Cultural landscape

Encyclopedia : C : CU : CUL : Cultural landscape

The Dresden Elbe Valley World Heritage Site is according to the UNESCO "an outstanding example of land use, representing an exceptional development of a major Central-European city" having almost half a million inhabitants

Cultural landscape is defined as the human-modified environment, including fields, houses, church, highways, planted forests, and mines, as well as weeds and pollution.

A cultural landscape is defined as:

"a geographic area,including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values."

In the USA, there are four general types of cultural landscapes, not mutually exclusive: historic sites, historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes.

“The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. Under the influence of a given culture, itself changing through time, the landscape undergoes development, passing through phases and probably reaching ultimately the end of its cycle of development. With the introduction of a different, alien culture, a rejuvenation of the cultural landscape sets in, or a new landscape is superimposed on remnants of the old one” (Sauer’s, 1925).

Sauer was explicitly concerned to counter an environmental determinism which had dominated the American geography of the previous generation, within which human agency was given scant autonomy in the shaping of the visible landscape. Sauer believed, and was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. Interestingly this results in elements of the physical environment, such as topography, soils, plants and animals needing to be incorporated into studies of the cultural landscape; so far as they provoke human responses and adaptations, or have themselves been altered by human activity (e.g. forest clearing and dams). Cronon (1995) believes that Sauer’s definition cannot be upheld today since it is clear that there is no clear distinction between nature and culture, since both interlink and should be regarded together as co-productions. Also noted should be the reference be Sauer of a different ‘alien culture’, which surely symbolises the cultural impacts caused by Europeans during colonialism which resulted in the imposition of colonial cultures upon pre-existing cultures.

Cultural landscape

See also