Abstract
Rachel Hunt and Ben Garlick’s Understanding Cultural Landscapes offers an accessible yet conceptually rigorous introduction to landscape study within contemporary cultural geography and allied disciplines. Synthesising traditions from Carl Sauer’s cultural landscape theory 2 to contemporary phenomenology, the book foregrounds landscape not as a purely material entity but as a socio-cultural and political construct. Throughout, the authors maintain a clear distinction between landscape as an expansive relational concept and the ‘site’ as a bounded spatial unit, positioning landscape as an analytically productive frame for understanding how place is culturally produced and contested.
Leaning heavily on the palimpsest metaphor, the text invites readers to treat territory not as a tabula rasa but as a stratified space in which historical meanings and cultural rationalities accumulate over the longue durée. This cultivates in the reader the ‘beholding eye’ 1 – a sensitivity to vestigial traces embedded in everyday environments. The authors make a compelling case, reframing Edinburgh’s post-industrial bings as ‘unintentional landscape sculptures’ (p. 54) – never designed to commemorate, yet monumental through the layered intensity of human practice, temporal depth and environmental transformation. The authors persuasively argue for a design-led and analytical approach which values continuity over erasure.
The text is particularly effective in its treatment of landscape as a ‘way of seeing’. Drawing on Denis Cosgrove, 3 John Berger, Tim Ingold, and John Wylie 4 the authors explore how visuality is culturally and historically constructed. They extend the analysis through feminist and situated knowledge frameworks to emphasise that all ways of seeing are partial, positioned and inherently contested. Yet what most stands out is the authors’ treatment of Indigenous Cultural Landscapes (ICLs). Hunt and Garlick argue that landscape meaning is produced through ongoing interactions among humans, non-humans and land, directly challenging Western nature–culture separations. The discussion underscores the political stakes of recognition: planning and conservation must engage Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge and stewardship to avoid reproducing colonial forms of erasure. By framing ICLs as holistic homelands rather than isolated sites, the book engages substantively with decolonial scholarship and epistemic plurality.
While the book’s engagement with the ‘lived’ and ‘felt’ dimensions of place will be familiar to many cultural geographers, its value lies in how these approaches address contemporary crises. Drawing on affect theory and multispecies relations, landscapes are framed as dynamic assemblages shaped by sensory experience and non-human agency. This becomes particularly compelling via David Matless’s 5 concept of the ‘Anthroposcenic’ (p. 213) – the landscape as the ground upon which our relationship with environmental crisis unfolds, demanding a landscape ethics grounded in environmental stewardship and social justice.
‘Pause for Thought’ exercises and guided seminar activities invite students to apply concepts; from social constructionism and iconographic analysis 6 to ‘affective regionality’ (p. 189) – to their own everyday environments, strengthening analytical skills, spatial awareness and the ability to read the landscape. The book helps cultivate what the authors call ‘pragmatic pluralism’ (p. 5) – a recognition that landscape meaning emerges through everyday use, negotiation and lived experience rather than top-down governance and policy prescription.
Certain thematic strands, particularly visuality and labour, will feel familiar to seasoned geographers; and empirical emphasis remains weighted towards Euro-American contexts. However, these are minor limitations. Understanding Cultural Landscapes brings together diverse approaches to power, perception, embodiment and more-than-human relations into a coherent and accessible framework. It is an essential resource for students and practitioners in cultural geography, landscape architecture and the environmental humanities, offering a valuable roadmap for engaging with contemporary landscape challenges.
