-
makers a medium and scale through which publics can grasp future or invisible ‘changes’ that
are ‘embedded into territories and local communities’ (Nadai and Van Der Horst 2010: 148). In
this section we highlight some of the ways in which landscape has been used to communicate
and define the risks and consequences associated with climate change to planners, policy makers
and the public.
Landscape visualization techniques are widely used by planners and decision-makers in a
variety of settings, from building design to landscape management. For example, physical and
virtual models are used to visualize future landscapes or undertake scenario-planning, as at
Mullion Harbour in Cornwall, UK, where technical drawings of likely future damage to the
harbour wall were used during the public consultation on managed retreat (DeSilvey 2012).
Meanwhile, Dockerty et al. (2005) use photorealistic image rendering software to visualize
‘futurescapes’, or impressions of potential future landscapes, in Norfolk, UK, based on a
synthesis of current policy and scientific research. Communicating with and engaging the public
in the problem of climate change is likely to involve a movement away from the traditional
icons of climate change, including polar bears and melting polar icecaps, towards landscape-scale
visualizations relevant to local people. Work has begun to examine how climate change is
framed in communication strategies, such as the National Trust’s (2005) Shifting Shores, through
images of gain and loss, both distant and local (Geoghegan and Leyshon 2012a). The effect of
such images of cliff top erosion and severe storm events utilized by the National Trust to gain
support for their strategies cannot be guaranteed, for ‘whilst making climate change personally
relevant may help to situate it in people’s everyday lives, it might also lessen the extent to which
impacts are viewed as severe and requiring action’ (Spence and Pidgeon 2010: 663). Crucial
464
here is the use of visualizations to predict and manage the public acceptance or denial of
change. As Devine-Wright (2011: 341) suggests in relation to tidal energy developments, ‘by
capturing the symbolic meanings associated with places proposed for development, a better
understanding can be obtained of public responses’.
The explicitly political use of photographs to visualize the effects of climate change on
landscapes is explored by Doyle (2007) in work on Greenpeace. She argues that the visualization
of climate change through photography creates a canonical set of images of melting glaciers and
she calls attention to the problems associated with trying to ‘communicate environmental
issues that are both temporal (long term and developmental) and unseen (not always visible),
through a medium that privileges the ‘here and now’ of the visual’ (Doyle 2007: 129). Never-
theless, as Hansen (2000: 55) argues, climate change has to be made visible in the public
sphere or in public arenas before it can attain the status of a ‘social problem’ of concern to the
public.
Alongside the recognition of how powerful visual images can be is a new concern with
other, more visceral, encounters with landscape and what they can bring to the study of climate
change. It is to the work on landscape as presence, made through physical, tactile and sensory
encounters, that this chapter now turns.
Social sciences and humanities: embodiment and everyday life

Despite recent assertions that it is important ‘to understand and evaluate scientific and
cultural discourses of climate change’ (Nerlich et al. 2010: 98, see also Hulme 2009 and
Moser 2009), descriptive, functional and quantitative approaches, which locate themselves
within the social sciences, remain the dominant epistemic approach to the study of the human
dimensions of climate change. An explicit appeal has been issued to consider what might
be generalized as ‘cultural landscapes’. Adger et al. (2009: 348) recognize landscapes as ‘dynamic
social constructions which reflect process and change through historical and contextual experi-
ence’, the symbolic meanings of which have cultural implications. They note that climate
change discussions which focus on biophysical transformations and economic implications
measured through utilitarian metrics ‘frequently fail to recognize that the experienced
worlds of individuals and communities are bound up in local places and that the physical
changes will have profound cultural and symbolic impacts’ (Adger et al. 2009: 347). Some of
this work is already ongoing; for example, Batterbury (2008) has made the case for the way
anthropologists have used local fieldwork to assess indigenous climate and environmental
knowledge (see also Strauss and Orlove 2003). We argue here that landscape and
associated concerns with the construction of knowledge, the workings of social relations in
space and the politics and poetics of place-based identities provide a lens through which
personal, collective and institutional responses to climate change can be evaluated. As Adger
et al. (2009: 339, emphasis added) further speculate: ‘many [climate change] impacts result
in loss of assets sometimes irreversible that individuals value’ and that such values ‘are
largely independent of material assets, but rather rely on perceptions and representations of the
world around us’. It is by moving beyond the statistical, quantifiable indicators and impacts of
climate change that a new culture of climate change emerges, drawing on cultural and psy-
chological understandings and interpretations, revealing a new set of climate imaginaries and
narratives.
Within the discipline of human geography the retheorization of landscape has been ongoing
for about eighty years. The multifarious ways in which ‘cultural landscapes’ have been imagined
by geographers have focused on landscape as, inter alia, an object, a repository of meaning and
465
value, and a way of seeing (Rose 2002). Added to these is a further theoretical pathway which
emphasizes what Wylie calls ‘the mutual embeddedness and interconnectivity of self, body and
land – landscape as the world we live in, a constantly emergent perceptual and material milieu’
(Wylie 2007: 1–2). This conceptualization of landscape can be used to explore the lived
experience of climate change. For Rose and Wylie (2006: 477), landscape can:
insinuate itself into vitalist, relational, and topological geographies: landscape reintroduces
perspective and contour; texture and feeling; perception and imagination. It is the synthesis
of elements, so elegantly traced by topologies, with something added: lightless chasms,
passing clouds, airless summits, sweeping sands.
Landscape enables us to consider ourselves as ‘being ‘of ’, ‘in’ and ‘on’ the world all at the same
time’ (Rose and Wylie 2006: 477) and allows us to explore ‘that which is elemental and
affective, with landscape’. Geoghegan and Leyshon (2012b) use these theorizations to explore
decisions made by farmers and land managers on the Lizard, Cornwall, UK, about the use and
management of land in changed climatic conditions, showing that these are informed by
embodiment and emotion, memory and sense of place as much as policy or regulation. One
outcome of these retheorizations of landscape is a new critical conception of climate change, to
which we now turn.
Landscape and ‘climate and the ways it might change’

Climate change is at once a reality, an agenda, a problem, a context, a narrative and a discourse
and it is for this reason that in this final section we explore a more open and inclusive for-
mulation: ‘climate and the ways it might change’. This allows different ways of knowing to play
a legitimate part in framing our personal, social and institutional responses (Brace and Geoghe-
gan 2011). Thus, using ‘climate and the ways it might change’ in preference to ‘climate change’
enables a relational approach to emerge which:
does not insist on research participants being able to disentangle anthropogenic causes from
natural causes of climate change;
acknowledges the way an understanding of climate change is conjoined with other kinds of
knowledge about the local environment; and
allows different ways of knowing to play a legitimate part in framing a culture of climate
change.
This shifts the attention of scholarly enquiry from the ontology of climate change, in which
proof of its existence is the goal, to epistemologies of climate change which prioritize not only
what is known but how it is known, remembered, experienced, embodied and practiced.
Echoing Lorimer (2006), by focusing on ordinary lives, climate and the ways it might change
can be explored as a ‘knowledge-in-practice’ and ‘on-the-ground’.
As a conceptualization, climate and the ways it might change acknowledges people’s under-
standings of themselves in relation to landscape, remembered past weather and climate, the
experience of present climate and imagined futures that they may or may not live to see, or that
may or may not come to pass. It draws on landscape as constitutive of what Ingold (2000)
describes as the processes of dwelling, through which familiarity with place is the result of a
daily encounter with it (Ingold 2004). However, our interest here is not only in ‘the texture of
the surface’, whereby ‘our life histories are woven, along with life-cycles of plants and animals’
466
(Ingold 2000: 198), but also with Ingold’s notion of the ‘weather world’, comprised of sky,
earth and ground:
to feel the wind is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but to
mingle with them. In this mingling, as we live and breathe, the wind, light, and moisture
of the sky bind with the substances of the earth in the continual forging of a way through
the tangle of life-lines that comprise the land.
(Ingold 2007: S19)
‘Placing’ climate change in the familiar landscapes of everyday life provides a way of ima-
gining the past, present and future and enables a conversation about climate and the ways it may
change that draws on local structures of feeling and lay knowledges. One outcome of such a
place-based approach is a greater attention to the specificities of people’s experience of climate
and place, a re-evaluation of lay knowledges, and a fresh understanding of the ways in which
different actors and interest groups negotiate the future in terms of responsibility for and cus-
todianship of local landscapes. Climate and the ways it might change is an approach that
emphasizes the relational qualities of human-environment systems and questions the personal
politics of local action in responding to and making sense of climate change. Whilst Nerlich
et al. (2010: 98) note that ‘knowledge and action emerge from ideas, practices, discourses and
perceived risks as much as from technological assessments of environmental quality’, this focus
on landscape in studies of climate change highlights how meaning is made through affective,
embodied, imaginative encounters in place.
Conclusion
Climate change is a high-stakes, high-profile and highly-politicized issue that relates –
often in messy, non-linear and diffuse ways – to people’s everyday lives, lifestyles and
livelihoods. It is no longer thought of merely as an environmental and/or scientific issue;
rather, the ‘climate question’ is considered one that now more than ever, permeates our
individual, as well as shared, economic, political, cultural and social lives.
(Boykoff et al. 2009: 1)
In this chapter we have reviewed work on landscape in studies of climate change, as they are
pursued in the natural sciences, applied contexts and the social sciences and humanities. We
have also set out an emergent field of landscape research on climate and the ways it might
change, and examined how it might be grounded and localized through the concept of familiar –
embodied, practised and lived – landscapes of everyday life. In this final section, we draw out
three important conclusions.
First, as a richly theorized concept, landscape enables us to study present-day and future
questions of citizenship and responsibility, cultural histories, contested imaginaries, scientific
interpretations and physical manifestations of climate change. Thus, landscape provides a way of
making climate change relevant both as a physical and intellectual artefact and an embodied and
experiential process. It does the work of ‘allowing climate to travel and cross scales without
losing … essential anchors and narratives’ (Hulme 2008: 8).
Second, because landscape – in all its multifarious definitions and theorizations – grounds an
understanding of climate and the ways it might change in a fundamental way, landscape
researchers need to think more creatively about how they might contribute to environmental
policy. As Henderson (2003: 196) argues,
467
the study of landscape, that thing which so often evokes the plane on which normal,
everyday life is lived – precisely because of the premium it places on the everyday – must
stand up to the facts of a world in crisis.
Finally, new landscapes of climate change are emerging, providing fertile opportunities for
researchers from many disciplines interested in landscape. Examples include: new landscapes of
energy; threatened coastal zones; the biogeography and management of invasive species; the
geomorphology of glacial retreat; the changed cultural landscapes of a thawed Arctic; agri-food
systems and food security; and the impact upon industries, livelihoods and landscapes. In sum,
because landscape has spatial scale, temporal depth and emotional resonance, it is an effective,
challenging and versatile medium through which to look at climate change and its effects on
everything from urban, rural, productive, designed, managed and imagined landscapes.
Further reading
Adger, W.N., Dessai, S., Goulden, M., Hulme, M., Lorenzoni, I., and Nelson, D.R. (2009) ‘Are There
Social Limits to Adaptation to Climate Change?’ Climatic Change 93, 335–54. (Argues limits to adaptation
are endogenous to society and hence contingent on ethics, knowledge, attitudes to risk and culture.)
Aspinall, R. (2010) ‘Geographical Perspectives on Climate Change’, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers (special issue: Climate Change) 100, 715–18. (Overview of environmental, human, social,
political, and methodological issues of the geographical dimensions of climate change.)
Brace, C. and Geoghegan, H. (2011) ‘Human Geographies of Climate Change: Landscape, Temporality,
Lay Knowledge’, Progress in Human Geography 35, 284–302. (Advocates a focus on familiar landscapes to
understandings of climate and the ways it might change.)
Ingold, T. (2007) ‘Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, S19–S38.
(Uses concept of dwelling to problematize our relationship with weather.)
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Index
Photographs, tables and illustrations are indicated by the letter ‘i’ after the location reference.
3D modelling 419–22, 423i; and behaviour Ahmed, Sarah 66

