ABSTRACT
In his elegant essay “Roads Belong in the Landscape” geographer J. B. Jackson (1994: 189-205) observes that, in the evolving Western notion of space, the path and the road became increasingly neglected and outclassed by the prestige of private space and the comfort of permanent settlement. Whereas before medieval times the road implied food and freedom, and the wanderer had a rightful place in the social order, modernity has imposed on our society a view of the road as “an unsightly, elongated and crooked space,” whose only role is to take us from one safe place to another, the road itself being dangerous and unwieldy. Moreover, those who belong on the road by choice or need – the transient and the homeless – have been set in a social class apart from, and incomprehensible to, the house dweller. Only recently have geographers and historians of the landscape begun to recognize that the road and the path are places in their own right, with unique activity, social intercourse, and material culture associations.
