Cultural Landscape and the 4 -Scapes
A cultural landscape can range from thousands of acres of rural tracks to a small house with a front garden. Like historic buildings and districts, thesis locations reveal aspects of our country's origins and development. Cultural landscapes revel a lot about our evolving relationship with the natural world. It is defined as "a geographical area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, person(s) or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values". There are four main types of cultural landscapes:
1. Historic Designed Landscape: a landscape which was consciously designed by a landscape architect or horticulturalist. The landscape may be associated with a significant person(s), trend or event landscape architecture. Aesthetic values play a significant role.
2. Historic Vernacular Landscape: a landscape which has evolved through use by people whose activities or occupancy shaped that landscape. Through social/cultural attitudes of an individual, family or community, the landscape reflects the physical, biological and cultural character if those everyday lives.
3. Historic Sites: a landscape significant for its association with a historic event, activity or person.
4. Ethnographic Landscape: a landscape containing a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people defines as heritage resources.
The World Heritage Committee define a cultural landscape as the "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man". A cultural landscape can be...
1. "a landscape designed and created intentionally by man"
2. an "organic evolved landscape" which may be a "relic (or fossil) landscape" or a "continuing landscape".
3. an "associative cultural landscape" which may be valued because of the "religious artistic or cultural associations of the natural element".
St Kilda in the United Kingdom is an example of a traditional cultural landscape. St Kilda is a volcanic archipelago. It has some of the highest cliffs in Europe, which are home to large colonies of rare and endangered species of birds such as Puffins. Uninhabited since 1930 St Kilda bears the evidence of more than 2000 years of human occupation in the extreme conditions prevalent in the Hebrides. The island is preserved from when the last occupants left the island, and is a cultural attribute.
Arjun Appadurai looked at models of cultural flows and came with the 4 -scapes, these are ethnoscape, technoscape, finanscape and mediascape.
Ethnoscape:
He defined an ethnoscape as a "landscape(s) of a persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live in;""tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers and other moving groups". In its simplest form an ethnoscape is the migration of people across cultures and borders. Examples of this are tourists, immigrants and refugees.
Technoscape:
A technoscape is the "global configuration of technology" which now moves quickly across previously imperious boundaries". Simply it is cultural interactions due to advancing technology.
Finanscape:
A finanscape describes the movements of capital across different borders. It describes how money moves around the world.
Mediascape:
A mediascape looks at the use of the media that shapes the way in which we interpret out imagined world. This can be through digital media such as TV or film, or through other forms of media such as print-based media like newspapers and magazines. These different "-scapes" can come together and interact to create an ideascape. The definition of an ideascape is ideas formed through the combination of the other 4 "-scapes". How they interact can be shown through the cultural web. Appadurai's idea of the different -scapes present culture and globalisation as flowing and being interactive instead of being static.
Landscapes can be 'read'- we can deduce the landscapes meaning by interpreting symbols and features used in their creation. Symbols could include the placement of monuments/religious structures; relationships between the buildings; the architecture, symbols and art used; and the relationship between natural and man made features.
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