prediction 423 air conditioning noise 236
Alaimo, Stacy 225
A2A 389 Åland Islands 259
Aarhus Convention 344 Alaskan pipeline 205
Abbots Hill Farm 392 alienation 249
Abercrombie, Patrick 369 Allegheny Riverfront Park 444
Aboriginal Australians 8–11, 81, 91, 277, 330 allegory 220–22; in music 233
Abram, David 101, 223 Allen, Stan 439
Abu Bakar, Mohd Sarofil 35 allotments 124–26
access 29–30 Alon-Mozes, T. 47
acid rain 397 ambient poetics 224
acoustic ecology 235 American Landuse Database 205
Acropolis 335, 336i American Society of Landscape Architects
Actor-Network theory (ANT) 148, 432 (ASLA) 15
Adams, John Luther 234–35 Americans with Disabilities Act 1990 359
Addison, Joseph 108 Ames, Ruth 312
Adger, Neil 465 Anchor Bay 210–11
Adirondacks 454 Anderson, Ben 44, 66, 68–69
administrative districts, formed from landscapes Andrews, Malcolm 58
254–56 animals: in communities 138; in farming 116–17;
admission fees 312–14 intrinsic value 451
Adorno, Theodor 236 Annapolis 149
aesthetic experience 109 Antarctic 72
aesthetic judgements 110, 113–15; objective 115; Antarctica 397
and scientific knowledge 115 anthropocene 77–78
aestheticism 31 anthropocentrism 451–52, 455
aesthetics 108–18, 173; assessing benefits 312; anthropology 61, 66; cultural 57, 79; and
ecological 30; and economic value 309–10, environmentalism 81, 83; social 32
315–16; as an economy of survival 31; of The Anthropology of Language (Hirsch and
garden landscapes 146; participatory 113 O’Hanlon) 79
affect 66–67; as inexpressible 68 antisocial behaviour 340
affordances 26, 38, 335 Appleton, Jay 27, 29, 32, 43–44, 47, 357
African Americans 364 Arc Wildlife Bridge Competition 444, 446
age, and perceptions of landscape 36–37, 47 Arcadian landscape 432
agency 67 ArcGIS 3D Analyst 420
Agenda 21 359 archaeological surveys 133–34
Agora 335, 341 archaeology 1, 61, 66; contextual 135;
agrarianism 430 interpretative 57; landscape 131–42; and
agriculture see farming storytelling 146; and theory 134
471
Index
Architectural Association (London) 439, 443 The Beatles 233, 291

architecture 1, 14, 48, 88, 98, 101, 273–74, 442; beauty 29, 30, 108, 110
and globalization 264; influence on landscape Bedouin 276, 277
design 356; see also landscape architecture behaviour: norms 243, 245; observing and
Arctic 125, 234, 383 mapping 34
Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) 15, being, and becoming 121
170, 367, 375, 462 being-in-the-world 70
Arendt, Hannah 343, 346 Belgrano, Andrea 27, 30–31
Arler, Finn 344 Belhassen, Yaniv 291
Armstrong, Helen 268 Belonging (Read) 91
Arnesen, Tor 102 Bender, Barbara 46, 70, 153, 167, 249, 273
Arnstein, Sherry 340, 341 Benedikt, M. L. 182
art 49, 56, 123, 324, 383; and aesthetics 108; Benediktsson, Karl 31, 62
representation of landscape 13, 95, 191–92, Beresford, M. W. 133
417–26; see also landscape painting Berger, Alan 411, 439
Art, Nature and Environment (RANE) 201 Berger, John 193
Art and Sustainability (Kagan) 207 Berleant, Arnold 31, 112
art history 2; evaluations of landscape 361–62 Bernstein, Basil 186–87
artists 49 Beunen, Raoul 378
artists’ networks 199 Beuys, Joseph 200, 201
Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘Beyond Intrinsic Value: Pragmatism in
(AHRC) 202 Environmental Ethics’ (Weston) 455
Arts Council England 203 Bhopal disaster 397
Ashworth, G. J. 266, 288 Biesbosch National Park 390
Asia 45, 199 Biggs, Ian 201
Aspinall, Peter 31 biking see cycling
asylum seeking 66 Bikini Atoll 289
Athens 335–36, 336i Bill of Rights (USA) 258
Atkinson, David 157–58 biodiversity 206, 463
atlases 19 biogeography 14
attachment 30 biography: and historic landscape 19, 146, 147–48
Attali, Jacques 232, 233 birds, migratory 88, 89
Attention Restoration Theory (ART) 27–28, 44 Birds and Habitats Directives (EU) 402
Audirac, Ivonne 428 birdsong 227, 233, 236
Austen, Jane 146 Birkeland, Inger 125
Australia 8–11, 28, 87, 91, 172, 276–77, 371, 389 Bishop, Peter 323
Authorized Heritage Discourse 154, 169 Black, Richard 206
authorship 155 black and minority ethnic groups (BME),
Autogena, Lisa 202 perceptions of landscape 36, 45–46
Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings 180, Black Country Living Museum 180, 181i,
186, 187i, 188 183–84, 186, 187i, 188
awe, in response to landscape 111 Black Mountain poets 228
Azazmeh tribe 277 Blackwater Estuary 392
Blade Runner (Scott) 214
Bachelard, Gaston 122, 188 Blake, Peter 430
Baker, J. A. 226–27 Blanc, Nathalie 199
Bakhtin, Mikhail 104 Blanche, Paul Vidal de la 14
Barad, Karen 225 Blists Hill Victorian Town 180, 183, 184i, 186,
Baroque design 265, 362 187i, 188
Barthes, Roland 98 Blunt, Alison 325
Bass Strait 89 blut und boden 267
Basso, Keith 70–71 Blut und Boden (blood and soil) 273–74
Batterbury, Simon 465 Boconnoc (Cornwall) 167i
Baumgarten, Alexander 108 Bodmin Moor 170
Bayer, Herbert 199 Bodmin Moor Vision 169
Bayesian Network 423 Boettger, Suzaan 200
Beardsley, John 200 Boetzkes, Amanda 200
472
Index
Bolt, Barbara 124 Callicott, J. Baird 455

Bondi, Liz 47, 324 Cambridgeshire 228
Bonneville Salt Flats 205 Cameron, John 90, 92
Bonpland, Aime 191–92 Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) 169
Bonsdorf, Pauline von 113 Canizaro, Vincent 267
A Book of Silence (Maitland) 55 Cannery Row 288
Bookchin, Murray 451 Cantrill, J. G. 339
borders/boundaries 45, 83–84, 103, 146, 170, Cape Farewell 202–3, 206
187–88, 401 Cardinham church (Cornwall) 171i
Boston 364; ‘emerald necklace’ 369 cardiovascular disease 301
Boulanger, Kevin 420 Cardwew, Cornelius 238
Boulder Museum of Art 206 Caribbean 147, 148
Bourassa, Steven 28, 43 Carlson, Allen 115–16, 361
Bourdieu, Pierre 135 carnivores, top-down regulation 386
Bowring, Jacky 44, 274 Carolan, Michael 68–71
Boym, Svetlana 268 Carson, Rachel 338, 458
Brace, Catherine 44, 62, 154, 155 Carter, Justin 201
branding 154, 156 Cartesian dualism 223
Branitz 308 cartography 14, 417; of sound 232
Brataualung people 93 CASE: Downsview Park (Czerniak) 439
‘Breakthrough’ (Nordhaus and Shellenberger) 78 Casella, Eleanor 149
Brennan, Andrew 455 Casey, Edward 90, 93, 122
Brick Lane 158 Cassirer, Ernst 323
Brin, David 228 cataloguing landscapes 18–19
Brind, Susan 201 categorisation, legal 255
Britain and the Beast (Williams-Ellis) 46 cathedrals 312
British Empire 194 Catskills 454
Britishness 324 CEMAGREF 19
Brooklyn Bridge Park Competition 444 Center for Art and Environment (CA+E) 206
Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’ 110, 260 Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) 204,
Brown, Mike 93 205–6
brownfield sites 405–16; see also post-industrial Central Park in the Dark (Ives) 237
sites Central Park, New York 215, 356
Brundtland Report 359, 397 Certeau, Michel de 66, 122
Brunner, John 228 Cezanne, Paul 195, 215
Buckland, David 202–3 Chaco Canyon 205
Buell, Lawrence 222 Chanan, Michael 232
Building Information Models (BIM) 423–24 change 103, 199; responses to 169
Bunce, Michael 430 chaos theory 338
Bunyan, John 220–21 Chatsworth Estate 260
Burchell, William 191 Chernobyl 228, 387, 397
Burger King 265 childcare 72
Burgess, Jacquelin 36, 46 children and young people 183; as an excluded
Burke, Edmund 43–44 group 341; experience of nature in urban areas
Burnley 327 299; identity linked to landscape 277–79,
Burra Charter 155, 172 278–80i; involvement in design process 357,
Burren College of Art 58 358i; landscape as a buffer against stress 35–36;
Bush, George W. 234 perceptions of landscape 35–36, 47; use of parks
Butler, Judith 66, 120–21 as meeting places 301; see also play areas
Byker 343 Chimborazo, Mount 191–92
China 45
Cage, John 234–35 Chitern Open Air Museum 180, 186, 187i, 188
Cahen, Harley 457 Choi, Y. K. 182
Cairngorm National Park Plan 376i chorology 16
Cairngorms 72, 375 Christianity 221, 291
Caledonian Forest 392 church art 322
California 205, 248, 266 church bells 236
473
Index
cities 167; generic 264; as landscapes 438 continental philosophy 454–55

