The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1315261

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

Perceived safety from crime in the urban environment

This article is a review of the first ten years of “prospect-refuge theory.” It discusses briefly the purposes and limitations of simple explanatory models and compares the theory specifically with the “Davisian cycle.” It identifies certain misconceptions about the theory and reviews some of the attempts that have been made to test it and to use it in landscape evaluation and landscape description and in literary and art criticism.

Prospects and Refuges Re-Visited

This paper is a response to several recent critical reviews and to the perceived need for a unifying theory of the field of landscape assessment. Three approaches or paradigms are identified in terms of their theoretical or conceptual orientations and their potential contributions to the field: professional, behavioral, and humanistic. Different levels of theory and the major theoretical and conceptual themes that run through the paradigms—normative aesthetic values, biological heritage, and cultural influence—are illustrated with selected examples from the scientific and professional literature. A transactional theoretical orientation is suggested as a basis for studying relationships within and among paradigms and themes and for contributing incrementally to knowledge and applications in the field.

Themes in Landscape Assessment Theory

Studies of the “human dimension” of landscapes have become increasingly important in landscape also as a “place” with its meanings and contributions to societal identity. In this chapter, we present some of the key theories of landscape experience and empirical research related to those theories. They are grouped around three concepts: First, we survey theories dealing with landscapes perceived as a physical space, covering topics such as environmental preference and the evolutionary basis of the psychological processes through which preferences arise. Secondly, we summarize some of the theories dealing with landscape perceived as place. Here we discuss concepts such as “sense of place” and “place identity”. We emphasize that place identity is a particular element contributing to sense of place. Thirdly, we discuss theory and research concerning the role of landscapes for psychological restoration, which bridges the approaches that treat landscape as space and those which treat it as place. In the conclusion, we provide some suggestions for further integrative work.

Mary Powell

Papers

Prospect‐refuge theory under test

Landscape evaluation and the quest for objectivity

Variations on a theme of dying trees