Cultural Geography

Rutland, Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley or Danish

Jutland, the stability of relations that tied com-

munity unreflectively to a delimited territory

seemed apparent in the visible forms of farms

and villages, fields and fences, meadows and

woods – in the ‘morphology’ of landscape whose

usage remained close to Landschaft’s original

Germanic usage (Cosgrove et al., 1996; Geipel,

1978; Olwig, 1984). Whether the label was land-

scape or paysor region, a principal concern of

cultural geography became to describe and

account for the ensemble of physical and human

forms as they appeared in the field or on the

topographic map, whose coloured and contoured

image, scaled between 1:25,000 and 1:100,000,

offered a synoptic impression of morpho-

logical permanence (Figure 12.1). Implicitly, the

geographer’s sovereign eye should disentangle

the natural and cultural forces that had brought

together land and life, offering a unique perspec-

tive to social science and history.

By the 1970s it was clear that across western

Europe and North America, and increasingly the

rest of the globe, the processes of modernization

that had disconcerted earlier cultural geogra-

phers were continuous and unstoppable. In eras-

ing the social processes that sustained ‘cultural

landscapes’, modernity had destroyed their

apparent naturalness. Even in France, for whose

geographers the tableauof rural paysand peas-

ant communities had been the visible expression

of the nation’s soul (Claval, 1995: 22–7), mass

migration to the cities had left whole regions

of emptied villages, abandoned farmhouses,

enlarged fields and an ageing rural population.

Within a generation these same landscapes

would be refilling with summer residents: the

children and grandchildren of successful

migrants to Paris and Lyon, English and German

second-homers, romantic neoruralists and

telecottagers (Matless, 1994). The arrival of such

communities introduced new aesthetic and

environmental pressures for preserving the visible

elements of a redundant geographical order.

Even in cities, the acceleration of ‘creative

destruction’, whereby capital fixed in the form of

an urban landscape of buildings and communica-

tions infrastructure is released for reinvestment

and reconstruction, was removing any sense of

ecological stability reflected in built form

(Harvey, 1989: 4–124). These economic, demo-

graphic and cultural shifts were readily apparent

across Europe and North America and increas-

ingly elsewhere. The questions surrounding cul-

tural landscapes in the late twentieth century

reflected new ways of seeing as much as new

ways of being, less to do with settled ecologies

of land and life and more with environmental

protection and aesthetics. The evolution of land-

scape study in cultural geography towards a criti-

cal examination of ways of seeing should be

understood in this context.

From the late 1960s demands to identify and

conserve ‘landscape values’ led geographers

to examine how different individuals and social

groups perceive the same rural or urban

scene (Penning-Rowsell and Lowenthal, 1986).

‘Amenity’, to adopt a British term, was a well-

honed political weapon within a politics of

scenic preservation that elided visual with social

order (Gruffudd, 1995; Matless, 1998; 1999).

Landscape values denoted the aesthetic and

LANDSCAPE AND THE EUROPEAN SENSE OF SIGHT 251

Figure 12.1 Detail from 1:50,000 German topographic map showing settlement patterns

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