Cultural landscape
Introduction
The cultural landscape is a term used in the fields of geography, ecology and heritage studies, to describe a symbiosis of human activity and the environment. According to the definition of the World Heritage Committee, they are "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and man" and are divided into three main categories:[1].
Development
The concept of cultural landscapes can be found in the European tradition of landscape painting.[3] From the century onwards, many European artists painted landscapes (possibly thanks to the influence of China)[4] on behalf of people, reducing the people in their paintings to figures subsumed within broader, regionally specific landscapes.[5].
The English word for "landscape", landscape, itself combines land (land, country) with a verb of Germanic origin, scapjan/schaffen to literally mean "shaped lands".[6] Lands were then considered shaped by natural forces, and the unique details of such landshaffen (shaped lands) became the subject of landscape paintings.[5].
The geographer Otto Schlüter) is credited with having formally used "cultural landscape" as an academic term at the turn of the century.[7] In 1908, Schlüter argued that by defining geography as Landschaftskunde (landscape science) this would give geography a logical theme shared by no other discipline. human-induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape), a landscape created by human culture. The main task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes.[9].
It was Carl O. Sauer, a human geographer, who was probably most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes.[10] Sauer was determined to emphasize 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 meaning, as a medium with and through which human cultures act.[11] His classic definition of a cultural landscape reads as follows:[9].
Since the first formal use of the term by Schlüter and the effective promotion of the idea by Sauer, the concept of cultural landscapes has been used, applied, debated, developed and refined in various ways in academia. In the 1950s, for example, J. B. Jackson and his publication Landscape influenced a generation of American scholars, including architectural historians Denise Scott Brown and Gwendolyn Wright.[12].