Landscape – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as (ice-capped) mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions.

Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect the living synthesis of people and place vital to local and national identity. Landscapes, their character and quality, help define the self-image of a region, its sense of place that differentiates it from other regions. It is the dynamic backdrop to peoples lives.

The Earth has a vast range of landscapes including the icy landscapes of polar regions, mountainous landscapes, vast arid desert landscapes, islands and coastal landscapes, densely forested or wooded landscapes including past boreal forests and tropical rainforests, and agricultural landscapes of temperate and tropical regions.

Landscape may be further reviewed under the following specific categories: landscape art, cultural landscape, landscape ecology, landscape planning, landscape assessment and landscape design. The activity that modifies the visible features of an area of land is named Landscaping.

The question of the various meanings which 'Landscape' and its cognate terms in the Germanic languages has acquired from the Middle Ages till present times is not just a question of etymological curiosity; it reflects, among others, the history of conflicts between local and centralized power in emerging European nation-states (a subject discussed in depth by Kenneth Olwig in publications listed below) and also changing approaches to landscape within Geography and within the Arts. Moreover, the story of the various meanings of the English word landscape makes up an interesting example of "dynamic construal" of meaning.

It is widely accepted in the literature that "In Europe the concept of landscape and the words for it in both Romance and Germanic languages emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century to denote a painting whose primary subject matter was natural scenery (Punter 1982; Cosgrove 1993)"[1]

It should be noted though that the Northern European concept of landscape appeared centuries earlier than the 19th and that it carried then, and continues to carry, meanings that go far beyond natural scenery.[2] 'It is believed that the words land, landscipe or landscaef entered the English language some time after the 5th century; these terms referred to a system of human-made spaces on the land.

Olwig argues that the substantive importance of the landscape concept is easier to understand when the word is broken down for separate analysis into land and scape and then reconstituted .[3]

Taking first land: Land (a word from Germanic origin) may be taken in its sense of something to which people belong (as in England being the land of the English, (likewise Finland, Ireland, Poland). The 'land of a people' was historically divided into smaller lands, which might belong to a communality (e.g. the common lands belonging to the village community) or to a figure seen to represent or embody the land (e.g. the lands of the prince).[3] (Another meaning of the term land refers to a material substance as in "an area of ground" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1971;in the following:OED).

On the suffix -scape:

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Landscape - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia