“Landscape turns” and “spatial turns” are referred to throughout the academic disciplines, often with reference to GIS and the neogeography revolution that puts mapping within the grasp of every high-school student. By “turning” we propose a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together.
For the broader questions of landscape — worldview, palimpsest, the commons and community, panopticism and territoriality — are older than GIS, their stories rooted in the foundations of the modern disciplines. These terms have their origin in a historic conversation about land use and agency.
Many of the first investigations of displacement and new urban spaces were wrapped up in the movement to render cities a safe space for the middle classes. Parisian police studied the crowd in different neighborhoods for signs of revolutionary behavior. The sanitary, criminal, and poverty maps of London, Paris, and Chicago are well known.[1] Alongside these [...]
Modern history started with a landscape. Jules Michelet, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Ranke forged experiments in applying the critical history of princes to the space of a nation. Macaulay represented the transitions of democracy, printing, and transport that invented modern England through the lens of the landscape. “Could the England of 1685 be, by some magical [...]
F. J. Egli in his Nomina Geographica (1893) demonstrated, in the words of Franz Boaz, that “geographical names, being an expression of the mental character of each people and each period, reflect their cultural life and the line of development belonging to each cultural area.” Not only that, but the “form of each language limits the [...]
By the end of the nineteenth century, the term “space” had a radically promiscuous career: “space” slipped between the “social space” that fin-de-siecle sociologists discovered around the Paris Commune; the “personal space” of midcentury psychologists; and the “Cartesian space” that Marxist geographers after 1968 associated with the liberal government and the rule of capital.[1] In [...]
Following the word “landscape” gives us richer history of the categories of political and economic organization at stake when we talk about city, nation, or other spaces. The Dutch Landskip or German Landschaft was a system of political and economic government that emerged in the sixteenth century for the purposes of managing the collective irrigation [...]
In 1952, the British Vernacular Architecture Group was founded to moot the concerns of the method’s growing body of followers. Following the model of the radical walkers, the VAG led its members on walking tours of particular locations.[1] The American Vernacular Architecture Forum was founded in 1980, and its founders immediately began taking their fellow-scholars [...]
Scholars in theology and anthropology look to material history of everyday landscape as a reservoir for locating agency from below. In the theology of Paul Tillich, the space of the self formed a major category for understanding the phenomenology of revelation. He distinguished the world as all things grasped, shaped, and formed by language, from the environment [...]
From 1923, when Melanie Klein published her psychological studies of children playing in sandboxes, to 1977, when the first studies of place cells were published, the primary field of new research in the mental processing of the landscape was child psychology. Piaget and Donald Winnicott claimed claimed to study the “infant’s point of view.” Piaget [...]
