The Social Genesis of the Definition of Landscape

Abstract

Previous chapters have established that the concept of landscape is a product of the social mechanisms by which meanings are defined in language—in this case, as Wescoat (2008) has noted, especially (but not exclusively) in the language of politics and economics; for other organizational systems—administrative, educational, scientific, and medial—are also interested in the interpretation, conservation, and change of the spaces in which we live.

Previous chapters have established that the concept of landscape is a product of the social mechanisms by which meanings are defined in language—in this case, as Wescoat (2008) has noted, especially (but not exclusively) in the language of politics and economics; for other organizational systems—administrative, educational, scientific, and medial—are also interested in the interpretation, conservation, and change of the spaces in which we live. All these systems exercise power—including the power of hierarchical social distinction—over the linguistic mechanisms of definition. The entire process is an aspect of socialization.

4.1 Socialization of Landscape Constructs

The paucity of instincts and patterns of congenital behavior in the human has as its converse a marked openness toward the world (see e.g. Plessner 1924; Gehlen 1956; Berger and Luckmann 1966) and a natural adaptativeness to life in society. “The individual, however, is not born a member of society. He is born with a predisposition toward sociality, and he becomes a member of society” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 129). The socialization process in which this occurs is one of learning which involves experience, thinking and doing. According to Fend (1981) the process has a twofold function: on the one hand to reproduce society (through the transmission of roles, values and norms), and on the other to equip the individual to act within society—a self-programming (Mead and Morris 1967) of consciousness that entails the acquisition and internalization of the roles, values, customs, and patterns of action operative in a particular society (see also Durkheim 2013 [1912]). Far from making the individual a simple “victim of circumstances” (Nissen 1998, p. 12), however, the socialization process is one in which “the personality germinates and grows in mutual exchange with its mediated social and material environment” (Geulen and Hurrelmann 1980, p. 51).

It is in this everyday environment that meaning—including spatial meaning—is constructed in accordance with material and cultural objects, patterns, and structures mediated by others (see Geulen 1991, 2005; Piaget 1937). Here the individual develops the moral and ethical, cognitive and emotional, social and aesthetic competencies that underlie “a productive interaction with the environment centered on individual needs and interests” (Nissen 1998, p. 32; see also Peatross and Peponis 1995; Grundmann 2006). Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 130) distinguish between primary and secondary socialization: “Primary socialization is the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood, through which he becomes a member of society. Secondary socialization is any subsequent process that inducts an already socialized individual into new sectors of the objective world of his society.” Primary socialization largely determines an individual’s chances in life, for it is here that the foundations of a normal ‘everyday’ access to world and self are laid.

Far from being neutral, the patterns of meaning mediated in the socialization process are infused with power. As Prengel (1994, p. 64) puts it: “The situations in which people are socialized are generally hierarchical, reflecting the hierarchies of culture, social class, and gender.” Successful socialization therefore entails both “adaptation and resistance to hierarchies, the art (and artfulness) of living within them and seeking profitable aspects for oneself […]” (Prengel 1994, p. 64; and see Monk 1992). Here the early experience of social inequality, especially in the distribution of life’s chances, is crucial, and with it the awareness of the existence of different interpretations of the social and material environment (Mansel and Hurrelmann 2003)—an environment whose objective ‘reality’ can either be accepted or critically questioned.

Nor is the socialization process completed with entry into adulthood: it is a lifelong process. The idea that a young adult has achieved relatively stable maturity no longer matches the conditions in which we live. These require spatial and social flexibility, lifelong learning, and the fragmentation of ‘normal’ biographies. Every phase of life today imposes its own specific developmental tasks (Elder 2000), if only at the level of daily routines that must be practiced in a socially accepted way; and with age, prior personal experience plays an increasingly important role (Hurrelmann 2006). Given the shift in life conditions, and the multiplicity of competing patterns of social action—from problem solving to conflict regulation—with which we are continuously confronted, analysts speak of a new type of ‘patchwork identity’ peculiar to the postmodern era (Keupp 1992, p. 176) that has turned socialization into a permanent reflective process (see Veith 2008; Böhnisch et al. 2009; for a more detailed analysis see Kühne 2008a, b).

4.1.1 General Socialization of Landscape in Childhood, Youth, and Early Adulthood

One of the material elements that falls within the complex cultural scope of socialization is landscape. The step in which the indefinite ‘other’ confronting my childhood self becomes a named and recognizable ‘landscape’ is rooted in cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic competencies exercised not only in relation to that ‘other’, but also to my reactions to it, whether socially desired, tolerated or proscribed (Proshansky et al. 1983; and see Thrift 1983; Nissen 1998; De Visscher and Bouverne-De Bie 2008; Kühne 2008a, 2013; Somerville et al. 2009). Socialization makes of these competencies a blueprint that successively modifies, and is modified by, individual experience of the spatial phenomena we call landscape. The process can be thought of as an aspect of the acquisition of everyday knowledge on which the social reality of our world as a system of manageable—because habitual and unquestioned—certainties is founded (Schutz and Luckmann 1973). As already explained earlier, landscape can be understood as a ‘special case’ of space (each understood as social constructions). Accordingly, landscape socialization can also be understood as a special case of the socialization of space, an this “spatial socialization may be defined as the process through which individual actors and collectivities are socialized as members of specific, territorially bounded spatial entities, and through which they more or less actively internalize territorial identities and shared traditions” (Paasi 1999, p. 4).

In Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) sense, the socialization of everyday knowledge, emotional relations, symbolic representation and others is part of primary socialization, and as such based on “one’s own experiences and the knowledge mediated by parents and friends, books and films about prescriptions and prohibitions, beginning with the simple labeling of things as good and ugly, edible and inedible” (Kruse-Graumann 1996, p. 172; and see e.g. Somerville et al. 2009). Even the extent to which, and in what circumstances, emotion is an appropriate reaction is subject to this kind of regulation (Eisenberg et al. 1998).

Apart from knowledge gained in school and other educational institutions, acquaintanceship with landscape and its attributes is generally unsystematic. In childhood—or more precisely in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development between six or seven and eleven or twelve years of age (Piaget and Inhelder 1948; and see Ahrend 1997)—such knowledge is generally mediated through ‘significant others’ (Mead and Morris 1967), especially the father. This statement is backed by evidence empirically gathered by Kühne (2006a, p. 182) in a survey with a quantitative sample of n = 455 and a qualitative analysis of 31 interviewees, of which the following example is typical:

I first became conscious of landscape as a 6–7 year-old when I walked with my father on Sunday mornings from [place name] to [place name] and we looked across from [place name] to [place name].

Characteristic of this early construction of landscape is its detachment, its lack of immediacy, although it still takes place against a backdrop of concrete events and perceptions (see Piaget and Inhelder 1948; Peatross and Peponis 1995). Landscape is construed as a concrete physical object whose content is gradually assimilated to received interpretive patterns (Kook 2008). In later childhood and youth, these patterns are complemented with independent ascriptions, on which the peer group exercises increasing pressure, as the following example (see Kühne 2006a, p. 183) illustrates:

So I first really became aware of it [landscape] when I was 6 or 7, during the war or shortly afterward, when we here in [place name] began to play further away from the house. We would say ‘We’re going into the fields’, or ‘We’re going into the woods’. Then sometime later—we would have been about 9 or 10—we would say to each other ‘Let’s play landscape games’—meaning cops and robbers.

Within its interactive horizon, the peer group develops its own world of understanding in which individual activities and attitudes are mutually attuned (Veith 2008) and meanings defined—for example in the agreement (whether implicit or explicit) about what is and is not ‘landscape’ as a physical setting for a young boys’ game. Especially important in this youthful appropriation of space is what Burckhardt (1980, p. 140) calls “no-man’s-lands”: spaces left unmarked by society or individual ownership that are available without any particular sanction for the group (or individual) as secret meeting places, hideouts, dens etc., if needs be furnished with the insignia of proprietorship. In this respect, the acquisition of space reflects “everyday practice with its forms of behavior and action, its cognitive and affective processes” (Chambart de Lowe 1977, p. 26; and see Graham 1998).

Among the landscape constructs whose foundations are laid in childhood and adolescence, pride of place must be accorded to the normative home landscape (Kühne 2006a, b, 2008a); the emotionally charged surroundings in which one grows up and which generally pass into adulthood as a stable and unquestioned standard untouched by aesthetic or cognitive criteria. One’s home landscape is “filled with early memories of regional speech and sounds, with smells, colors, gestures and moods—things that speak to one and remain deeply anchored in the memory (Hüppauf 2007, p. 112; and see Proshansky et al. 1983; Stremlow 2001; De Visscher and Bouverne-De Bie 2008; Micheel 2012): molding consciousness, the contours of this landscape “offer an enduring maternal shelter and home” (Hard 1969, p. 11). In adulthood this is reinforced by the experience of other landscapes, but even here the home landscape will remain subliminally dominant until external events impinge with sufficient force to question its normative status—either by a change in its physical shape or by the re-rooting of the individual in another, different landscape, whether through travel, change of domicile, or (generally to a lesser extent) the influence of the media (Kühne 2008b; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a).

A second major influence is the stereotypical landscape (Kühne 2006a, b, 2008a; and see Bacher et al. 2016). As with stereotypes in general, the simplifying impact of such landscapes is not related to objective criteria of truth. But they, too, underpin the production and development of individual matrices of social action. Here, however, the operative factor is not so much the direct confrontation with physical space as the secondary presentation of such space in the media (Kühne 2008a, 2015b). In Central Europe this tends to focus on pre-industrial signifiers and meanings: woods, meadows, streams, mountains etc. (see e.g. Hoisl et al. 1987, 1989; Ulrich 1977; Konold 1996; Hunziker and Kienast 1999; Ipsen et al. 2003). The attractiveness of such landscapes lies in the cognitive simplicity of their symbolism (Jackson 1984), the relative universality of their aesthetic standards, and their emotional ‘homeliness’ (Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1

A stereotypical Central European landscape from the Bliesgau (Saarland; Photo Olaf Kühne)

The internalized interpretive patterns of normative home landscape and its stereotypical counterpart underlie and form our perceptions as an active, evaluative force: “Whenever we are confronted with new experiences, we involuntarily compare our perceptions and feelings of landscape with the images stored in our memory” (Nohl 2004, p. 37)—‘the mountains are higher than ours’, ‘there is less industry than at home’, ‘that high-rise block spoils the landscape’, ‘the power station is ugly’ etc. (see Said 2000; for a more detailed analysis see Kühne 2006a, 2008a, b; Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.2

A physical complex, which, in its misty, romantic dawn atmosphere, expresses a Central European stereotype. When the mist lifts, the sun will shine, however, on high-rise blocks in the valley and a line of pylons carrying electricity across it (Photo Olaf Kühne)

It follows that the normative home landscape cannot itself function as a stereotype: it is too familiar and emotionally charged for that (see Kühne 2006a, 2007a, b, 2008b; Kühne and Schönwald 2014, 2015c). The immunity of the native landscape to stereotypical ascriptions preserves it from subjection, either mental or real, to abstract, alienated standards of beauty, whether at the individual level (in the sense of loss of value of the home landscape in comparison with a stereotype) or at the social level (in the reality of dysfunctional attempts to ‘improve’ its physical appearance).

4.1.2 Influences on Landscape Awareness: Gender, Mobility, Mass Media

The social landscape is no more than a body of meanings and values onto which an individually perceived landscape is, so to speak, plotted. These two are not identical. However, individually traced patterns also have a social dimension, which can be briefly described in the impact of three variables: gender, mobility, and mass media.

According to Ipsen (2002; more fully in Kühne 2015c), the cognitive, functional, emotional and aesthetic components of landscape awareness reveal gender-specific differences both in their socialization processes and in their adult structures. In the quantitative survey referred to above, Kühne (2006a; n = 455) established a significantly higher level of cognitive knowledge of landscape in male than in female respondents, while in the qualitative survey women on the whole perceived landscape aesthetically and men more cognitively. These results can be ascribed to polarized gender role types and socialization processes, which for girls and women lay emphasis on the emotional and aesthetic, for boys and men on the cognitive, functional, and exploratory-proprietary (Hagemann-White 1993; and see Saugeres 2002). Typifications of this sort also marked earlier geography teaching in Germany, whose gender image Schultz (2006, p. 114) pithily categorized as “soul and feeling are womanly, understanding and action manly” (original emphasis). To the present day, the socialization of girls has, in fact, often tended to passivity and—informed by an implicit fear of rape—centered on house and home, whereas that of boys has taken greater account of the socializing force of active spatial exploration (Monk 1992; Radding 2005; Nissen 1998; Kühne 2008a, b).

Another important factor in the construction of landscape—in this case an intergenerational difference—is mobility. In 1955, Pfeil noted that children explored the space around their home in more or less concentric circles, but this has now changed. Developing means and patterns of transportation (automobile, bus, streetcar, subway, airplane etc.) have long since linked locations with different specific functions, with the result that landscape—even visually—is increasingly perceived as a set of spatial islands (Bertels 1997).

A third factor is the virtual landscapes of media and cyberspace, which stand in competition with the constructs of immediate perception. Their informative-interpretive models frequently have recourse to stereotypes which themselves draw on individual stereotypes. One sees this, for example, in films and computer games, which regularly choose scenic elements that reflect common associations of outdoor space with action (Asmuth 2005; and see Sects. 4.3.4 and 5.6 below). However, “the actual impact of mass media” on social perceptions of landscape is difficult to determine, as it “depends closely […] on individual usage” (Veith 2008, p. 29). Nevertheless, it is clear from both qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys that the Internet in particular has increasingly influenced individual constructions of landscape (Kühne 2014b; Fig. 4.3).

Fig. 4.3

Frequency of answers by age group (n = 1546) to the question ‘How do you acquire knowledge of landscape?’—multiple answers possible. The pale bar for the ‘under-15’ age group, and the lack of a percentage figure, reflect the statistical unreliability of answers in this cohort (diagram after Kühne 2014b)

4.1.3 Socialization of the Concept of Landscape Among Specialists

While the non-professional socialization of landscape, whether in childhood, adolescence, or adult life, takes place—apart from school geography classes—in a largely unsystematic fashion, its conceptual development among adult professionals is systematic. This ‘secondary socialization’ takes place in what Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 138) call the “institution-based ‘subworlds’” of tertiary education: college and university departments of landscape planning, architecture, ecology and gardening, as well as (to some extent) geography and biology. Glaser and Chi (1988) have demonstrated that landscape specialists possess outstanding knowledge in their field: rather than simply experiencing landscape, they ‘read’ it quickly and meaningfully on both large and smaller scales, use their memory effectively, and perceive and address problems at a deeper level than laypeople. They also spend a lot of time on the qualitative analysis of landscape issues, and are more self-reflective in their procedures than laypeople, so they are generally more sensitive to problems and errors.

The differences in socialization between specialists and non-professionals are clearly expressed in Kühne’s interview with the physical geographer K.U. (Kühne 2006a, p. 189):

My sense of landscape was greatly reinforced at university. In fact, I only became really conscious of it then […], thought about why landscapes are as they are. Before that time I just accepted it, saw landscapes as impressive. It was only at university that I began to look analytically at that question: why they have that particular shape. Moreover, that’s where I still am. I think: Just look at those strata!

University—as Hilbig (2014, p. 98) comments of architectural students—turns the world-view of young people upside down: “By the time they graduate they can only see buildings in that way: as beautiful, ugly, honest, inauthentic etc.” (original emphasis). The same is evidently true of landscape. Today the training of landscape specialists has created a class of “organized professionals who are entrusted with the solution of problems” (Tänzler 2007, p. 125), and a corresponding acceptance of the distinction between “those who are competent [in this field] and those who are not” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 13). The former, in our functionally differentiated society, possess a problem-solving monopoly (see e.g. Larson 1977; Freidson 1986; Luhmann 1990; Stichweh 1997; Weingart 2003; Tänzler 2007; Hilbig 2014; Kühne 2014c; Matheis 2016). In Ipsen’s (2002) terms, their approach to landscape is cognitive rather than emotional, while in the lay awareness of landscape the dominance of the latter dimension is evident in the normative appeal of the native landscape and later aesthetic stereotypes.

Empirical research (Kühne 2006a, 2014b; Hunziker et al. 2008; Hunziker 2010; Hokema 2015; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a; Bacher et al. 2016) suggests in this context that Ipsen’s triad of cognition, aesthetics and emotion should be complemented with a functional dimension—although experts and non-experts tend to interpret ‘functional’ in widely differing senses. For experts it means the function of a ‘landscape’ (e.g. rough grazing or recreation), whereas for laypeople it tends to refer more narrowly to their personal free-time requirements (e.g. walking, cycling, paragliding, or photography), the typical question here being ‘Is it good for me?’ (Kühne 2015c). Among experts, the aesthetic dimension of socialization also tends to differ according to training and specialty. This is evident above all in the difference between planners, who give less, and designers, who give more weight to aesthetics. For Debes (2005, p. 117), landscape design means “intentionally altering landscape in a symbiosis of the functional and the artistic”, while planning seeks “convincing solutions that combine rational consideration of conflicting interests and objective evaluation [of alternatives].” Above all in the planning disciplines, the socialization of the concept of landscape is, with few exceptions, positivist, with constructivist positions treated, if anything, cursorily (Jessel 2000; Kühne 2008a). Accordingly, typifications such as ‘green belt’, ‘saprobic system’, ‘landscape element’, ‘climate classification’ etc. are applied to physical space—for the most part uncritically and to the point of ritual repetition—creating unreflected stereotypes (see Kühne 2008a and Sect. 4.2 below) that differ from those of laypeople only in being based on scientific method and a corresponding canon rather than on tradition and emotion. In both cases the constitutive mechanism is what Berger and Luckmann (1969) call ‘objectification’ (see also Hard 1991, 2002c [1970], 2002 [1971]; Schneider 1989; Weingart 2003; Hilbig 2014).

The scholarly approach to landscape in the relevant disciplines also reveals considerable dependence on schematic interpretations in Bourdieu’s (1979, 1985) sense, which, for all their ostensible neutrality with regard to the physical genesis of landscapes, mediate an implicit or explicit scale of values that elevates ‘historical cultural landscape’ to a primacy verging on the sacral. Wöbse (1999, p. 271), for example, declares that “the conservation of a historical cultural landscape is an obligation, its development a task” (for similar views see Zimmermann 1982; Wagner 1997; Quasten 1997; Denecke 2000; for further detail see Sect. 4.2 below). In this sense physical change is “experienced as ‘loss’, ‘decline’ or ‘destruction’ of the real or supposed former qualities” of a landscape (Hokema 2009, p. 241). Stereotypes of this kind reduce the complexities of a world or situation to a simple disjunction (see Luhmann 1984), subjecting multiple sense impressions to a rapid (and often rigorous) evaluation that categorizes them as either ‘fitting’ or ‘unfitting’. That experts are, in fact, more liable than laypeople to make judgments of this kind is noted by Tessin (2008, p. 136; and see Hilbig 2014), who comments: “Urbanization is largely seen in professional landscape aesthetics as […] a ‘disfigurement’ or ‘devouring’ of the landscape,” whereas laypeople see it as “also having something to do with ‘living’ comfortably.”

4.1.4 Relation Between Lay and Expert Views of Landscape

Lay and expert attitudes should not, however, be thought of as polar opposites: they represent, rather, the opposite ends of a continuum (Kühne 2008b) whose intervening space has become increasingly important in a world where education and information are widely available; the informed newspaper reader or scientifically literate member of a citizens’ initiative are cases in point. Nevertheless, this does not nullify the fundamental distinction between professionals and laypeople (see Weingart 2003, 2012; Kühne 2008b).

