It’s always nice to know what our Directors are up to! Kenneth Olwig, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, recently published a new book with Routledge, The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice.
Listen to an excellent podcast with him discussing the themes within the work, recorded by the New Books Network, and the below text is reposted from their site.
In The Meanings of Landscape: Essays on Place, Space, Nature and Justice (Routledge, 2019), Kenneth Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influence from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has now come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment.
Olwig is an American-born landscape geographer, specializing in the study of the Scandinavian landscape. He is best known for advocating a “substantive” understanding landscape, one that incorporates legal and other lived significances of landscape, rather than viewing it in a more purely aesthetic way. His writings include Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic (2002) and Nature’s Ideological Landscape (1984). Olwig is Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture Planning and Management at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, Sweden.
Reposted from New Books Network.