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Cultural Landscapes
HEIDEROSE KILPER and LUDGER GAILING
Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space,
Germany
To describe a specific area as a cultural land-
scape essentially means three things. First,
specific features are ascribed to it, which have
been negotiated by society and accepted, and
which find expression in homogeneity criteria
such as “unity of land and people” or “unique
character.” Second, an assumption is made
that there is a specific reciprocal relationship
between the material conditions and features
of this area and its cultural significance to
society. Third, a societal interest in the nor-
mative handling of this area is implied, as it is
deemed valuable from an historic, ecological,
economic, and/or aesthetic point of view.
The syllable “-schaft,” which is the suffix
of the German term Landschaft (landscape),
has its origins in old Germanic languages.
It indicates a spectrum of meaning which
expresses the composition, the order, the
form, or the qualities of an object being
described or the cohesiveness of each of its
elements. The earliest notions of landscape
in the German-speaking world were strongly
tied up with norms and customs which
related to particular spatial units. Remnants
of the medieval traditions of Germanic lan-
guages, where a landscape was understood
as a “unit of policy and place” (Olwig and
Jones 2008, xxviii), have, for example, been
perpetuated in the name of the “Canton of
Basel-Landschaft” in Switzerland’s federal
system. The political notion of “landscape as
polity and policy,” however, has today been
marginalized in favor of the aesthetic notion
of landscape (“landscape as scenery”).
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0068
“Landscape” as an aesthetic experience
is regarded as an accomplishment of the
modern era and as the result of the subjec-
tive capacity of perception. Consequently,
Cosgrove (1984, 1) refers to landscape as “a
way of seeing.” The aesthetically experienced
phenomenon of the “landscape” initially
prevailed as a privileged manner of viewing
nature. The person observing the landscape
can be characterized as an outsider who is
capable of aesthetic contemplation, as he/she
is free of the necessity to live and work in the
segment of nature being observed. “Land-
scape” could therefore also be considered an
ideological and elitist concept.
For decades, the notion of the landscape
had particularly defined the discipline of
geography which had established itself as a
scientific discipline in the mid-nineteenth
century with the measurement of the earth’s
surface and the cartographical representation
of the world. “Cultural landscape geography,”
which was significantly influenced by Carl
Sauer (1925, 46) in the 1920s, and was a
research direction also known as the Berkeley
School of landscape research, was already
placing an emphasis on the formative capac-
ity of mankind: “The cultural landscape is
fashioned out of a natural landscape by a cul-
tural group. Culture is the agent, the natural
area is the medium, the cultural landscape
the result” (Sauer 1925, 46).
Since then, the conceptual and empirical
studies of cultural landscape research can
essentially be divided into three thematic
areas: cultural landscapes as the physical
expression of land-use change; cultural land-
scapes as individual regions; and cultural
landscapes as the product of the interac-
tion of man with his physical and material
environment. Until the 1930s, a “genetic”

2 C U LTU R A L L AN D S C A PE S
approach was dominant, which attempted
to reconstruct the historical development of
nature into a man-made cultural landscape in
order to explain the morphology of the land-
scape and to describe the visible phenomena
within the landscape (such as settlements,
transport routes, forms of agricultural land
use, etc.).
In the postwar period, the landscape
initially retained its relevance as a geograph-
ical concept. However, sociogeographical
landscape research increasingly distanced
itself from classical landscape geography
because physical features were increasingly
replaced by social processes as the focal point
of research, and consequently the material
traces in the cultural landscape were merely
interpreted as indicators of social processes.
Along with a postpositivist social geogra-
phy and a new cultural geography, insights
into social construction and the processual
character of the landscape (Robertson and
Richards 2003) or into a plural understand-
ing of culture (Norton 2000) have led to new
discussions in geography concerning the
cultural landscape.
Social constructivists interpret cultural
landscapes as representations of reality which
stand for society’s relationships with its
material environment. They are a part of a
constructed and circular system composed
of cultural meanings which can be encoded
not only in texts, but also in images. More
“radical” poststructuralist interpretations of
cultural landscapes do not refer to objective
realities at all, whereas, from a “moderated”
constructivist perspective, cultural land-
scapes are interpreted as social constructs in
a comprehensive way including materiality.
From an analytical point of view, a social
constructivist perspective on landscape can
be differentiated in the following ways: (a) in
terms of its subjective construction by means
of the perception of individuals, (b) in terms
of its physical and material construction by
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means of human processes applied to nature,
and (c) in terms of its collective construction
by means of society’s processes of negotiation.
In reality, these processes are interdependent.
For example, the subjective perception of a
cultural landscape and its interpretation as
a specific area is a prerequisite of collective
constructions of any kind. In turn, these
collective constructions then have an effect
on subjective ways of perception. All this is
also based on immediately present, unique
artifacts and physical structures, which them-
selves may be a direct or indirect consequence
of construction processes in the past.
Social scientists emphasize the particular
role played by symbols in the social construc-
tion of cultural landscapes. They reason that
cultural landscapes are entirely different from
simple natural environments due to the fact
that cultural groups have reified them and
augmented them with symbols and meanings
which are at times highly contradictory. As
Greider and Garkovich (1994) have clarified,
this reification is key to the obfuscation of
the constructed nature of cultural landscapes,
as they imply that humans suppress their
part in their processual construction and that
landscapes can be perceived as naturalized
objects.
Since the last decade of the twentieth
century, the discourse within society on
cultural landscapes has seen something of a
renaissance. This became evident at the end
of the 1990s, when not only regional devel-
opment policy and rural development policy
but also the tourism industry discovered
cultural landscapes as a source of poten-
tial for regional development. Establishing
identities based on an area and generating
regional images are two significant effects
of the qualities of cultural landscapes that
can contribute to the development and
stabilization of a region as “soft” location
factors. In this context, cultural landscapes
are increasingly perceived and protected as