Some of these differences are illustrated in Fig. 4.4, a photograph shown to a total of 399 people who were asked to characterize it with three concepts. Laypeople almost unanimously described the scene as beautiful: a peaceful, balanced natural landscape. Experts, on the other hand, immediately noted its shortcomings, which differed (sometimes widely) according to their discipline. Landscape conservationists remarked on the sparseness of fruit trees and hedges in the foreground and the encroaching woodland on the slopes in the middle ground; agriculturalists considered the hay bales on the field in the foreground as too numerous for balanced husbandry; forestry scientists objected to the monocultural spruce plantations in the background, and urban planners to the irregular roof shapes of the settlement in the middle ground (Kühne 2008a, b).

Fig. 4.4

A landscape open to varying professional and lay constructions (Photo Olaf Kühne)

Laypeople have frequently, in varying intensities, acquired unsystematic bits and pieces of expert knowledge and interpretive models from their schooling, or from books, newspapers, excursions etc., and these may often be in conflict (Korff 2008, p. 103) with the aesthetic and emotional dimensions of their landscape awareness. Tourists in the Black Forest, for example, may be prepared to accept what they might otherwise regard as ugly aspects of the landscape “once they recognize these as regionally specific” (Korff 2008, p. 103). And this type of conflict may also beset experts (Kühne 2008b). Thus a biogeographer interviewed by Kühne (2006a, p. 192), answered the question ‘What makes a piece of the earth’s surface or a specific area into a landscape?’ as follows:

OK – on the one hand closed ecological systems, on the other hand whatever I see. In addition, that may be the totality of all the various aspects of the landscape – of the ecosystems. That, of course, contradicts what I just said. On the one hand I defined landscapes as ecosystems; but on the other hand … when I look out of the window I see an urban landscape, and behind it the Bliesgau, for example, or Saarkohlenwald Forest … that’s a contradiction, I admit.

The intense selectivity of specialist training—an ecologist sees landscape primarily as an ecosystem, a geomorphologist as a contoured surface)—results in structures that transcend the categories of the particular discipline being relegated to general knowledge. Thus, the biologist may have no more differentiated access to the beauty of landscape than a layperson. Experts develop various strategies to cope with this disparity (Kühne 2006a):

• (a) bypassing primarily socialized landscape awareness or treating it as irrelevant

• (b) consternation at the apparent contradiction of their own concept of landscape

• (c) equating the beauty of landscape with ecosystem factors

• (d) acceptance of the polyvalence of their own concept of landscape

• (e) creation of a synthesis of primarily and secondarily socialized landscape awareness.

These five strategies reveal different evaluations of lay and expert attitudes: (a)–(c) set the expert approach to landscape hierarchically above the lay; (d) sees them as hierarchically equal; (e) sees lay awareness as complementing and extending that of the experts.

Table 4.1 presents a comparison between various perspectives on landscape.

Table 4.1 Contextually variant evaluations of appropriated physical landscape (after Hunziker 1995, 2010)

Differences in awareness of landscape deriving from different levels of professionalization give rise to social distinctions. This will be treated in the following section.

4.2 Social Distinction and Landscape

The attractiveness of physical landscape as a social construct cannot be gauged in terms of spatial complexity (see e.g. Ulrich 1979; Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Prominski 2004; Ipsen 2006; Weis 2008; Ode et al. 2010; Papadimitriou 2010), or accessibility to individual or communal appropriation (see Burckhardt e.g. 1978c; for greater detail Kühne 2013a); it is an inherent function of processes of social distinction which are reproduced in landscape not only as a social construct, but also in the individual and even physical actualizations of that construct—or, to put it another way, as the symbolic communication of physical order (see Duncan 1999). In this context, Rotenberg’s words, albeit primarily referring to urban landscapes, have a wider application: “The forms that impose upon their environment represent their social selves. Because they can build on a monumental scale, institutional leaders produce elaborate and complete representations of their vision of the metropolis. As groups of institutional leaders succeed each other in power, they appropriate a specific set of public landscape design possibilities to represent their vision” (Rotenberg 1995, p. 4). Seeking sustainability and ‘normalization’, power tends to inscribe itself permanently on the physical environment—not least in its claim to exercise social control over life’s opportunities.

4.2.1 Social Distinction and the Aesthetics of Landscape

4.2.1.1 Landscape as a Class Signifier in the Wake of Social Modernization

As a synoptic construct of symbols and physical objects, landscape is largely indebted to the code of landscape painting (see Chap. 3). Art—and with it landscape both in and as art—is particularly adapted to express social distinctions of taste and the legitimacy accorded them by the ruling class (Bourdieu 1979; Kühne 2008a). After all, art-and-landscape discourse employs a special register and code (Resch 1999), whose nuances must be learned from experts. Access to the stylistic critique of Classicism and Romanticism, of the Enlightenment and Biedermeier, is confined to the educated classes. Only they have the necessary susceptibility to “the landscape ideals” implicit in the “parallel manifestations of the beautiful and the sublime” (Riedel 1989, p. 45) specific to each of these movements. In the German-speaking countries of Central Europe, Schiller and Eichendorff, Droste-Hülshoff, Lorrain, Friedrich and Runge all contributed to the genesis of a stereotypical social ideal of landscape, whose evolution can be seen as both accompanying and countering that of the normative home landscape (Manwaring 1965; Kühne 2008a).

The inscription on physical space of the landscape visions of painting—and to a lesser extent poetry—is graphically illustrated in the phenomenon of the so-called ‘Claude glass’, a tinted mirror used by artists and travelers in the 18th and early 19th centuries to emulate the tonal gradations of Claude Lorrain: “the glass was moved to and fro until it captured, as it were, a ‘Lorrain landscape’, on which, significantly, the observer had turned his or her back” (Kortländer 1977, p. 37; and see Cosgrove 1985; Groth and Wilson 2003). The very possession of such an instrument—all the more so its use and the description of the impressions it conveyed—demonstrated not only the constructed nature of landscape but also the distinctiveness of those aware of it.

When, in the wake of the Enlightenment, landscape was rediscovered, few physical spaces in the open countryside could actually represent the social ideal. Their place was taken by the landscaped gardens and parks of the 18th and 19th century ruling class—precincts, like the French Garden, with highly restricted rights of access (see Maier-Solgk and Greuter 1997). The Romantic aesthetic that infused and appropriated both wild and agriculturally productive landscape also followed the functional logic of landscape as a universal (in the sense proposed by Veblen 1899), elevating the non-useful into the aesthetic code and applying it—at a symbolic rather than physical level—as an instrument of social distinction (see Kühne 2006a, 2008a). For with the Industrial Revolution, the social as well as economic significance of agriculture had diminished rapidly, and the aesthetic vision of nature henceforth found expression in emotional contemplation and enjoyment (Haber 1992; Fuhrer 1997; Hoeres 2004). Oppositional pairings derived from the Enlightenment, such as “nature and God, nature and history, nature and science, and even nature and culture” (Dethloff 1995a, p. 7) became the standard by which educated people viewed the world. Nevertheless, by implication, these polarities affirmed that nature qua nature was also constructed—and not merely by “alien, imposed connotations or religious and moral claims on meaning” (Warnke 1992, p. 137): the Romantic answer to this development was the wholesale re-enchantment of nature (see Chap. 3).

The aesthetic of the sublime was predicated of nature as a new world-view steeped in symbolism (Hammerschmidt and Wilke 1990), borne by the new urban elites of the 19th century (Graham et al. 2000). The enlightened, with their technical prowess, could furnish a designer landscape with a ruin as a symbol of bygone days, of the transience of fame, and of a yearning for the imagined authenticity of a former age (Burckhardt 1979b; Hartmann 1981; Sieferle 1984; Thacker 1995; Hauser 2001). In this sense, the Romantics developed a sentimental relation to the Middle Ages in sharp opposition to the Enlightenment (Hegel 1970 [1835–1838]; Illing 2006). The medieval castle became a symbol of the “particularity of feudal resistance” (Warnke 1992, p. 54), and—especially after Novalis—of the “quest for a long-lost era, mirrored in individual childhood and that of the human race, […] when faith and love had [not yet been] supplanted by knowledge and possession” (Safranski 2007, p. 129). The irony of romanticizing castles, which until the Early Modern Age had stood for “the more aggressive forms of local violence” (Liddiard 2005, p. 2), went largely unnoticed.

According to Dethloff, the Romantic concept of landscape projected a dominant social construct—that of the elevated individual of the 18th and 19th centuries—onto the image of divine creation. Gripped in the “high frenzy of the promeneur solitaire” (Dethloff 1995b, p. 27; original emphasis), the enlightened wanderer read into both wild and hand-hewn landscapes the “ideal contours of a fusion between society and culture” (Jessel 2004, p. 22), personified in the figure of the peasant as unspoilt ‘natural man’ (Bray 1995; see Haupt 1998; Pollard 1998; Greenberg 2007 [1939]). The motif of the promeneur solitaire has persisted in Western society in the form of the lonesome rider of film (whether on horseback or motor-cycle), the flaneur of essays and journalism, and the city ‘night-hawk’ fraught with the burden of impending decision or threatening fate.

The landscape aesthetic was maintained by the aristocratic and bourgeois classes: the affluent industrialists, merchants, and intellectuals whom Bourdieu (1979) collectively defines as the ‘ruling class’. Not immediately dependent on the physical produce of the countryside, they enjoyed the cultural competence and necessary economic distance to the wild—as well as peasant-farmed—landscape to treat it as an aesthetic complex and, as such, a discursive marker of social distinction. They were in possession not only of the codes of landscape art handed down “in the literary forms of the 18th century: in essays, geographical and natural history travelogues, and fictional (for example idyllic) writing” (Hard 1977, p. 14; and see Hard 2002a [1969]; Cosgrove 1984), but also of the complex religious and mystical patterns of Romantic landscape painting. Natural beauty was accordingly something that could “only be upheld in the silence of educated contemplation” (Zeller 2002, p. 25); landscape became a “cultural weltanschauung” (see Manwaring 1965; Hard 1977, 2002a [1969a]; Cosgrove 1984; Hugill 1986; Haber 2000), or as Piepmeier (1980, p. 32) forcefully put it: “Natural beauty only exists in elitist seclusion.” But, for all their desire to “flee the social shackles and physical confinement of the city” (Kaufmann 2005, p. 59), the educated urban classes were inevitably subject to the forces of “power and money—the tribute of taxes, tenancies, interest, and produce flowing into the city” from the surrounding countryside (Burckhardt 1995b, p. 272; and see Cosgrove 1984). In connection with the economic-aesthetic distancing of the educated classes from nature, Burckhardt (1977, p. 19) summarizes the reciprocity between the social appropriation of landscape and its physical planning in the following terms: landscape “is a perceptual construct used by a society that no longer lives directly from the soil: a way of looking that can shape or disfigure the outside world when that society begins to implement its perspective in the form of planning.”

Achleitner illustrates the obduracy with which the farmers, who are responsible for the stereotypical beauty of many landscapes, resisted (and in places still resist) the implications of this perspective. He comments: “in many Alpine areas it was not until the 1950s that the farmers finally succumbed to the hard drug of sentimental regional films and began to look on their working environment as beautiful, or even worth preserving” (Achleitner 1997, pp. 54–55). In this latter aspect they were aided and abetted by the realization that “there are people who find the [Alpine] environment desirable even for a few weeks of the year” (ibid.) and are willing to pay real money for the pleasure of experiencing it as tourists (see Bätzing 2000; on the understanding of physical structures as ‘heritage’ see Graham et al. 2000; Matless 2005).

In the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries, the established landscape code was popularized and inevitably thereby trivialized (see Burckhardt 1977; Hard 1977). The lower middle class, aspiring (unsuccessfully) to imitate the ‘legitimate’ taste of the day (see Bourdieu 1979), began to look on the physical phenomena of the countryside as ‘beautiful’ without, however, enjoying access to the powerfully metaphorical language that underlay such an epithet—a language confined to those whose aesthetic and scientific discourse had (especially in the wake of Romanticism) molded and continued to sustain that perspective (see Hard 1965; and more generally Maasen and Weingart 2013). In this light, the adulteration of taste can be seen as a futile attempt to gain access to the social opportunities of the ruling class by mimicking their aesthetic of physical space. This aesthetic did, however, spread into the language of science. Hard observed how many landscape researchers of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries (e.g. Rüstow, Hehn, Ratzel, Vischer, Ritter, Winckelmann) employed what he called a “singular geographical prose”—a language marked by the “concepts and vocabulary of classical aesthetics” (Hard 1965, p. 16), distinctive in style as well as content. And he further remarked that while landscape still played an important role in poetry, novels, stories and essays between 1920 and 1940, by the late 1960s “it occurred, in writing of quality, almost exclusively in contexts of ironic parody, or at least in deeply disguised variants; […] taken at face value, landscape was now characteristic only of sub-literature” (Hard 2002b [1969b], p. 114; and see: Schönenborn 2005; Fig. 4.5).

Fig. 4.5

The mass reproduction of the appropriated physical landscape of Cracow and its environs has reduced it to a stereotype bereft of any distinguishing characteristic: a ‘sunken cultural gem’ (Photo Olaf Kühne)

Another key factor in the trivialization of landscape is its global availability in terms of the changing ratio of cost (and ease) of travel to distance traveled. In earlier times, when journeys could only be made on foot, on horseback, or by stagecoach, travel was slow, uncomfortable, and (especially if one counts incidental outlay) expensive. The railway, and later the private car and airplane, changed all that: travel became more comfortable, and today even flying has become cheaper. Landscape of all sorts “is now so close, so easily attainable that it has become a virtual byproduct of transportation technology, a consumer article: landscape has become homeless” (Vöckler 1998, p. 278). Nevertheless, mass taste still lacks access to the complex codes of legitimacy, from the Romantic sublimity of the mountains to the tranquil slopes of Arcadia (see Sachs 2007 [1932]). Up to and including the long-haul flight to Australia, landscape is today accessible to almost everyone (Lippard 1999), from the ‘stunning view’ with its mood of exaltation rendered consumable by the AAA roadmap (Vöckler 1998; see Lippard 1999 and Fig. 4.5) to the industrially produced posters of roaring stags before an Alpine panorama, or (even more topically) palm trees silhouetted against the sunset on a South Sea beach. Bourdieu (1979) saw the spread of kitsch motifs of this kind as the expression of a working class aesthetic typical of the mid third of the 20th century, honed—according to Greenberg—on the functional mechanization of factory routine: “second-hand experience with pre-injected feeling” (Greenberg 2007 [1939], p. 206). Once this point is reached, landscape—robbed of any distinguishing mark—has become impervious to a more differentiated aesthetics.

4.2.1.2 A New Distinctiveness—Landscape in the Age of Deindustrialization and the Growth of Ecological Consciousness

The contemporary transition from an industrial to a post-industrial society (Bell 1973) reflects, in its structural premises and aesthetic implications, the earlier transition from an agricultural to an industrial society (and see Kühne 2006c, d). On the other hand, to put it another way, the significance of the secondary economic sector has dwindled, just as that of the primary economic sector did in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

With the shift from a modern (Fordist) to a postmodern (post-Fordist) regime of accumulation (see also Sects. 3.1.6 and 3.1.7 above)—above all in the old industrial areas of Western Europe and North America—a semiotic transformation has also occurred: from the signs and symbols of industrial space to those of post-industrial space (Lash and Urry 1994, p. 193). The derelict monuments of industry “have been infused with new meaning” (Hoppmann 2000, p. 159), their distinctive value has been restored in terms of a new self-reflecting perspective: that of media aesthetics. The design of post-industrial urban landscapes “associates rusting blast furnaces with a Baroque aesthetic of ruins, and the scars of opencast lignite mining with the picturesque eighteenth century garden; industrial plant is now a ‘cultural landscape’ in its own right” (Hauser 2004, p. 154). Post-industrial landscape architecture sees ruins of this sort, according to Weilacher (2008, pp. 94–95), “as a witness to the past and a source of information that makes landscape legible”. But ruins are “not only preserved, they are, on occasion, newly built,” as in the classical English garden—a fact Burckhardt (1995a, p. 104) sees as “paradoxical confirmation […] that the lost claim to significance remains; its raison d’être, however, is no longer in the realm of logic but in that of remembrance and etymology”—i.e. in the names and signs buried in layers of history. The aesthetic accessibility of old industrial landscapes derives especially from their contrast with stereotypically beautiful landscapes. Thus Burckhardt (1979, p. 36) observes that “the pleasure one takes in these objects is proportional to the effort one must put into integrating them into the [traditional] scheme of the attractive”—an integration that has a lot to do with the rehabilitation of the sublime noted by Lyotard (1991): applied to anthropogenic objects of the industrial past, the sense of sublimity may be rooted either in their sheer size (‘the mathematical sublime’) or in their symbolic force as a direct counter to conventional denotations of beauty (‘the dynamic sublime’).

At the social level, the aesthetic of ruins can again be interpreted as an expression of a ‘ruling’ taste that almost arbitrarily singles out a profane complex from the wasteland of dysfunctionality and elevates it to relevance and value (see Bourdieu 1979). For the ruling class, the sacralization of the profane (Durkheim 1984) fills such a landscape with a distinctive and distinguishing function, for middle class and popular taste—i.e. the standard of the ruled—has little access (as yet) to the Schillerian pathos (see Schiller 1970) that can perceive sublimity in industrial ruins (Kühne 2006a, c, d). As a symbolic record of the “simple, hard life of the workers” (Vicenotti 2005, p. 231), the monuments of industrial archaeology reproduce the scheme of values applied to the simple, hard life of the agricultural community at the time of industrialization (see Höfer 2001)—a model brought up to date by Bachtin in his influential book Rabelais and His World (1987; see Illing 2006). To conventional and popular taste these relics of a lost industrial past speak, however, more of economic—and even social—decline and failure, and as such were better removed from the landscape altogether (Kühne 2006a, c, d, 2007, 2008a).

Alongside the social distinction inherent in the aesthetic perspective of industrial archaeology, a further important distinguishing factor of recent decades is the ecological approach to landscape. And the two tendencies frequently coincide. Burckhardt points out in this context that ecology, as a scientific construct, is also a social sign system: after all, “ecology itself […] is invisible” (1995b, p. 278). Like all sign systems, it is, moreover, a product of social actions and subject to changing social forces (see Sect. 4.3), which in turn reflect dominant aesthetic perspectives. Rooted in the Romantic Movement but increasingly informed by scientific ecology, these have raised what was once valueless into a dimension of planetary value. However, without the infusion of a biologically based semiotics, the aesthetics of landscape would have lacked the energy required for a sustained and socially distinctive conservation of the natural environment. Significantly, dammed valleys, for example, are often seen today as enhancements of nature rather than condemned as “offenses against the beauty of the landscape” (Blackbourn 2007, p. 288). Indeed one of the biggest German breweries advertises its products nationwide in press and television (especially in connection with soccer games) with a thoroughly romanticized image of just such an artificial lake.

At the same trivial level, but with a clearly contrasting social message, Zillich’s characterization of the ‘typical German yard’ (in the magazine of ‘BUND’, the German Association for the Environment and Nature Conservation) sets the diversity of the native cultural landscape, which “has acclimatized itself over centuries to its own habitat” (Zillich 2004, p. 21), against a Fordist uniformity of popular taste: “Row upon row of sterile gardens with close-cropped lawns and ugly conifers. It’s not enough that our forests—now that spruce and fir promise quick profits—are carpeted with pine needles rather than rustling leaves. No! At home, too, we must surround ourselves with the products of the garden center, from globular ‘teddy Thuja’ cypresses to the mussel-shaped variety that resemble pointed cabbages (Zillich 2004, p. 21). For his environmentally conscious readership, the gain in definition (and social distinction) is unmistakable. That (in this example) it is at the cost of a latent xenophobia—‘our trees are better than theirs’—may well go unnoticed (see Körner 2005c; Eissing and Franke 2015).

