Unlike the other contributors to this section, I

do not use ‘landscape’ as a regular part of my

academic vocabulary. Frankly I am not keen on

the term. It is a concept too burdened with its

own history – too fixated on origins. I have

tended to focus on the concepts of place and

space. I like place because of its everyday nature.

Place, unlike space and landscape, permeates our

everyday life and provides meaning in people’s

lives. Places are quite clearly ‘lived’. At the other

extreme space has an analytical quality about it.

It rubs shoulders easily with social theory and

allows conversations to occur with other social

science disciplines. Landscape, on the other

hand, does not have much space for temporality,

for movement and flux and mundane practice. It

is too much about the already accomplished and

not enough about the processes of everyday life.

It is too stuck in the humanities to make it

amenable to the kind of critical theory that

appeals to me. It seems altogether too quaint. I

realize these are personal predilections. It is true

that the concept can be made to grow and adapt,

to colonize the dynamism of living geography,

but I wonder what would be saved in the process.

Why not, in other words, abandon the concept

altogether and leave it as a dusty anachronism in

the glossary of cultural geography? This chapter

is about the limits of/to landscape.

Landscape is a very loosely used term. The

relative voguishness of geography has ensured

that it is no longer predominantly a concern of

geography. Part of the problem is that landscape

has resonance well beyond geography and even

academia: it is part of our everyday vocabulary.

There are landscapes of ... just about anything.

In popular journalism it is not unusual to see

reports on ‘the changing leisure landscape’ or

‘the fantasy landscape’. This is sometimes

fancifully changed to shortened forms such as

‘mindscape’ or ‘pleasurescape’. Beyond geography

in the academic world, landscape has become a

well-worn metaphor. A quick look at a biblio-

graphic database reveals a confusing array of

uses for the term. Some are close to geography

and have easily intelligible meanings such as

‘mapping the criminal landscape’, while others

appear to use the term as a generic metaphor for

a kind of intellectual survey. Examples include

‘the legal landscape’ and ‘white flecks across the

landscape of literary history’, ‘the political land-

scape of American schools’, and ‘Germany’s

changing religious landscape’. Still more take

landscape out of the humanities and the social

sciences and place it firmly in the lexicon of

science, where theoretical physicists use some-

thing called ‘landscape analysis’ to discover the

lattice structure of alpha beta transitions in pro-

tein folding and talk of ‘free energy landscapes’.

Urologists meanwhile are busy discussing the

‘changing landscape of bladder augmentation’.

These uses of the term ‘landscape’ actually tell

us quite a lot about the term. ‘The changing land-

scape of bladder augmentation’ suggests an

overview, a survey. It also suggests that the

author of the paper is in a position to tell us all

about it. He is authoritative. An idea such as ‘free

energy landscapes’ points towards the impor-

tance of form – of topography. It also suggests

we might be able to visualize energy. These are

important factors in the notion of landscape we

have inherited – an authoritative and surveying

13

Landscape and the

Obliteration of Practice

Tim Cresswell

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