citizenship 278 Conversations with Landscape (Benediktsson and
The City (film) 212 Lund) 62
civic humanism 257 Cook, Captain James 192
Civilizing Terrains: Mountains, Mounds and Mesas Coolidge, Matthew 205, 205–6
(Moorish) 357 Cooper, Thomas Joshua 201
CIVILSCAPE 19 ‘Cooper’s Hill’ (Denham) 222
Clark, Kate 170 Corbin, Alan 237
class 99, 148–49, 214, 249, 364; and perceptions Corby, Tom 202
of landscape 46–47 Cormier, Claude 359
‘Class Codes and Control’ (Bernstein) 186 Corner, James 439, 441–42, 444
classical features in landscapes 110 Cornwall 158, 158i, 167i, 169, 170, 464, 466
classification 185–86, 187 Cosco, Nilda 34
Clement, Gilles 355 Cosgrove, Denis 2, 18, 46, 58, 97–98, 100, 135,
climate change 84, 297, 383, 461–68; American 154, 156, 161, 191, 193, 275, 322, 363
attitudes 76; and art 199; artists’ responses to cost, of landscapes 309–10
207; defining 462–63; and human rights Cotswolds 44
278–79; indigenous knowledge 465; and Council for the Preservation of Rural England
migration 275; mitigation 76–78; as a social (CPRE) 169, 367
problem 465 Council of Europe 17
climate imagery 203 country houses 148
climatology 14 Cowie, Jefferson 410
climbing 61 Crankshaw, Ned 433
Cloke, Paul 148 Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area
Club of Rome 383 80–81
coastal realignment 392 Crawford, O. G. S. 132
Cobbett, William 146 creation 11
cognition 69 Creative Research in the Environment
cognitive psychology 26–27 (CORE) 201
coherence 175 creativity 145, 154
Coke, Edward 259 Creighton, Oliver 46
Coleman, Alice 339 Cresswell, Tim 87, 123, 276
Colonial Williamsburg 288 Critical Regionalism 274
colonialism 134, 149, 154, 194 Crockett, Samuel R. 216
Common Ground 266 Cronon, William 79, 87, 454
common land 260 Crouch, David 48, 70
communication 104, 340 Crutzen, P. J. 76
communities 138, 299; engagement with Cullen, Gordon 27
landscape 172; self-reliant 339; social contact Cultura21 199
and crowding 300 cultural identity 338
community gardens 124–26, 301 cultural imperialism 192, 244–45
commuter belts 427 cultural landscape 13, 273
Computer Aided Design (CAD) 419 cultural studies, and landscape design 362–64
computer modelling 419 culture, semiotics of 98
concentration 298 Culture and Explosion (Lotman) 103
Congress of New Urbanism 447 The Culture of Nature (Wilson) 79
Connerton, Paul 324 custom, and law 259–60
Conrad, Elisabeth 378 cycle lanes 302, 305
consciousness 32 cycling 61, 243, 302
conservation 169, 395–404 Czech Republic 234
Conservation is our Government Now (West) 80 Czerniak, Julia 439, 440
Conservation Management Planning 169
Constable, John 3–4, 193–94, 323–24 Dalarna 45
Constable Country 194 Dale Farm traveller site 343
consumption 99 Dalziel, Mathew 202
contemplation 61 dance 120
Contested Landscapes (Bender) 70 danger 111
474
Index
Daniel, T. C. 31, 33 digital modelling 35

Daniels, Stephen 2, 58–59, 100, 135, 147, 191, Dingpolitik 253, 259, 261
194, 233, 323 dioramas 417
Dann, G. 290, 292 disability 36–37, 341, 358; and perceptions of
Darby, W. J. 46 landscape 37
Darras Hall 133i disaster zones, and rewilding 387
Dartmoor 238 discounting 317
Darwin, Charles 10, 14, 223, 358 discourses 154
David, Bruno 131 discrimination 358
Davidson, Joyce 324 Disney 210
Davies, Sir John 259 Disneyland 374
Dawkins, Richard 342, 359 documentary film 212–13
De Cunzo, Lu Ann 149 documentary sources 145
de Groot, Rudolf 384 Dogs and Demons (Kerr) 457
De natura deorum (Cicero) 383 The Domesday Geography 16
de Vries, Sjerp 297 donations 312
Dearden, P. 48 Dora, Della 290, 292
‘The Death of Environmentalism’ (Nordhaus and Dorgan, Robert 357
Shellenberger) 76, 78 Dorset 216
decision-making 340; public participation 344 Dos Passos, John 228
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples ‘Double Negative’ (Heizer) 205
(UN) 276 Downsview Park 445
decolonization 154 Doyle, Julie 465
Dee, Tim 228 drama, in landscape 110–11
Deetz, James 146 Dreamings, Aboriginal Australian 8–11
Deleuze, Gilles 62, 66, 68, 122 Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America
Deliège, Glenn 453 (Berger) 439
Delphi method 360 drosscapes 411
DeLue, Rachel Ziady 58 Drum Island 94i
demarcation 255 Duany, Andres 447
dementia-sensitive landscape 357 Dubow, Jessica 58–59, 62
Deming, Elen 347 Duisberg North 365, 407
democracy 166, 246, 258, 335–36, 337i, 340, 344 Dunaway, Finis 31
democratic spaces 341 Duncan, James 99, 275
Demos 175 Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art 202
Denes, Agnes 200 Dundreggan Estate 392
Denham, John 222 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau 228
depression, environmental factors 303 Durack, Ruth 440
Derrida, Jacques 62, 223–24 Dutch elm disease 311
desakota 433 Dutcher, Daniel 30
design 13, 33, 88, 115, 263, 355–65; competitions dwelling perspective 145
446–47; and inclusion 358; industrial 264; dwelling theory 338
participatory 126, 360 Dyer, John 222–23
Design on the Land (Newton) 362 dystopias 214
Design with Nature (McHarg) 369, 456
designation of landscapes 56, 378, 384–85 ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’ 206
DeSilvey, Caitlin 61 Earth Summit 342, 359
determinism 273 Earthworks and Beyond (Beardsley) 200
Deusen, R. Van 46 Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties
development 76 (Boettger) 200
Devine-Wright, Patrick 465 Eco, Umberto 98
Devon 48 Ecoarts Network 199
Dewey, John 340, 344, 359 eco/art/scot/land 199
Dewsbury, John-David 66, 70, 290 eco-bridges 389
Di Giovine, Michael 159 ecocentrism 451, 455
diabetes 301 ecocriticism 223–26
Diamond, Jared 339 ecofeminism 224
475
Index
ecological approach to landscape studies 97 Et landskab 256i

Ecological Restoration Zones (ERZs) 392–93 ethics 66, 73; environmental 450–60;
Ecological Urbanism 411, 447–48 human-centred 450–51; ‘leave no trace’ 205
Ecological Urbanism (Mostafavi) 439 Ethics and the Built Environment (Fox) 455
Ecologische Hoofdstructuur (National Ecological The Ethics of Earth Art (Boetzkes) 200
Network) 390, 392 ethnic groups, perceptions of landscape 36, 45–46
Ecology without Nature (Morton) 224 ethnicity 364
ecomuseums 188, 339 ethnography 72, 145, 158, 161; and research
economic injustice 244 methods 35
economics of landscape 308–21 Europe 276; legal and administrative families 379i
ecophilosophy 201 European Commission 340
ecosemiotics 104 European Conference of Landscape Architecture
ecosystems 11, 384 Schools (ECLAS) 17
Edensor, Tim 275, 291 European Federation of Landscape Architects
Edinburgh College of Art 201, 205 (EFLA) 281
education 48 European Landscape Convention (ELC) 1, 4,
Eggener, Keith 268 17–19, 46, 48, 76, 84, 136, 143–44, 245–46, 254,
Egyptian wall paintings 417 274, 336, 339, 346, 367, 370, 375, 402; definition
Eidophusikons 417 of landscape 166, 308, 366; impact on policy
Eire Street Plaza 446–47 making 18–19; ratification in UK 33–34, 143
elderly people 302 European Science Foundation 297
Eliot, George 221 evaluation 360
elite values, and landscape 323 Everett, Sally 291
Elkin, James 58 Ewald, Wendy 277
Elliot, Robert 452 excavation 134
Elsinga, Marja 48 exhibitions 202–3, 206–7
embodiment 66, 68–69, 70, 72–73, 155 exile 249
emotion 66, 69, 70; and responses to landscape Existential Semiotics (Tarasti) 100
26, 110–11, 195 Exmoor Landscape (Richards) 238
empowerment 324, 342–43 experience 166; interpreting 145; poetics of 122
Emscher Park 407, 411 The Experience of Landscape (Appleton) 44
enclosure 36, 146, 254, 258 explanatory theories 357
The End of Nature (McKibbin) 452 expression 147
endangered species 80, 385, 456 extinction 385, 395
energy 170; consumption 304; renewable 77, 464; extinction dynamics 386
tidal 465; wind generated 76–77, 82–83 Exxon Valdez oil spill 397
engagement, with landscape 338
England 36, 44, 169, 173 Fairbrother, Nan 377
English Heritage 173–74, 175 ‘Faking Nature’ (Elliot) 452
Englishness 44, 44–45, 324, 326 family, and spaces 143
Enlightenment 233, 258 Far From the Madding Crowd (Schlesinger) 216
entitlement 249 Farina, Almo 27, 30–31, 98, 102, 104
environment, restorative 27–28 Farman, Joe 397
environmental art 199; development of 200 farming 29, 47, 48, 113, 115, 133, 146, 266;
environmental biology 44 impact on land 388; industrial scale 116; subsidies
environmental collapse, depicted in film 214 387; traditional 116; use of livestock 396
environmental determinism 273 farmland preservation 430–31
environmental ethics 450–60 Faro Convention 172
The Environmental Imagination (Buell) 222 fascism 267
Environmental Impact Assessment 16, 370 fashion 264
environmentalism 76–86; and indigenous people fear 29–30, 324
78–80, 81; see also postenvironmentalism Feld, Steven 235
erosion 388 feminism 224–25, 244
Erskine, Ralph 343 feminist studies 66, 195
Ervin, Stephen 424 Fenner, David 30
Escape from New York (Carpenter) 214 Fernandez, J. 29
Essex Wildlife Trust 392 festivals 231, 232, 233, 288
476
Index
Festspiele 216 Gabo, Naum 124

