Environmental Aesthetics
Environmental Aesthetics

Author: Jack L. Nasar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1992-07-31

Total Pages: 564

ISBN-13: 9780521429160

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How do people react to the visual character of their surroundings? What can planners do to improve the aesthetic quality of these surroundings? Too often in environmental design, visual quality--aesthetics--is misunderstood as only a minor concern, dependent on volatile taste and thus undefinable. Yet a substantial body of research indicates the importance of visual quality in the environment to the public and has uncovered systematic patterns of human response to visual attributes of the built environment. Efforts to understand environmental aesthetics have been undertaken by investigators from such diverse fields as landscape architecture, environmental psychology, geography, philosophy, architecture, and city planning. As a result the relevant information is scattered and not readily available to professionals and policy makers. The book brings together classic and new contributions by distinguished workers in different disciplines. It explores theory and data on preferences in the visual environment, and also addresses the practical application of aesthetic criteria in design, planning and public policy. Promising directions for future research are identified.

Landscape Perception
Landscape Perception

Author: Amita Sinha

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

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Consists of papers previously published in the Journal of environmental psychology.

Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process
Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process

Author: Simon Bell

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2013-01-11

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1135820066

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Providing a fresh approach to the theory of design, Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process synthesizes planning, design and ecology and shows a new view of where design can develop. The book brings together the work and subject areas of a range of disciplines including psychologists, philosophers, geologists, ecologists, cultural geographers, foresters, urban planners and landscape architects and synthesizes all these together. Since many landscape and environmental problems require multi-disciplinary approaches for their solution, this book demonstrates how the best integration can be achieved. Highly illustrated, it contains examples from North America, Canada, Europe and Australasia. Glossary, references and further reading provide the reader with guidance and back-up resources.

Landscape Lab
Landscape Lab

Author: Fabio Bianconi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-05

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 331994150X

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This book explores the relationship between the sciences of representation and the strategy of landscape valorisation. The topic is connected to the theme of the image of the city, which is extended to the territory scale and applied to case studies in Italy’s Umbria region, where the goal is to strike a dynamic balance between cultural heritage and nature. The studies demonstrate how landscape represents an interpretive process of finding meaning, a product of the relationships between mankind and the places in which it lives. The work proceeds from the assumption that it is possible to describe these connections between environment, territory and landscape by applying the Vitruvian triad, composed of Firmitas (solidity), Utilitas (utility) and Venustas(beauty). The environment, the sum of the conditions that influence all life, represents the place’s solidity, because it guarantees its survival. In turn, territory is connected to utility, and through its etymological meaning is linked to possession, to a domain; while landscape, as an “area perceived by people”, expresses the search for beauty in a given place, the process of critically interpreting a vision.

From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning
From Landscape Research to Landscape Planning

Author: Bärbel Tress

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-10-25

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9781402039782

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This book provides guidelines for those pursuing landscape projects based on integrative concepts – interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity – whether they are members of an integrative research team or individuals working on a problem that demands integration. They must define terminology, choose appropriate methodologies, overcome epistemological barriers and cope with the high expectations of some stakeholders while encouraging others to participate at all.

The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies
The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies

Author: Peter Howard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1136220593

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Landscape is a vital, synergistic concept which opens up ways of thinking about many of the problems which beset our contemporary world, such as climate change, social alienation, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and destruction of heritage. As a concept, landscape does not respect disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, many academic disciplines have found the concept so important, it has been used as a qualifier that delineates whole sub-disciplines: landscape ecology, landscape planning, landscape archaeology, and so forth. In other cases, landscape studies progress under a broader banner, such as heritage studies or cultural geography. Yet it does not always mean the same thing in all of these contexts. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies offers the first comprehensive attempt to explore research directions into the many uses and meanings of ‘landscape’. The Companion contains thirty-nine original contributions from leading scholars within the field, which have been divided into four parts: Experiencing Landscape; Landscape Culture and Heritage; Landscape, Society and Justice; and Design and Planning for Landscape. Topics covered range from phenomenological approaches to landscape, to the consideration of landscape as a repository of human culture; from ideas of identity and belonging, to issues of power and hegemony; and from discussions of participatory planning and design to the call for new imaginaries in a time of global and environmental crisis. Each contribution explores the future development of different conceptual and theoretical approaches, as well as recent empirical contributions to knowledge and understanding. Collectively, they encourage dialogue across disciplinary barriers and reflection upon the implications of research findings for local, national and international policy in relation to landscape. This Companion provides up-to-date critical reviews of state of the art perspectives across this multifaceted field, embracing disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural studies, geography, landscape planning, landscape architecture, countryside management, forestry, heritage studies, ecology, and fine art. It serves as an invaluable point of reference for scholars, researchers and graduate students alike, engaging in the field of landscape studies.

The Perception of the Environment
The Perception of the Environment

Author: Tim Ingold

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 644

ISBN-13: 1000504662

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In this work Tim Ingold offers a persuasive new approach to understanding how human beings perceive their surroundings. He argues that what we are used to calling cultural variation consists, in the first place, of variations in skill. Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. To account for the generation of skills we have therefore to understand the dynamics of development. And this in turn calls for an ecological approach that situates practitioners in the context of an active engagement with the constituents of their surroundings. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to ‘dwell’, and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before. The book is set to revolutionise the way we think about what is ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ in humans, about evolution and history, and indeed about what it means for human beings – at once organisms and persons – to inhabit an environment. The Perception of the Environment will be essential reading not only for anthropologists but also for biologists, psychologists, archaeologists, geographers and philosophers. This edition includes a new Preface by the author.

Science and the Perception of Nature
Science and the Perception of Nature

Author: Charlotte Klonk

Publisher: Paul Mellon Ctr for Studies

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780300069501

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Charlotte Klonk's deeply researched accounts of the complex and often ambiguous interactions that took place between artists and scientists challenge simplistic accounts of developments in art as mere by-products of scientific progress as well as reductive socio-economic interpretations. For Klonk, the common thread running through the changes in both art and science is the emergence of a new phenomenalist conception of experience around the turn of the century. Phenomenalism involved a commitment to the scrupulous observation of particular phenomena, without making prior assumptions about meaning or underlying causes, and this ideal was common to both artists and scientists. In this way, Klonk argues, the period represents a brief moment of balance before the concerns of science and art split apart into objectivity and subjectivity, respectively.

Imagining Landscapes
Imagining Landscapes

Author: Monica Janowski

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-13

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1317118650

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The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.