Landscape Experience Research Articles

Imaginary Landscapes: Sublime and Saturated Phenomena in “Kubla Khan” and the Arab Dream

This article considers “Kubla Khan” and the the Arab dream section from the fifth book The Prelude as precursors to the recently theorized concept of saturated phenomenality. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth insist on the limitedness of their dream subjects even as they magnify their dreamt of landscapes to heights of sublimity. Falke describes the implications that this insistence on smallness has for relating experiences of sublime landscapes to experiences of reading or writing poetry.

To describe an alien planet: An experience of landscape in "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin

This text presents an attempt to reread Darwin’s account of his journey on the Beagle. That account constitutes a report of meetings and confrontations with various “strangers”: men, animals, as well as with different faces of otherness and exoticism, that culminate in a landscape so radically distinct from the European one, namely that of the South Pacific. This interpretation allows us to look at Darwin—the narrator—as more than just a naive traveler who observes and judges the world exclusively through the narrow perspective of British imperialism. The naturalist struggles with describing that which exceeds his previous experiences. The imperialistic perspective of landscape taken up in this text allows us to reflect on Darwin’s perception of the landscape. The sights analyzed in the text are foremost treated as emanations of the powers of nature. At the same time, Darwin defines these sights in categories that are not scientific but aesthetic, finding them beautiful and sublime.

Deconstructing landscape pattern: applications of remote sensing to physiognomic landscape mapping

In 1939, Carl Troll pointed out that “air photo interpretation is to a large extent landscape ecology”. From that time forward, remote sensing has been applied across different disciplines to comprehend the holistic and dynamic spatial layout of the visual Earth environment. However, its applicability in the domain of landscape character assessment, landscape design and planning is still questionable. The purpose of this paper was to synthesise some historical and current applications of remote sensing for the decomposition of the continual visual landscape from a bird’s eye perspective and to explore the potential for bridging geographic processes with visual perception and an appreciation of the landscape pattern. From the point of view of landscape ecology, the organisation of the landscape pattern [namely, the size, shape (form), number, density and diversity, the complexity of landscape elements, and colours and textures of the land cover] is crucial for the cognition of both the visual landscape experience and the geographic processes. There are numerous pieces of evidence from the literature that remote sensing data are widely implemented in the modelling of physiognomic landscape. The synthesis of the literature concludes with perspective directions of remote sensing applications, such as mapping the status of the ecosystem (landscape) services provision, the delineation of the boundaries of the protected areas based on the quality of the visual environment, and the assessment of the sustainability of the land use practices, regarding their impact on landscape aesthetics extent.

Stressor landscapes, birth weight, and prematurity at the intersection of race and income: Elucidating birth contexts through patterned life events.

Women of color and women in poverty experience disproportionately high rates of adverse birth outcomes in the United States (US). We use an intersectionality-based approach to examine how maternal life events (LE's) preceding childbirth are patterned and shape birth outcomes at the intersection of race and income. Using population data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System we uncover common maternal LE clusters preceding births in 2011–2015, offering a description and measurement of what we call “stressor landscapes” that go beyond standard measures by frequency or type alone. Three landscapes emerge: (1) Protected, characterized by very few LE's; (2) Illness/Isolated, with very few LE's and most commonly involving an illness or death of someone close; and (3) Toxic/Cumulative, comprising more frequent and acute LE's. Mothers in the toxic landscape experience on average 107-g lighter birth weights and a 27%, 49%, and 57% greater risk of PTB, LBW, and VLBW, respectively, compared to in the protected landscape. Low-income and non-Hispanic black (NHB), Hispanic, American Indian (AI), and Alaska Native (AN) mothers are among the groups disproportionately exposed to toxic stressor landscapes. The association between landscape and birth outcomes additionally varies by race and income. Among non-Hispanic white mothers, toxic landscapes are linked to poor birth outcomes at lower incomes. Among NHB mothers, illness-related stressors are additionally linked to worse outcomes and stressor landscapes disproportionately harm middle-income mothers. Toxic stressors may contribute to worse outcomes among middle- and high-income Hispanic and AI/AN mothers, but these patterns are less clear. Our study offers a new approach to measuring LE's that match common conceptions of exposure clustering and applies it to US population data to reveal LE patterns underlying persistent social disparities in maternal and child health.