feudalism 257 Gabrys, Jennifer 202
fiction 146, 154 Galindo, M. P. 34
fieldwork 93, 201 Gallagher, Nathan 203
film 210–19; documentary realism 212–13; Galloway 216
functions of landscape in 211; impact of sets on Garden, Mary-Catherine 159, 289
landscape 210, 216; locations 211, 215, 216; as Garden Cities 296, 368
a medium for recording reality 212–13; music garden design 14, 17, 47, 257, 265, 355
in 232; science-fiction 213–15; and tourism 216 garden landscapes 146
film noir 214 garden shows 359
Finberg, H. P. R. 133 gardening 66, 124–25, 355
Findings (Jamie) 227–28 gardens 175, 257, 260, 383; admission fees
Finland 45, 157i; and national branding 156–57 312–13; community 301; donations and
Finlay, Ian Hamilton 200 voluntary subscriptions 312–13; as the poetry of
First Assessment of Europe’s Environment 17 landscapes 355–56; sustaining social
First World War 234 relationships 149
Fischer, Frank 343, 344 Gas Works Park, Seattle 410, 411i
fishing 383 gaze 88, 120, 195, 203, 322; collective 289;
Five Village Soundscapes 236 romantic 289
Flaherty, Robert 212 Geddes, Patrick 201, 368, 440
Flannery, Tim 11 gender 99, 120, 143, 249, 364; and perceptions
Fleming, Andrew 145 of landscape 47
flirting with space 119, 121–22, 126 genealogy 156
Flitner, Michael 29 Gennargentu national park 81–82
Florence 257, 287 gentrification 288, 433
focal species 369 Geoghegan, Hilary 466
focus groups 34, 72 geographical features, as literary symbols 221
folk music 233, 236 Geographical Review 44
folklore 238 geography 61; cultural 5, 57, 79, 88, 90, 132,
follies 110 134–36, 273; human 56, 68, 88; interpretative
food: regional 315; and tourism 291 137; landscape as core topic 14–15; neglect of
A Force for our Future 173 popular culture 215; physical 56; sonic 232–33
forest clearance 92 geology 463
forested landscapes 48; perceptions of safety and geometry 149
risk 36; preferences for 29 geomorphology 115, 463
foresters 48 geosemiotics 100
Forestry Commission 391–92 Germany 15–16, 29, 44, 45, 76, 81, 82–83, 378;
Forman, Dave 386 crisis in landscape science 16; national parks 83i;
Forman, Richard 398 post-industrial sites 405–9
Forster, E. M. 287 gesture 120, 122
Fossey, Dian 397 Geuze, Adriaan 439
Foucault, Michel 225, 289 Giblett, Rod 221
Four Fields (Dee) 228 Gibson, Eleanor 26
Fox, Warwick 456 Gibson, James 26
Fox, William L. 206 Giddens, Anthony 135
Fragile Ecologies (Matilsky) 200 Giedion, Siegfried 362
Fragstats 19 GIF 19
framing 187–88, 249 Gilbert, Bill 204, 206
Frampton, Kenneth 268, 274 Gimi people 80–81
France 45, 237 GIS (Geographical Information Systems) 19, 134,
Frankenstein (Shelley) 78 137, 137i, 369, 389, 398, 419; softGIS 35, 37
freedom 72 Glacken, Clarence 233
Freshkills Park 443–44, 445–46, 446i Gladstone Pottery Museum 71
Freud, Sigmund 362–64 Glaser, Barney 346
Fulton, Hamish 200 Glasgow and Clyde Valley Green Network 377
‘The Future of Landscape and Moving Image’ 202 Glasgow School of Art 201
futurescapes 464 Glastonbury Festival 233
477
Index
Global Landscape Convention 380 Gunn, Alastair 453

globalization 263–71; environmental hazards 265; Gwent Levels Project 133
impact on landscape 263; as liberating 264 gypsies 276
Glotfelty, Cheryll 221
Gloucester 45 Haacke, Hans 200
Goathland 217 Haag, Richard 410
Gobster, Paul 30–31, 36 Habermas, Jurgen 340, 346
God, as creator 111 habitat changes 463
Godlovitch, Stan 31 habitat destruction 385
God’s Own Junkyard, the Planned Deterioration of habitat networks 385
America’s Landscape (Blake) 430 Hack, Gary 421
Goethe, Wilhelm Friedrich von 192 Hägerhäll, Caroline 28–29
Goldberg, Lea 281–82 Halbwachs, Maurice 324
Goldsworthy, Andy 200 Haley, David 201
golf courses, globalized design 265 Hall, Peter 432
Gomez-Limon, J. 29 Halprin, Laurence 266
Google Earth 419, 420 Häme 45
Google Maps 419 Hampshire 146, 216
Gore, Al, ‘politics of fear’ 78 Han, Ke-Tsung 29
Gothein, Marie Louise 362 Handbook of Landscape Archaeology (David and
government 169, 173, 245–46 Thomas) 131
Governor’s Island Design Competition 445 hanging baskets 318i
Gozo 401 Hardin, Garrett 342, 383
Grahame Foundation 439 Harding, David 201
Grand Tour of Europe 215, 287, 361 Hardy, Thomas 216, 221–22, 226
Granö, Johannes 14, 235 Harewood House 146–47, 147i
Gray, Thomas 223 Hargrove, Eugene 456
grazing 387 harmony 233
Greater London Plan 1944 369 Harris, Catherine Page 204
Greece 44, 136i, 137i; ancient 335–36 Harrison, Helen and Newton 200, 201, 206
greehouse gases: see climate change Harrison, Paul 46, 66
‘green and pleasant land’ 194 Hartig, Terry 28, 38
green belt 368, 387, 430, 432 Hartshorne, Richard 14
green corridors 303, 304–5, 369, 389 Harvard Graduate School of Design 439, 443, 447
green exercise 301 Harvey, David 135, 155, 244, 266, 269, 276
Green Infrastructure Strategy for Leeds City Haunted Earth (Read) 91
Region 377 Hawkins, V. 369
green movement 78 Hayrynen, Maunu 59
green networks 377 The Hay Wain (Constable) 3–4, 193–94
green roofs 299 Healey, Patsy 344
green walls 299 health: and landscape 38, 48, 258, 340; and
Greenpeace 465 landscape economics 311; and urbanization
Gregory, Richard 36 296–307, 301–3
Greimas, A. J. 98–99 Heartbeat 216, 217
Grieg, Edvard 234 Heathcott, Joseph 410
Grierson, John 212 Heatherington, Tracey 81–82
Grimley, Daniel 234–35, 238 Hedin, Jenny 186
Grimmer, Abel 232 Heffernan, Michael 325
‘Grongar Hill’ (Dyer) 222–23 Heft, Harry 30, 32
Grosz, Elizabeth 66, 121 Heidegger, Martin 54, 56, 60, 66, 90, 223, 225,
The Ground Aslant (Tarlo) 228 253, 454, 458
grounded theory 346 heimat 44
‘Groundworks’ 207 Heise, Ursula 224, 228
Grusch, Rick 26 Heizer, Michael 199, 205, 206
Guattari, Felix 62, 66, 122 Helliwell system 312–13
Gudeman, Stephen 260 Henderson, George 467–68
guide books 44–45 Herbert, George 220–21
478
Index
‘Here’ (Larkin) 223 ICOMOS 155

heritage 45, 144, 152–65, 169, 339; assets 175; iconography 323, 327; of Englishness 323–24;
and commodification of place 288; designation religious 322
174–75; and identity 266, 323; intrinsic, The Iconography of Landscape (Cosgrove and
instrumental and institutional values 174–75; Daniels) 46
and national branding 154, 156; and process identity 30, 60, 70, 91, 99, 123, 263, 272–85;
154–55; ‘sacred cows’ 155 fluid 225; fluid and dynamic 275; and
Heritage Lottery Fund (UK) (HLF) 158, 174 globalization 266; national 44; and national
heritagescape 159, 289 heritage 157; politics of 72; reification of 275
Herriot, James 216 ideology 2, 120
Herzog, Thomas 29 Ikeda, Ichi 200
Hewison, Robert 154 imagination 108
Hidalgo, M. C. 34 IMAGIS system 420
High Line Park 444, 444i, 446 IMAX cinemas 417
Hip Hop Garden 360i immigration 46, 94, 248, 341; and place 91
historic characterization 173 imperialism 191, 323
Historic Environment Action Plans (HEAPs) 176; Implementation Theory 370
England 170 India 276, 325; rural development 338
Historic Landscape Characterization (HLC) 17, indigenous people 92, 276, 292, 339; on
136–37, 144, 170, 173–75 protected land 78–80, 81; relationships with
historic landscapes 45, 143–51, 166; defined 143; landscapes 339
designation of 175; management of 169 Indonesia 82
Historic Seaside Characterization 173–74 industrial landscapes 18
historical value 173 industrialisation 111, 123–24, 144; and landscape
history, oral 145, 148, 155 406; see also post-industrial sites
History of Garden Art (Gothein) 361 inferiority 245
Hobbs, Richard 402 information technology, and research methods 35
Hodder, Ian 135 infrastructure, performative beauty of 442
Hodges, William 192, 195 Inglis, Fred 47
Hogarth, William 108 Ingold, Tim 31, 32, 38, 60–61, 69, 101, 138, 225,
Holt, Nancy 199 276, 338, 466–67
Hong Kong 214 insideness 48, 90, 340–41
Hooftman. Eelco 201 integrity 175
Hopkins, Jeffrey 289 intercorporeality 72
Hoskins, W. G. 15, 89, 133, 134, 144, 273 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Hough, Michael 267 (IPCC) 462–63
housing 214 internalisation 108
housing density 300 International Association of Landscape Ecology
Houston 206 (IALE) 16, 19, 401
Howard, Ebenezer 296, 368 International Building Exhibition (IBA) 407, 411
Hudson, Kenneth 183 International Conference on Landscape
human rights 272, 364; landscape as a right 4, 18, Economics 309–10
272; of nomadic people 277 International Federation of Landscape Architects
human-landscape relationship 8–11 (IFLA) 274, 359
‘Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing International Landscape Urbanism Exhibition 439
Planet’ 206 International Movement 123
humans, relationships with landscapes Internet 362
339, 383 The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Meinig) 273
Humboldt, Alexander von 14, 191–92, interviews 34, 37, 72
195, 254 inventories 18
Hunt, John Dixon 355 Ireland 44
hunter-gatherers 395 ‘Is There a Need for New, an Environmental,
Hurst, J. G. 133 Ethic?’ (Routley) 450
Husserl, Edmund 90 island biogeography 386
Hutchinson, Francis 108 Ismail, Nor Atiah 281
hybrid landscapes 427–37 Israel 275, 276
hybridity 153 Italian Renaissance 362
479
Index
Italy 33 Krauss, Werner 48, 49, 153