Heinrich Spanier points up parallels in this context between the communicative modes of nature and landscape conservation and the history of the perception of Romantic landscape painting. Both are concerned with the mediation of powerful feelings, which he sees as approximating “in language and gesture the pathos of suffering and religion” that was characteristic of the Romantic world-view (Spanier 2006, p. 26). He concretizes this in the figure of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), whose work, he notes, undergoes a remarkable renaissance whenever environmental and nature conservation discourse peaks (see also Kühne 2006c). Hauser (2001, p. 198) takes this argument a step further, adding that nature, “given the wealth of publications from many disciplines and perspectives, […] has in the course of the environmental debate become a simulacrum”—a term derived from Baudrillard (1978). A simulacrum points to something real but non-existent, and in so doing, becomes a reality itself. Nevertheless, this reality is not a fake: far from lying, it tells its own truth, for there is no other—no ‘reality’ to serve as a benchmark.

4.2.2 Social Distinction and the Aesthetics of Planning

The internalized norms of taste are already evident in the opportuneness of the descriptions presented by planners—a fact noted more than a century ago by Ratzel (1904, p. 231): “The tasteless is inevitably wrong. Where description is called for, images are required, and the choice of images immediately reveals taste or its opposite. Where taste is absent, description cannot succeed.” Among landscape professionals, then—especially those of different disciplines and convictions—and between landscape experts and their lay audiences (see Sect. 4.2 passim), language is again a medium of social distinction (see also Cosgrove and Domosh 1997; Maasen and Weingart 2013). Crucial here is the modernist assumption that a good environment produces a good society—i.e. one ordered in accordance with the normative taste of the day—and that a good society will in turn produce a good environment.

The argument is in this sense future-oriented and as such “elevated above both present and historical standards of judgment, indeed dismissive of the present altogether” (Schneider 1989, p. 19). To plan is “to provide for the future” (Spitzer 1996, p. 14), and this provision often follows the modernist axiom ‘form follows function’. In this sense landscape planning has always seen its task, in Schneider’s words (1989, p. 101), as establishing “purity, beauty and order,” a perspective that inevitably marks it as “a profoundly ideological discipline, set on imposing governance.” And (as will later be described in greater detail) the governance in question, at both political and administrative levels, is a tool of power—a power of definition, reserved to professionals and experts, which equates the functional with the pure, the pure with the normative, and the normative with the aesthetic (see Haug 1986; Stevens 2002; Paris 2005). The force of social distinction could hardly be more explicit; and it met with early opposition from the empiricist Gustav Theodor Fechner, who in his 1876 Vorschule der Ästhetik (Handbook of Elementary Aesthetics) condemned ‘an aesthetics imposed from on high’ based only on the conceptual deductions of experts from unproven and unprovable postulates. Against it he set an empirically established spectrum of aesthetic norms and values—thereby risking the accusation of having merely supplanted an old authority with a new, albeit on different principles.

Goodman (1971) highlights the unintended social side effects of compliance, in the era of functionalist urban planning, with the norms and interests of the ruling class. Highways were routed through neighborhoods whose residents lacked sufficient symbolic capital to make their voices heard within the existing political system; whole areas were refurbished with apartment blocks built so cheaply that they failed to meet the standards the planners themselves had laid down; large municipally funded estates segregated groups with differing social structures—all of this “aggravated the suffering of an already disadvantaged urban populace” (Burckhardt 1978b, p. 175). Planners and municipalities alike took the path of least resistance—social as well as orographic—implicitly measured on the availability of symbolic capital per unit of area. And, as Bourdieu (1997, p. 164) has remarked, the lack of economic, social, and cultural capital “reinforces the sense of confinement: it chains you to a specific place”—a place whose (real and symbolic) burden of acoustic, olfactory, and visual disturbance increases with every realization of infrastructural plans.

4.2.3 Social Distinction and Landscape Experts—The Aesthetics of the Urban-Rural Hybrid

In its aesthetic potential for distinctiveness, the postmodern pluralization of landscape does not confine itself, however, to old industrial environments; it affords room for the systematic appropriation of all the elements of the landscape patchwork, especially those that contravene modern paradigms of purity. Expert discussion in recent years has proposed many different terms for describing the increasing hybridization of the city and its surroundings: among them are ‘suburbia’, ‘urban sprawl’, ‘intermediate city’ (Sieverts 2001), ‘exopolis’ (Soja 1995), ‘city-land’ (Holzner 1996), ‘city-landscape’ (e.g. Hofmeister and Kühne 2016), and ‘urban-rural hybrid’ (Kühne 2012; and see Kropp 2015; Hofmeister and Kühne 2016; Kühne 2016a, b). With varying emphases, all these terms encapsulate patterns of development that have superseded the obsolete dichotomy of town and village. Thus ‘intermediate city’ (in German ‘Zwischenstadt’) refers broadly to the urbanization of “a [rurally conceived] landscape and the concomitant ‘ruralizing’ of the city” (Vicenzotti 2011, p. 15; and see Vicenzotti 2008, 2012). The expression has given rise in German-speaking debate of the past two decades to considerable controversy.

According to Sieverts (2001, p. 7) the intermediate city is “the urban area between the old historical city core and the open countryside, between places where people live and non-places transcending spatial definition, between the small cycles of a localized economy and dependence on the global market.” As such it lies between individual places as the definable centers of historical life and the “uniform apparatus of a global division of labor, between space as an inhabited environment and a non-space that is measurable only in terms of time used, between the enduring myth of the old city and the dream of a once vital cultural landscape” (Sieverts 2001, p. 14; and at a more general level see Thabe 2002; Massey 2006). In Kühn’s (2002, p. 95) words, the idea of the intermediate city represents the “antithesis of the traditional conception of the European city with its inherent opposition to ‘landscape’.” Commenting on the intense debate between supporters and opponents of this position, Bodenschatz (2001) advises against unqualified support for either side: “The alternative either ‘European city’ or ‘intermediate city’ is a dead-end: it leads to confusion and the stultification of scientific discourse […], implying in many cases a rejection of the concept of urban center and a strategic neglect of suburbia.” This opens up the field for a third position, that of the qualified supporters of the idea of the intermediate city. The individual positions can be outlined—following Vicenzotti (2008, 2011, 2012) and Schultheiss (2007)—as follows:

Opponents of the intermediate city tend to contrast it with an ‘organic historical-cultural landscape’ on the one hand, and the ‘old city’ or ‘European city’ on the other. In contrast to these, the intermediate city, given its ahistorical nature, lacks identity—and identity is essential for a place to become ‘home’. The chief characteristic of the ‘unorganically developed’ intermediate city is its fragmentation and heterogeneity: “instead of legible structures it offers only a disorderly mess of settlements” (Vicenzotti 2011, p. 85), which in turn prescribes severely, curtailed lifestyles. Such arguments are visibly conservative in their world-view (see Kühne 2015d).

Rather than seeking to establish a specific local-historical identity, euphoric proponents of the intermediate city emphasize its indefinite, fragmentary openness to any and every mode of living. Behind this lies an emphatically urban notion of lifestyle (Vicenzotti 2011, p. 87): “The city means […] unlimited freedom, unlimited possibilities, the mixing and layering of every conceivable social interest.” In its world-view, this is unadulterated liberalism (see Kühne 2015d).

Qualified supporters of the intermediate city, like its opponents, consider the ‘identity’ of settlements as central, but (unlike them) maintain that the intermediate city possesses its own identity. For this group, too, history is important, but not exclusively so. Historical elements of the appropriated physical landscape—village center, pathways, streams etc.—should be integrated into the planning of the intermediate city; or as Hauser and Kamleithner (2006, p. 213) put it: “Meaningful strategies […] presuppose [definable] goals,” which in turn rest on an aesthetic of “thoughtful observation and conscious perception” (Boczek 2006, p. 230). Again here, the guiding principle is order (Schultheiss 2007). Thus it is a meaningful strategy, for example, to transform the fragmented elements of a spatial patchwork into perceptibly related units, while another, contrary strategy is to “stage their fragmentation and heterogeneity […] on the premise that this is their specific character” (Vicenzotti 2011, p. 89). The urban is understood here as the possibility of individual self-determination, on the one hand within the framework of communally negotiated limits—which indicates a fundamentally democratic outlook. On the other hand, the very qualification of the concept of the intermediate city depends on expert philosophies of order and design that are difficult to reconcile with lay participation (Schultheiss 2007).

In the final analysis this view is imbued with a twofold potential for distinction, for on the one hand it opposes the old urban-rural dichotomy, with its inherently conservationist demands, while on the other it relies for implementation on both the science of planners and the cooperation of laypeople, thus creating a hierarchical system of meta-experts, experts, and laity. It is in this latter respect, as Hahn (2014, p. 83) observes, that the entire strategy of qualification fails, for “the inhabitants of the so-called ‘urban region’ were […] not asked whether they wanted to have their spatial ‘identity bestowed’ on them by planners.” As a rule they do not have the impression of living in a faceless void, nor have they ever expressed a desire for ‘identity’—at least not one that could be fulfilled by planners and architects, with their inalienable déformation professionelle (Kühne 2008a; Hahn 2014; Hilbig 2014; and see Stevens 2002). The construction of identities, however, is not entirely devoid of side-effects: “Regional identities and affiliations with region are not always rosy visions of solidarity or unity but may coexist with internal oppositions based on cultural, economic and political conflict and processes of Othering” (Paasi 2011, p. 15).

4.2.4 Appropriated Physical Landscape as an Embodiment of Social Distinction

The immediately preceding sections have shown that the social distinction inherent in planning is a recursive feature of physical landscape as appropriated by society and its individual members. The following sections will differentiate and concretize this argument.

4.2.4.1 Basic Considerations

The need of the ruling class to be seen and felt as such has left its imprint on physical space in many different ways (see Fig. 4.6 and Sects. 5.1 and 5.3 below). Aided and abetted by the prevailing system of social distinctions, the concepts and images currently favored by the more powerful are imposed on the less powerful and endowed with the permanence of law (see Cosgrove 1993; Higley 1995; Duncan 1999; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Kühne 2008a). Especially in the postmodern age, the physical landscape has been subjected to the designations and symbolic meanings of its hierarchical masters, with all the milieu-specific staging and social distancing this involves (see Mitchell 2001; Krämer-Badoni 2003; Seidman 2012). Fine distinctions in the availability of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1979) express themselves in rights of access, sojourn, and disposal. The contours of a subtly differentiated private-public allocation of such rights are visible, for instance, in shopping malls and gated communities: two examples of private spaces with regulated, socially selective public access (see Goss 1993; Selle 2002, 2004; Kühne 2015a; for greater detail see Sect. 5.2).

Fig. 4.6

Visible from afar, the radio transmitter on the Puy de Dôme in the French Massif Central is a physical symbol of technological mastery over nature (Photo Olaf Kühne)

A further manifestation of social distinction and its spatial expression is the distribution, occupation and design of sites with appropriate landscape views. Historically this has often meant that those with a higher level of symbolic capital congregate on the city’s higher ground, whose environmental quality and wider views are preferable not just for health reasons (Kühne 2012). The ‘better’ residential districts offer the prospect of ‘suitable’ company and contacts, with all the events of the social round that go with them, from hunting and cruising, through balls and receptions, to sporting occasions, cultural ceremonies and the like. Thus Bourdieu (1983, p. 67): “As if by chance [such spatial arrangements] occasion meetings between individuals who in all that bears on the life and survival of the group are as homogeneous as possible.”

Already in the 17th and 18th centuries “city planners, military engineers, architects, constructional theoreticians, and landscape gardeners” (Markowitz 1995, p. 121)—all of them intellectuals of one kind or another—concerned themselves, from the standpoint of the city, “with different aspects of the view into the landscape.” One such way of appropriating—or staging—the surrounding countryside for the city-dweller was to lay down broad avenues as “[visual] axes, affording masterfully architectonic landscape perspectives” (Markowitz 1995, p. 122). Another way was to open the city ramparts—in places where their martial function could safely be consigned to the past—either demolishing them completely or converting them into gardens, as exemplified in the late 18th century cities of Düsseldorf, Wolfenbüttel, Celle, Brunswick, Göttingen, Oldenburg, and Hanover. A third modality was the creation of viewing terraces in the gardens of the former princely residences—or adjacent citadels—of such cities, and connecting them with rampart promenades enjoying views into the surrounding landscape, as in Mannheim, Würzburg and Münster.

Yet another opportunity for urban connoisseurs of landscape developed in 16th century Rome and other Italian cities, whose girdle of villas boasted terraces, landings, loggias, galleries, roof gardens and verandas, and whose gardens were furnished with spiraling walkways and hillocks, all of these features affording aspects of neighboring parks and gardens, as well as of the open country—the appropriated physical landscape. Architectonic forms of this kind spread first throughout Europe, and then worldwide; today they are an established item of the global architectural canon (Markowitz 1995). One thing all such constructs had in common was their privileged status: access was reserved to the master, with his family and companions, and definitively closed to those who dwelt beneath their gaze—as closed as was the aesthetic governing that perspective. It was the unprivileged class, nevertheless, that bore the burden of physical change to the environment which that arrangement entailed. Life’s opportunities were indeed unequal (for greater detail see Kühne 2012; Lenski 2013).

An interesting aspect of more recent urban development is the differences in symbolic (and with it economic) structure occurring in areas of very similar architectonic substance according to the social background of their residents. Drawing on Michael Thompson’s 1979 book Rubbish Theory, Burckhardt (1991) examines this phenomenon in some London streets of 18th century brick houses, where, depending on the background of their current purchasers, three different stories can be told:

• If the houses are bought by Pakistanis, their monetary value and potential as social symbols drop steeply without any change being made (initially) to the fabric (brickwork and window frames may later be painted in the brighter colors favored by the new owners). Nevertheless, lived in by people with low symbolic capital, the house and row will have lost their snob appeal (Burckhardt 1991, p. 224).

• If the houses are bought by skilled workers—printers, gas station proprietors, electricians etc.—devaluation will be less sudden (Burckhardt 1991, p. 224). The fabric will be well maintained, but in such a way that the symbols of an earlier heritage—wooden doors with brass fittings, wood-framed paned or sash windows—will be gradually replaced with hygienic mass products from the DIY store that meet the taste and symbolic capital of the lower middle class.

• If the houses are bought by the educated middle class—a group with higher cultural and symbolic, and at least medium economic capital—they will be preserved (or restored) in a way that sustains their fabric and boosts their economic value in line with their symbolic social distinctiveness: a new residential cycle will begin.

Independently of utility value there are, then, “opinion makers that create value” (Burckhardt 1991, p. 225) in economic terms, and non-opinion-makers that destroy it (see Kühne and Schönwald 2015a). Zukin (2009, p. 544) puts the matter succinctly: “Properly speaking […] gentrification is an individual action, involving the preservation, restoration and re-use of old houses of some certified architectural quality, which—when broad in scale—produces both a demographic change and a change in a space’s social character.”

4.2.4.2 The Multi-sensory Atmosphere of Appropriated Physical Landscape as a Social Definer

The social construction of landscape is on the whole—and even more so in the case of experts—confined to the visual: “Implicit in the landscape idea is a visual ideology which was extended from painting to our relationship with the real world” (Cosgrove 1985, p. 55). Non-visual aspects are often relegated by professionals to a sub-discourse, which is understandable, given the absence of an adequately developed vocabulary to express them (Brady 2005). This is above all the case in the spatially oriented sciences, whose insights tend to be expressed in maps, models and other visual media (Tuan 1979b). But the modern mind in general—including modern science—is heavily reliant on visual perception, as even our metaphors reveal (see Latour 2002 [1999]): we ‘see’ the world through a distinct ‘perspective’; our ‘vision’ is disturbed by prejudice; our ‘world-view’ is clear or blurred (and see Maasen and Weingart 2013).

The non-visual dimensions of an appropriated physical landscape, however, are crucially important for its atmosphere. This is not something that can be physically located with any accuracy, nor is it strictly measurable. On the contrary, atmosphere, according to Fuchs, “is a holistic phenomenon of spatial expression, indefinably diffused over the length and breadth of a place or situation, as when one feels the cool darkness of an alleyway in a Romanesque church, or plunges into the noisy gaiety of a county fair, or senses the oppressiveness of a thunderstorm closing over the landscape” (Fuchs 2000, p. 213).

Atmosphere is a fleeting thing, neither spatially nor temporally sustainable (Kazig 2007). Rooted in the sensory relation of the self to its surroundings, it is a medium of subjective wellbeing—or its opposite (Thibaud 2003; Kazig 2007, 2008). Böhme (1995) endows atmosphere with independent reality, but it is a reality that is unutterable—and hence cannot be confined—by any sign system; for atmosphere is a matter less of cognition than of affect and emotion (Hasse 1993, 2000; Seel 1996; Kazig 2008; Forkel and Grimm 2014). Alongside emotion, alertness is a defining factor; not that “the senses are directed like a spotlight on a particular segment of surrounding space”, but rather that “according to the situation, senses, mind and body act in a specific way together” (Kazig 2008, p. 150)—alertness, then, in the sense of an acute bodily wakefulness and sensitivity. In addition, a third dimension of this complex, according to Kazig, is the motor functions, above all inasmuch as “atmosphere is perceived in connection with (specific styles of) movement” (Kazig 2008, p. 150). Raab (1998) relates the systematic disregard, especially of the sense of smell, with the demands of Western science (universal validity, provability, and lack of subjectivity). For “while, for example, visual perception is informed by optical qualities (colors) that are definable by physical measurement (wavelengths of light) and can be classified in a readily available system of subjective categories (basic colors), the olfactory realm enjoys no such consistent relations between the chemical and physical characteristics of scents and their impact, nor any aspects under which their subjectively perceived qualities might be classified” (Raab 1998, p. 16). The social implications of smells was already noted by Simmel in his sociology of the senses (1908), where he pointed out that the social question has an olfactory as well as an ethical dimension: “That we can smell the atmosphere a person radiates is the most intimate of perceptions, one in which he penetrates our inmost being, as it were, in aerial form. How obvious, then, that a heightened sensibility to scent must lead of itself to the selection—and, if needs be, distancing—that is among the sensory foundations for the sociological reserve of the modern individual” (Simmel 1999, pp. 734–735). To say, for example, that you ‘don’t like the smell of him’, or that a particular gathering ‘stinks of corruption’, is an expression of social stigma as well as profound antipathy (see Payer n.d.), and a sign of the way in which the olfactory functions as a medium of social distinction. But this is a far broader issue, for particular scents immediately express the spatial workings of social power: the powerful—i.e. those endowed with greater symbolic capital—can determine where those who ‘smell unpleasant’ shall reside, and can themselves avoid the noisome odors of subways, pedestrian tunnels, crowded sidewalks, and public transportation by using their private automobile for every journey, and the stench of factory chimneys and other sites and products of cheap labor by withdrawing to the higher ground of their expensive villas (see also Wyckoff 1990).

The elimination of society’s olfactory burden obeyed (and continues to obey) the logic of social differentiation. Payer (op. cit.) illustrates this with the example of late 19th century Vienna, where fecal odors had been effectively quenched by the construction of flushable sewers, but other, less omnipresent sources of repugnance, from factory chimneys to the recently invented automobile, were dealt with a great deal less energetically, for the simple reason that wealthier citizens could withdraw from the nuisance—and in doing so underline their statement of social distinction. Only with the onset of the environmental movement in the late 1970s and 80s, at least in Germany and Austria—in other parts of Europe and North America ecological awareness developed earlier (or in some cases later)—was massive criticism of these causes of pollution voiced, whereupon politics intervened relatively quickly to reduce their intensity (see Payer op. cit.).

