ABSTRACT
The conceptualization of landscape is an important topic for a variety of disciplines. Landscape conceptualization informs environmental decision making, serves as a fundamental component of understanding place, and is the basic building block of landscape design. This chapter reviews perspectives of landscape emerging from research in art, geography, cognitive science, and military science to begin to develop a framework based on three shared themes: viewpoint, distance, and perception. The viewpoint, or vantage point, separates the human viewer from the landscape and provides them with new information not available through the traditional ground viewpoint. The distance from the landscape isolates the viewer. Finally, in discussing perception, these disciplines address how symbolism, context, and saliency impact information extraction. In the area of art, concern over the relationship between human and landscape is linked to aesthetic appreciation. In contrast, military science depicts the viewer as an information collector for strategic or tactical gains. Finally, for the cognitive scientist, the task and the viewer are less well defined, and instead varied to build a picture of the general viewer’s response to the spectrum of potential visual inputs. This model is in early development, but it is hoped that it will provide a common starting point for interdisciplinary discussions about how aerial imagery of the landscape can be used by people to understand the world around them.