action spaces for regional development and
planning – for example, as cultural land-
scapes on the UNESCO World Heritage list,
as spaces for integrated rural development
which are being promoted as part of the EU’s
LEADER program, or within the context
of formal institutional nature conservation,
such as nature parks.
Cultural landscapes as action spaces are
placed within the context of a complex
institutional structure (Gailing 2014). The
stakeholders in this process come from the
sectors of nature conservation and the preser-
vation of historical monuments, and therefore
primarily represent goals of ecological and
cultural conservation. They hail from agricul-
ture or the tourism industry, and are largely
pursuing economic goals. They deal with
regional planning and thus their primary
goals concern spatial rules and development.
In other words, cultural landscapes are action
spaces for stakeholders coming from diverse
institutional systems within various sectors.
However, these are always integrated into
nation-state, European, and international
institutional systems.
Neo-institutional concepts differentiate
here between institutions in their formal
(e.g., laws and procedural regulations) and
informal (e.g., cultural values and patterns of
perception) manifestations. In fact, it is the
informal institutions at a regional level which
determine the respective logic of develop-
ment of specific cultural landscapes as action
spaces (Gailing 2014). These rely heavily on
communication, symbols, and references to
the physical and material environment.
Shared images of the space, symbols,
toponyms, traditions, and so forth (Paasi
2008), in their capacity as informal institu-
tions, not only have a legitimizing effect but
can also be contents of collective governance.
The lessons learned by the implementation
of policies like the EU’s LEADER program
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C U LTU R A L L AN D S C A PE S 3
are diverse and rich experiences with coor-
dination between different sectoral systems,
actors, procedures, and instruments. They are
a good example of regional policy of cultural
landscapes not only in rural areas, but also in
suburban areas as well as in urban areas.
These interpretations of cultural landscapes
from neo-institutionalist and governance per-
spectives are part of a larger debate around
the “politics” of cultural landscapes. This
opens up, for potential future research, fields
for understanding the political nature of
landscapes. Four important aspects are cru-
cial for this ongoing debate: the role of power
in the social construction of landscapes; the
role of group identities for the politics of
belonging in cultural landscapes; the role of
visual and other representations for mate-
rial processes of labor and production in
landscapes; and, finally, normative issues of
landscape democracy and landscape justice.
SEE ALSO: Regional Governance; Spatial
Theories/Social Construction of Spaces
REFERENCES
Cosgrove, D. 1984. Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape. London: Croom Helm.
Gailing, L. 2014. Kulturlandschaftspolitik: Die
gesellschaftliche Konstituierung von Kulturland-
schaft durch Institutionen und Governance [The
Politics of Cultural Landscape: The Societal Con-
stitution of Cultural Landscape by Institutions
and Governance]. Detmold: Rohn.
Greider, T., and L. Garkovich. 1994. “The Social
Construction of Nature and the Environment.”
Rural Sociology, 59: 1–24.
Norton, W. 2000. Cultural Geography: Themes,
Concepts, Analyses. London: Oxford University
Press.
Olwig, K. R., and M. Jones. 2008. “Introduction:
Thinking Landscape and Regional Belonging on
the Northern Edge of Europe.” In Nordic Land-
scapes: Region and Belonging on the Northern
Edge of Europe, edited by M. Jones and K. R.
Olwig, ix–xxix. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.

4 C U LTU R A L L AN D S C A PE S
Paasi, A. 2008. “Finnish Landscape as Social Prac-
tice: Mapping Identity and Scale.” In Nordic
Landscapes: Region and Belonging on the North-
ern Edge of Europe, edited by M. Jones and
K. R. Olwig, 511–539. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Robertson, I., and P. Richards. 2003. “Introduc-
tion.” In Studying Cultural Landscapes, edited
by I. Robertson and P. Richards, 1–18. London:
Edward Arnold.
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Sauer, C. O. 1925. The Morphology of Landscape.
University of California Publications in Geogra-
phy, 2. Berkeley: University of California.
FURTHER READING
Munns, J. 2003. “Landscape Glossary.” In Studying
Cultural Landscapes, edited by I. Robertson and
P. Richards, 170–177. London: Edward Arnold.
Wylie, J. 2007. Landscape. Key Ideas in Geography.
London: Routledge.