How to define (or redefine) the concept landscape?
The original meaning of the word landscape is the collection, a “sheaf” of lands, presumably interrelated and part of a system. Country or countryside indicates the territory of a community of people all speaking the same dialect, all engaged in the same kind of farming, all subjects of the same local lord, all conscious of having customs and traditions of their own and of possessing certain ancient rights and privileges. It is here, in the usage of the two words landscape and country, that we are confronted with the distinction between the vernacular and the aristocratic or political concepts of space.
In a vernacular landscape are the evidences of political organization of space largely or entirely absent. By political I mean those spaces and structures designed to impose or preserve a unity and order on the land, or keeping with a long-range, large–scale plan. Yet underneath those symbols of permanent political power there lay a vernacular landscape – or rather thousands of mall and impoverished vernacular landscapes, organizing and using spaces in their traditional way and living in communities governed by custom, held together by personal relationships.
At the present state of our studies of the vernacular landscape as a type all that we can say is that its spaces are usually small, irregular in shape, subject to rapid change in use, in ownership, in dimensions; that the houses, even the villages themselves, grow, shrink, change morphology, change location; that there is always a vast amount of “common land” – waste, pasturage, forest, areas where natural resources are exploited in a piecemeal manner; that its roads are little more than paths and lanes, never maintained and rarely permanent clusters of fields, islands in a sea of waste or wilderness changing from generation to generation, leaving no monuments, only abandonment or signs of renewal.
Mobility and change are the key to the vernacular landscape, but of an involuntary, reluctant sort; not the expression of restlessness and search for improvement but an unending patient adjustment to circumstances.
A landscape without visible signs of political history is a landscape without memory or forethought. Monuments are much more than remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles;
Landscape One, which mixed all kinds of uses and spaces together, Landscape Two insists on spaces which are homogenous and devoted to a single purpose. It makes a distinction between city and country, between forest and field, between public and private, rich and poor, work and play; it prefers the linear frontier between nations rather than the medieval patchwork of intermingled territories. As for the distinction between mobility and immobility, it clearly believes that whatever is temporary or short-lived or movable is not to be encouraged.
But the essential characteristic of Landscape Two is its belief in the sanctity of place. It is place, permanent position both in the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity. The function of space according to this belief is to make us visible, allow us to put down roots and become member of a working community; it was a temporary symbol of relationships. In Landscape Two land means property and permanence and power.
Remark added to the text: Asian landscapes as Landscape One – medieval? No Renaissance?
Salvation of Landscape Three depends on our relinquishing this power to alter the flow of time and on our returning to a more natural order. But the new ordering of time should affect not only nature, it should affect ourselves. It promises us a new kind of history, a new, more responsive social order, and ultimately a new landscape.