B 1.1 Definition

[TERCUD]

"Landscape is made of what is visible. It coincides with the interface between the atmosphere, on the one side, and the lithosphere and the hydrosphere, on the other. It is the main component of the biosphere.
Every landscape has a finite extent – it stops at the limit of what can be seen. As long as the observer is located on the surface of the Earth and looks horizontally or obliquely around her/himself, the landscape has both hidden and visible parts. When the observer looks from above, from a balloon, a plane or a satellite, the hidden parts disappear. The area covered by the landscape grows as the eye moves higher."

(This is an excerpt from the text by Professor Paul Claval “THE IDEA OF LANDSCAPE”)

[dolitl@austin.utexas.edu]

Like Prof. Claval, I have long considered landscapes as being "made of what is visible." Recently, however, I find myself questioning this notion. Does the landscape not exist for persons who are blind? And, what about other forms of vision impairment? I enjoy 20/20 vision, but suffer a red/green deficiency. On many occasions I've looked out across a landscape accompanied by someone who commented on the "beautiful flowers;" flowers I could not see. On the other hand, camouflage is invisible to most people but stands-out vividly to me. What this suggests to me is that several people could all look at one landscape and see many different landscapes. Were this not confusing enough, what about smells, sounds, feelings, and even tastes? Does one needs to see to sense the landscape of a beach? A small town street in Italy? An alp? I struggle with these notions, in regard to both understanding them and communicating them to students and in scholarly discourse. I would appreciate the input of others.

[Anders Larsson]

”Landscape” is, first of all, a word (in English) and a concept. Talking and writing is a technique we use for communicating and sharing experiences. One problem is that our thoughts not only make it possible to understand and develop our technology, but that our communicative techniques also affect the way we think. Another problem is that we move directly towards filling the “technique” (concepts and words) with content, with little knowledge about the technique in itself.

All of us, for instance, who read this, are literally trained. We have been reading and writing since we were kids, which is the basic prerequisite for a “scientific” way of thinking. I have tested my landscape architect students several times by asking them what a “tree” is. They automatically respond in terms of several scientific categories – it is an “organism”, it has a “stem, root and leaves”, etc. When similar tests are made with people who have never been in contact with any written language, the answer would rather be – “Are you stupid? Everybody knows what a tree is! Trees could be used for making fires, building houses and other things – and some of them provide us with delicious fruits” (Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, 1982). Non-literals automatically think about the situation, purpose and the usefulness, not the scientific category.

Also, the Swedish “landskap” and the German “landschaft” have very different origins compared to the English “landscape”, even though we today use the international (English!) conference concept “landscape” for the aggregated conceptual meaning. The only strange thing would be if this was not confusing. What we can say for sure is that “landscape” is a historically “modern” concept, created by men in power or academics, since it is of much higher complexity than basic concepts like mountain, lake, fields, walls etc. Farmers didn’t really need a landscape concept. But tax collectors had to divide the country between them (Swedish origin of “landskap”) and the artists wanted a concept for the idealised countryside environments they painted (English origin of “landscape”).

My recommendation is, considering the high complexity of the landscape concept and the various national interpretations, that we should not strive for one unifying concept. Instead, we should try to describe what we mean in every specific situation in concrete terms. “Landscape” is a highly context dependent concept and, thus, we need to practise how to step back from the scientific perspective and look at the same concept from a similar perspective as the non-literals. Do we really need this specific abstract concept/word (added value), or would it be more productive to use other basic and concrete concepts/words with a more obvious relation to the specific problem we are trying to solve? And – the more we learn about how to continuously change between these two perspectives, the more we will understand about the relation between “concepts” and “science” (the technique of handling concepts).

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