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 collection of readings and commentary guides you through the aesthetic, social, cultural and environmental foundations of our thinking about landscape.

'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates. 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. In this carefully selected collection of readings and commentary Ian Thompson 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.If you are to appreciate landscape theory, you first have to understand that current thinking is built on the theory of the past. There is no such thing as 'dead theory' in the study of landscape, simply theory waiting to come back into life. "Rethinking Landscape" provokes thought and discussion. It does not provide answers, and will not conclude with an infallible theory of landscape - there is of course no such thing. But with a range of readings from Vitruvius to Jellicoe, from Burke to Berlin to Berleant, from the study of the Picturesque to Phenomenology, every reader will find something here to set them thinking; and thinking is the root of all invention.

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