The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition
Landscape in conventional usage is a spatial concept, denoting an area of land whose coherence sets it apart from surrounding territory. Its medieval origins as a legal term in Germanic language relate to the collective ownership and use of an area (for example, the cultivated lands of a parish or other community). Its parallels in the Romance languages (pays, paesaggio, paisaje) have a similar derivation. The suffix scape relates to the verb shape, implying intentional human organization and design of space. Since the sixteenth century, however, landscape and its parallels in other European languages have taken on a strongly visual dimension, largely from their use in painting, the coherence and design of a landscape now deriving from its framing and composition. From being a term of art, landscape evolved to denote actual scenery, spaces which either have the qualities of a painting, or which are viewed in a painterly way. Landscape gardening, which extended the aesthetic qualities of the garden beyond its traditional enclosure, played a role in this semiotic transformation. The meaning of landscape has been further extended, to refer to any area, aesthetically pleasing or otherwise. But it retains both strong visual reference and close connection to cultivated land, rather than urbanized or maritime spaces, to which the derivative terms townscape and seascape are applied. ‘Wilderness’ may be referred to as landscape when its visual qualities are being emphasized.
Among the social sciences, geography has paid greatest attention to landscape. Drawing on German geographical precedents, Carl Sauer and his students at Berkeley used it as an important concept in studies of human transformation of the natural world and its characteristic cultural expressions in particular regions (Leighly 1963). The cultural landscape was an empirical datum for assessing the changes wrought by material human culture on a pre-existing natural landscape, through such activities as cultivation, domestication, land drainage and forest clearance (Thomas 1956). Study of landscape as an expression of culture was extended to more contemporary and vernacular scenes by J.B.Jackson, founder of the journal Landscape, whose writings sought to explore changing American popular culture through such elements as the highway strip, the front yard and the shopping mall Jackson 1984; Meinig 1979).
Since the mid-1980s increased academic emphasis has been placed on the cultural politics of landscape, with the recognition that the idea of landscape represents a way of seeing and representing area with close historical and conceptual connections to actual control and authority over space (Bender 1994; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). The connections between landscape, mapping and property ownership have been explored (Cosgrove 1984), as have the roles of landscape representations in constructing, sustaining and contesting the identities of communities and places at different scales. Iconic landscapes such as Niagara Falls (McKinsey 1985), Constable’s Suffolk (Daniels 1992), or the Danish heathlands (Olwig 1984) play a significant role in the construction of national identity. Construction and reproduction of such landscapes is as much an aspect of cultural imagination as of the material world, although studies of such landscapes have developed partly in response to a growing demand for environmental and heritage conservation and for marketing the past, all of which have brought landscape more centrally into the field of social policy and planning. As a concept which mediates nature and culture, landscape is of growing theoretical significance in an environmentally conscious age.
Denis Cosgrove
University of London
References
Bender, B.
(ed.) (1994) Landscape: Politics and perspectives, London.
Cosgrove, D. (1984) Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, London.
Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S.J. (1988) The Iconography of Landscape, Cambridge, UK.
Daniels, S.J. (1992) Fields of Vision: Landscape and National Identity in England and the United States, London.
Jackson, J.B. (1984) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, CT.
Leighly, J. (1963) Land and Life: Selections from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, Berkeley, CA.
McKinsey, E. (1985) Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime, Cambridge, UK.
Meinig, D. (1979) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, Oxford.
Olwig, K. (1984) Nature’s Ideological Landscape, London.
Thomas, W.L. (1956) Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Chicago.
See also: cartography; cultural geography; environment; nature; space.
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