While at UC Berkeley, pursuing a PhD in Ancient History, I took a seminar on the American Landscape and was fascinated. Here was a topic that was far from the pomp and grandeur of the Roman Empire and yet there was something compelling about looking deeply at what was right there in the everyday world around me. The idea of the prosaic, the banal, as a legitimate topic of inquiry was eye-opening and led eventually to a PhD in Cultural Geography. While these books might not alter the reader’s life trajectory, they will hopefully offer an invitation to view the everyday world with a bit more curiosity.
This was the book that made me pause, look around, and realize the prosaic and banal world around us is full of wonder and meaning. While we often think about bombastic, symbolically rich sites, for example, the Lincoln Memorial, as being “meaningful,” the ordinary spaces that we encounter in our daily lives are equally full of meaning.
The built environment around us tells a story. It tells us about our values, our way of life, the way we organize our societies, and our priorities. This is a collection of essays by some of the leading humanistic geographers of the period, but it’s not a theoretical academic thesis but an incredibly accessible guide to making meaning out of the banal built environment around us.
The study of the cultural meaning of landscapes is of increasing interest in several fields. This book attempts to open up the subject to a wider audience, and is the first to deal with the basic principles of reading the landscape'.
J. B. Jackson was an iconoclast, each summer riding his motorcycle between Harvard and Berkeley. Jackson saw America from the road and up close, and in his magazine Landscape, he invited readers to see the every day and the prosaic as well.
His writing illuminates topics like the road, commercial architecture, and mobile homes. Before “Learning from Las Vegas,” Jackson asked us to consider what we could learn from the vernacular architecture around us. His writing is theory-free and offers a meditation on seeing what is around us.
J.B. Jackson, a pioneer in the field of landscape studies, here takes us on a tour of American landscapes past and present, showing how our surroundings reflect important changes in our culture.
Because we live in urban and industrial environments that are constantly evolving, says Jackson, time and movement are increasingly important to us and place and permanence are less so. We no longer gain a feeling of community from where we live or where we assemble but from common work hours, habits, and customs. Jackson examines the new vernacular landscape of trailers, parking lots, trucks, loading docks, and suburban…
This book takes the physical and built environment as the centerpiece for looking at the historical trajectory of the United States. The multiple essays highlight the ways in which the country was being shaped by the interaction of both the physical environment of North America and the cultural forces acting upon the land from Native Americans to the Federal Government.
The landscape is seen as a text that, if one stops to observe, reveals itself as a rich artifact to be examined. Place names, architecture, and land use patterns are not arbitrary but are the result of culture, politics, economics, imperialism, etc.
The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent's physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.
Yi-Fu Tuan’s brilliance is in illustrating how variable and contextual our understanding of space and place really are, and how our experience of the physical world is based on our mental and bodily perceptions of the places and spaces we encounter.
When we are cheering on our favorite team, we want a crowd of like-minded fans (sitting in empty stands is a depressing thought), but heading to the car, that same crowd becomes intolerable. The small town with 2,000 inhabitants can feel stifling, but the big city, with two million people (which demographers would say would be empirically more “crowded”), provides the freedom to be.
Tuan was a leader in the field of humanistic geography and his writings are a pleasurable meditation of our place in the world.
A study of the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time."Since it is the breadth and universality of his argument that concerns Yi-Fu Tuan, experience is defined as 'all the modes by which a person knows and constructs reality,' and examples are taken with equal ease from non-literate cultures, from ancient and modern oriental and western civilizations, from novels, poetry, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties…
Chicago played a pivotal role in the development of the US and Cronon’s work brings to the fore the physical landscape in his environmental and economic history. From pigs to lumber, rail lines to Lake Michigan, the teeming city and its environs are made effervescent.
When sitting in a cozy corner of your favorite coffee shop with this book in your hand, you can almost feel yourself enveloped in the miasma emanating from the stockyards, and you’ll appreciate how gifted of a guide your author is through the dry facts of commodities that passed through Chicago.
It’s a hefty tome, but in the end, you’ll wish for more scenes from this city and the prairie that surrounds it.
In this groundbreaking work, William Cronon gives us an environmental perspective on the history of nineteenth-century America. By exploring the ecological and economic changes that made Chicago America's most dynamic city and the Great West its hinterland, Mr. Cronon opens a new window onto our national past. This is the story of city and country becoming ever more tightly bound in a system so powerful that it reshaped the American landscape and transformed American culture. The world that emerged is our own.
This book brings together the literature of landscape geography, tourism studies, cultural studies, and semiotics to explore the interaction between urban environments, national identity, and tourism. Using the theoretical writings of the American Pragmatist Charles S. Peirce on interpretation, this book explores the ways in which thoughts and objects shape our understanding of place.
This study illustrates the importance of the American School of Semiotics to landscape studies and how attention to meaning can help in urban planning and tourism development. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it highlights the role of national culture, architecture, and the prosaic in urban tourism.