Applied to ecological communication, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (Luhmann 1986) explains the harnessing of politics to the environmental movement as a matter of ‘resonance’ between the two systems (for further analysis see Sect. 4.3.1.4): in other words, the uptake of ecology enhanced the scope and power of politics. Subsequent legislation had an immediate acoustic and olfactory impact on the landscape. On the one hand, admissible levels of pollution were lowered, controlled, and sanctioned, but on the other hand this very process largely flattened the sensory profile of the landscape. Where the presence of industrial plants had long been obvious to nose and ears, modern production facilities (where they exist at all in Western countries) are acoustically and olfactorily sealed from their surroundings, and only the omnipresent motor vehicle still pours its sound and stench into the environment. This regulatory process, however, is yet another example of the workings of power: politicians and experts determine the limiting values, experts monitor them, and experts propose new steps to meet new situations and materials (for greater detail see Sect. 4.3).

Noise and stench currently count as environmental pollutants to be neutralized with mufflers, chimneys, effluent disposal systems, and air conditioning plant (Bischoff 2005a); they are not accepted as a dimension of landscape in their own right. In this context, the olfactory-acoustic dimension of social segregation has a twofold impact on the landscape: on the one hand the imposition of target levels represents an element of social standardization; but on the other the intentional or unintentional neglect of these factors by landscape experts (especially planners) contributes to the burdening and eventual stigmatization of whole segments of landscape and their inhabitants (see Bischoff 2005b). The imbalance between the de facto irreducibility of the sense of smell—for “the scents that […] correspond with our wellbeing” do so through the very activity of breathing (Bischoff 2003, p. 45; and see Bernat and Hernik 2015)—and its dismissive treatment by those responsible for the design of the appropriated physical landscape (or of physical space as such) is an indication of the latent or manifest refusal of the more powerful to concern themselves with the load borne by the less: after all, they are not themselves affected.

4.2.5 Contingent Paradigms: The Conservation of ‘Historical Cultural Landscape’ and Its Alternatives

The appropriate shape of the landscape in the wake of postmodern change is a controversial issue between both experts and, to a lesser extent, laypeople. Whether in specialist literature or interviews, four paradigmatic positions are discernible—positions whose protagonists as a rule stand in direct competition for interpretational sovereignty (Kühne 2006a, 2008a, 2013; on environmental paradigms in general see Hannigan 2014). These will be described in the following subsections.

4.2.5.1 The Conservationist Paradigm

Supporters of the conservationist paradigm of ‘historical cultural landscape’ distinguish between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ landscapes, and between these and landscapes that have not ‘developed historically’—even to the extent of denying these latter the predicate ‘landscape’ altogether. The concept of cultural landscape “expresses the idea of ‘cultivation’” (Ewald 1996, p. 100): these are landscapes that have grown under human hands (see e.g. Heiland 2006; Wöbse 2006). Wöbse (1999) characterizes them in the following six propositions:

• cultural landscapes have positive value

• not every natural landscape changed by human hands is a cultural landscape

• cultural landscapes are materialized spirituality

• cultural landscapes are multifunctional and guarantee diversity

• cultural landscapes maintain a balance between economic, ecological, aesthetic and cultural aspects

• cultural landscapes provide us with a long-term home.

He summarizes the concept of historical cultural landscape as follows: “A historical cultural landscape is one formed by men and women of an earlier age. It tells of their commerce with nature and the landscape, and allows conclusions to be drawn about their relation with nature. It tells, too, of lifestyles, needs and opportunities. Historical cultural landscapes contribute much to the individuality and beauty of a region” (Wöbse 2002, p. 186).

The terminological distinction between natural and cultural landscapes reflects, for Siekmann (2004, p. 32), a dichotomy between nature and culture that runs through Western thought: a philosophy that “delimits human activity from external natural events” and, for Holzinger (2004) can be seen as a project of the Modern Age (and see Zierhofer 2002, 2003; Groß 2006; in greater detail Kühne 2012; in creative literature D’hulst 2007). Zutz (2005, p. 39) perceives a close link between the concept of cultural landscape and conservationist argumentation: “Today, when a landscape planner mentions cultural landscape, it is generally in the context of its maintenance and preservation.” And Wöbse (1994, p. 37) sees it as an unchallenged truth that “cultural landscape is a thing of value, worth preserving.” Even more vigorously, Wagner (1999, p. 36) judges the leveling of the appropriated physical landscape in the wake of globalization and its concomitant “abolition of regional differences” as a cultural decline that “cannot be condemned in strong enough terms.” In the same tenor, “the preservation of the regional differences between diverse cultural landscapes” (Quasten 1997, p. 19; and see Henkel 1997; Weber 2007) is the stated aim of organizations dedicated to landscape conservation.

The concept of cultural landscape is, then, not merely descriptive: it implies positive values (see Heiland 2006) which are often borne on a current of melancholy as if faced with loss or threat. Butler (2001, p. 177) describes melancholy as “a suppressed rebellion” which, far from remaining passive, evolves “into a sort of ongoing labor of distraction.” In the case of loss of the inherited conditions of a particular landscape, melancholy of this sort involves acknowledgment and sublimation of the prevailing social power structures, as opposed to open confrontation with them (Kühne 2008a). In this context, Burckhardt points up an inherent fault in the paradigm of historical cultural landscape: its innate connection with the ‘old’. Cultural landscape conservation—like that of historic monuments—is inseparably “connected with old things, and ‘old’ has a double connotation: it is both what we throw away and what we cherish” (Burckhardt 1991, p. 222).

The conservation of historical cultural landscapes—especially when this is connected with the home environment—often reveals a dogmatic undercurrent: the perspective reduces to a core of mutually defining self-referential propositions (see Paris 2005). Thus Thieleking (2006, p. 51) argues that action in support of a cultural landscape depends on people’s sense of its being their home, and the sense of home is generated precisely in a “historical cultural landscape” (see e.g. Born 1995; Wagner 1997, 1999; Güth 2004; Heringer 2005 for similar arguments). In the same tenor, Wöbse’s axiomatic statement, “the conservation of a historical cultural landscape is an obligation, its development a task” (Wöbse 1999, p. 271), elevates the inherited landscape to sacral status—an attitude of semi-belief that allows for neither counter-argument nor qualification (see Paris 2005). From this derives a moral imperative which, as Bogner (2005, p. 172) comments, “today has both a private and a public aspect,” for nature protection, sustainability, and the conservation of “historical cultural landscape” are issues which, in Spanier’s words (2006, p. 31), “regularly excite the profoundest emotions. Given the scale of the task, only these emotions seem appropriate. Whether that is really the case, however, is a matter that calls for reflection: excessive emotion and pathos can be off-putting.” An appraisal published in 1999 by the Scientific Advisory Board to the German Federal Government exemplifies this attitude. Entitled Conservation and Sustainable Use of the Biosphere, it describes “the biosphere crisis” in downright apocalyptic terms: “We are currently experiencing the sixth annihilation of genetic and species diversity. This could exceed in scope the last great crisis, 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs (among other species) became extinct” (WGBU 1999, p. 3). Against such a conservative mindset (see Vicenzotti 2012; Kühne 2013a, 2015d), change to the physical structure of landscape takes on a quasi-religious aura. As Zimmermann pointedly remarks, the intellectual development that led through the Enlightenment and industrialization to modern individualism “gave birth in due course to the ecological crisis”—from which he concludes that “the ecological crisis was preceded by a religious one […]” (Zimmermann 1982, p. 92).

The ‘profoundest emotions’ excited by issues of landscape and sustainability have infused an amalgam of ecologically, aesthetically, economically, and politically motivated changes to the landscape with a moral hue characteristic of current discourse (see Illing 2006). In this context, Luhmann (1993, p. 332) observes that the “moral level of public communication” rises in proportion to the risks, uncertainties, and lack of knowledge inherent in a situation, and that the transformation of a perceived change into a moral problem may facilitate its public communication by reducing it to the universally accessible systemic code of ‘good/bad’; but the inevitable side-effect of this reduction is at the very least to make adequate communication of the problem more difficult (and see Bogner 2005). Moreover, an equally inevitable quality of moral commitment within “a community, with its ingrained habits and conventions, traditions, norms and values” (Berr 2014, p. 31) is that it can only with difficulty be rescinded; for the moral code applies not just to a particular role, but also to the whole person. Moreover, moral communication tends to look at breaches of the code rather than compliance with it, to discredit rather than approve a person’s actions and intentions, and frequently, therefore, to discredit the person as such (Luhmann 1993). Because of its universality, the moral code also has a leveling bias that is not open to compensation by appeal to a higher instance: the playing field, here at least, is level. Moreover, as the whole person is involved, rather than just a specific role, the game tends to be played with greater vigor. Thus Luhmann (1989, p. 370): “Morality is a risky business: to moralize is to accept that risk. Where resistance arises, more forceful means may be required if one is not to lose face”—which explains the innate tendency of moral positions “to engender strife, to flow from strife, and to exacerbate strife” (Luhmann 1989, p. 370). For the ‘good/bad’ code may well be understood in different ways: one person’s moral tenets positively invite scrutiny through the lens of another’s (Luhmann 1993; and see Kneer and Nassehi 1997; Kühne 2008c, 2014c). Moreover, when semi-belief requires the continuous underpinning of dogma, what Bourdieu (2000; also Bourdieu and Eagleton 1992) calls the ‘doxa’ underlying moral judgments will be applied to others in all its scope and rigor.

The paradigmatic defense of the ‘historical cultural landscape’ has a number of facets, which have arisen in opposition to other established approaches to landscape conservation, such as:

• (a) the preservation of the physical landscape, especially the restriction of activities to the ‘natural landscape’ in the sense initially promulgated in the National Parks concept, whereas here the focus is on landscapes modified by human hands;

• (b) the protection of species and biotopes, which focuses on individual endangered species and their habitats, whereas here the focus is on the aesthetic dimension and wider physical spaces;

• (c) the conservation of cultural monuments, which can cover landscape features as well as buildings, but not (or only minimally) biotic elements of the physical landscape;

• (d) most of all, perhaps, recent planning initiatives, as exemplified in Schroeder’s (1994, p. 79) remarks on the perceived dichotomy between the historical cultural landscape and actual encroachments: “Towns and villages used not to flow out into the landscape, but held together in mutual protection like a herd of animals. Orchards and meadows encircled a settlement, guarding it and forming a transitional space into the landscape”—which goes far to explain why today’s protagonists of conservation, are skeptical, if not openly hostile, toward contemporary demands for urban space (Kühne 2008a; and see Graham et al. 2000).

Once recognized and accepted, interpretations of landscape and its human import tend to be uncritically perpetuated, stereotyped and moralized as solid elements of the natural and social world. However, the appropriated physical landscape is a consequence and by-product of social action, and “culture is action, invention, progress” (Burckhardt 1994, p. 92): an open-ended process of transformation. For Burckhardt, the historical cultural landscape is, therefore, “a momentary historical view [which] could be topical, current, and progressive—only that is no longer allowed today” (Burckhardt 1994, pp. 92–93; see also Jackson 1984; Trepl 2012). Consistently, he defines cultural landscape as landscape “into which one comes late in the day, whose charm lies in the fact that one can still (just) read it as it once was; and as it once was is, for us, how it should always be—as in the days when gentlemen rode out from town to hunt and looked on the peasants and said to one another ‘Happy folk of field and meadow, not yet awoken to liberty’” (Burckhardt 1994, p. 92). A cultural landscape is not just a product of description and normativity: it is infused with ideology, yearning, social distinction and other vested power interests, as well as with the intellectual forces of analysis, ethics, and morality (Kühne 2006c). A telling instance of this composite in modern dress is the golf course. Designed for the most part on the model of the English park, golf courses approximate the stereotypical ideal of beautiful landscape. Yet many cultural landscape conservationists and home environment protection groups reject them as “Americanizations […] of the landscape, destructive and pernicious” (Kaufmann 2004, p. 90). The drive for social distinction predicated of the mostly urban golfers is countered here by the distinction of superior knowledge of the landscape in its historical and cultural development, accompanied by the relevant attributes of power, rights of access, and the will to assert them (see Kaufmann 2004; Kühne 2006c; Zutz 2015).

In this sense the conservation of the historical cultural landscape can, with Simmel, be described as a triumph of ‘fake authenticity’. Seen through the lens of normative aesthetic projections representing bygone social conditions, the physical landscape loses its de facto authenticity for society as a whole (in the sense of a correspondence between form and function). A partial system—as a rule the political—imposes the official stamp of expert opinion on other societal systems, with the aim, according to Bourdieu (1976, p. 90), “of transforming ‘egoistic’, private, individual motives and interests […] into disinterested, publicly presentable, collective—in short ‘legitimate’—motives and interests.” The imposition is generally conducted through legal directives and regulations, but it is also implicit in the socialization of the concept of ‘beautiful landscape’ itself (Kühne 2008a).

In a qualitative study of landscape awareness among both experts and laypeople, Kühne (2006a) determined that the paradigm of conserving and restoring appropriated physical landscape was upheld above all by those respondents whose approach to landscape, whether functional or aesthetic, excluded other perspectives. The functional approach evaluates landscape according to its individual, social and/or ecological functionality (Kühne 2006a), while the aesthetic approach takes correspondence with classical—or frequently stereotypical—concepts of beauty as its benchmark. In either case the goal is the preservation (or restoration) of landscape in accordance with exclusive principles. The implementation of these principles is as a rule viewed as a moral imperative subject to conventional norms of right and duty (on which see Kohlberg 1974; Colby and Kohlberg 1978). In Kühne’s investigation, the functional approach revealed itself to be based almost wholly on secondary socialization. Elements of landscape consciousness derived from primary socialization were either denied or suppressed; moreover, personal convictions were proposed as exclusive and absolute (Kühne 2006a; on exclusivism in general see Sloterdijk 1987). The aesthetic approach was similarly absolute, and categorically rejected any alternative. Exclusivism of this kind is found among experts and non-experts alike, the difference being that experts often stress the distinctive quality of their knowledge. Thus Wöbse: “The loss [of cultural landscape], albeit occurring less from ill will or intention than from inadequate knowledge or untrained awareness, is nothing less than a destruction of culture” (Wöbse 1994, p. 40).

4.2.5.2 Alternative Paradigms

The paradigm of the conservation and preservation of ‘historical cultural landscape’ dominates both specialist and public discourse, but—according to Kühne (2006a)—the current debate on landscape development is also marked by three other interpretive paradigms: those of successional development, reflective design, and reinterpretation.

The paradigm of successional development ascribes a fundamentally passive role to the appropriated physical landscape in the face of social transformations (see e.g. Vervloet 1999; Weber 2007), restricting the concept of an aspired target state to the results and by-products of socioeconomic development. This may mean leaving the landscape to natural succession, or it may entail a change (e.g. intensification) of usage. Adherents of this paradigm—and they include both laypeople and experts (see Kühne 2006a)—generally share an inclusive, tolerant perspective on landscape: they either express no preference about target states, or do not regard their own preferences as privileged. The position is criticized on the one hand for ignoring the impact of social (and especially economic) forces on overly stretched ecological systems, and on the other for failing to do justice to the importance of familiar cultural landscape in the sustenance of a ‘felt home environment’ (see e.g. Schenk 1997; Dosch and Beckmann 1999; Härle 2004).

The paradigm of reflective design aims to consciously endow the appropriated physical landscape with new symbolism as a step toward a new aesthetic based on defamiliarization (in Mukarovsky’s (1970) sense of that term). The emphasis on intrusive, transformational design distinguishes this approach from the conservationist/restorationist paradigm, and a distinguishing feature is its predilection for historical forms and artifacts—especially as undisguised simulations (Hartz 2003; Hartz and Kühne 2006). Polyvalence is not only admissible, it is encouraged—to the extent that local inhabitants are prepared to accept it, for this paradigm sets great store on lay participation (see Brown 1989; Michert 2000; Bezzenberger et al. 2003). Protagonists of this position—in Kühne’s study (2006a) these were all experts—generally share an inclusive perspective on landscape, characterized by the desire for a synthesis of aspects of primary and secondary socialization of landscape awareness with reflection on its onward development (Kühne 2006a). Changes in the physical foundations of landscape are often explained with reference to semiotic interpretive patterns. The position is criticized not only for its radical polyvalence (or lack of unambiguous principle)—e.g. in undermining the ability to read the historical development of the landscape with any clarity, as well as blurring the meaning of historical objects by subjecting them to frequent redesign (see e.g. Güth 2004)—but also for its superficial attitude and practice as regards lay consultation.

The immediate aim of the paradigm of reinterpretation is not to intrude into or redesign the physical landscape but to achieve a reflective change in the way it is received and appropriated by society—and by the individual through society. The overriding aim is to render redundant any major modification of the physical landscape demanded in the name of wellbeing (see Lacoste 1990). To this end, evaluative categories like functional/non-functional and beautiful/ugly, as well as positively and negatively charged symbolisms, are modified or radically transformed, and normative and/or stereotypical landscape concepts neutralized (see e.g. Piepmeier 1980; Höfer 2004; Prominski 2004a, 2006b; Kühne 2008a). Höfer comments: “A landscape in the process of conversion is a stimulus to free oneself from clichés—but also a reminder not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Landscape is in constant motion, and although we don’t yet know where the journey will end, it is our task to explore that end” (Höfer 2004, p. 33). However, liberation from clichés is one thing; the worry that, with a change of paradigm, the very object of the landscape expert’s science (and the source of his or her self-definition) will be lost is quite another. Hence Debes’ (2005, p. 124) plea for a differentiated and multi-layered approach to landscape that “goes beyond traditional thought patterns.” Supporters of this paradigm generally share an affinity with semiotic interpretations of landscape development and a basically inclusive and synthesizing perspective. Criticism comes on two scores (see Kühne 2006a): first, the paradigm is an expert construct that is entirely foreign to the world of those primarily concerned—the inhabitants of the landscape—most of whom are neither prepared nor able to give up their stereotypes; secondly, it largely obscures the motivation of those who propose it. This motivation, it is objected, lies in the perceived impossibility, in the face of restricted national budgets and the requirements of free trade agreements, of leaving the landscape in a state that will meet generally held (i.e. stereotypical) criteria of beauty.

In comparison with the conservation and restoration paradigm (see Sect. 4.2.5.1), the three alternative positions presented in this section are less normative; all of them allow for what Colby and Kohlberg (1978) called a ‘post-conventional’ ability to form (moral) judgments about the matter in question—here the physical landscape. The equilibration strategies of the four paradigms—in Piaget and Inhelder’s sense (1948)—also differ. While the conservation/restoration paradigm and that of successional development are based on a strategy of assimilation—i.e. the adaptation of the environment to one’s own needs—the paradigm of reinterpretation pursues the opposite line of accommodation, developing new, flexible and contingent patterns of perception and interpretation that fulfill Ingarden’s definition (1992) of ‘points of indeterminacy’. The paradigm of reflective design falls in this context somewhere between these two poles, seeking accommodation through a path of reflective assimilation.

The four paradigms possess disparate potential for social distinction. Their superior knowledge of—and consequent ability to identify and evaluate—elements of the appropriated physical landscape in their historical development provides advocates of the conservation/restoration paradigm (especially experts) with little inherently conceptual distinctiveness, as this knowledge in any case largely coincides with stereotypical notions. The paradigm of successional development enjoys higher potential in this respect for the simple reason that it departs from the conceptual status quo; even more so the paradigm of reflective design, which explicitly breaks with traditional parameters of perception and evaluation (see Kühne 2008a). Maximum distinction potential at the conceptual level is attained by the reinterpretation paradigm, whose constructivist perspective represents a radical break with existing (stereotypical) approaches, which it seeks to replace with new patterns of perception and interpretation.

