Landscape

Landscapes are created by natural and social processes and their complex entanglements. The concept of landscape has travelled and changed for thousands of years: in both everyday language and disciplines like geography, philosophy, history, archaeology and anthropology. The Cultural Geography group is open to a variety of approaches, studying landscape as something being real and ‘out there’, but also as a way of seeing, a practice, discursive, enacted or performed and embodied. In particular, we focus on natural, cultural and urban landscapes and they manifold ways they came into existence.

We aspire to understand both the deliberate ways communities shape landscapes (by means of governance, planning and design) and the vernacular and natural processes that co-constitute their presence. We combine historical approaches with case studies situated in the present. In addition to the extensive list of academic publications, GEO research on landscapes has been published in innovative ways to reach out not only to academia, but also to the broader public through film-making, newspaper articles, local news blogs and public discussions. We actively contribute to societal debates on the conservation, development and planning of landscapes and related topics such as democratisation, issues of inclusion and exclusion.