Ives, Charles 237 Krenichyn, Kira 36
Kruse, Robert 291
Jackson, J. B. 57, 122, 273, 286, 292, 356 Kuentzel, Walter 340, 344
Jacobs, Jane 300 Kurttila, Terhi 276
Jacobs, P. 376 Kyttä, Marketta 35, 37
Jacobsen, Jens 290, 292
Jamie, Kathleen 227–28 Labelle, Brandon 238
Jamieson, Dale 458–59 Labour: and landscape production 248;
Japan 101, 199, 378 division of 244
Les Jardins de Métis 359, 360i Lacock, Wiltshire 216
Jefferson, Thomas 257 Ladkin, Donna 453
Jellicoe, Geoffrey 356, 362 Lake District 46, 72, 217, 322, 323–24, 325–26,
Jellicoe, Susan 362 391, 454; visualizing experiences of 326–31
Jencks, Charles 383, 440 Lake Stoibermühle 434i
Jenkins, Olivia 290, 291 Lambert, Constant 234
Jensen, Jen 273–74 Land and Environmental Art (Kastner and Wallis) 200
Joad, C. E. M. 46 Land Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Andrews)
Johnson, Matthew 132, 134 205
Johns-Putra, Adeline 62, 154, 155 Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) 204–5
Johnston, Alan 201 land ethics 450, 455
Jones, Owain 61, 148 land ownership 149, 170, 194, 276
Jorgensen, Anna 376 land use, economics of 309–10
Journal of Environmental Psychology 44 Land2 199, 201
Judd, Donald 204 landform data 420
judgements, aesthetic 110, 113–15 landmarks 235
Jung, Carl 356 Landscape 273
Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site 159–61, 160i landscape: admission charges 312–14; aesthetic
justice, social 243–52 appreciation 108–18; attachment to 276; as a
Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young) 244 construction 90; crisis 7, 17; as cultural image
60; definitions 109, 123, 257; demarcation of
Kagan, Sacha 199, 207 255; descriptions of 170; direct engagement
Kaluli people 235 with 112; duty of care to 388; dynamic, fluid
Kant, Immanuel 111, 355 conception of 1, 70, 72, 147, 153, 166–67,
Kaplan, Rachel and Stephen 27–28, 29, 34, 44, 171, 224; economics 308–21; as a framing
298 device 183, 188; holistic views of 14; human
Kastner, Jeffery 200, 205 aspects 14; inhabiting 113; as layered 327; lived
Katz, Eric 452 experience and materiality of 9–10, 57, 122;
Keeling, Paul 454–55 meanings 12–13; mythology 289; networks
Keiller, Patrick 202 18–19; as an object of tourism 287–88; origins
Keitumetse, Susan 155, 159, 161 of word 12–13, 88–89, 109; owned 104, 260;
Kelly, George 32 preferences 28–31; research 12–22, 13i;
Kelsey, Robin 62 responses to 170; as a right 272; scientific
Kent, William 110, 355 appreciation of 191–92; as a spectacle 213; as a
KERB 439 visual ideology 57, 60; Western notion of 79;
Kerr, Alex 457 workers 125; see also landscape architecture;
Kerr, James Semple 170 landscape ecology; landscape painting
Kester, Grant 207 Landscape and Memory (Schama) 89
Kibria, Shahrea 421 Landscape and Urban Planning 16
Kidd, Sue 4–5 landscape architecture 17, 263, 302–4, 383;
Kirkwood, Niall 410 emergence as a profession 356; and
Kobayashi, Yutaka 199 globalization 265; influences on 273–74;
Kohak, Erazim 10 obligation to protect landscape identity 274
Kohsaka, Ryo 29 Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) 17, 338
Koli 156–57, 157i Landscape Ecology 16
Koolhaas, Rem 264, 265, 439 landscape ecology 395–404, 463; congnitive 27;
Kowarik, Ingo 407 general principles 399–400i; origins of term 397
480
Index
Landscape Europe 19 Lichtenstein, Rachel 158

Landscape Identity Circle 274 LiDAR data 134, 420
Landscape Impact Assessment 370 Liddiard, Robert 46
Landscape Information Models (LIM) 424 life histories 37
Landscape of Man (Jellicoe) 362 LIFESCAPE 445
landscape painting 12, 29, 45, 190; alternative lifeworld 90
visions 326–28; consequences for landscape light, and mental health 303
194; production and consumption of 195 Light, Andrew 455–56
Landscape Research 2, 16, 397 Lincoln University Christchurch 277
Landscape Research Group (LRG) 2, 16, 397 A Line Made by Walking (Long) 195–96
Landscape Theory (DeLue and Elkin) 58–59, 62 linguascape 100
Landscape Tomorrow 19 linguistics 98; applied to landscape elements
Landscape Urbanism 2, 6, 359, 413, 438–49; ten 98–99, 292
tenets 441; working method 442–43 Lippard, Lucy 88–89, 90, 200, 204, 206, 267
Landscape Urbanism (Mostafavi) 439 Lipstick Forest 360
Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim) 439, 441, literary settings 222
447 literary tourism 216
‘Landscapes for Life’ 462 literature 100; representations of landscape 220–30
‘Landscapes in a new Europe: unity in diversity’ 17 litter 300
‘Landscape/Space/Politics: an essay’ (Massey) 202 Little, B. R. 34
Landschaft 14, 248, 254, 258, 264 Liverpool, and Beatles tourism 291
Landschaftsforschung 257 A Living Landscape (Wildlife Trust) 462
Landschap 16 Living Reviews in Landscape Research 17
Landsdowne Park Competition 447 Liza river 392
landskip 264 Lizard peninsula 466
land-use conflicts 430–31 lobby groups 169
Lang, Fritz 214 local norms 243, 245
language 46, 227–30; analogous to landscape 98 localisation 266
Lanyon, Peter 123–24, 196 London 158, 176i, 368; parks and Green Belt land
Lapland 276 368–69
Larkin, Philip 223, 229 Long, Richard 195–96
Larsen, Jonas 290 Long Kesh (Maze) Prison 155
Las Vegas 214 Lopez, Barry 94
Lascelles, Henry 147 Lopez, Tony 228
Latham, John 202 The Lord of the Rings films 216
Latour, Bruno 66, 78, 84, 148, 253, 256, 259 Lorimer, Hayden 61, 66, 67, 72, 466
Latz, Peter 364, 407 Lorrain, Claude 323
Lautrop, Peter 256i Los Angeles 214
law 253–62 loss 249
Law, John 148 Lotman, Juri 103
Lawton Report 392 Loutherbourg, Philip James de 417
learning disabilities, and perceptions of Love Your Monsters (Nordhaus and Shellenberger)
landscape 37 78
Lebanon 281 ‘Lovely Weather’ 199
Lefaivre, Liane 267, 269, 274 Lowe, Graham 322, 326–27
Lennon, John 233 Lowe, Philip 432
LE:NOTRE 17 Lowenthal, David 44, 153, 325
Leonardo Journal 199 Lower Don Lands Master Plan Competition 446
Leone, Massimo 101 LRG 19
Leopold, Aldo 30, 338, 385, 388, 450, 455, 458 Lund, Katrin 62
Leopold matrix 16 The Lure of the Local (Lippard) 267
Leppert, Richard 232, 233, 237 Lynch, Kevin 33, 421
Less Favoured Area 170 lyrics 232
Levinas, Emmanuel 62
Leyshon, Catherine 466 Ma Vlast (Smetana) 234
liability issues 411 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 220
Library Square, Vancouver 362, 363i MacCannell, Dean 288–89, 364
481
Index
MacKaye, Benton 429–30, 440 memory 26, 36, 61, 123, 154, 156, 167, 223, 249,
Mackenzie, Lisa 201 274, 322–34; and identity 268; and landscape
MacPherson, H. 72 158; in music 233; sensory 329; memory sites
Maitland, Robert 288 325; social 157
Maitland, Sarah 55–56, 58 mental health 35–36, 297–98, 340
Makhzoumi, Jala 281 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 32, 54, 56, 66, 90, 102,
The Making of the English Landscape (Hoskins) 15, 196, 223
144, 273 Merriman, P. 70
‘Making Space for Nature’ (Lawton Report) 392 Mesoamerican Biodiversity Corridor (CBM) 389
Malaysia 35 metaphysics 223
Mali, Wu 199 metapopulation theory 386
Malpas, Jeff 62 meteorology 115
Malta 210, 211i Metropolis (Lang) 214
Malthus, Thomas 383 Metro-Roland, Michelle 102, 104, 288
Manacorda, Francesco 206 Mexico, Gulf of 77
management, of landscapes 105 microclimate 297
Manchester Metropolitan University 201 Microsoft Bing Maps 419
Manhattan 214; street grid 442 Middle Earth 216
Man’s Responsibility for Nature (Passmore) 451, 456 Midgley, Mary 452
Maori people 92, 277, 385 migration 275, 281
maps 14, 100, 132–34, 174, 346, 417, 419; Miles, Malcolm 341, 343
cognitive 33, 171 Mill, Stephanie 453
Marcucci, Daniel 375 The Mill on the Floss (Eliot) 221
marginalization 249, 324 Miller, Daniel 59, 135
Maria, Walter de 199, 206 Miller Galleries 207
Marshall, Jennifer Jane 59 Milwaukee 446
Marwell, Gerald 312 Minca, Claudio 291
Marxism 2, 100, 193, 244, 249, 362–64 minority groups, perceptions of landscape 36
masculinist view of the world 323 Misreading African Landscapes (Fairhead and Leach)
Massachusetts 146 79
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 439, 443 Miss, Mary 199
Massey, Doreen 47, 122, 123, 202, 268, 276 Mitchell, Don 244, 247–49, 250, 267, 275
Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D (Allen) 439 Mitchell, J. W. T. 46, 275
material features, impact on cultural landscape MLTW 266
144–45 Moa bird 385
material semiotics 103 Moana (Flaherty) 212
materiality, and perception 70 mobile phone noise 236
mathematics 233 mobility studies 102, 122
Matilsky, Barbara 200, 207 Mockbee, Sam 268
Matless, David 48, 123, 232–33, 233, 237, 323 models 418i
The Matrix (Wachowski) 215 Modernism 228
Matuszewski, Boleslaw 212 modernity 144
Max-Neef, Manfred 345 Molcho, Ilan 277
Maze Prison 155 Moldau river 234
McAtackney, Laura 155, 159 Monnai Teruyuki 101
McCartney, Paul 233 monoculture 266
McClanahan, Angela 161 Montag, Daro 201
McCormack, Derek 66, 72, 155 Montana 228
McDonald’s 265 Montreal Convention Center 360
McGee, Terry 433 Montreal Protocol 397
McHarg, Ian 356, 358–59, 369, 430, 440, 451, Moore, Robin 34
456–57 Moorish, William R. 357
McKibbin, Bill 452, 454 morality 259; represented by landscape 221
McLean, Ross 201 Morris, William 367
McMullan, Shauna 201 Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona 225
Meinig, Donald 43, 148, 273 Morton, Timothy 224
memorials 325 Mostafavi, Mohsen 439, 447
482
Index
motion 70, 72 nature-culture cycle 384i