The foregoing discussion of the paradigms that will determine future attitudes to landscape (in particular appropriated physical landscape) illustrates the close relation between scientific and non-scientific (mainly everyday) knowledge, like the influences of primary socialization, aesthetic traditions, personal claims and preferences in the use of landscape etc. Despite the scientific claims of the various disciplines operating in this field, their knowledge, as Ziman (2000) aptly observes for science as a whole, remains—like other systems of belief, from religion to the football club—based on faith. As such, it is engaged rather in a process of negotiation and political implementation than with the discovery of new laws. In Zimen’s terms, this means that scientific knowledge is reflective rather than objective.

4.3 Landscape and Power

The genesis of landscape as the physical manifestation of social power is, according to DeMarrais, Castillo and Earle, marked by two central processes: “First, an elite with the resources to extend its ideology through materialization promotes its objectives and legitimacy at the expense of competing groups who lack those resources. […] Second, materialization makes ideology a significant element of political strategy. Because ideas and meaning are difficult to control, it is impossible to prevent individuals who oppose the dominant group from generating their own ideas about the world and then attempting to convince others of their validity” (DeMarrais et al. 1996, p. 17). The second point in particular highlights the close link between power and knowledge—a connection with spatial implications, which, as social products, are subject to societal change. Hence Stehr’s comment that “knowledge and power are allies, [for] knowledge and control of the conditions of action are allies when it is a matter of setting something in motion with the aid of knowledge” (Stehr 2006, p. 39). If, in the modern era, power was concentrated in the political, economic, social and cultural centers, it has, with the onset of postmodernism, become decentralized: its topology no longer assigns it a single privileged source (Deleuze 1975). According to Foucault (2006 [1976]) this decentralization is a key aspect of the transition from an absolutist to a discipline-focused society, while for Lefèbvre (1972) it is rooted topographically in the city: the power of social organization no longer derives in principle from industry, but from the everyday urban pattern of consumption, planning, and public spectacle (and see Prigge 1991).

Society generates, controls, and appropriates space through a range of recursive mechanisms and processes (see Lefèbvre 1974). The contours of physical space reveal a society’s patterns of production, reproduction and usage, as well as its conceptions of physical space, all of which vary in reciprocal relation with its specific temporal, cultural, stratigraphical, and functional structures. Harvey (1991, p. 158) characterizes the complex as follows: “Control of spatial organization, and authority over its usage, are central instruments for the reproduction of social power relationships.” Accordingly, appropriated physical landscape is not simply a product of fields of power: it is also a cause, an “agent of social, economic, and political processes” (Groth and Wilson 2003, p. 74; Clarke 2008): it bears recursively on society by structuring its patterns of interpretation and action (see Harvey 1996; Kühne 2008a). Bound up in this process, the various organizers of physical space—the state, municipalities, real estate agents, property owners—carefully conceal “their impact on social reproduction behind an ostensibly neutral power over the organization of space” (Harvey 1991, p. 158): the social outreach of their activities is simply taken for granted.

The development of appropriated physical landscape in Central Europe may be seen very largely as a by-product of social activity, an embodiment of society (Kühne 2005, 2006a, 2008a). Landscapes arose through economic necessity, modified by communal norms and values. Social order, Paris observes (2005, p. 28), “channels the contingencies of freedom.” Where it relates to space, it channels the contingencies of its physical development, including those of what we call landscape. Landscape in this sense is, then, the product of an everyday geography of authoritative control within the normative remit of political regionalization (Werlen 1995, 1998; see also Saar 2010).

4.3.1 Landscape, Power, and Economics

4.3.1.1 Appropriated Physical Landscape and the Staging of Economic Power

The establishment of rights of ownership over space represents the transformation of space into a commodity (see e.g. Smith 1984; Wescoat 2008); but in its impersonal formalism it is at the same time a simplification of per se contingent patterns of appropriation, integrating these in a system that promises greater sustainability and stability. In addition, this system is accepted unquestioningly as the basis for rights of usage and disposal—or as Popitz puts it: “Power consolidates, and is ever more consolidated” (Popitz 1992, p. 234). Moreover, power has an inalienably spatial dimension: “every general and every politician knows that control of space is of crucial strategic importance. […] Indeed, every supermarket manager is well aware that power over a strategically important location within the entirety of social space is worth its weight in gold” (Harvey 1991, p. 158). The placing of goods in a supermarket—to stay with this example—is governed by economic interests in the same way as the organization of constructed space. In addition, property tax itself is calculated on the basis of the economic capital value assigned by society to the limited temporal rights of usage and disposal vested in a specific parcel of real estate—rights that in turn represent limited territorial control over society’s reproductive capacity (see Lefèbvre 1974; Lacoste 1990; Wyckoff 1990; Kost and Schönwald 2015; Megerle 2015; Harvey 1991, p. 166): “The acquisition of private ownership rights forms the basis for exclusive dominance over a spatial entity” and the profits that derive from it (Bourdieu 1991a). Accordingly, property ownership not only bestows social prestige, but “allows one to repel undesired trespassers […] and to keep at a distance persons or things with which one wishes to have no contact” (Schroer 2006, p. 94).

The economic productivity of physical space is as differentiated in terms of goods and services as it is in terms of societal reproduction, and both gradients (measured in tax per square meter) follow relative proximity to the city center (see Fig. 4.7), as this is also the basis on which returns can be calculated. Accordingly, usages that bring the highest returns are as a rule found closest to the city center—although this principle has been modified by the construction of suburban centers, shopping malls, and consumer markets in peripheral, non-integrated locations such as satellite and edge cities, where property taxes are also correspondingly high (see Heineberg 1989; Bathelt and Glückler 2003).

Fig. 4.7

Urban land usage based on differential property tax zones (Heineberg 1989; Bathelt and Glückler 2003)

Despite high construction costs, the vertical organization of usage relativizes the economic valuation of the parcel of land on which it is built by multiplying usable floor space and corresponding returns (Alonso 1964; Heineberg 1989; Zukin et al. 1992; Zukin 1993; Krätke 1995). Moreover, vertical organization also has a symbolic component in terms of social distinction: as in the biblical Tower of Babel, the higher you are, the more godlike your power. Skyscrapers are “marvels of nature cast in stone by human hand, able to withstand such natural forces as wind and weather and even the movements of the earth” (Bischoff 2002, p. 120). They express the technological and economic power of a society (Fig. 4.8).

Fig. 4.8

Verticality as a symbol of economic power—particularly in a region of predominantly horizontal structures, as here in downtown San Francisco (Photo Olaf Kühne)

For within a business skyscraper, an office with vistas across the city embodies the unquestioned power of a military commander situated on a hill above the battlefield—a position of high social status and potential for consolidating stability. Business enterprises follow the same logic, investing their economic capital (in alliance with the political-administrative establishment) to gain the cultural capital of a top address (see Bourdieu 1991a; Schroer 2006). For the “shaping and domestication of space” (Drepper 2003, p. 118) as a staging of organizational and economic rank is not confined to the height and design of a building: it is also crucially a question of address. An example is the so-called ‘power tower’ of RWE (a major German energy provider) in Essen, whose site on a busy intersection was renamed ‘Opernplatz’ (Opera Square), giving the corporation’s head office the address ‘Opernplatz 1’, with all the enhanced cultural connotations that accompany such a location (Drepper 2003).

The downside of skyscrapers is on the one hand the displacement of the less powerful by the more—the demolition, in order to build them, of a district generally inhabited by groups with less symbolic capital—and on the other the diminution of the quality of usage and even casual sojourn in their immediate vicinity. For, as Rodenstein (2000, p. 66) observes: “The centralization of functions in high-rise office towers paradoxically detracts from the vitality and diversity of the city, because it boosts land values to speculative heights, excluding the multifarious small traders who might react flexibly to new demands.” The result is an “absence of attractive places to meet after work, and a rush to leave the inner city for one’s more or less distant home” (ibid.; see also Kühne 2012).

However, the inscription of economic structures on physical space is inevitably subject to rapid fluctuation. Not only for this reason, it constitutes an inadequate index of the city as such. For, as Zukin has observed (1993, p. 186): “Downtown is in fact, as well as image, a collective memory of objective achievement and sentimental attachment to place” (see also Mitchell and Staeheli 2009). It is here, crucially, that the conflicts surrounding change in the physical order are rooted. For although the city center is a magnet for the forces of global finance as the prime symbol of unbounded economic freedom (see e.g. Ohmae 1999), it is precisely its global horizon that destroys the familiarity of a home environment grown on the particularity of the historical inner city.

4.3.1.2 Suburbanization—The Making of a Landscape Between Power, Social Distinction, and Economic Analysis

Suburbanization has been the subject of intense—and as a rule controversial, at times even markedly ideological—discussion in specialist circles for some decades (see e.g. Friedrichs 1995; Häussermann and Siebel 2004; Kühne 2007b, 2012), although the intensity of debate has somewhat diminished in the wake of more recent reurbanizing tendencies. For Bourdieu, suburbia is (in Western societies) a result of the expansion of home ownership; indeed, research into this phenomenon is central to the understanding of these societies: “The massive turn to home ownership is a crucial phenomenon; it must be grasped if one wants to understand what is going on in modern society and political life” (Bourdieu 1991b, p. 144). Suburbanization, therefore, does not just denote the expansion of the city into the surrounding countryside. More significantly, it is a process of deconcentration of the population, and with it of the production of goods, and administrative as well as other services. Key parameters are the ready availability of building land at lower prices, and the increasing motorization of the population. An immediate result is the infrastructural development of the city environs, especially for transportation and traffic.

Suburbanization permanently changes the character of the appropriated physical landscape from a predominantly agricultural (more rarely forestry-dominated) mode with smallish settlements to one that can no longer be adequately contained within the classical dichotomies of conventional landscape description and evaluation (see also Sect. 4.2.3). Suburban space is hybrid, defined by radical mixing, ambiguity, and transition (see Kühne 2012). Its focal point is “the house as real estate, locus of ownership, and site of intimate private life” (Hahn 2001, p. 230). Nevertheless, the quality of the periphery is also measured in terms of its accessibility: it is “a springboard for the conquest of the world beyond the intimate and private, a gateway offering entry to urban and rural alike” (ibid.).

As a social—as well as physical, landscape-impacting—process, suburbanization is a by-product both of socially transmitted norms of behavior and action, and of “barriers, measures of exclusion and selective inclusion” (Hauser and Kamleithner 2006, p. 62). Given a mobile, mass-consumer society, it is in essence the fruit of a rational cost-benefit analysis elevated by homo oeconomicus to the level of a social norm—a model which for Bourdieu rests on two postulates held by their supporters to be unshakable axioms: first that “the economy is a separate entity governed by universally valid natural laws not to be breached by misplaced political intervention; [and second that] the market is the optimum means toward just and efficient organization of the production and exchange of goods in a democratic society” (Bourdieu 2002, p. 32). On this basis the lower costs of suburban property, whether owned or rented, are offset against higher costs and longer times of travel to and from the workplace (unless this is also suburban). But suburban living also has other, broader incentives: property ownership is socially valued as a type of old-age insurance, as well as a status symbol, and as a simple multiplication (relative to inner city life) of physical distance to one’s neighbors. Another major perceived advantage is the ecologically more relaxed atmosphere of the suburbs, which—especially in the awareness of the many young families—approaches that of the stereotypical rural landscape (see Kühne 2006a, d; Bucher et al. 1982; Palen 1995). Finally, suburbanization can be seen as another form of symbolic social dominance, described by Bourdieu in terms of “the programmatic notion, propagated by women’s magazines and fueled by the legitimate fears of parents, that—especially with regard to the schooling and later success of their offspring—they must have a pleasant house with a separate room for each child”—a conviction, he adds, that “bears in its train weighty economic decisions” (Bourdieu 1991b, p. 144).

Not just the economic, also the immediate social consequences of buying a house in the suburbs are—especially for many women in Central Europe—considerable, given the gender-specific role differentiation that tends to mark everyday life on the urban periphery (Menzl 2006). Young mothers in particular often experience a multiple break in their lifestyle, bearing the financial burden of a mortgage and the work of rearing a family, while at the same time giving up their former career and network of relations, and having to put down new social roots in unfamiliar surroundings. The resultant everyday pattern—above all if a woman’s role is overwhelmingly domestic—may well be “largely dependent on local facilities” (Menzl 2006, p. 2; and see Monk 1992; Duncan and Duncan 2004). The male role, on the other hand, is characteristically dual, with the working day retaining its dominant position and evenings and weekends spent in the ‘counter-world’ of the suburban family home. Hence, according to Menzl (op. cit.), men generally experience the change in lifestyle associated with a move to the suburbs as less abrupt and far-reaching than it is for many women.

An essential feature of suburban life is the garden: an expression of the yearning for a perceived rural idyll within the convenient confines of the city (see Mitscherlich 1980; Hard 1985; Schneider 1989; Sieverts 2001; for the UK and USA Brunce 1994; Palen 1995; Schein 1997; Knox and Pinch 2010). Conceived, designed, and cared for as an epiphany of nature, the suburban garden, like a luxury garment (Schneider 1989), is there to be looked at and enjoyed—a unique expression of the principle of monetary exchange of goods and services, as even a rudimentary cultivation of crops is for the most part excluded in favor of a mass aesthetic of pure adornment (Veblen 1899). Again, this represents the busy ambition of the middle class to imitate the ‘legitimate taste’ of an old leisured society. Hence “the purity of an after-work atmosphere” (Schäfer 1981, p. 258) should be undisturbed by any physical sign of labor, or indeed any other unseemly usage such as children’s games—a principle extended to the exclusion of all activities reminiscent of a former urban, rural, or village lifestyle, like “living above the workplace, or playing on the street or in the (uncultivated) fields” (Sieverts 2004, p. 87).

A major by-product of suburbanization is the passive segregation described by Bourdieu (1991a) as arising historically from the socioeconomic ability of individuals to select their relationships, excluding the undesired, embracing the desired (see e.g. Mekdjian 2008; Knox and Pinch 2010; Pietila 2010; Kühne 2012; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a). The upshot, to oversimplify somewhat, is on the one hand a homogeneous suburban population of young relatively affluent middle class families, and on the other an inner city (or indeed also countryside) housing those segments of the population that lack sufficient economic or social capital to leave their inherited environment. Häussermann and Siebel speak in this context of “a concentration [of households], based on a combination of inadequate economic resources and social discrimination, in similarly marginalized situations in derelict areas (Häußermann and Siebel 2004, p. 159; and see also Dangschat 1997, 2000; Schroer 2006; Knox and Pinch 2010). Selective mobility brings with it collective decline and ‘no-go’ districts of poverty and exclusion (Häussermann and Kapphan 2000; Knox and Pinch 2010; Kühne 2012), whose residents themselves—unless gentrification has set in—all become tarred with the same brush, looked on as thieves and drug dealers (Belina 2006). An inevitable result of this polarization is the glaring spatial patchwork of the appropriated physical landscape (Harvey 1990; Cosgrove 1993; Rose 1995; Soja 1993; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Knox and Pinch 2010; Pietila 2010; Zukin et al. 1992; Zukin 1993), where dereliction and neglect of material substance and public space (see Schnittger and Schubert 2005) contrast with the glossy façade of “www.suburbia” (Kunzmann 2001, p. 218): a landscape defined by spatial borders that embody not only socioeconomic but also aesthetic power (Duncan 1973; Harvey 1996; Duncan and Duncan 2004; Kühne 2012; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a).

Bourdieu (1990, 2002) sees the spread of home ownership as an index of the extent to which the working class has assimilated to the bourgeois, integrated and stabilized within a system of stakeholders disciplined by the constraints of mortgage companies and hence less likely to rebel or go on strike. Ostensibly profiting from their new bourgeois identity, house owners are in fact “tied to a house that is frequently no longer sellable” (Bourdieu 2002, p. 41), thereby losing spatial mobility. The ideal customer in this market is “neither one with high economic and cultural capital, who knows his rights and restrictions, nor one lacking either economic or cultural capital, who will sign anything in order to realize his dreams, but the low or middle ranking government employee who on the one hand has just enough financial resources to be able to offer the necessary collateral and enough job security to face the future with confidence, but is not sufficiently wealthy to dispense with a loan altogether, and on the other has the cultural resources to understand and accept the requirements of the mortgage company without being in a position to offer organized resistance to their maneuverings” (Bourdieu 2002, p. 140, original emphasis).

Moreover, between the vendor and purchaser of a newly built house—or of the mortgage that mostly goes with it—there is an asymmetry of both knowledge and power: “Strengthened by the experience of thousands of similar cases, often codified in sales handbooks that contain appropriate answers to every foreseeable question and situation […], and armed with the information that every purchaser involuntarily provides and that enables him to classify them and to predict their every expectation and preference—even their banal defense mechanisms, catch questions and pretended competencies—the functionary within such a system can treat the customer, for whom this is a one-off experience (and one that is all the more daunting the higher the stakes and the thinner the real information) like a mere number in a series, arbitrary and exchangeable with any other” (ibid., p. 128).

Yet suburbia also reflects the increasing individualism of postmodern society. After all, “living in these newly urbanized landscapes [requires] a high level of personal initiative and management skills, given the widespread lack in the immediate vicinity of public or other collective facilities” (Hauser and Kamleithner 2006, p. 113; see also Pred and Watts 1992). Conversely, it also requires the need to compensate this lack in the form of the family automobile, the symbolic ‘machine of mobile privacy’ (Kühne 2012) that furnishes contact with the outside world (Jackson 1990). In all these aspects, suburbia is the emblem and symbol of a society based on individual opportunity.

The wish for a suburban home, one may conclude, is derived not from objective economic conditions but from social perceptions and values (Kühne 2007b), above all from a symbolic sense of mastery. But there is a paradox here, for the suburb and its inhabitants in fact destroy the very stereotype of ‘beautiful landscape’ to which they seek access (see Kühne 2008a). The logical answer is to move still further from the city center and in doing so to stabilize still more effectively the system of social dominance established in the bespoke mansions of the surrounding countryside. More recently, however, to escape this logic, a counter-movement has set in, albeit one that is no less unquestioningly subject to the existing hierarchies of socioeconomic and aesthetic power. The new quest for residential distinction finds expression in a return to the inner city and its immediate ring of housing, and the creation of a new type of settlement, the URFSURB.

4.3.1.3 Reurbanization and Its Physical Consequences: The URFSURBS of Southern California

The contemporary development of urban-rural hybrids in the USA has departed from the quasi-linear modernist path of de- and exurbanization: “The sparse technical and social infrastructure of many suburban areas, combined with a possibly permanent rise in energy prices, puts a question mark on the whole concept of suburbia” (Hesse 2008, p. 230). Especially in older suburbs with low property values, municipalities often lack the income from real estate taxes to reverse the remorseless deterioration of the technical infrastructure (for an overview see Hesse 2008, 2010; Hanlon 2012; Gallagher 2013). The problem has been further aggravated by the financial crisis, leading to an above average depreciation in property values in areas dwelt in by people with little capital (Kühne 2012).

