ABSTRACT
Landscape is changing. Fairly closed discourses on aesthetics, art and architectural history are being opened up and historical accounts of the development of place that emphasized overarching economic, social and political processes are being contested (see Chapter 11). As value is typically placed on aspects that most directly inform favoured discourses, new ways of valuing are stimulated by new definitions of landscape, including the European Landscape Convention’s, ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors’ (Council of Europe 2000). How landscape is experienced from within, as ‘a constantly emergent perceptual and material milieu’ (Wylie 2007: 2) also influences evaluation. The typically critical and subjective emphases of the newer landscape studies suggest that
wider society can and should be actively and constructively involved in evaluating landscape. They should then develop greater confidence to become involved in the democratically established processes of formal planning and policy, in the management of the historic landscape, and in the representation of more local or personal values in debates about place and identity (Schofield 2008). More than that, people are encouraged to more actively recognize that a key aspect of being human is the way we consciously and unconsciously work and play in and with landscape, connect with and perform our lives in it. Such self-aware engagements increase those other forms of landscape evaluation displayed through satisfaction and enjoyment, or their opposites (Ingold 2000; Pearson 2006) (see Figure 14.1). The notion that landscape need not be a detached and certain image, viewed from afar and
managed by those with developed knowledge, but instead a fluid impression, partly of our own creating and located within us, is not necessarily new. It resembles how place was appreciated and responded to by all in pre-Enlightenment times, deeply aware of the ways of their world, but less constrained by the certainties imposed by more systematized forms of knowledge or understanding (Tilley 1994: 26; Herring forthcoming). ‘Lanscape is nothing but Deceptive visions, a kind of cousning or cheating your owne Eyes, by our owne consent and assistance, and by a plot of your owne contriving’ (Edward Norgate, 1648-50, cited in Walsham 2011: 17).
