1 All the visible features of an area of land, the appearance of an area, or the gathering of objects which produce that appearance: ‘the expression of interaction between humans and their environment’ (C. Sauer 1925). In a rather grumpy paper, Minca (2007) PHG 31, 2 complains that ideas of the geographical landscape have remained essentially immune to the extraordinary body of critical reflection in the writings of Denis Cosgrove, Stephen Daniels, James Duncan, and other British cultural geographers. ‘We may think of individual “landscapes” as being compromised, partial, contested and only provisionally stable as modes of ordering the world and our engagement with it. If so, this suggests that we should not think of individual landscapes as discrete pieces of territory because they are supported by, and help to sustain, the interests of mere sections of any given society. Alternatively, we might think of landscapes as being formed in relation to other landscapes and conceptions of landscape. In that case, perhaps also we should base our analysis in terms of the interconnectedness of landscape, its links with other landscapes, other geographies’ (J. Gold and G. Revill 2000). ‘Landscape is far from being a neutral concept—[it is] is deeply rooted in a performative and ideological mode of engagement with site’ (M. Shanks, site 2006). Revil (2007) TIBG 32, 2 argues for ‘landscape as a mode of governance’. Henderson in C. Wilson and P. Groth, eds (2003) argues that landscape in geography can be broken down into landscape as Landschaft; landscape as social space; the epistemological landscape (‘the material revelation of human practice and thought’); and the apocryphal landscape (‘landscape as a way of seeing’).
B. Rhoads and C. Thorn (1996) define the geomorphological landscape as ‘the totality of surface landforms’, referred to by Thwaites and Bell (2004) SuperSoil, as the geoscape.
2 An overview of a specific phenomenon, and its structures, which might not be material. Parto (2005, MERIT-Infonomics Res. Memo 2005–001) writes that ‘the new landscape of governance…is marked by a departure from territorially defined spaces of the post war nation states…governance in this new landscape increasingly has to rely on formal and informal, supra- and sub-national institutions of the nation states if it is to attain a similar degree of legitimacy as governance at the national territorial scale’. See Hashim (OECD 2002) on Malaysia, and Robinson and Shaw (2001) Reg. Studs 35, 5 on north-east England. Parto (op. cit.) contends that ‘each subsystem is the product of its “own” institutional landscape’. Make of that what you will.
The term is similarly used in landscapes of care; see Moon et al. (2006) TIBG 31, 2; Gleeson and Kearns (2001) Env. & Plan. D 19, 1; and Williams (2002) Sol. Sci. & Medi. 55, 1. See the Health, Place and Society Research Group at Queen Mary College, U. London.