mountains 110 nature/culture divide 138
Mousehole (Cornwall) 158, 158i nature-culture hybrids 7
MP3 players 232 navigation 32–33
Mt St Victoire paintings (Cezanne) 195 Naxos 136i, 137i
Mueller, Kurt 206 Nazism 267
Muir, John 78, 368, 385, 455, 458 Negev Coexistence Forum for Civil Equality 277
Mullion Harbour 464 Nerlich, Brigitte 467
Mumford, Lewis 440 Netherlands 148, 378, 389; rewilding projects 390i
Murdoch, Jonathan 432 networks 199
Murray, John Stuart 201 neurobiology 68
museums 71, 161, 179–89, 264, 288, 325, 339; Nevada Museum of Art 205, 206
design of 181–85 New England 48, 259, 409
music 4, 56, 66, 204, 231–40, 300; as divine New Lives, New Landscapes (Fairbrother) 377
inspiration 235; imitating nature 233; lyrics and New Mobilities Paradigm 276
libretti 232; and natural sounds 231–32; New South Wales 357
soundtracks 232 New York 36, 214, 362, 443–44
muzak 236 New York Times 76
MVRDV 264 New Zealand 44, 91, 92–93, 277; film locations
My Country (Smetana) 234 216
Myers, M. S. 34 Newbury, Massachusetts 146
mythology 156, 161, 233 Newbury Bypass protests 343
Newcastle upon Tyne 133i, 343
Naess, Arne 30–31, 451 Newman, Oscar 339–40
Nahsicht 14 Newman, Peter 288
Najle, Ciro 439 Newton, Norman T. 357, 362
Nancy, Jean-Luc 62 Nga Uruora (The Groves of Life) (Park) 92
narrative strategies 224 Niagara Falls 454
narratives: and knowledge 153; place-based 93 nightjar 227
Nasar, Jack 30, 46 nomadic cultures 276; perceived as landless 277
Nash, Catherine 195 Non-Photo Realistic Rendering (NPR) 422–23
National Character Area 170 non-representational theory 66–75, 120
National Ecosystem Assessment (UK) 308 Nooramunga Marine and Coastal Reserve 88i,
National Endowment for the Arts (USA) 204 88–91, 93–94, 94i
National Geographical Society (NGS) 15 Norberg-Schultz, Christian 32
national identity 44–45, 194, 234, 273, 329 Nordh, Helena 300
national landscapes 324 Nordhaus, T. 76–78, 80
national parks 15, 56, 76, 78–79, 81, 82–83, 91, Norfolk 464
260, 324, 325, 367–68, 375, 384–85, 389, 413; Norfolk Broads 232–33
attack on concept of 78; planning 375–76i normative theories 357–59
National Parks and Resident Peoples (West and North American Prairie School 273–74
Brechin) 79 North Sea 76
National Trust (NT) 15, 169, 183, 312, 367, 372, Northern Ireland 155
391, 392, 462, 464 Norton, Bryan 452
National Wildlife Corridor Plan (Australia) 389 Norway 47, 234, 377
nationalism 249; reinforced by landscape 275 Noss, Reed 386
The Natural Choice (White Paper) 462 nostalgia 2, 4, 322, 324–25; smokestack nostalgia
natural disasters 383 411
natural disturbance ecology 386 Nurturing Ecologies 322, 327, 328i, 329i, 330i
The Natural Environment (Natural England) 462 Nye, David 58
Natural History Museum, London 186
‘Natural Reality’ 207 Oakes, Tim 291
natural selection 358–59 Oberlander, Cornelia Hahn 362, 363i
nature: as a construction 90; as an external realm obesity 301
54; imitation of 356; mistrusted 226 oceans 383
Nature Improvement Areas (NIAs) 393 O’Connor, James 244, 246
nature reserves see protection ocularcentrism 264–65
483
Index
Ode, Asa 34 Parks and People: The Social Impact of Protected Areas
‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (West et al.) 79
(Gray) 223 Parkway movement 296
oil drilling 234 parole 99
older people 36–37 participation 336–38, 337i; with design 126;
Olmsted, Fredrik Law 296, 356 inhibiting factors 348; ladder of 340, 341
Olson, Charles 228 Participatory Action Research 347
Olwig, Kenneth 58, 135, 247, 275, 340, 344, 348, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) 346
409, 411 Passarge, Siegfried 14
Opdam, Paul 378 Passini, Romedi 33
open-air museums 179–89, 188, 288; design and Passmore, John 451, 456
planning 183–87, 187i; landscape as a framing pastoral landscapes 110, 257; influence on music 233
device 183, 188; representing an idealized, Pastoral Symphony (Williams) 234
nostalgic and apolitical version of the past 182; patterns, in landscape 398
role of landscape 183–84 Peak District 72, 260
Oppel, Alwin 14 Peak Practice 216
Orians, Gordon 44 Pearl River Delta 444
The Origin of the Species (Darwin) 223 Pearson, Mike 61, 155, 158
Orkney World Heritage Site 161 peat bogs 114–15
Orpheus, legend of 233 pedagogy 93–95, 347
Ostrom, Elinor 260, 342 Pedroli, Bas 269, 274
otherness 249 Peirce, Charles Sanders 101, 102
Ottawa 446 Penn, William 368
overfishing 383 Pennartz, Paul 48
Overlay (Lippard) 200 Penny Lane (Beatles) 233
owls 226 People and Planning 340
The Oxfam Handbook of Development and Relief ‘The People’s Claim’ (Joad) 46
(Eade and Williams) 345 Peponis, John 186
Oxford Brookes University 201 perception 16, 25–42, 59; in children and young
ozone layer 397 people 35–36; and cognition 26–27; ecological
approach 26; and materiality 70; and reality 26;
Paca, William, garden 149 through different ‘lenses’ 43–53
painting 49, 196, 324; discussed as final product The Peregrine (Baker) 226
225; panoramic 417; and perceptions of performance and performance studies 6, 57, 61, 66,
landscape 190, 193; presenting idealised, 119–27, 156, 204; street performance 70–71
nostalgic view of landscape 193 performativity 119–27
paintings 417 performing, as a tourist 290
Pakistan Welfare Association 326–27 peri-urban landscapes 427–37, 429i
Palestine 275 Permanent European Conference for the Study of
palimpsest 154 the Rural Landscape (PECSRL) 15–16
Palladian architecture 257 personal construct theory (PCT) 37
The Palladian Landscape (Cosgrove) 46 personal music systems 232
Pallasmaa, Juhani 264 perspective 417
Pan European Ecological Network (PEEN) 391 Pfälzerwald 45
Panofsky, Erwin 323 phenomenology 32, 37, 54–65, 101–2, 196, 223,
Papua New Guinea 80–81, 235 338; cannot be conceived of separately from
paradox 224 landscape 55; negative 62; position within
Paramaribo 45 landscape theory 57–58; and research methods 35
Paramount 210 Philadelphia, ‘Greene Country Towne’ 368
Parc de la Villette design competition 439 philosophy 88
Parish Mapping 346 photography 14, 27, 33, 72, 100, 132, 193,
Park, Geoff 91, 92–93 195–96, 201, 212, 277–78, 278i, 346, 417;
parks 37, 175, 257, 260, 298, 443; design 110–11, aerial 15, 133, 420; image manipulation 35; and
299, 300–301; eighteenth century 111; health tourism 290–91
benefits 296–98; as ‘lungs’ 368; meeting photomontage 417
multiple needs 304; as meeting places 301, physical activity: in urban green spaces 301–3; see
301i; perceptions of safety and risk 36 also exercise
484
Index
picturesqueness 110, 111, 193 poverty 193, 345

Pile, Steve 68 power 4, 120, 134, 148, 341
‘The Pilgrimage’ (Herbert) 220–21 Power of Place 173
pilgrimages 291 practice 66, 67, 69, 119
The Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) 220–21 pragmatism 455
PINE (Goldberg) 281–82 Prague 234
place 123; and identity 91; and language 292; Pred, Allan 143
sense of 87–96, 268; used interchangeably with Presley, Frances 228
‘landscape’ 98 Prigann, Herman 200
Place: A Short Introduction (Cresswell) 87 Primdahl, Jorgen 266
The Place of Landscape (Malpas) 62 Primdahl, Jørgen 48
planning 366–82; collaborative approaches 170, Prince William Sound, Alaska 397
370; community-led 170; diverse perspectives process: and heritage studies 153; and landscaping
involved 367; influence of Landscape Urbanism 70; post-processual studies 144–45, 148
440; integrated approaches 370–80, 371–76i; Process: Landscape and Text (Brace and
nineteenth century roots 367–68; policy 14, Johns-Putra) 62
105, 143, 166, 340 professions, and perceptions of landscape 48–49
Planning for Real 360 Project for Public Spaces (PPS) 362
plantation landscapes 149 property 250, 257; creation of 255
plantations 147, 148 property law 258
plants 356; intrinsic value 451 ‘prospect poems’ 222–23
play areas 35, 47, 302; racially segregated 364 prospect refuge theory 112, 357
Plumwood, Val 224, 228 Prospect-Refuge theory 27
Plymouth 238 protected areas 385
Plymouth Plantation 288 protection 15, 76, 144, 169, 175, 317, 400–401;
Pnika Hill 335, 336i costs 310; and indigenous people 78–82, 91;
Pnyx 335 of landscapes 56, 78–80; see also national
Pocock, Douglas 322 parks
poetry 56, 145, 196, 223–24, 227–30, 281–82, protest 343
324, 454; ‘prospect poems’ 222–23 Prynne, J. H. 228–29
policy making 18–19, 245–47 Psarra, Sophia 182
‘polite society’ 148–49 psycho-geography 201
politics of landscape 100, 191, 193, 248; and psychology: cognitive 26–27; environmental 44;
painting 193–94 personal construct 34
pollarding 457 public health 296
Polli, Andrea 204 public participation 245–47
Pollock, Griselda 122 Pulkara, Daly 10
pollution, mitigating the impact of 297 Purcell, A. T. 26, 28, 31
Pons, Obrador 290 pyschological health 296–98
Pope, Alexander 257
Popeye 210 Qianhai Water City 444
‘Popeye Village’ 210–11, 211i quantum theory 338
popular culture 210–19 Queiroz, A. I. 342
porous landscapes 428 questionnaires 34, 313
Porteous, J. Douglas 235, 290
Portugal 81 race 72, 99, 249, 364
post-colonial studies 248 ‘Radical Nature’ 206
postenvironmentalism 76–86 Rahui forest reserves 385
posthumanism 226 railway lines 408i, 412
post-industrial sites 200, 405–16, 408i, 409i, 412i; rainforests, logging in 383
in Europe 405–9; in the United States 405–6, Ramona Trail 288
409–13; use of historic elements as decoration Rätzel, Friedrich 273
410–11 rave parties 233
postmodernism 152, 440 Read, Peter 91
post-structuralism 244, 275, 323 Read, Simon 202
potentiality 122 Reading, Peter 228
The Potteries 71; see also Stoke-on-Trent reality, knowledge of 99
485
Index
RECEP-ENELC 19 Romanticism 144, 223, 224, 323, 326, 367,

