Modernity, Community and the Landscape Idea

Abstract

Landscape has recently achieved a broad intellectual prominence as a theoretical concept across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Its complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized in relation to processes of cultural modernization. Landscape's roots in territorially based community governed by customary law have never been wholly destroyed and an analysis of the evolution of landscapes in Southern California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the context of hypermodernity.