Steinbeck's Plays

Abstract Steinbeck wanted more people to read plays unencumbered by lengthy set descriptions or stage directions, so he set about writing novellas that could be staged, wherein the set descriptions were minimal, and everything else was conferred by dialogue between characters. The first of three such novella/plays was Of Mice and Men, based to some extent on Steinbeck's own experience and set in a recognizable California landscape. The next, The Moon Is Down, written for the propaganda wing of WWII's OSS, is set in an unnamed country invaded and occupied by unnamed forces. The third, Burning Bright, initially set in a circus, then on a farm, originally titled Everyman by Steinbeck, indicated his purpose: to preach a moral lesson. The three plays move from realism to abstraction, and in so doing, had shorter Broadway runs and much less audience involvement.

Tracking Skelm (Sly/Surreptitious/Covert) Signs in the ‘Bush’ War Landscape in Namibia

This paper attends to the phenomenology of particular military landscapes as experienced through the bodies of San spoorsnyers (trackers) as they trailed insurgents during a specific historical moment, the ‘Bush’ War (Namibian War of Independence or South African Border War) on the border between Namibia (formerly South West Africa) and Angola. As an ethically defined group, the San (Also referred to as Bushmen) were enlisted on the basis of stereotypical representations of them as hunters and trackers who could, when trained in the Army, trail insurgents through landscapes. The paper elaborates the ways in which these trackers experienced landscapes in and through bodies in motion and practice: as visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile and atmospheric. It emphasizes the particularity of the San trackers’ lived experiences of military landscapes, as the latter drew on a combination of historical, culturally informed and soldierly habitus, somatic modes of attention and bodily dispositions.

Geoparks als Mittler zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft – Landschaftserlebnisse „outdoor“ und interaktiv im Geo­Naturpark Bergstrasse­Odenwald (UNESCO Global Geopark)

Geoparks als Mittler zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft – Landschaftserlebnisse „outdoor“ und interaktiv im Geo­Naturpark Bergstrasse­Odenwald (UNESCO Global Geopark)

Landscape as Experienced Place and Worth Conserving in the Drawings of Finnish and Swedish Students

Children explore their environment through experiences and each experience is meaningful in developing their environmental consciousness and identity. On the basis of the drawn landscape experiences, the present qualitative study set out to find out what landscapes the participating students deemed worth conserving. The data consisted of the drawings of 11- to 16-year-old Finnish (n = 311) and Swedish (n = 246) students. Deductive and inductive content analyses were used to analyse the data. The results showed that all three landscape types; nature, built, and social were presented in the drawings. Nature and built landscapes were the most frequent types, with the proportion of nature landscapes increasing and that of built landscapes decreasing with age. There were gender and cultural preferences: boys drew built landscapes more often than girls; and Finnish students drew summer cottages, a cultural phenomenon typical of Finnish landscapes, which was not found in Swedish drawings. Similarities in Finnish and Swedish data were identified e.g., in forest and water and “cultural landscapes”. Some of the students displayed a more distant, observing role, whereas others adopted an active one in relation to all three landscape types. The results are discussed in connection to the landscape theories and earlier findings of the drawn environments.

The influence of landscape conditions on the properties of soil cover of arable land on a gentle slope lake-glacial plains

In order to lay the landscape experience, the soil cover of the agro-landscape on the gentle slope of the lake-glacial plain was studied and the factors and parameters of spatial differentiation of some physical, physico-chemical and agrochemical properties were established. The different degree of differentiation of individual properties associated with the characteristics of soil-ing rocks, geochemical regimes and the nature of anthropogenic impact is established. Significant heterogeneity in the power of eluvial horizons, the degree of development of the gley process, the structural state, the content of organic matter, nitrogen and moderate- granulometric composition, physico chemical properties and nutritional regime. The main factor of variation of soil properties in the agricultural landscape is heterogeneity of soil-forming rocks, estimated in terms of physical, chemical and agrochemical properties in 19-59 %. Natural and anthropogenic soil formation process reduced the average coefficient of variation of these properties within the arable layer by 2.6 times (from 36% to 14 %). The factor of increasing the heterogeneity of a number of agrochemical properties by 1.3-1.9 times in the tranzitno-eluvial facies was planar erosion, in the eluvial facies by 3 times uneven application of organic fertilizers.

Urban resilience at eye level: Spatial analysis of empirically defined experiential landscapes

An unresolved issue in creating resilient cities is how to obtain sustainability benefits from densification while not eroding the capacity of social-ecological systems to generate wellbeing for urban dwellers. To understand how different relationships between urban form and wellbeing together play out, we analysed geocoded experiential data (1460 experiences from 780 respondents) together with variables of the physical environment. Through statistical and spatial analysis, we operationalised resilience principles to assess what urban environments provide “resilience at eye level” – a diversity of experiences and a level of connectivity between them that limit adverse outcomes. We found 8 typologies of experiential landscapes – distinct compositions of 11 categories of experiences. Our analysis shows that typologies with experiences supportive of wellbeing are diverse and exist in environments that balance residents and workplaces, avoid extreme spatial integration and/or density and have accessible nature. Typologies with many experiences hindering wellbeing fail in one or several of these respects. Our findings suggest that resilience principles can act as a guiding heuristic for urban densification that does not compromise human wellbeing.