Demographic factors have contributed to a growing preference for locations closer to the urban center. Where in 1960 three-quarters of all US-Americans were married, today the figure is 50%; and where half the households then had children, current forecasts for 2025 indicate a drop to 25% (Gallagher 2013). More than three-quarters of younger Americans prefer urban living, and the number of driving license holders—the prerequisite for suburban living—is correspondingly falling: in 1980, 66% of sixteen year-olds possessed a driving license; in 2010 the figure was 47% (ibid.). These demographic shifts are reflected by the house-building industry: the new millennium has seen a continuing increase in activity in urban, and a decrease in suburban districts. Big supermarket chains like Walmart have launched inner city stores tailored to the requirements of a new breed of customer, whereas only one shopping mall—the symbol par excellence of the suburban lifestyle—has opened in the entire United States since 2006 (ibid.). Modern ICT also plays a major role in decoupling social and emotional proximities: “our neighbors may be total strangers, while our closest friend can live on the other side of the world” (Rosa 2013, p. 62). The quest for a community of the likeminded that underlay the suburban ideal has yielded to the appeal of a location offering above all flexibility.

Depending on accessibility and symbolic valuation, the urban-rural hybrid has witnessed a veritable pastiche of historical developments, with the classical streetcar suburbs built for the rising middle classes in the initial phase of suburbanization gradually being taken over, for lack of investment, by people with low capital assets, before a new wave of gentrification started in the 1980s (see Zukin et al. 1992; Zukin 1993; Palen 1995; Mills 1997a, b; Hanlon 2012; Gallagher 2013; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a; Kühne 2016b). The Los Angeles conurbation, for example, contains old suburbs like Glendale or Garden Grove whose population, thanks to immigration, is now once again growing (Hanlon 2012, p. 68). So long as they are incorporated as independent municipalities, other suburbs can maintain their socioeconomic status with the help of the—by European standards restrained—planning regulations that keep parcels of building land large but the permissible area for building small (Palen 1995, pp. 103–105), and at the same time prevent the construction of socially subsidized apartment blocks (Davis 2004). Characterized by architectonic simulacra and panoramic landscapes reflecting a socially stereotypical aesthetic, Bel Air and Beverly Hills, for example, retain their virtually universal attraction, while other suburbs draw residents with specific spatial requirements (e.g. stabling or similar; see Hanlon 2012).

Thus, while some conditioning factors (like rising energy prices) are global constants, and others (like demographic change) characterize many Western societies, the historical development of urban-rural hybrids in the United States remains subject to regional and local specifics. Growth regions like Southern California undergo developments that to some extent differ significantly from the general U.S. pattern, particularly as regards the frequently chronicled decline of the ‘inner suburban ring’. Alongside a gentrification that maintains continuity of (generally residential) usage while undertaking widespread refurbishment—exemplified in San Diego’s South Park (see Kühne and Schönwald 2015a)—other developments reveal a new quality in the reshaping of Californian cities: more specifically of those parts of the cities built in the first phase of suburban expansion. In recent years these have in some cases undergone a process of functional as well as structural reurbanization that justifies their classification as ‘urbanized former suburbs’ (URFSURBS for short: Kühne and Schönwald 2015a, b; Kühne 2016b). The development may consist in the extension of an existing urban center (as in East Village and Barrio Logan in San Diego, or Skid Row in Los Angeles), or in a clear structural-functional separation from historical downtown (as in West Hollywood or San Diego’s Hillcrest,: Kühne 2012; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a, b). Here reurbanization takes the form of new apartment blocks with shopping and gastronomic infrastructure constructed on the generous areas of land vacated by industry (as in San Diego’s Barrio Logan and East Village). While in Los Angeles’ Skid Row former industrial buildings that fulfill urban socio-aesthetic criteria have simply been converted into loft apartments (Füller and Marquardt 2010), other areas further from the center have attracted an urbanophile population that has rededicated empty buildings as stores or restaurants and stimulated the construction of new ones with typically urban functions. With their new settlement patterns, especially by the gay community these URFSURBS have generated a characteristically urban style evident both in San Diego’s Hillcrest and in West Hollywood (see Fig. 4.9).

Fig. 4.9

URFSURB variants: (left) loft conversion of former industrial buildings, Skid Row, Los Angeles; (upper right) new apartment block, East Village, San Diego—both locations are linked structurally and functionally to the respective urban center. In contrast, Hillcrest (lower right), some 5 km north of downtown San Diego, reveals a typically urban pattern of public and private service provision (Photos Olaf Kühne)

4.3.1.4 Ecosystem Services—Subjecting Nature to Economics

The translation of various aspects of the natural environment into social action has in recent years received a new conceptual framework in the shape of ‘ecosystem services’ (ESS). Three central documents, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005), The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study (TEEB 2009), and the Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity in Europe policy report (EASAC 2009), set out to show how “ecological aspects in general, and freely available natural forces in particular, can be better integrated into decision making processes in order to safeguard sustainable land usage and to counter the exploitation and degradation of natural life conditions” (Grunewald and Bastian 2013, p. 2).

The ESS concept systematizes these aspects and forces, focusing on “technological access to the self-generating and regenerating systems of dynamic relations among living organisms and their environment” (Voigt 2015, p. 204), and thereby seeking to make society aware of what nature offers in economic terms. ESS enhances “public awareness of the natural consequences of human decisions about consumption and investment and their impact on our wellbeing” (Schröter-Schlaack 2012, p. 10), transforming these consequences, in terms of pollution, into economically quantifiable units that can serve as a measure of the obligation on the polluter to compensate the polluted (Knorring 1995, p. 2). This can then take the form of a withdrawal of alternative goods of exchange—calculable unit for unit—against the loss inflicted on the good constituted by the natural environment: an economically rational solution intelligible to any business person. With its inherently economic perspective on biodiversity and ecosystems, ESS therefore represents “nothing less than the attempt to elicit action—economic action—in the face of the threat to humanity of diminishing natural resources” (Hansjürgens and Schröter-Schlaack 2012, p. 16), and its converse, the imperative to conserve natural resources on purely economic grounds (Jessel et al. 2009). This perspective entails aspects of power and power relations that will be addressed in the following pages with reference to Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory (for greater detail see Kühne 2014a).

Luhmann’s theory of social systems sees modern societies as a complex of subsystems tasked with the management of specific social sectors and problems (Luhmann 1984, 1986). Each of these systems “introduces its own categories and distinctions, with which it grasps the situations and events that serve it as information” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 45; original emphasis). The extent to which it grasps this information at all depends on whether the data impinges on—or in Luhmann’s terms ‘disturbs’ or ‘resonates with’—the system. In addition, even where it does so, “the system does not react to ‘the environment’, but to its own concept of environment” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 47). A central societal factor here is communication: climate change, loss of biodiversity, the formation of surface-level ozone and other anthropogenic impacts on the natural environment will elicit no resonance within society as chemical, physical or biotic facts “so long as this is not communicated” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 63); and non-communication can have dire consequences for the system. For one must “at least envisage the possibility that a system so impacts its environment that it can at some point no longer exist in that environment” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 38).

Communication within the different subsystems of a society follows their inherently individual logic (Van Assche and Verschraegen 2008): for example, landscape is interesting for the economic sector when it is connected with money (‘have/lack’ code); and it is interesting for science when it can be investigated and yields new knowledge through the application of scientific methods (‘true/untrue’ code)—although what counts as true and what as untrue is again discipline-specific (with reference to landscape see e.g. Kühne 2008a, b, c); the natural environment is politically relevant when it concerns questions of power (‘power/powerlessness’ code). No subsystem—not even that of science—can, on the basis of its own code, grasp the environment objectively; nor is societal resonance to environmental change simply “the sum of the resonances of its subsystems” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 98). For each subsystem sees the other subsystems as environmental factors conditioning and disturbing it: the process is mutual (one need only think of the sometimes conflict-laden relations between politics and industry).

Given that ESS implies the convertibility of the common good of the natural environment into an economic good, which can as such be subjected to the rational parameters of the economic system (see Heiland 1999; Schneider 2016), it follows from a systems theory perspective that economic actors face the alternative of “either being owners or not” (Luhmann 1990 [1986], p. 102). For them, the gap in the social communication of the natural environment arising from the logic of functional differentiation within society is thereby closed; for “no functional system can replace or even relieve another” (Luhmann (1990 [1986], p. 207). In this way ESS offers the economic system the opportunity of at least partially escaping from the moral and political judgments (and condemnations) toward which it has in the past necessarily been passive.

The economic code can, however, only be applied restrictively to the natural environment, for only known influences and their impacts can be monetarized: what is unknown in terms of either cause or effect cannot, by definition, be converted into monetary terms. Future impacts, for example, are particularly difficult to predict, as future market prices are unknown (Kühne 2004). Nor does the same cause—or what is held to be the same—have everywhere the same effect: global and even regional economic differences preclude any uniform evaluation of local environmental factors. All one can say in principle is that the smaller the area under consideration (e.g. the catchment area of a stream or brook) and the fewer the environmental factors involved (e.g. water), the better the chances of achieving an accurate monetary balance between cause and effect of damage.

The attempt to grasp the natural environment in exclusively monetary terms runs the further risk of blurring the borders between the various subsystems of society. If the economic code is allowed to dominate, it will impose itself on other, non-economic subsystems. And if science begins to perceive changes in the natural environment, especially those engendered by society, in accordance with the economic code of possession rather than with the scientific code of truth—e.g. in light of the availability of third party funding for the department’s environmental research—or if politics suddenly decides to dispense with the instruments of law enforcement classically embedded in the political code of power, society will soon cease to function. Kühne (2003) cites Eastern Europe under communism as an example of the results of imposing a systemically alien political logic on economic decisions (see also Sect. 5.3). Moreover, the conversion of aspects of nature into monetary units ignores the ecological function of many less common species (see Kühne 2004; Voigt 2015), with the result that their protection becomes difficult to defend; after all, “ecosystem services are generally rendered by common species that are tolerant of change […] rather than by rare and endangered species” (Voigt 2015, p. 211).

The expansion of the economic code can also be observed as an infra-theoretical phenomenon, inasmuch as current discussions of ESS seem wholly focused on monetary categories; other interpretations are marginalized. But hegemonic discourse of this kind not only endangers the plurality of the key concept, but also propagates the illusion that the complexity of the world—here the natural environment—can be reduced to a sum of money, while at the same time fostering the illusion that the (frequently subjective) ascription of economic values to (often merely hypothetical) damage is actually objective (Kühne 2014a). Moreover, the cultural rootedness of evaluations concerned with nature and landscape (see Sects. 3.1 and 3.2) is ignored. Different cultural contexts can view—and also evaluate in monetary terms—the preservation or loss of a certain object very differently (Voigt 2015), all the more so given the disparities of wealth that pertain among the world’s (or even between different regional) economies (see Kühne 2004).

4.3.2 Landscape as a Medium of Symbolic Communication at the Interface of Science, Politics, Administration, and Civil Society

4.3.2.1 Symbolic Communication—Language, Power, and Landscape

To scrutinize the relation between landscape and power is to inquire into the social function of knowledge, its transformation, and its bearers (see e.g. Weingart 2003, 2012; Stehr 2006; Lynch 2016). Transdisciplinary sociological research of this kind cannot fall back on a closed canon of knowledge: it is involved in a strategic conceptual feedback process with other social subsystems, and individual as well as collective worlds. Moreover, according to Giddens (1990), personal assimilation of expert knowledge is increasing: “Individuals engage in their environment with the aid of specialist information, which they routinely interpret and use as the basis for action” (Knorr Cetina 2006, p. 110; see also Kukla 2000; Lynch 2016). However, this engagement is particularly susceptible to expert interests rooted in power rather than truth.

A particularly significant factor in the symbolic communication of power and landscape is authority over the definition of its codes of communication. Once it is accepted that language is not simply a neutral instrument of communication but a transformative mechanism of power, it becomes necessary to consider the entire range of meanings contained in speech about landscape (see Pred 1990). Words, according to Bourdieu (1982, p. 83), exercise “a typically magical power: they make one see, they make one believe, and they make one act.” In the spatial dimension, this often takes the initial form of assigning toponyms; for to name a place is to impose the power of definition on it (Myers 1996; see also Gailing 2014). Moreover—unless the speaker is prepared to appear a novice among initiates—this definition is bound to a particular semiotics: for like all discourse, landscape discourse is “a means not only of expression but also of censorship. Paradoxically a language always consists not only of the things it permits one to think and say, but also of those that it forbids: things that other language systems may allow […]” (Bourdieu 1977, pp. 19–20). A relevant example of these “other language systems” in the context of landscape is lay discourse.

“All dominance,” Burckhardt has said, “is linguistic. Language is the instrument of executive action” (Burckhardt 1982, p. 106). A corollary of this is that those not specifically educated in landscape-related fields are forced to remain silent in the face of professional discourse about the forms and development of the physical landscape and its societal basis—especially in the context of voluntary (or legally prescribed) participation in planning or conservation procedures. They can choose only “between an officious alien jargon and their own colloquial idiom” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 27; see also Jackson 1990). In this respect the silence of the non-professional is often merely a matter of avoiding a put-down in the face of professional self-assurance and precision—although, as Gelfert observes (2000, p. 85), the language of the professional can itself be censured as “browbeating kitsch” shot through with irrational myths and highfalutin expressions (see also Maasen and Weingart 2013).

In its bearing on landscape, the deployment of power can be measured by the resistance to change in its symbolic language. Thus single signs can be more readily changed than whole complexes (Ipsen 2006): it is a simple matter to move a hazel bush in order to make way for a path, but to move an immemorial oak—or any other landscape element protected by law—may ignite the resistance of honorary as well as official nature conservationists, and possibly of an entire local population; in which case the goal can only be achieved by invoking supra-regional forces and the instruments of official authority (Kühne 2008a). Alterations to the symbolism of an urban complex are even more difficult and require a force majeure which, in its short-term mobilization of both power of action and instrumental power, as a rule oversteps the limits of democratic order—as with the construction of the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris, or of the analogous central boulevards of socialist states, all of which represent symbols of a manifestly superior modernity. As far as the alteration of complex symbols is concerned, the shift in the forms of power that must be deployed—ranging from (potential) violence with corresponding compliance to unquestioned authority with corresponding technological dominance—requires an extension of the time dimension. A strategy often employed in such circumstances, when the immediate attainment of a planning target is faced with resistance (e.g. from citizens’ initiatives), is to exchange this target for a long-term evolution that will likely go unnoticed, for example the marginal gentrification of a district due in any case for wholesale refurbishment (see Popitz 1992; Jordan 1996; Holm 2006; Ipsen 2006; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a).

The relation between power, dominance, and distinction is clear, but not linear. Power and dominance may always be distinctive, but distinction does not always involve power or dominance. Distinction is based on the knowledge and use of signs and symbols, but power is “concerned very significantly” (Ipsen 2006, p. 45) with the production and control of such symbols. In landscape planning, for instance, power takes the form not merely of being able to read a landscape, but of being able to change its symbolic statement (also in its physical manifestation) in line with the decision implicit in the planning proposal as to “how people in these concrete circumstances should live” (Hauser 2001, p. 41; see also Irrgang 2014). Power thus expresses itself as the sovereignty of definition held by a small body of specialists over the codes of communication (see Hugill 1995): a power of authority manifest also in their control of the technical standards governing a physical space—i.e. Popitz’s ‘technical’ or structural power (Popitz 1995; see Sect. 2.3).

4.3.2.2 Appropriated Physical Landscape and Power—Expert-Lay Relations

The development of ‘knowledge societies’ is based on “systems of experts […] penetrating every aspect of social life” (Knorr Cetina 2002a, p. 11) and developing their characteristic knowledge cultures in the form of “practices, mechanisms, and principles bound by mutual relation, circumstance, and historical coincidence, which determine in a specific field how and what we know” (Knorr Cetina 2002a, p. 11). Among these, in accordance with the differentiation of modern society, are “specialists in [terrestrial] space” (Prigge 1991, p. 105)—or in what we call ‘landscape’, whose function consists in objectivizing the inherently self-referential tendency of a professional discourse encapsulated and perpetuated in scornful disregard for “the uneducated taste of capitalist society” (Elias 2002, p. 157). In the same vein Paris (2005, p. 116) characterizes experts as acting “as if they could present their credentials at any time if they wanted to, but actually don’t need to.”

An important aspect of modern differentiated societies is the bureaucracy (Weber 1976 [1922]), which—in combination with expanding technological capabilities (railroads, steamships, excavators etc.) has promoted a more powerful political and administrative grip on the development and shaping of the appropriated physical landscape (see Gregory 1994). Along with this has come the distinction between the professional landscape planner/architect and the nonprofessional—part of the growing (and by now universal) “separation of the competent from the incompetent” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 13). Enhanced by a disparity in the possession of information, this has inevitably resulted in an uneven accumulation of power—or in Theodor Geiger’s terms (1947) a divide between the more and the less powerful—in relation to the planning and structuring of the landscape (see also Paris 2005).

The recursive nature of professional landscape discourse is aptly illustrated in the discussion between the landscape architect Prominski (2006a, b) and Stefan Körner (2006) about ‘Landscape Three’ (broadly speaking what has here been called ‘appropriated physical landscape’). As the undisputed field of the landscape architect, landscape is a key aspect of professional identity, guiding both perception and action in accordance with an established rationale and instrumental scope, rather than with communicative principles of action (Habermas 1970). The way in which experts cut through the complexities of landscape planning was already exposed by Burckhardt, when he pointedly asked “what does a designer or architect suggest when faced with a problem? What does an apple tree suggest …? Apples, of course. Moreover, the architect suggests buildings. Every problem leads to a building” (Burckhardt 1967, p. 44)—a pre-eminent example of déformation professionelle exacerbated by “the belief that in designing a technology the constructor can determine its use” (Irrgang 2014, p. 12).

Contemporary research in the sociology of science sees experts less as “repositories of competence and knowledge than as representing the [strategic] interests of a scientific or technological community” (Saretzki 2005, p. 359); for, as Bourdieu has remarked, the science construct is the result of a long and arduous process of gathering many different indicators whose consideration is recommended from the point of view of practical knowledge of various positions of power […]: on the one hand of personages regarded as ‘powerful’ or ‘influential’, and on the other of the qualities commonly proposed—or pilloried—as hallmarks of power (Bourdieu 1985).

In this sense, scientific work, according to Cetina (2002b, p. 175), “is characterized by an opportunistic rationality embedded in transepistemic contexts of argument” that readily activates the strategies of officialdom in both individual and professional interests (for further details see Sect. 4.2.5). Thus the postulated intrinsic value of a natural resource can serve to secure significant economic, political, communal, and sociocultural power for the landscape and nature conservation professions (Kühne 2006c) and at the same time to satisfy their internalized moral norms, for “to help is to exercise power selflessly—but with uplift for the self” (Paris 2005, p. 25): an uplift that gains social capital (and social capital can, when the time is ripe, be cashed in for economic capital—see Sect. 5.4 for an example from the field of renewably sourced energies).

Based on secondary socialization (see Kühne 2006a), and as such characterized by the incorporated and institutionalized possession of cultural capital, the training of landscape experts is an aspect of the 20th century expansion of higher education (see Bell 1973). The professional authority of such experts is primarily communicated in the definition of ecological standards sanctioned (more or less stringently and negatively rather than positively) by law. However, while scientific approaches focus primarily on ecosystems and quantitative methods, aesthetic approaches are frequently based on (and derive distinction from) a Romantic concept of landscape; this may, indeed, even inform reflective post-industrial concern for the physical landscape (see Kühne 2006a, c). Professional power in this approach is communicated less as a cognitive resource than as a superior taste, a subtle appeal to the middle class instinct to close the gap separating them from their sociocultural masters. In this sense the affirmation of the object of aesthetic distinction—here a landscape deemed worthy of conservation—serves, in fact, to underpin the structures of social power which Bourdieu (1979) sees as an essential foundation for social stratification, and in the final analysis for the inequality that accompanies it (see also Greider and Garkovich 1994).

