ABSTRACT
The aesthetics of the rural-urban fringe is a theme that we have already touched upon at a number of points in this book. The ‘look’ of a landscape is in part determined by the arrangement of natural and made-made features: the contents of the fringe were introduced in Chapter 1, and re-examined in Chapter 2, where the quality of recent development (an expression of the quality of planning) was brought into focus. We have also introduced the idea that landscapes are ‘made’ in a physical and in a social sense. In this chapter, we intend to delve more deeply into the aesthetics of landscape, dealing not only with physical expression, but also with cultural images and representations of the rural-urban fringe, in media and film and in the collective public psyche. Essentially, this chapter is concerned with ‘aesthetics’, a word frequently associated with the fine arts, but more broadly defined as ‘the area of philosophy that concerns our appreciation of things as they affect our senses, and especially as they affect them in a pleasing way’ (Carlson, 2000: xvii). The idea of ‘environmental aesthetics’ is closely allied to the notion of ‘landscape’, a Dutch creation that first appeared in the sixteenth century in reference to the pictorial representation of rural scenery. Later, ‘landscape’ also came to signify a more general notion of the countryside as a ‘visual phenomenon’ (Muir, 1999: xv-xvi). In more recent times, the word has taken on a broader range of meanings: in the field of geography – which is perhaps the most relevant here – particular ‘landscapes’ were initially associated with particular regions (mountainous, forested, and so forth), but today the word has been realigned with aesthetics and with more subjective responses to particular places (Bourassa, 1991: 2-3).
