Property and Aesthetics in an Ordinary American Landscape*

Abstract

This article encapsulates my thoughts about how to look, through landscape aesthetics, at an ordinary residential landscape in order to understand the ways in which people make sense of, draw on, and attempt to secure particular landscape visions and dispositions. More precisely, it deals with the articulation of a specific bungalow landscape aesthetic and a specific proprietary sense of property ownership in the Kenwick neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky. The framework adopted calls for a broadening of the purview of landscape aesthetics beyond the domains of “high culture,” elites, and the visual in order to interrogate the workings of ordinary landscapes at the interface of landscape epistemology (a way of seeing) and the tangible, visible scene.