Cultural Geography

Among the most dramatic examples of how

pictorial images of nature have influenced the

ways that actual spaces are encountered is the

early-eighteenth-century example of the Claude

glass. Young aristocrats and the sons of newly

rich merchants and financiers in Protestant

Europe, sent to complete their education in the

Classical topoiand urbane society of the south,

found painted images of the Roman Campagna

or of Mediterranean arcadia appealed to a taste

shaped by Latin literature and imagined geo-

graphies of the exotic (Bermingham, 1986; Pugh,

1988; Said, 1993; Schama, 1995: 453–62). Land-

scape paintings by the artist Claude Lorraine

became fashionable markers of wealth and status

in polite English society, for example, com-

manding high prices for originals and spawning

a host of imitations. Northern scenes too came to

be framed, composed and illuminated by soft

Mediterranean light. Painted images came to

shape the vision of actual landscapes with the

invention of a convex, circular instrument, the

Claude glass, a highly polished copper surface

through which actual views could be framed and

tinted to resemble painted ones. The instrument’s

use required the viewer to face away from the

scene, privileging the eye and distancing it from

material nature as effectively as any movie

screen or TV monitor.

While the fashion for the Claude glass was

short-lived, its association with the transformation

of physical spaces in conformity with pictorial

tastes has been much more long-lasting. The

desire to manipulate and reshape the natural world

according to an image of perfection is widespread,

and its fulfilment by individuals of wealth and

power through the design of gardens is recorded

historically in most civilizations (Hunt, 2000;

Warnke, 1994). But there is a difference between

the garden – conventionally a walled, fenced or

otherwise bounded space whose sensual pleasures

are as much to do with smell, sound, touch and

taste as with vision – and designed landscape.

‘Landscape gardening’ involved removing the

visual boundary between the spaces of recreation

and production. The landscape garden is a pictorial

illusion founded upon the capitalist property

rights and investment strategies mentioned above.

It commonly involved expunging pre-existing col-

lective land rights and identity (denoted in the

earliest meaning of ‘landscape’) in favour of

‘picturesque’ alterations to the land determined by

aesthetic choices. Shaping actual landscapes

according to pictorial images has been a founda-

tion of landscape architecture. Humphry Repton’s

trademark approach to redesigning English landed

estates involved coloured sketches with pasted

flaps that could be turned to demonstrate the

visual effects of his improvements (Daniels,

1999). Changing styles in landscape architecture

and design have consistently paralleled those in

the visual arts, and only in recent years has land-

scape architecture begun to examine critically the

implications of its connections with seeing, paral-

leling in its attention to the ecological, social

and political implications of its site selection

and design the radical concerns of cultural

geographers (Corner, 1999).

As the modern world witnesses the continuous

substitution of usufruct by private property rights

and regulation of land uses by state agencies, and

as agriculture demands ever-smaller inputs of

direct human labour, so the conscious manipula-

tion of nature as landscape extends over wider

geographical surfaces. Taste and fashion, formed

in large measure by pictorial conventions, continue

to be significant factors in shaping landscape, just

as they are in shaping other consumption choices

and in framing social identities. Because landscape

is constituted from the everyday world in which we

live, its naturalizing effects remain particularly

powerful in obscuring the often unequal social

relations which it expresses (Daniels, 1989). Yet

the same social processes that remove people from

direct dependence on productive land allow greater

recognition of the inequalities and exclusions

inscribed into landscape, and thus increased resis-

tance to its regulatory effects. Landscape is

increasingly recognized as a continuing process

rather than a finished form. As process, nature is

‘produced’ and ‘consumed’ and its meanings

‘naturalized’ in landscape, especially through its

association with vision as guarantor of truth.

LANDSCAPE AND SOCIAL PROCESS

Treating landscape as a process in which social

relations and the natural world are mutually con-

stituted in the formation of visible scenes, lived

spaces and regulated territories democratizes and

politicizes what would otherwise be a neutral and

descriptive exploration of physical and cultural

morphologies. It thus introduces into landscape

study questions of identity formation, expres-

sion, performance and even conflict. These have

been examined through the solidarities of class

and ethnicity and through the ascription and

experience of gender difference.

Landscape and class

It is currently unfashionable to use class as a

significant social category in landscape study,

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