Reconciling Cultural and Cognitive

This chapter dissects a contemporary idea of landscape into its multiple components. The text analyzes a series of landscape constructs in a conceptual sequence moving from elemental to elaborate: ur-Landschaft; habitat; environment; territory; cultural landscape; cognitive landscape. The chapter discusses various positions that have been recently confronting over the notion of landscape, whose alternative landscape paradigms gather around two opposite fronts: the ‘culturalist-geophilosophical’ and the ‘scientific-cognitivist’. The text elaborates on a number of the diverse layers and components referable to a contemporary landscape notion. Components and layers derive from literature and practice, originating in the present and in the recent or remote past. The text, then, examines with specific focus the contended character of continuity or discontinuity of the notion of landscape and its evolution both in time and space, on which the very essence of the notion is dependent. The text compares positions describing the landscape as an aboriginal construct generated by the man/nature interaction and others regarding landscape as a sophisticated construct only generated when man’s manipulation of space drops any utilitarian purpose aiming at a greater perfection. The text then construes a landscape paradigm capable to accommodate both culturalist and cognitivist layers and components from previously analyzed models. Reformed and recombined the layers and components conform a new ‘symbiotic landscape paradigm’ that is described and graphically represented in a diagram.