Rethinking Landscape ─ A Critical Reader

Our landscapes have never failed to entice and capture the imagination of writers, painters and philosophers – and in turn their work has influenced our landscapes for centuries.
This carefully selected collection of readings and commentary expertly guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape, and explores the key writings which shaped the field in its emergence and maturity.
Provoking thought and discussion, this book does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking.

Part 1: Pluralism 1. Is the Truth Out There? 2. Trivalent Design Part 2: Aesthetics 3. Rationalism 4. Empiricism 5. The Picturesque 6. Biological Theories 7. Use and Beauty 8. Functionalism 9. Landscape as Art Part 3: The Social Mission 10. Landscape and Power 11. The Failed Vision of Modernism 12. The Amelioration of the City 13. Participation and Collaboration Part 4: Ecology 13. Meanings and Metaphors in Ecology 14. Varieties of Environmental Ethics 15. The Ecological Approach and Landscape Ecology 16. Sustainability Part 5: Some other Perspectives 17. Phenomenology and the Experience of Landscape 18. The Genius Loci Part 6: Conclusions and Suggestions 19. Pulling it all Together. Further Reading