ABSTRACT
This final chapter takes a prospective look at current work and emerging trends and agendas in cultural geographies of landscape. In terms of content, therefore, it has been the most difficult chapter to plan and write.This is because no one can know how cultural geographies of landscape will develop in the future – or even, it could be argued, if they will develop. It would have been very difficult to predict in 1980, for example, that in just over ten years a range of new interpretative approaches to landscape – landscape as way of seeing, landscape as text – would have galvanised work in cultural and historical geography in the UK in particular. Equally, from the vantage point of the early to mid-1990s, a resurgence of interest in phenomenological approaches to landscape would have seemed unlikely. Further complicating the task of assessing the present is the fact that today’s trends do not necessarily constitute tomorrow’s established research platforms. And beyond this, the fact that landscape has long been a key term and concept for geographers does not in and of itself guarantee its continuing purchase and salience in the future. But, as the preceding two chapters have demonstrated, landscape research is today very much a vibrant and evolving field and, given the diversity and scope of current landscape writing, one might quickly come to regret overly confident predictions about the future.