Recovering Landscape (Corner) 439 383; in archaeological practice 134; as the
‘Red Books’ (Repton) 417 common heritage of both landscape and
Reed, Chris 447 phenomenology 54–60; influence on
A Reference Manifesto (Waldheim) 440 perceptions of landscape 89; in music 231;
refugees 278 and perceptions of landscape 111
regionalism 267, 273 A Room with a View (Forster) 287
reindeer herding 72 rootedness 222, 275
Reine Geographie (Granö) 14 Rosch, E. H. 26
relationships 148 Rose, Deborah Bird 276–77
religion, and perceptions of landscape 45 Rose, Mitch 66, 69, 71, 466
Relph, Edward 48, 57, 89, 90–91, 93, 99, 101 Ross, Stephanie 361
Renaissance 233, 258, 361 Routley, Richard 457
Renaissance art 257 Routley, Richard (Sylvan) 450–51
repetition 120 Rowe, Peter 433
representation 66–75, 95, 98, 100, 120, 137, 154, Royal Geographical Society (RGS) 15
190; in documentary film 212–13; emulation Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) 202
26–27; as fluid 123 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
Repton, Humphrey 146–47, 417, 419 (RSPB) 372, 392
republicanism 257 Rügen 313i
res publica 257 Ruhr region, transformation of 407
research methodology 31–32, 37–38, 72–73, 154, running 298
170, 315, 319; using a broad sensory range 37; rural: landscapes 48, 146; myth of 289;
using painting 326–30; visual 33–34; see also communities and development 338;
fieldwork gentrification 433; poverty 4; preservation
resilience theory 347 of 144
Resolution (Cook’s ship) 192 Rural Studio 268
resource depletion 342 rural-urban fringe see peri-urban landscapes
restoration 297–99, 311, 383–94, 453 Ruskin, John 144, 323–24, 367
‘RETHINK – Contemporary Art and Climate Rwanda 397
Change’ 207 Ryan, James 194
Returning to Nothing (Read) 91 Rybczynski, Witold 446
revolutionary ‘turn’ 138
rewilding 6, 383–94, 386i, 453; ‘letting go’ 387; Sacks, Shelly 201
origins of term 385; ‘wild by design’ 387 safety 29–30, 324; in parks 300; perceptions of 36
Rewilding Institute 389 Said, Ismail 35
Richards, Sam 238 salt marsh 392
Richardson, Craig 202 Salzburg 216
Ricoeur, Paul 267 Samuel, Raphael 157, 325
‘The Right to Landscape, Contesting Landscape Samuels, M. S. 147
and Human Rights’ 272 A Sand Country Almanac (Leopold) 338, 385
Right to the City 281 Sandler, Ronald 457–58
Riley, Mark 135, 155 Sanesi, Giovanni 33
Rio Declaration on Environment and Sardinia 81–82
Development 421 Sarewitz, Dan 78
Rippon, Stephen 133 Sauer, Carl 14, 57, 89–90, 245, 273
Rishbeth, Clare 36 Saussure, Ferdinand de 98, 101
risk see safety savannah hypothesis 29, 44, 112
‘River Journeys’ (BBC) 213 scale models 418i
Rixecker, Stephanie 279 Scandinavia 125
road signs 100 Scania, Sweden 429i
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 62 scenario planning 464
Robinson, William 355 scenery 257
Roden Crater 205 Schafer, R. Murray 235, 235–37
Roe, Jenny 35 Schama, Simon 9, 44, 88, 322, 330
Rolston, Holmes III 450 Schein, Richard 243, 250
Roma culture 276 Schleswig-Holstein 255
486
Index
Schroth, Olaf 422 silviculture 115

Schwartz, Martha 356 Simpson, Paul 70–71
science, and art 203 Singer, Peter 451
science-fiction 213–15 Sites of Special Scientific Interest 367
scientific value 172 Skeffington Report 340
S-City VT 423 sketches 423
Scotland 36, 369, 392 Skrbina, David 338
Scottish Highlands 454 Skye, Isle of 55
Scratch Orchestra 238 skyscrapers 214
Scullion, Louise 202 slavery 148, 149, 258
sculpture, social 201 SLOSS dilemma 401
‘Sculpture and Environmental Art’ (SEA) 201 Smart Museum 207
Sea Ranch, California 266 smartphones 424–25
Seamon, David 57, 90, 93 smellscape 290–91
seasons 463 Smetana, Bedrich 234
seating areas 299 Smith, Adam 342
Seattle 410 Smith, Laurajane 154, 155
seawalls 392 Smith, Neil 269
Sebekhotep gardens 417 Smith, Stephanie 207
Seddon, George 91 Smithson, Robert 199, 205
sedimentology 463 Snake Island 88i, 93
Selby, Martin 288 social class see class
self-awareness 166 social constructivism 67
Sellgren, John and Adrian 48 social contact, superficial 299
Selman, Paul 369, 380 Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape
semiology 97 (Cosgrove) 46
Semiotic Landscapes (Jaworski and Thurlow) 100 social groups, and spaces 143
semiotics 97–107, 122; landscape as a sign 102; social justice 243–52
material 103; urban 98 The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Whyte) 362
Senecah, S. L. 339 ‘Social Sculpture Research Unit’ (SSRU) 201
Sennett, Richard 335 social spaces 143
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Heise) 224 social status, and perceptions of landscape 46–47
sensory experience 25–42, 69, 72, 109, 120; in social value 173
gardening 124–25; haptic 37; of landscapes 290; solar power 170
and sound 37 solitude 299
Serra, Richard 199 Solnit, Rebecca 58
Service, Tom 238 Sonfist, Alan 200
Service Learning 347 sonic landscapes 235
Setten, Gunhild 46, 153, 155 Soulé, Michael 386, 453
settlers: see immigration sound 227; authorised and unauthorised 232–33;
sexuality 249 background noise 236; natural 233; and
shade 303 perceptions of landscape 37; as promiscuous
Shakespeare, William 220 238; see also music
Sheffield 168i; green belt 431i The Sound of Music (Wise) 216
Shellenberger, M. 76–78, 80 soundmarks 235
Shelley, Mary 78 soundscapes 235–38; as culturally creative 236–37
Shifting Shores (National Trust) 462, 464 soundtracks 232
Shoard, Marion 435 South Seas 192
Sibelius, Jean 234–35 Soylent Green (Fleischer) 214
Sibley, Frank 114 space 398; contested 134; as unfixed 122; used
Sieverts, Thomas 433 interchangeably with ‘landscape’ 98
signifiers 98–99 Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion) 362
signs 97, 98–99, 102; arbtrariness of 102, 104; spacing 70, 122
road signs 100 Spaghetti westerns 216
signum triciput 171, 171i Spaid, Sue 207
Silent Spring (Carson) 338 Spatial Formations (Thrift) 67
Sillitoe, Paul 345 spatial relationships 32–33
487
Index
The Spell of the Sensuous (Abram) 223 Tahiti Revisited (Hodges) 192
Spinoza, Benedict de 68 Taiwan 377
‘Spiral Jetty’ (Smithson) 205 Taking Measures Across the American Landscape
spirit, and place 91 (Corner) 439
Spirn, Ann Whiston 58 Taoism 356
The Spoils of the Park (Olmsted) 356 Tarasti, Eero 100
sport 302 Tarlo, Harriet 228
Spring (Grimmer) 232 Tartu-Moscow school 99, 103
St Louis Gateway Arch Competition 444 taskscape 225
St Petersberg 265, 268 Tasmania 149
stabilisation of landscape 369 taste 110, 360
stakeholders 255 taxonometric design 185–86
Stalking Detroit (Waldheim) 439 Taylor, Chris 204
Stark, Jeanne 29 Taylor, Paul 451
Steinitz, Carl 421 Tchernichovsky, Shaul 273, 282
Stiles, Richard 380 technology, and environmentalism 78
Stobbelaar, Derk Jan 269, 274 teenagers: perceptions of landscape 35–36;
Stoermer, E. 76 use of parks as meeting places 301
Stoke-on-Trent 71; see also The Potteries telephone directories 44
Stokes, Martin 236 television 211, 216; travel programmes 213;
stories, place-based 93, 95 see also film
storytelling 146 The Temple (Herbert) 220–21
Stoss Landscape Urbanism 444 temples 110
Stourhead 308, 308i The Temporality of the Landscape (Ingold) 60–61
Strawberry Fields Forever (Beatles) 233 temptations, represented by landscape 220
streetscapes 71; see also urban landscapes Terkenli, Theano 44, 290
stress 297–98, 298, 340; landscape as buffer territory 308
against 35–36 text: landscape as 99; and object 135
structuralism 98 Thayer, Robert 265, 267
Strumse, E. 47 Thebes 417
Sturges, Molly 204 thematic design 185–86
subjectivity 59, 67, 104, 108; and art 200 theme parks 211
sublimation 363 Thien, Deborah 71
sublime 108, 110–11, 224 thinking 67; forced upon us by landscape 69–70
subsidy 310 Thomas, Julian 45, 131
suburbs 427 Thomas Cook 287
sugar plantations 147, 148 Thomashow, Mitchell 224–25, 228
Sugiyama, Takemi 37 Thompson, Catherine Ward 201
Sullivan, Louis H. 273 Thompson, Emily 237
Superfund program 410 Thompson, Ian 441, 446
support systems 395 Thoreau, Henry 368, 383–84, 455
Surrey 146 ‘Three around Farnham’ (Williams) 146
surveillance 148 Thrift, Nigel 66, 67, 70, 138
surveys 72 Tiananmen Square 269
sustainability 265, 304, 316, 339, 383 tidal energy 465
Swaffield, Simon 266, 347 Till, Jeremy 268
Sweden 45, 276, 303 Tilley, Christopher 101, 167, 275
Sweethaven 210 Tillman, Benjamin 265
Switzerland 259 time-space 67
Sydney 215 ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Wordsworth) 223–24
Sylvan, Richard (Routley) 453 Tivoli 361
Symbolic Landscapes (Backhaus and Murungi) 102 Tokyo 214
symbolism 221 Tolia-Kelly, Divya 36, 46, 71–72, 249,
276, 326
tablet computers 424i To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
Tacey, David 91 (Howard) 368
Tagore, Rabindranath 338, 342 tone poems 231
488
Index
top-down regulation 386 United States 45, 91, 257; attitudes to climate
Topophilia (Tuan) 273 change 76; constitution 258; environmental
Topos 71 439 artists 199, 204–7
touch, and perceptions of landscape 37 United Utilities 391
tourism 45, 66, 91, 98, 264, 286–95; cultural University College Falmouth 201
215–16 University of Illinois 439
The Tourist (MacCannell) 288 University of Massachusetts 377
The Tourist Gaze (Urry) 288 urban landscapes 13, 18, 33, 36, 71, 168i,
Town and Country Planning Act 1971 340 296–307, 438–49; design 27; in film 212–13;
town criers 236 industrial 408i; models 418; perceptions of 46;
traffic 302–3; noise 233, 236 represented in film 214–15; tourism 288;
tragedy 222 vertical cities 214
tranquillity 233 urban nature 302i; as a public health resource
transdisciplinarity 1, 346 296–305; restorative effect 297–98
Transdisciplinary Action Research 347 urban planning 14, 302, 340, 367, 377; focus on
transport 302, 305 green networks 304–5
trauma, and perceptions of landscape 48 urban sprawl 428; see also peri-urban landscapes
travel 66; as a human right 317 urbanization 236, 427–28; access to green space
travelogues 212 297–305; consequences for public health
Treaty of Waitangi 277 296–307
Tree Cultures (Jones and Cloke) 148 Urquhart, Donald 201
trees 299, 303 Urry, John 288
Trees for Life 392
Troll, Carl 15, 16, 397, 399 Valkenburgh, Michael Van 444
‘Tropical Visions’ 190, 192 values 172, 175
‘The Trouble with Wilderness’ (Cronon) 454 Van den Born, Riyan 456
Tschumi, Bernard 439 Van Gogh, Vincent 215
Tsing, Anna 82 Vancouver 362
Tuan, Yi-Fu 32, 48, 57, 90, 93, 99, 101, 123, Varner, Gary 451
273, 323 Venice 46, 257, 291
Tufte, Edward 419 Venice International Charter 169
The Tuning of the World (Schafer) 235 Ventriss, Curtis 340, 344
Tunnard, Christopher 356 Vermont 82; opposition to wind farm 77
Turner, J. M. W. 323–24 Versailles 308
Turrell, James 205 vertical cities 214
Tuvalo 279 Victoria, Queen 194
Tzonis, Alexander 267, 269, 274 Victorian gardens 363
video 33, 72; perceptions of 27
Uexküll, Jakob von 104 views 258
Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 200 Villa d’Este 362
Ulrich, Roger 28, 298 Villa Lante 361i, 361–62
Umwelt 30, 225 Village Bells (Corbin) 237
Uncommon Ground: Reinventing Nature Village Homes 343
(Cronon) 79 violence 72, 244
UNESCO 18, 159–61, 326, 374; and universal Virginia 257
world heritage 155 virtualism 78–80
‘U-n-f-o-l-d’ (Buckland and Wainright) 202 virtue ethics 457, 458
UNISCAPE 19 vision 2, 26; and memory 322; privileging 68
United Kingdom 36, 44, 169; environmental visual culture 190, 289; as primary conduit for
artists 199–204; rewilding projects 391–93 globalization 264
United Nations Convention of Biological visual impairment 341
Diversity 374 visual literacy 277
United Nations Convention on Environment and visualizing landscapes 417–26; 3D computer
Development 342 modelling 419–22
United Nations Convention on the Rights of Vltava river 234
Persons with Disabilities 358 Vogel, Steven 454–55
United Nations Declaration of Human Rights 272 Vosges 45
489
Index
Vygotsky, L. S. 28 William Paca Garden 149