Their common secondary socialization ensures far-reaching agreement among landscape experts as to the appropriate aims, concepts, and paradigms with which to approach physical—and to a lesser extent social—landscape. Their academic training will as a rule have been positivist and empirical, but it may have had a scientific or aesthetic bias of varying intensity, and in fact natural scientists often expressly exclude aesthetic parameters. Leser (1984, p. 75), for example, remarks that landscape is “certainly not an aesthetic something or other on the borders of art and science.” Experts with this background often view landscape-related concerns as definable in terms of “objects and objectivity” (Paris 2005, p. 114; Hilbig 2014; Matheis 2016). To justify their superiority, the ‘ruling class’ of landscape experts tends to invoke a “special disciplinary competence, scientific method, or sometimes even ‘talent’ […]” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 14) which, clad in impressive jargon, will testify to their claimed scientific authority (Adorno 1977). A favored instrument of this formalized language is the visual plan, about which Burckhardt trenchantly comments: “Planners often laugh about laypeople who seem unable to read a plan; but plans are not a suitable code for describing reality. If an expert cannot express in words what the plan depicts, there must be some deficiency in the information it contains” (Burckhardt 1982, p. 103; see also Kühne 2006c, d).

Despite their projected distinction, professional landscape planners are hardly “intellectuals in the traditional sense” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 15) of reflecting systematically on social developments; they are rather what Bourdieu calls “intellectuals for specific services […], masters of action rather than reflection” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 15; Hilbig 2014). The strong practical bias in the profession is evident from the description of their work given on the homepage of the Federation of German Landscape Architects, which also clearly circumscribes their competencies: “Landscape architects today are largely responsible for the shape of the natural environment that forms the basis of our lives, and for its interrelations with the social and physically constructed worlds. With their unique combination of ecological knowledge and planning competence they stand for the feasibility of ideas and projects. In this way they play a key role in the development of the landscape and the planning of both urban and rural open spaces” (BDLA 2006a). These activities, Schneider (1987) observes, constitute for the landscape architect a rather one-sided relationship, a passion that is as fulfilling, as it is intolerant of critique; for critique risks loss of the very source of the artist’s recognition, questioning the paradise she or he has created. Expert activity can at times—and by no means only here—approximate all too closely the everyday banalities of a “monistic materialism” (Lerf 2016, p. 247).

4.3.2.3 On the Changing Relation Between Science and Politics

Although the power of the individual state to “maintain established structures and control of relations between opposed societal interests” (Belina 2006, p. 13) may be receding—among other things as a result of globalization—it still has many channels through which to exercise its authority. The state, for Foucault, can be described as “a superstructure reaching across a whole series of power networks including the body, sexuality, the family, forms of behavior, knowledge, technology etc.” Nevertheless, it can only exercise this “superordinate function” (Foucault 1978, p. 116) because it is itself rooted in a series of multi-faceted and undefined power relations that “constitute the indispensable foundation for these major forms of negative power” (ibid.). Among these are the relations between politics and science. Interest will focus in the following section on the mechanisms within the general context of landscape with which the state maintains its power and that of its servants, along with the “micro-powers” (Foucault 1977, p. 39) of its external intellectual resources.

The political system has recourse both internally and externally to scientific research; not only the relations between science and politics, however, but the system of science itself has fundamentally changed. The separation of fundamental from applied research (‘mode 1’ knowledge production) has given way to systematically mixed forms of applied fundamental research (‘mode 2’ knowledge production; see Gibbons et al. 1994; Latour 1999; Nowotny et al. 2001; Bender 2004; Nowotny 2005; Berr 2013). This modal shift foregrounds the “ad hoc, context-driven nature” (Berr 2013, p. 130) of many modern research projects. Latour, in fact, distinguishes ‘science’ from ‘research’: “While Science had certainty, coldness, aloofness, objectivity, distance, and necessity, Research appears to have all the opposite characteristics: it is uncertain; open-ended; immersed in many lowly problems of money, instruments, and know-how; unable to differentiate as yet between hot and cold, subjective and objective, human and nonhuman” (Latour 1999, p. 20)

According to Gibbons et al. (1994) and Nowotny (1995), the transition from mode 1 to mode 2 entails an epistemological break: science no longer investigates the basic laws of nature, but produces ‘socially robust knowledge’ in applied interdisciplinary contexts (see Kukla 2000; Viehöver 2005). This also bears on the relation between science and non-science: science is seen as a node within a real-world-focused feedback system of autonomies, alliances, and public presences (Latour 1999):

• The real-world focus implies the incorporation into the scientific of a range of instruments from technical appliances, through surveys and data collection, to expeditions (and the various sites associated with these activities and objects), in which information about the ‘non-scientific’ world is gathered.

• The autonomies in question are those associated with the innate drive of every discipline, profession and clique to establish its own reference and value system—i.e. to gain disciplinary independence, interpretive sovereignty and distinction.

• An essential feature of mode 2 science is the alliances it promotes between researchers and non-scientific (e.g. industrial) organizations. Thus physicists must interest the military, geographers (or more specifically cartographers) must interest the governors of states, chemists must interest the captains of industry, political scientists must interest parliamentarians, and educationalists must interest teachers and educational administrators for their concerns. Only in this way can they mobilize the necessary (in particular financial) resources for their projects.

• Science must have a public presence: it needs relations with the press in order to have relevance for the public at large. So it is in many cases desirable to publicize research projects pointedly and programmatically (see also Weingart 2012).

On these feedback loops depend the material and immaterial (symbolic capital) resources required for the effectiveness of individual research projects. Without alliances, science can develop sophisticated and autonomous theories with large empirical databases, and may even achieve high public awareness, but its results will not be put into practice in the real world.

The alliance of the political with the external scientific system (Luhmann 1997) in the context of the transition from mode 1 to mode 2 implies a widening of the outreach and responsibilities of science (Nowotny 2005) that bears within it, however, the seeds of an acute problem. For, Bourdieu argues, given the major influence of science and scientists on political decisions, “even if only to underpin their legitimacy with rational, ‘objective’ arguments” (Weingart 2003, p. 92), “science gains, in the battle of ideas […] that are accepted by society as true and valid, a unique power, which furnishes its representatives”—or whoever possesses or appears to possess scientific knowledge about the socially available world—with a monopolistic legitimacy in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy (Bourdieu 1985). But a prophecy about the future is always an act of hubris with regard to those whose future it will (or may) be—the more so since every prognosis “paves the way for a development in just that direction” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 26).

A corollary is that the laws of science, according to Bloor (1982) are not established and propagated on the basis of scientific evidence but because of their perceived public impact, justification and legitimacy. But such a process runs the risk of governments and parliaments being “colonized” (Weingart 2003, p. 98) by a single perspective: one school of thought (e.g. natural succession of the landscape) will exclude others (e.g. preservation of the physical landscape), and the consultation between politicians and scientists—which is in any case subject to other social influences than the pure quest for knowledge—will be exposed to “a constant threat to its primary basis of legitimacy […], the will of the people expressed via the ballot box” (Weingart 2003, p. 92). In any case the very specialization and differentiation of the sciences, each with its own methods and language, already creates a dangerous gap between science and society (see Weingart 2003; Berr 2014; Matheis 2016).

This applies to landscape research in all its subdisciplines, whether in the natural sciences, the humanities, the social sciences, or in architecture and design. Here, too, communication is frustrated—or at least considerably hindered—by the multiplicity of intellectual traditions and specialist languages involved. The result, when it comes to the actual ordering of physical objects in a ‘landscape’, is that the (often stereotypical) concepts of local citizens are either overridden in favor of ideas proposed by committees of politicians and their expert advisers (whether internal or external to the respective administration), or a third way is taken, a compromise between expert recommendations, what a decision maker sees as personally power-enhancing, and what is perceived, on the basis of personal observation, as a successful model (Schimank 2012, p. 385; Forsyth 2004; Blum et al. 2014).

The consultation process in the multifarious alliances between science and politics is not linear. Science communicates—sometimes circuitously via presentation and public opinion—issues that are taken up by politicians, for example climate change, demographic change, biodiversity, or soil erosion, in order “to forestall either danger or loss of legitimacy” (Weingart 2003, p. 94). In this process, scientists (or at least their leading representatives) may well find themselves in a position to put specific problems on the political agenda—problems for which they themselves will then be invited to suggest solutions. This requires two-way translation between the ‘true/untrue’ code of science and the ‘power/powerlessness’ code of politics (see Luhmann 1990, 1997; Weingart 2003; Weingart et al. 2008; Kühne 2013a, 2014a)—a situation in which expertise is necessarily transgressive, for “all experts must overstep their scientific competencies, because all are faced with questions from other fields than their own” (Nowotny 2005, p. 37). This has considerable consequences for scientific statements, for “despite an official face of neutrality flowing from scientific expertise, members of expert panels regularly make moral and political claims and choices” (Hannigan 2014, p. 96; see also Forsyth 2004; Holzinger 2004; Levidow 2005; Hilbig 2014; Matheis 2016).

Scientific opinion—given the usual asymmetrical power relationship between consulter and consulted—is generally sought on condition that evidence be presented in a summary form intelligible to the layperson, preferably with explicit recommendations for action; the detailed evidence will then serve as source material for an eventual decision (see Weingart et al. 2008; Berr 2014; Hannigan 2014). This forces experts to fall back on inexact prescientific language that renders them vulnerable to criticism. The comprehensive lists of plant and animal species often found under their scientific names (along with other technical vocabulary) in landscape planning proposals, will be relegated (if anything) to an annex; the recommendations themselves will contain only general terms like ‘mown meadow’ or ‘mixed woodland’. Moreover, the predilection of the politics-administration-science triangle for recursive structures will often mean that new studies are repeatedly commissioned on the basis of old—frequently as subordinate inquiries in ever greater detail—with the result that they excite ever-diminishing public interest, acquire ever-diminishing funds, and generate ever-increasing competition for those funds, to say nothing of the associated personal animosities among politicians, civil servants, and scientists, which endure in some cases until retirement, dismissal, or even death.

As problems become more complex and their outreach widens, the dilemma of ‘expert scientific advisers’ becomes more acute (see Beck 1986). For as complexity grows, the scientific position loses its firmness. Funtowicz and Ramirez (1990) illustrate this with the example of anthropogenic climate change: despite global research, the growing complexity of the relations of individuals and societies to the environment has increased the scope of scientific uncertainty and ignorance, and with it the “hypothetical risks” (Fischer 2005, p. 111) to all concerned. The climate-stabilizing mechanisms of the earth’s atmospheric temperature are not only complex, they are often embedded in feedback systems; and with a standard measurement period (the gap between readings) of thirty years, it is highly unlikely that prognoses, however expert, will be verified. The consequence is a public loss of scientific credibility: if the danger of global warming is emphasized and no short-term change is noticed, scientists will be blamed for raising unnecessary alarm; if they refrain from giving advice, they will be blamed for neglecting their duty (Weingart 2001; see also Cosgrove and Domosh 1997). One way or the other, the experts’ dilemma—in its essence a conflict between opinions (see Nennen and Garbe 1996)—is understood in scientific circles neither as an unintended questioning of one’s own position in the sense proposed by Beck (1986) nor as a sign of the growing significance of not-knowing in the sense proposed by Nowotny (2005) and Lerf (2016), but as the failure of decision makers and administrators to correctly implement the ‘scientific facts’. For Nowotny the argumentation of climatologists reveals the “typical pattern of the enlightened scientist, along the lines: ‘We know what we’re talking about, but you’ll have to acquire a minimum of scientific knowledge before we can even begin to talk to you!’” (Nowotny 2005, p. 40).

4.3.2.4 Landscape, Power, and Administration

Far from basing their decisions in matters relating to landscape on their own knowledge and mature consideration of circumstances and consequences, the legislative and executive as a rule delegate their authority to (qualified but not elected) bodies of experts and/or to organizations working directly in the field (Burckhardt 1978a; Beck 1997; Michelsen and Walter 2013). Until about the mid 20th century this took the form of recruiting academically qualified staff into the various administrations, which could then build up a body of specialist departmental knowledge—with all the conflicts of power and loyalty that went with it. However, as science grew more specialized and society—both internally and in its external relations—more complex, this structure revealed itself as inadequate, and “since that point, appeal to specialist scientific knowledge became necessary” (Weingart 2003, p. 90). The classical model that still largely governs the interface of politics with science reflects this division of labor, viewing planning and decision making as separate functions: “The government commissions specialists to conduct research, feasibility studies, and/or projects, and the specialists present the results of their inquiries and studies, and their various alternative plans, to the government, which then decides what shall be done—that’s the received doctrine” (Burckhardt 1974, pp. 72–73).

It is, perhaps, inevitable that the drive for discursive dominance over the physical landscape among the representatives of different social subsystems should entail disallowing the legitimacy of competing arguments and perspectives. The following excerpt from the Fundamentals of Regional Planning and Development illustrates this attitude: “The professional rationality and long-term perspective [of the Regional Planning Department], with its carefully balanced consideration of communal interests, is restricted in its decision making not only by self-interested resistance on the part of enterprises and other administrative departments, but also by ineradicable characteristics of the political system and its processes: coalition agreements, questionable political bundling of issues, concerns of individual local politicians due for re-election […]” (ARL-Regional and State Planning Academy 2011, p. 18).

Far-sighted, professional planners dedicated to the common good are, in other words, frustrated in the pursuit of their legitimate goals by the profit interests of industry and the sectarian interests of (e.g.) departments of the natural or cultural environment, whose members are implicitly accused of lacking rational long-term vision. The political system is disavowed in even stronger terms: its decisions are questionable, its alliances remote from actual needs, and its interests focused on the retention of power—accusations corroborated by von Arnim, who censures politicians for their overwhelming self-interest. Not, he concedes, that they break the law: “they don’t even have to—they make the law, and make it to suit themselves” (von Arnim 2007, p. 271). However, in the context of democratically organized communal structures, the demand that planning decisions be left to planners is, to say the least, not altogether without problems, for it amounts to promoting the interests of one subsystem, which enjoys no direct democratic legitimacy, against another. The increasing appeal to lay participation in planning procedures can be seen as an attempt to compensate for this lack of legitimacy (Kühne 2014c; see also Van Assche and Verschraegen 2008).

Von Beyme (2013, p. 13; Michelsen and Walter 2013) see the waxing importance of experts against the background of social change: “The decline of the social classes and the rise of the experts seems to have decisively weakened democratic parties. Disciplinary competence has displaced the enthusiasm of the amateur.” A politics “steeped in science” (Jörke 2010, p. 275) has “banished the classical intellectual […] in favor of experts and planners” (Michelsen and Walter 2013, p. 365). This is combined with an increasingly detailed articulation of social challenges which “in view of the declining ability of political institutions to solve problems, invokes the apolitical measures of administrators, who enjoy the confidence of a civil society bent on output” (ibid. 109). Max Weber understood the remit of politics and administration very differently. His principle of “governance through knowledge” (Weber 1976 [1922], p. 226) is rooted in the distinction between the politician, who seeks a majority for his or her policies, and the administrator, whose job is to execute those policies. A civil servant tasked with political decisions will, however, apply the logic of the administrator and split these into discrete, procedurally manageable (and politically invulnerable) units (see Van Assche and Verschraegen 2008; Schluchter 2009; Michelsen and Walter 2013; Hahn 2014; Kühne 2014c). Sofsky draws the sobering conclusion that the state “can neither protect from material need, nor create jobs and economic growth, [but] lets the transportational infrastructure and education rot […], while allowing its civil service and quasi-governmental bodies” to grow unhindered (Sofsky 2007, p. 104).

The distinction between science and politics is sometimes reduced to a questionable “rhetorical dichotomy between facts and values” (Pregernig 2005, p. 272; see also Forsyth 2004). In relation to landscape, however, the process of consultation, delegation and decision in which politicians and experts are engaged shows the extent to which the decision making model of politics has been supplanted by a technocratic (and sometimes even pragmatic) approach to managing the issues concerned. Thus preparations for a (political) decision will often be delegated to tiers of administrators, creating a pressure-relieving mechanism that moves conflict risks—e.g. between agricultural interests—down the line to subordinate administrative bodies entrusted, for example, with the definition of specially protected areas (see Burckhardt 1967; Popitz 1992). In this process, the master is the one that “can afford to let others do the dirty work, or can conjure up new offices to produce new knowledge” (Paris 2005, p. 22).

In their empirical investigation of modes of governance and the deployment of power, Sofsky and Paris (1994) distinguish various structures of formal and personal authority:

• (a) Official authority is accorded to a position; thus, the minister of a federal state has greater power in the definition and implementation of a landscape norm than the case officer of a subordinate department tasked with executing it.

• (b) Organizational authority is “a matter of leadership” Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 69) entailing the distribution of tasks and the overseeing of their execution. In the landscape context, it is connected with the question of where responsibility for that sector resides—in Germany in departments of town and country (rather than regional) planning.

• (c) Specialist authority is vested in a person “whose specialist knowledge is attested by others as indispensable for the task in hand” (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 51). Above all in exceptional situations, it provides immediate accessibility of incorporated cultural capital. Virtually independent of official hierarchical structures (Krackhardt 1990), such knowledge (e.g. of local botany or zoology), and the authority that goes with it, can be acquired by a junior case officer just as well as by a head of department.

• (d) Functional (or operational) authority is vested in the process manager who can successfully break down overall goals into feasible work units. Generally, a middle management position, its equivalent in a German state Ministry of the Environment is the civil servant who drafts funding programs and regulations based on ministerial directives (see Krackhardt 1990).

• (e) Finally, charismatic authority is a matter of personality and character. Of crucial importance in leadership contexts, and a key factor in group coherence, it can in principle exist at any level of an official hierarchy, but will excite envy and suspicion in any superior who lacks it.

It is evident from this overview that in performing the “dirty work” (Paris 2005, p. 22) the middle ranks of the hierarchy enjoy considerable authority—the more so, the further the lines of this hierarchy are extended (see Burckhardt 1967). And their power, so far as landscape is concerned, largely lacks democratic legitimacy, inasmuch as consultation with elected organs is (generally for reasons of time) extremely rare. Thus regulations on landscape conservation via such instruments as protected areas, landmarked buildings, or agricultural subsidies derive their legitimacy neither directly from the electorate nor from its representatives in the executive, legislative and judiciary, but as a rule from the same group of experts that applies them (Kühne 2006c). Mosca (1922) described these ‘technocrats’ as the ‘actual ruling class’, for they are needed by both ruler and ruled as the medium of transmission and communication without which the social order would collapse (see also Tamayo 1998). But this inevitably results—if only as a by-product—in pursuit of their own interests. Thus Tänzler (2007, p. 114) observes that “the nomination and appointment of representatives” elevates them above the realm of everyday reality. For Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 164) the problem lies not so much in an inherent leaning toward betrayal as in “their ambiguous in-between position, which means they can only survive in the long run by asserting all-round independence.”

This certainly applies in the context of landscape planning, whose officials tend to construct ‘practical constraints’ which are then—often by appeal to other experts—transformed into apparently ‘external’ constraints. They “obscure their de facto levels of freedom,” Burckhardt observes (1982, p. 106), “by referring to aspects they cannot themselves decide and lamenting this as ‘beyond their control’”—a tactic which, in the absence of any code of governance, effectively preempts evaluation or revision by civil society or its delegates. In his study of the development of landscape and transportation infrastructure between 1930 and 1990, Zeller (2002, p. 411) speaks of the “shift in the ideological current, from the politically charged, mythically staged projects of a dictatorship incorporating nature itself, to an ostensibly apolitical sphere of rapid and unhindered circulation of goods and persons under the dominance of academically trained experts” (for a similar analysis see Illich 1979; Dingler 1998; Michelsen and Walter 2013). The result of this dominance is a definition of targets and measures whose lack of transparency (Popitz 1992) often hinders assent by outsiders—a pertinent example being the concerted discovery of protected lichen species along the course of a projected major road without any further mapping of the species in the adjacent area.

