People tend to think that landscapes are these neatly delineated entities. Plus, it’s not just that people speak of this and/or that landscape, whatever it may be, like in reference to what they see in front of them. That’s fair enough. That’s how a language like English works. We segment what’s otherwise a continuum. It’s rather that people think that this and/or that landscape is like it’s own thing, not just an ad-hoc way of making sense of that continuum, there and then.
Now, I have explained this before and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to repeat myself. That said, I recently ran into a recent article, ‘Landscapes move – and challenge borders’ written by Jan Kolen. What’s notable, if not remarkable about the article is how he manages to provide a fresh take on something that many landscape researchers are already aware of, but might struggle to explain to wider audience.
Anyway, the gist of Kolen’s (1) article is to explain what needs to be explained, especially to a wider audience than landscape researchers, that what I just pointed out “sounds so self evident that it apparently requires little explanation” It’s all fixed. It is simply taken for granted that are these neatly delineated areas, like regions, and they are assessed in terms of their landscape character or identity, as he (1) points out. To be blunt, we could simply replace landscape with area, with emphasis on the visual aspects of area, and we’d be none the wiser. That’s what people mean when they bring up landscape and talk about how this and/or that landscape looks.
What I think is particularly noteworthy in this context is how he (1) specifies this. So, okay, there are these fixed entities, so people think anyway, but whatever happens to that landscape, its character and its identity, it is that landscape that undergoes transformation. No matter what happens, it is that landscape, so that it “is usually conceived as the same landscape”, as he (1) points out.
This way of thinking about landscape is mainstream. It’s how people tend to think, at least in the western world, but it’s also how the experts, people dealing with heritage and landscape design, think, as acknowledged by him (1).
That said, nearly every landscape researcher recognizes how problematic that way of thinking is and how misconceived it is. Nearly all of them have read Denis Cosgrove’s article, ‘Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea’, and realize that, one way or another, landscape is not really a thing, like a physical thing, out there, waiting for us to figure it out. Instead, it’s way of seeing the world or, more broadly speaking, a way of making sense of world that happens to privilege the vision over other senses. This means that landscape is in your head and connected to whatever it is that you see. It’s not something just out there. This also means that landscapes are not fixed, but rather move with us, as Kolen (2) expresses it.
The highlight of Kolen’s article is, for me, how he exemplifies this. So, in summary, he ran into this Turkish man or, to be more specific, a man from Turkey living in the Netherlands (I don’t know his citizenship), who had invested his time and money into turning a vacant lot (I’m tempted to write wasteland, like Kolen does, but it’s more like barren) into a garden. The thing is, however, that it did not turn out to be a Dutch garden, like what you’d expect in the Netherlands, but like an Anatolian garden. Why? Well, it’s because the way we conceive space is in our heads. That man happens to have the kind of background that tends to result in an Anatolian garden. It’s what he knows, so it’s how he ends up turning that vacant lot into a garden. To me, this makes perfect sense. It’s like what is the likelihood that he turns that lot into a Dutch or, let’s be more creative, like a Japanese garden? This does not, of course, mean that just because the man is Turkish, he must think and see the world like someone who is Turkish. No. It’s rather that it is only likely to be the case. He might have opted for something else, but then it’s likely that he has spent considerably time living somewhere else and/or has background in gardening.
To put this more simply, that man had a certain background, which explains why he sought to use that unused land in a certain way, growing certain kinds of plants instead of other kinds of plants. This was based on his experiences of gardens and therefore that specific garden is based on a certain landscape idea, as Kolen (2-3) points out.
What is notable here, and what he (3) goes on to emphasize, is that even if we think of landscapes as these countable entities, like there being a landscape, among other landscapes, they are not fixed entities, with fixed characteristics, nor can we encounter and assess them as such. All it takes is some random Turkish man who has moved to the Netherlands, for reasons unknown, to make sense of that, as carefully explained by Kolen (2-3). That man was needed to make that landscape, to landscape the vacant lot, so that it appeared the way it did to Kolen and others.
It would have been interesting to read more about this case, like how did it turn out over the years, but I get it why Kolen doesn’t cover it and moves on to use other examples. That’s totally fine. Had he brought more attention to this case, it would have proven the point, even better than he did in this article, but it is only likely that it would have been the swift end of that landscape. I bet people would have come out of the woodwork to object to this man’s little project, not really because he was using someone else’s land for his project, but because it made the landscape look unfamiliar, if not foreign, and therefore more or less disagreeable. This is how landscape works, as this idea of how landscape ‘should’ look according to people, who’ve learned that from other people, who have learned that from other people, and so on and so forth, without ever thinking whose idea that was and now is, and who benefited and now benefits from this idea.
The rest of the article was also interesting to read. He broadens the discussion considerably, but I wanted to highlight his example, because it is such a simple, to the point, everyday example, something that you might encounter in everyday life. It works great, not because I didn’t already know how landscape works as an idea and what the consequences of that idea tend to be, but because it should be fairly easy to understand even if you aren’t already aware of all that.
References
- Cosgrove, D. E. (1985). Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1), 45–62.
- Kolen, J. (2026). Landscapes move – and challenge borders. Landscape Research.