Vysehrad 234 Williams, Raymond 146, 266, 323
Williams, Vaughan 234
Wadden Sea 83 Williamson, Tom 148
Wadi Al Na’am 277 Wilson, Alexander 79
Wainwright, Chris 203 Wilson, E. O. 395
Waitt, Gordon 69 Wilson, Richard 192
Waldheim, Charles 439, 447 wind turbines 76–77, 82–83, 84, 310; aesthetics
Wales 175 of 116
Walker, Peter 435 Winter Music (Adams) 234
walking 61, 66, 112, 122, 232, 298, 302; as an Wirrpa, Jessie 8–11
artistic mode 195 Wisdom Sits in Places (Basso) 70
walkways, as expressions of power 364 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 454
Wallace, David 213 Women Environmental Artists Directory 199
Wallis, Brian 200 The Woodlanders (Hardy) 221–22
Walmart 265 The Word Itself (Jackson) 88
Walpole, Horace 355 Wordsworth, William 144, 223,
war 383; memorials 325 323–24, 326
Ward Thompson, Catharine 34, 36, 37, 47 workers, migrant 248
water 110; restorative effect 298, 299i, 300i workhouses 149
Waterton, Emma 154, 155 Working Community Landscape Ecological
Wattchow, Brian 1 Research (WLO) 16
wayfinding 32–33 working patterns 145
Weald and Downland Museum 180, 184, 185i, World Charter for Nature 397
186, 188 World Conservation Strategy 397
weather 463 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology 236–37
‘Weather Report: Art and Climate Change’ 206 World Heritage Sites 18, 45, 155, 159–61, 326,
Wells, Nancy 35 374; fetishized 159
Welsh Register of Historic Landscapes of World Soundscape Project 235–36
Outstanding of Special Interest 175 Wright, Frank Lloyd 273–74
Wessex 216 Wright, Joseph 194
West, Paige 80 Wright, Patrick 202
West Dean Park 188 writing 145, 154
Westerkamp, Hildergard 236–37, 238 WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) 81
Weston, Anthony 455 Wye Valley 375
wetlands 389 Wylie, John 66–67, 69–70, 72, 93, 155, 167,
Whatmore, Sarah 138 338, 466
Whelan, Yvonne 325
White, Gilbert 146 Y2Y 389
‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (Larkin) 223, 229–30 Yellowstone National Park 77, 389, 454
Whyte, William 362 Yokohari, Makoto 432
Wicken Fen 392 Yorkshire 217
Wigglesworth, Sarah 268 Yosemite 454
Wilberforce, William 147 Young, Iris Marion 120, 244, 249, 289
Wild Ennerdale 391 Youngson, Carole 124–25
wild garden 355 Yukon 389
WILD9 389 Yusoff, J. 72
wilderness 452–54; (re)creating 383–94; as a
construction 90 Zambia 228
wilding 6, 386; see also rewilding zero nature 383
Wildlands Network 389 Zonnevend, Jan 16
Wildnis 407 zoos 264
Wildways 389 Zwischenstadt see peri-urban landscapes
490

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The Routledge Companion to

ISBN: 978-0-415-68460-6 (hbk)

Fitting into country 8

1 A brief history of landscape research 12

2 Landscape perception and environmental psychology 25

4 Landscape and phenomenology 54

5 Landscape and non-representational theories 66

6 The anthropology of postenvironmental landscapes 76

7 Landscape and a sense of place: a creative tension 87

9 Aesthetic appreciation of landscape 108

10 Landscape, performance and performativity 119

Landscape culture and heritage 129

11 Landscape archaeology 131

12 Historic landscapes 143

13 Emerging landscapes of heritage 152

14 Valuing the whole historic landscape 166

15 Constructing spaces, representing places: the role of landscape in

16 Picturing landscape 190

17 Art imagination and environment 199

19 New directions in the literary representation of landscape 220

20 Landscape, music and the cartography of sound 231

Landscape, society and justice 241

21 Landscape and social justice 243

23 Navigating the global, the regional and the local: researching

24 Landscape and identity: beyond a geography of one place 272

25 Landscape studies and tourism research 286

26 Urban nature as a resource for public health 296

27 Researching the economics of landscape 308

28 Landscape and memory 322

29 Landscape and participation 335

Design and planning for landscape 353

30 An ontology of landscape design 355

32 (Re)creating wilderness: rewilding and habitat restoration 383

33 Landscape and ecology: the need for an holistic approach to the

34 Post-industrial landscapes: evolving concepts 405

35 Visualizing landscapes 417

36 Peri-urban landscapes: from disorder to hybridity 427

37 On landscape urbanism 438

38 Landscape and environmental ethics 450

39 Landscape and climate change 461

1.1 Development of Landscape Research 13

27.4 Street hanging baskets 318

31.1 Multi-functionality as an integrative concept 373

33.1 General principles of landscape ecology 399

Hilary Geoghegan PhD is a cultural geographer with interests in geographies of knowledge

Margaret M. Gold MA is Senior Lecturer in Arts and Heritage Management at London

David C. Harvey PhD is an Associate Professor in Historical Cultural Geography at the

Harriet Hawkins PhD is a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway,

Susan Herrington MLA is Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at University

Michelle M. Metro-Roland PhD is Director of Faculty and Global Program Development at

Mattias Qviström PhD is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture at Swedish Uni-

Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Indiana

Gunhild Setten Dr Polit is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, Norwegian

Ian Thompson PhD is Reader in Landscape Architecture at Newcastle University. He is

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly PhD is a Reader in Geography at the University of Durham. Her

Catharine Ward Thompson PhD is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of

Landscape – a complicated idea

 Landscape is ‘multi-faceted, at once an object, an idea, a representation and an experience’

The structure of the book

The critique of power and hegemony

Belonging and identity

Process, practice and performance

The nature–culture hybrid

Landscape is ‘multi-faceted, at once an object, an idea, a representation and an experience’

Landscapes are to a certain extent analogous to languages.