Songs of Nature in Medieval Northern France: Landscape, Identity, and Environment

Thirteenth-century trouvère songs and motets often begin with a conventionalized introduction in which the sensory experience of a springtime landscape inspires the composer to think of his beloved and to sing. Long derided as insincere by critics or simply ignored, the “springtime opening” of the trouvères represents one of the largest bodies of nature imagery in medieval vernacular song. Drawing on a corpus of over one hundred songs and motets, this article offers an ecomusicological reconsideration of the springtime opening, revealing that the way individual medieval composers invoked nature imagery was often correlated with their status and geography. Aristocratic trouvères, who had ready access to open expanses of land on their estates, used the opening often and earnestly. An emerging group of urban trouvères, many of whom were educated clerics, rarely invoked the springtime opening, and when they did, they distanced themselves from it through clever inversions and parody. I argue that these divergent reactions to nature imagery likely reflected lived experiences in the environment, and further, that the songs bear witness to major changes in land management in urban and rural northern France. These songs and motets prompt observations about the relationships between nature, culture, and crisis in medieval and modern society.

Chronotope as a framework for landscape experience analysis

ABSTRACTThe paper explores the analysability of landscape experience and the interpretation enabled by the concept of the chronotope. Beyond its potential for a holistic study of texts, the chronotope can also be applied in landscape studies. In geography, the chronotope has primarily been used for analysis within three different areas: discourses and narratives, spatiotemporal sense of everyday places and biological spaces. Our aim is to show the applicability of the chronotope in the experiential aspect of landscape studies. Experiencing the landscape implies a dialogic understanding of action in a situation including the subject’s interrelationship with the environment. We examine how the subjective experience of an abandoned landscape is internally multiple and has significant value for imagination and meaning-making. The example analysed is an Estonian architect’s description of his visit to Hashima Island, Japan, and focuses on three levels of chronotopes—the topographic, the psychological and the metaphysical.

Contesting brandscapes in Hong Kong: Exploring youth activist experiences of the contemporary consumerist landscape

Since the 2000s, Hong Kong has become inundated with retail centres, such that the territory is now known as ‘Mall City’, a condition now problematised by youth activists in the city. This article is interested in why these youths take issue with this form of urban development. By tracing the emergence of the contemporary consumerist landscape from the colonial era to the present, it is shown that the current manifestation and characteristics of Hong Kong’s brandscapes are the product of unequal power dynamics between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, estate developers and the Hong Kong citizenry in shaping the city. By bringing youth activist voices to the forefront through the use of ethnographic data, the discussion then examines youth activist accounts detailing the experiential dimensions of living in this consumerist landscape, noting the feelings of alienation and exploitation circulating within the vernacular domains of Hong Kong society. The article concludes by reviewing the different ways these youths have attempted to reconfigure their relationship with this brandscape, and thus challenge the control the HKSAR government and estate developers have over Hong Kong urban space.

An assessment of visited landscapes using a Cultural Ecosystem Services framework

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), Ecosystem Services are divided into four main categories: supporting, regulating, provisioning, and cultural services. The Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) represent the physical, intellectual, and spiritual interactions with ecosystems and land/seascapes. The current work aims to strengthen the links between CES and Tourism, by presenting how the conceptualization of CES can contribute to researching landscapes. A sample of 876 questionnaire respondents in six different types of landscape revealed that the CES conceptualization could provide a useful framework for understanding visitor perceptions and experiences of landscapes. Furthermore, the study showed that CES categories are very closely interconnected and an integrated approach is recommended for all landscape planning. This knowledge is essential to place making, which incorporates elements of meaning-making and attachment, as well as place identity, continuity, and dependency.

