I had to go to Sweden in the 1980s to hear the phrase "cultural landscape" and to listen to discussions about its evolution through time and human social and economic practice. Then, the concept seemed almost second nature to my academic colleagues there, but rather alien here. The Swedes took it as read that landscape and culture were inseparable, and that they co-evolved. They also knew that the cultural included the agricultural, as working the land for human survival, and farming more formally, were recognised as key components of a continuing human evolution with the land.
Today the use of cultural landscape in the UK is more widespread, with an Oxford-based landscape research group stressing its significance:
Cultural Landscape: includes not only culture and ecology, natural resources and biodiversity. It also embraces historic events, activities, which occur in relationship to soil, slope, water and fertility, climate, flora and fauna. The range of human responses to placed conditions define the tangible and intangible values inherent in cultural landscapes.
The agri is implicit, rather than specific, here.
Natural England seems to prefer the term historic environment, but says this:
Cultural landscapes are areas that include cultural and natural resources associated with an historic event, activity, person, or group of people. They range from thousands of acres of rural land to homesteads with small front yards. These landscapes can be man-made expressions of visual and spatial relationships, which include grand estates, farmlands, public gardens and parks, college campuses, cemeteries, scenic highways, and industrial sites. Cultural landscapes are works of art, texts and narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity. They also exist in relationship to their ecological contexts.
Here, the agri is more explicit, although, actually, it's hard to see what is not included in this rather all-encompassing view. My bird-friendly garden seems to fit – but then, perhaps it should.
I was musing on all this whilst walking above Fyfield Down on the Ridgeway last week (where the agri is all around you), wondering what, if anything, children are taught about any of this these days (or ever!). Given that the idea of cultural landscape is closely bound up with the meaning that people find in their lives, it probably cannot be taught in any formal sense, so the question, perhaps, is how are young people helped to understand it – and hence themselves. Primae facie, it would seem to need a coming together of history and geography – and future studies.
Either way, this has to be a core aspect of any education that takes sustainability seriously, given that this involves coming to views of what is important to our lives and the way we (want to) live, with others, and with the land.
Responses
In English we also have the term 'townscape', and perhaps cultural landscape and townscape are the same idea. For example, Bath is a 'cultura'l World Heritage Site, although dependent upon on natural heritage (water, stone, topograhy and landscape). The Unesco WHS logo illustrates this nature/culture interdependence.
Natural England sees gardens as cultural landscape, but not houses. English Heritage would not make the same distinction.
A concept which drew together how we saw, and planned, our landscapes and townscapes was the 'picturesque' (Wm. Gilpin). This usefully added tourism to the local economy of places like the Cotswolds and Wye Valley, But perhaps one of our current challenges is to free ourselves from such romanticism?
The ideas of Rousseau and Geddes, underpinned the field/urban studies movements in the second half of the 20th century, and reflected (for me, at least) an interesting balance between the romantic and the pragmatic. Exploring values and emotional responses to 'place', and re-thinking how we live, were both part of that era of environmental education. In the current educational landscape, such ideas/practice seem to be becoming part of the leaf-litter of adjectival educations. Hopefully, they will be rediscovered in the fullness of time...