ABSTRACT
Cultural landscapes can evoke powerful images and emotions that help to constitute a moral order and can play a central role in the practices and performance of place-based social identities, community values, and social distinction (Cosgrove 1993; Daniels 1993; Graham 1994; Lowenthal 1991; Rose 1995; Matless 1998). This is especially the case when the landscapes in question also are landscapes of home. Landscapes of home are personal, even as they link us to a place-based sense of community. The landscape of home often is a commonly recognized landscape that plays an active role in articulating identity, differentiating social position, and maintaining both positive and negative emotional attachments to place. Landscapes of home thus can be fraught with politics. They are implicated in the work of defining and negotiating just who belongs to a community (and how they may belong). Powerful localized interests often are able to define a seemingly stable, rooted, and closed local community through the cultural landscape, despite the inevitable interconnectivity and mutual interdependence of the “local” and the “global” in contemporary life. This is especially the case in affluent U.S. suburbs.
