Beyond the view: Future directions in landscape aesthetics research

The dominant view of landscape research in the latter half of the 20th century saw landscape aesthetics as a discrete area of study, a socio-cultural value detached from other considerations. This view was later challenged by proponents of ecological aesthetics, who countered that what makes landscapes beautiful is often intimately linked to other intrinsic landscape values, such as biodiversity, and that these other values can shift perceptions of how we perceive and appreciate the beauty of landscapes. At the same time, environmental psychologists and others wrestled with questions regarding the extent to which landscape aesthetics had a biological or cultural basis, and examined the impact of individual differences and life experiences. More recently landscape urbanism has reexamined the drivers of urban landscape change, prompting questions of whether landscape aesthetics should be abandoned in favour of landscape pragmatism and instrumentality. Furthermore, new understandings of how we might best sustain biological diversity in the context of global climate change signal an end to the perceived biological status quo and the advent of an aesthetics of necessity. This essay outlines these trends and explores their implications for researching landscape aesthetics. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V.