A unifying structure of metamodel landscape

PurposeThe modelling landscape experiences a rich proliferation of modelling language, or metamodel. The emergence of cross-disciplinary disciplines, such as enterprise engineering and service engineering, necessitates a multi-perspective approach to traverse the component from strategic level to technological aspect. This paper aims to find a unifying structure of metamodels introduced by academics and industries.Design/methodology/approachA grounded approach is taken to define the structure by collating the metamodels to form an emerging structure. Metamodels were collected from a literature survey from several interrelated disciplines: software engineering, system engineering, enterprise architecture, service engineering, business process management and financial accounting.FindingsThe result suggests seven stereotypes of metamodel, characterized by its label: goal, enterprise, business model, service, process, software and system. The aspect of “process” holds a central role in connecting all other aspect in the modelling continuum. Service engineering can be viewed as an alternative abstraction of enterprise engineering in containing the concepts of “business model”, “capability”, “value”, “interaction”, “process” and “software”.Research limitations/implicationsMetamodel collection was performed to emphasize on representativeness rather than comprehensiveness, in which old and unpopular metamodel were disregarded unless it offer unique characteristic not yet represented in the collection. Owing to its bottom-up approach, the paper is not intended to identify a gap in metamodel offering.Originality/valueThis paper produces a structure of metamodel landscape in a graphical format to illustrate correlation between metamodels in which evolutive patterns of metamodel proliferation can be observed. The produced structure can serve as map in metamodel continuum.

Songs of Life and Death in Walker Percy’s Lancelot (1977)

Cultures of life and death are central to the writing of American Southern novelist Walker Percy (1916–1990), and they are drawn with special force in his early novel Lancelot (1977), where songs and music deepen the reader experience of the cultural landscape of life and death. The present article combines methods of historically informed literary criticism and song analysis to examine Walker Percy’s presentation of life and death in the novel. The conclusion is that certain musical genres, such as popular music, folk song, and classical music are associated with particular manifestations of the cultures of life and death in the novel.

Landscape Design Strategies

In the second chapter we will set the thematic context more specifically and explore the terms of landscape and its design strategies as I will use them throughout this study. The whole chapter focuses on the exploration of the idea of landscape around the question: What landscape strategies are applicable in architectural design? (Q. 1.1.2) I refer to landscape from a number of selected standpoints and discuss the concepts of landscape space. There I encounter crucial ideas about the human experience of landscape that are generally applicable to understanding space (2.1.). This will lead to a specific and concise definition of the discipline of landscape architecture through its approach to landscape itself (2.2.). Of many strategies of landscape design, this thesis relies on a comprehensive definition of landscape architecture "attitudes" by Sebastien Marot (1999). I illustrate each of Marot's four attitudes of landscape design with specific examples and distribute key concepts to landscape (2.3.1. to .4.). To explain the application of landscape strategies, I also place the four attitudes of landscape in the theoretical context of architecture in each section and briefly summarise them in the last subchapter 2.3.4. The introduction of landscape attitudes in this chapter is different and more accurate than the idea of nature in architecture that I will discuss in the chapter three.

Blurred Borderlands: Sustainability and the Urban/Nature Divide at the Frick Environmental Center

ABSTRACTSustainable development is rhetorically framed as exhibiting natural processes, reflected both symbolically and materially. Taking the Frick Environmental Center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as a rhetorical artifact, I argue that spaces where sustainable human-made structures and human-cultivated landscapes meet, reflect blurred borderlands of a culturally constructed urban/nature divide. Considering the Frick Environmental Center as an experiential landscape, my mixed methodology of textual analysis and rhetorical field work identifies how naturalized framing of sustainability bridges the urban/nature divide, inviting restoration, preservation, and construction efforts that are more environmentally engaged.

Multi-scaler 3D modelling to reconstruct an experiential landscape: An example from a worker's cottage at Mount Dutton Bay, South Australia

New advances in 3D GIS provide the opportunity to create and interact with spatial datasets that are both empirical and experiential, thus bridging the historical divide between cartography and phenomenology. Survey and photogrammetry data from the colonial-era woolshed and port of Mount Dutton Bay in South Australia are used to create a visually realistic 3D landscape model. Viewshed analysis provided important information about the use of space and construction techniques for the shearers' cottage on this site. The results demonstrate that rigorous quantitative analysis is not incompatible with understanding the human experience of an archaeological site, and therefore open up exciting new avenues of archaeological enquiry.

Seeing double in art and geoscience: 3D aerial portraits of ‘lost’ Anthropocene landscapes

ABSTRACTRelationships between humans and environments are deeply challenged by recognition of the Anthropocene, which implicates humans as major drivers of planetary-scale environmental changes. Responding to these challenges requires technical expertise, but also creativity in dealing with complex social, cultural and political relationships of place. This paper introduces Relief as an art project that repurposes historical aerial photographs for the creation of affective, low-tech 3D experiences of landscapes and their histories. The creation of these works, and the experience of viewing them, offer a process for witnessing change in the Anthropocene. Content and aesthetics bring viewers into different ways of seeing landscapes, with implications for outreach and communication, as well as approaches to situating science and scientist in relation to society, politics and place. This art project leads into discussion of human agents and non-human agents as co-producers of landscapes, and the opportunities for art and science to respond to environmental concerns.