ABSTRACT
Questions of landscape aesthetics have rarely been approached directly by those concerned with environmental values. Rather, researchers have preferred to discuss questions of preference, taste, perception, interpretation, evaluation, management and modification as more tangible surrogates or indicators of aesthetic experience. Explicit discussion of landscape aesthetics largely disappeared with the eclipse of Romanticism, though it has been kept alive throughout the 20th century by the work of a few, largely isolated individuals: notably, Vaughan Cornish in his writings on aesthetic geography, the work of Gordon Cullen and others on townscapes, and a small cadre ofhuman geographers who have contributed extensively to the journal Landscape. 1 Nevertheless, there has been a recent revival of interest in the search for correctives to positivist approaches to landscape and spatial experience, and with the preoccupation of more affluent, mobile and leisured members of the community (and thereby institutional and governmental policy-makers) with questions of environmental amenity. Evidence of this revival can be seen in a diverse body of new work which tackles questions of aesthetic experience from radically different philosophical and methodological perspectives, which have parallels, but apparently little direct contact, with developments in aesthetic theory at large.
