(BQ) Part 2 book "Everyday America" has contents: Interpreting twentieth century urban landscapes, questioning theoretical assumptions, normative dimensions of landscape, private property and the ecological commons in the American west,. | GEORGE L. HENDERSON WHAT (ELSE) WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LANDSCAPE 11 For a Return to the Social Imagination A view, a place, a picture, an angle on the world . . . a landscape. How many meanings of that word might there be? Anyone who has been a student of landscape for even a short period of time, or who has read the dictionary entry, for that matter, will surely discover that the meanings are multiple, and perhaps multiplying. But how do these meanings serve the cultural and social critique that is the point of much landscape scholarship, and how does such critique itself generate landscape meanings? That landscape has multiple meanings, that it is a concept and refers not just to a portion of the external world, or to actual material places—seen, depicted, walked through, or built—is well worth contemplating, or recalling, as would be the case for readers of . Jackson’s many essays. Landscape is worthy of attention as a concept because shifts in meaning may slip by unnoticed, and once they do, the reasons to study and appreciate landscape critically, whatever concept of it is adopted, may also be forgotten. The risk of this sort of recuperative work, however, should not 178 WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LANDSCAPE | 179 be overlooked, perhaps especially by those who need no reminding about the multiplicity of landscape: What exactly are the reasons to foreground landscape, and are they defensible? Because the answer depends on what is meant by landscape in the first place, much can be gained by clarifying what it is we talk about when we talk about landscape, and what else we might then have to say. Not least is the recognition that such talk raises important issues—for instance, matters of social justice and norms—that the dominant landscape concepts may be ill-equipped to resolve. COMING INTO THE COUNTRY The recent history and treatment of landscape (and some strongly affiliated concepts) in geography is one way to begin looking at landscape .
