ABSTRACT
The word ‘landscape’ is often used in everyday speech – we speak of natural landscapes, of course, but also about landscaped gardens, political landscapes, mental landscapes, epidemiological landscapes (Pavlovsky 1966), landscapes of fear (Tuan 1979) and landscapes of despair (Dear and Wolch 1987). Landscape may appear to be simply ‘what is out there’ for us to register with all our senses, but its simplicity is belied by the fact that no two people will ‘read’ or interpret what is out there in the same way. What we say about landscapes is mediated by how we have been acculturated to see the world, what our society believes is important, and by our individual experiences. Cultural geographers have reached no clear consensus on how to define landscape and, in fact, have tried to make sense of the term in several different ways (Lewis 1979; Meinig 1979; Palka 1995a). Here we will attempt to make a virtue out of the plurality of definitions and look at landscapes from three perspectives (see Chapter 2 for more on these approaches), each of which can be illustrated by examples of landscapes of health.
