Landscape and Place

Abstract

Within the humanities and social sciences there has been an upwelling of interest in both landscape and place. The escalation in interest has been most marked in the area of humanistic geography, which emerged during the 1970s and subsequently gathered strength: ‘Humanistic geography is in large part a response to perceived inadequacies in the traditional geographical approach to understanding the cultural landscape. That approach, with its goal of objective scientific detachment, fails to grasp the fundamental matter of what it is to exist in or experience the landscape’ (Bourassa, 1991 pp. 2–3). To some human geographers, the (re)discovery of place meant a return to relevance: ‘If geography is to survive as a rational framework for teaching and research, it must identify a new integrative core. We argue that a return to our traditional disciplinary concern with a sense of place and landscape would allow geography to move forward again, as a unified and valued discipline’ (Robinson and McCarroll, 1990 p. 1). As favour swung strongly away from positivism in the 1980s, interest in the sense of place existed as a strong strand — probably the strongest strand — of enquiry in the expanding humanistic geography. The developing approach had its critics, and disapproval was directed at the rather ‘precious’ nature of much of the discussion relating to the sense of place (Brookfield, 1989).