Democratic communication between experts and laity is in general fraught with what are seen as the “middle-class presuppositions of planners, their ill-considered myths of intuition, and their ideological severance of means from ends” (Fezer 2006, p. 13). Walgenbach adds to this list the “myth of rationality,” and continues that “myths in this sense depend on a shared belief that exempts them from objective examination” (Walgenbach 1999, p. 66; see also Hahn 2014), making them ideal instruments of exclusion for every eventuality that might disturb the decision making process. Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 111) speak similarly of “elaborated myths […] that strive to eliminate inconsistencies and maintain the mythological universe in theoretically integrated terms.” Many patterns of judgment and action established through secondary socialization and professional practice, whether work- or status-related—e.g. the imposition of restrictions on public access and use)—are in this sense remarkably (one might even say mythically) self-referential. Nor is any fault perceived in this, for professional recognition is accorded in a “process of mutual exchange between the privileged” (Popitz 1992, p. 198, original emphasis)—a body steeped in explicit and implicit self-confirmation that extends to experts both within and beyond the ranks of officialdom.

A corollary of these structures is the undercurrent of advantage to be found in smooth decision making processes, for the greater the discrepancy between expert opinions—whether within a profession (e.g. cultural landscape conservationists vs. environmental successionists) or across professions (e.g. biologists vs. landscape architects)—the more weakly institutionalized is the fiction of rationality (Schimank 2012, p. 385; Saar 2010) and the more isolated the decision maker, who can scarcely delegate anything to disagreeing parties. Hence there is a congruence of interests among politicians, administrative specialists (e.g. heads of landscape planning departments), and external specialists (e.g. professors of geography) to find common ground early in the proceedings (see Dingler 1998; Michelsen and Walter 2013). Various permutations are likely in this context (see Fig. 4.10):

Fig. 4.10

Traditionally, theory is thought to originate in empirical investigation (a). Latour (1999) sees the solution to a scientific question as also depending on the underlying attitude and convictions of the scientist (b). Following Horkheimer (1977 [1937]), Habermas (1982), and Latour (1999), Kühne (2008a, b, c) sees applied research as further subject to political (often opportunistic) feasibility

• all round agreement, promising a smooth transition from (scientific) knowledge to power

• agreement between the decision maker and external experts, to which the administrator must submit, but whose implementation he or she can ex officio effectively obstruct

• agreement between administrative officer and expert, who then inform the decision maker, with the risk that their recommendation may be rejected on other (e.g. political) grounds.

The shift from mode 1 to mode 2 knowledge production is reflected in a power shift among experts, administrators, and politicians. In the mode 1 era, experts were existentially and socially—and hence also in their judgments—largely independent of politicians and administrators. In the mode 2 era this has changed: experts depend today, in every respect, on third-party finance, which in the landscape sector means as a rule public sector funding allocated by administrators and politicians. As the research contracts of specialists are invariably for the term of the particular project, these experts are inherently interested in the prolongation of the project or the granting of a new or follow-up project. Moreover, the social status of university professors is now measured not only in terms of research publications and (in the landscape-related sector) by the quality of teaching, but also by success in acquiring third-party funding. (This is a frequent stipulation for professorial appointments, where “relevant research experience including the acquisition of third-party funding” is called for.) Accordingly, the simple requirement of mode 1 research that underlying attitudes and theories concur with empirical results has yielded in mode 2 research to a situation where political feasibility (or indeed opportunism) must also be taken into account if the researcher is not to forego the availability of further funding (see Fig. 4.10). In the concrete case of landscape-related projects, if a certain modification of the appropriated physical landscape seems politically inopportune, it will not be investigated: it will be rejected ab initio either by the provider or by the recipient of the putative funding (see Dingler 1998; Kühne 2008a).

Rooted in the symbolic dominance of the state, the definition and implementation of landscape targets by experts can in the final analysis be described as a corporate discourse revealing every dimension of power defined by Popitz (see Kühne 2006c, 2008a, 2015a; Sect. 2.3):

• Technical (structural) power resides, for instance, not only in the definition of standards (e.g. selection for IUCN Red Lists) but also in the increasing ability, with the aid of modern technology, to create or change landscapes as expressions of symbolic power. Contemporary examples are Palm Jumeirah Island in Dubai and the renatured opencast coalmining landscapes of Germany. Popitz cites the example of residential estates whose “planners and developers take decisions that affect the living conditions and spatial and environmental constraints of many people” (1992, p. 30). Building “worlds for others”, they determine spatial functions and implicitly draw lines of segregation not only according to income but also (and increasingly) according to the milieu an area represents (see also Duncan and Duncan 2004).

• Authoritative (directive) power is evidenced in the incorporation of landscape-related concepts in both primary and secondary socialization—e.g. in the virtually sacred construct of an “ecologically intact, beautiful landscape, close to (untouched) nature” (Wöbse 1991, p. 34).

• Instrumental (persuasive) power reveals itself e.g. in the declaration of protected areas with corresponding restricted usage and even expropriation—an act that Schneider (1989) characterizes as “the ultimate step of ideological landscape conservation” securing for the superior end of nature protection what legally and factually belongs to another.

• Active (coercive) power is evident, for example, in police enforcement of restrictions to the use of protected areas.

The targets defined by experts can be implemented administratively by either threat or incentive. A threat, Paris observes, is only effective when “one can perform the threatened action (or have it performed) if the other party continues to resist” (Paris 2005, p. 39). As a conditional act, it binds both parties to a certain course of action. In terms of symbolic capital, it costs little if it is successful but a good deal more if it is unsuccessful (see Schelling 1960). The prohibition to enter a nature reserve, for example, coupled with the imposition of a fine, will only be credible if, upon breach of the prohibition, the fine is actually incurred; but this entails administrative costs both in surveillance of the nature reserve and in processing the fine. Incentives “invert this structure by offering reward and gratification” (Paris 2005, p. 41) to their target group, so they are cheap when rejected but expensive when accepted. In principle, they are more likely to evoke loyalty, but they are not entirely free from difficulty, because once they are accepted as the status quo, any restriction imposed to save resources may cause conflict (see Paris 2005). An example is the EEC agricultural subsidies of the 1950s and 1960s, which aimed to boost crop production in Central and Western Europe in order to provide the population with ample food at affordable prices. But overproduction in and after the 1970s led, within the framework of the so-called Agenda 2000, to medium-term cuts coupled with restructuring of the program—measures which in 1999 and 2003 met with vehement protest from agricultural organizations (see Nassauer and Wascher 2008).

The role of political action outside the constitutional sphere of the legislature and executive has been intensely researched in recent years. Crouch speaks of a “post-democracy” (Crouch 2008, p. 13) in which the formal institutions of democracy persist but the power of the traditional political parties is steadily dwindling. In this situation the political life of a country is increasingly shaped on the one hand by the media, Internet and social networks and on the other by a privileged elite (see Leggewie 1998; von Beyme 2013; Michelsen and Walter 2013; Swyngedouw 2013). The upshot is that “individual citizen-stakeholders lose any say in the proceedings” in favor of NGOs and expert groups who “enhance the aura projected by politicians that their decisions lack any alternative” (Michelsen and Walter 2013, p. 79). The expertise of such groups serves in the final analysis to maximize both output and its acceptance (Michelsen and Walter 2013; Kühne 2008a). The loss of power of the elected representatives in western nation states to experts inside and outside the bureaucracy, as well as to societal actors outside the system of politics and administration, is only one side of the loss of centered national power. The other side of the coin is the strengthening of transnational units (such as the European Union, the United Nations; see for example Beck 1986; Chilla et al. 2016), but also sub-national units (Allmendinger/Haughton 2012; Paasi 2009). The consequence of this is, on the one hand, an increasing complexity of the inscription power in physical spaces and, on the other hand, an equally increasing complexity regarding the sovereignty of interpretation over what is called landscape (see Weber 2015).

4.3.2.5 Landscape and the Actions of the (Relatively) Powerless

The mighty stand in polar contrast to their followers, the lord to the vassal, the leader to the led (although the mighty in other contexts may also be powerless—in the dentist’s chair or at a frontier, their institutionalized power avails them little). The motives and structures of leadership have been far more extensively researched than those of the follower. An exception is the sixfold typification proposed by Paris on the basis of a person’s “level of internalized compliance, the intensity of their will to follow” a particular leader or program (Paris 2005, p. 104):

• (a) The enthusiastic follower is passionate, unconditional, and unreserved—a type often found in more or less autonomous local grass-roots initiatives (see Brand 1999), especially during the initial phase of their constitution, which has been characterized by Kuphal (2006, p. 39) as one of “fiery love and solemn oaths.” Large, traditional, environmental and landscape protection groups—also local ones—are less likely to inspire this level of emotion.

• (b) The committed follower, motivated more by rational interest than enthusiasm, is commonly found in the lower administrative ranks of landscape-related organizations, whether corporate or governmental (see Brand 1999). The transition from enthusiastic to committed follower is often evident at the point when groups and associations are professionalized, not least because the availability and management of public funds brings with it a need to strengthen structures and clarify lines of competency and responsibility. This tends to dampen overt enthusiasm (Kuphal 2006). Moreover, professional structures offer opportunities for advancement to those whose commitment is firm and rational.

• (c) Habitual followers are not really committed to an idea or program, but follow because they are used to doing so: for them, “achievement of the goal is only of mild interest” (Paris 2005, p. 105). The old nature protection associations and the new, ecologically oriented environmental groups—as well as party-political organizations (Brand 1999)—have many such members. They attend major events (like AGMs) and may join in the occasional activity (e.g. landscape conservation), but “not so as to excite notice or confrontation” (Paris 2005, p. 105). This is the default mode for both enthusiastic and committed followers whose motivation has (for whatever reason) flagged, and their numbers are legion in major organizations and in political parties, which continue to run for hardly more reason than that they have been there for so long that “their continuation seems somehow a duty” (Kuphal 2006, p. 40), as well as in public authorities, whose officials perform their tasks out of a sense of duty rather than desire, and certainly no longer from personal ambition.

• (d) The automatic follower is characterized by the simple drive to obey without reflection. Found above all in organizations with linear hierarchies (e.g. public authorities), they “function, rather than follow by an act of the will” (Paris 2005, p. 105). An example might be the landscape officer in a local administration who simply ‘does her duty’ with no real interest in its content, implications, or consequences.

• (e) The unwilling follower is one with individual ideas, but who has to follow directives because “not to do so would involve high personal costs” (Paris 2005, p. 106). Such persons are to be found in associations and networks, as well as in public bodies, and especially in this latter case, their disruptive potential is considerable. While they are bound by office, and frequently also by the obligations implicit in the comprehensive security provision they enjoy, they nevertheless often find themselves in disagreement with their superiors on job-related as well as political issues—for example the funding of landscape or village renewal projects, the siting and construction of power stations or transportation infrastructure, the planning of new residential areas etc. Paris remarks, however, that their integration in a rigid hierarchical structure, mitigated by the awareness that a political superior may only last until the next election, means that their “constant grousing and grumbling” is of no consequence (Paris 2005, p. 106).

• (f) The protesting follower is one who is vocally unwilling, who considers the plan in question to be wrong, but still follows it, because there is no turning back: too many obligations toward the organization or superior have been accumulated for any other course to be thinkable. In the landscape context, this structure can be found in any type of organization, but in linear hierarchies its impact is greater than in more loosely organized, less institutionalized bodies.

Committed, habitual, unwilling and protesting followers are characteristically people who “half believe” (Paris 2005, p. 110). Half-belief is a compound of belief and its opposite: “the semi-believer both believes and does not believe one and the same thing” (Paris 2005, p. 110), albeit with different intensities. While the enthusiastic follower believes wholeheartedly in every aspect and consequence of the program, the automatic follower neither believes nor disbelieves, but simply follows. In the committed follower, belief outweighs disbelief; but in the unwilling or protesting follower, the opposite is the case. The habitual follower both believes and disbelieves, while ignoring the internal dissonance of that position.

A key characteristic of half-belief—at least in public discourse—is its innate tendency to dogmatism, coupled with highly selective perception and a correlative demonizing of opposing positions. The complexity of landscape as a phenomenon, in its social as well as ecological dimensions, is typically reduced to the semi-believer’s professional interest as a representative of farming, hunting, or heritage conservation agencies, or as an official of the forestry, tourist, or nature conservancy board—bodies whose social, cultural, aesthetic, or ecological importance is hammered home in threadbare phrases, while other aspects of landscape are treated with suspicion, granted only ancillary importance (e.g. the role of agriculture in preserving tall oatgrass meadows), or ruled out altogether. Such discourse is ultimately self-referential and self-confirming, underpinning the speaker’s own position, lest doubt arise as to its worth (see Paris 2005). Critical scrutiny of one’s own position and that of other semi-believers is avoided or over-compensated by externalizing responsibility to distant “centers of evil” (Paris 2005, p. 14) and/or by personally discrediting an opponent as “having no idea of farming, hunting, forestry, or heritage conservation—after all he/she is not a farmer, hunter etc.” As if only the farmer had a right to talk about farming, the hunter about hunting, or the politician about politics—a circular argument whose absurdity Latour (1999) has formulated in the postulate that only rats should talk about rats, frogs about frogs, houses about houses, and electrons about electrons. Furthermore, the lack of empathy shown by other semi-believers (oneself always excepted) is compensated by a hyperactivity (Paris 2005) that combines selfless commitment to one’s own group, program, or leader with time-consuming projects that leave no room for reflection or self-questioning. Precious leisure hours spent on excursions explaining the significance of the physical landscape or the danger of scrub encroachment fostered by mowing threatened meadows leave no time to ask if one is not, in fact, treading the well-worn path of Don Quixote.

Half-belief is also a typical attribute of the mayors of small to medium-sized municipalities who, in the absence of any distinctive feature in their territory, will indulge in cliché-ridden advertisement, personalized conflict against other municipalities and superordinate bodies (e.g. ‘the minister’), emotional moralizing when a neighboring town is praised in a publication that ignores their own, hyperactivity in attending clubs and small-town fêtes, and apathy toward developments they cannot control, like the consequences of demographic change (see Paris 2005; Kühne 2006a). Given the restricted power enjoyed by the heads of such municipalities, landscape constitutes an ideal symbol of energetic leadership: the creation and funding, enabling and conservation of physical landscape structures demonstrates a will-in-action that all can see. As a stage for self-projection, landscape eminently fulfills Bourdieu’s axiom that a measure counts only when it is announced, and as soon as it is announced it counts in the public mind as realized (Bourdieu 1985; see also Jain 2000; Michelsen and Walter 2013).

The relative powerlessness of civil society in matters of landscape typically reveals itself not only in the phenomenon of half-belief but also in the frequent rejection by citizens’ initiatives of actual and target states as defined (see Sect. 5.4). Resistance of this sort to planning projects was initially “understood as a lack of appropriate explanation: one only had to inform citizens of the benign intentions of the planners, and they would immediately realize that certain incidental shortcomings must be accepted for the greater good” (Burckhardt 1978a, p. 97). Burckhardt points out, however, that the real bone of contention often lies not in the individual measures but in their arbitrary division into means and ends, and the exchangeability of these two logically disparate levels. If the declared end is to widen a street, the demolition of adjacent houses can be presented as a necessary means. However, the real end may be to build stores and office blocks, and the widening of the street is just a means to that end. Burckhardt concludes, “power is the power to define things as means or ends. Resistance arises where the ideological character of this division is revealed” (Burckhardt 1978a, p. 97).

Even if the relatively powerless cannot as a rule prevent the implementation of landscape targets, they can hinder it, especially by drawing public attention to their claims. Here (and sometimes even in contention between the equally powerful) the principle of the double bind is often invoked. Applied in various forms and on various levels, the double bind embodies “the demand for two or more courses of action that are in fact self-contradictory but each of which carries a threat of sanction, so that any reaction to the initial demand can be deemed inappropriate” (Paris 2005, p. 45). The method enables its user to be right at all times—a gratifying perspective in situations laden with high emotion (e.g. recrimination). Politicians, for example, can be labeled incompetent and irresponsible and at the same time called upon to deliver full employment and to radiate altruism, authenticity and credibility (see Paris 2005; Tänzler 2007). The reality constructed by a double bind immunizes its user against arguments from data or experience; its semantic structure is so constructed as to be (on its own logical level) unfalsifiable.

A pertinent example is the plan published by the Saarland to create, in cooperation with local municipalities, a UNESCO biosphere in Bliesgau (the south-eastern part of the state). The plan has met with resistance from farmers who fear restrictions on their use of natural resources (see Hussong 2006; Kühne 2010; Nienaber and Lübke 2012). When it is pointed out that the state government intends no such restrictions on agriculture, the rejoinder is simple: ‘The current government may not, but what about a future government?’ This is an ecological Cassandra painting in glaring colors a damage, which, she asserts, is only unreal inasmuch as it has not yet happened. A corollary directed at politicians in general is that they all lie, so why should one believe them in this instance? The conundrum is not helped by attempting to be factual, for this is interpreted as talking the danger down, which merely confirms one’s lack of credibility (see Paris 2005).

Protest against the workings of symbolic power in the landscape can be physical as well as discursive, ranging from planting one’s front garden with xenophytes (in the German context thuja cypresses etc.) in flagrant disregard of a municipal target, to vandalizing protected natural or cultural monuments. A common form of (especially urban) cultural protest is the omnipresent graffiti, which, despite their arguable claim to creativity, are often perceived as a violent confrontation with official culture and majority taste. Paris comments: “While art leaves the public free to approach it or turn away, graffiti occupy the field of perception and leave the passer-by no choice” (Paris 2005, p. 138). Like the soundscapes of rocker subculture, graffiti transgress the received norms that shape public space, symbolizing their slow loss of authority and relativizing what we hold in common (Popitz 1992). Yet at the same time, they represent a ‘landscape of resistance’ which has so far escaped the attention of scholars (see Palang and Sooväli-Sepping 2011). The graffito shown in Fig. 4.11, for example, expresses the desire for beauty while ironically contradicting—not only by its presence on a public wall, but also (and in particular) by its crude representation of a hemp leaf—the conventional ideal. On the other hand, the passer-by schooled in philosophy may see in it a critique of mainstream Western aesthetics, with its time-worn union of ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’.

Fig. 4.11

“The world is good, but is it also beautiful?”—graffito at Kirkel train station, Saarland (Photo Olaf Kühne)

4.3.3 Landscape, Social Capital, and Power

As members of the “state intellectual apparatus” (Ó Tuathail 1996, p. 61) and producers of socially appropriated landscape, landscape experts possess an incorporated, institutionalized, and objectified cultural capital that is secured in all its dimensions through stable networks of (more or less) institutionalized mutual awareness and recognition. And as these resources “derive from membership of a group” (Bourdieu 1983, p. 63), their cultural capital also constitutes social capital. The less institutionalized networks include ritualized conversations about colleagues, informal get-togethers, and casual meetings at conferences etc., all of which serve to accumulate social capital and corresponding distinction (Adler and Kwon 2002). Like all such professional networks, these convey a privileged position in the production and distribution of information, so that experts have “a better chance of organizing themselves quickly and effectively” (Popitz 1992, p. 191) than either non-experts or experts outside such networks. Their interests are “not necessarily more intense, but they have higher organizational potential” (Popitz 1992, p. 191; original emphasis) than other groups. This process of “networking democracy” (von Beyme 2013, p. 13) is a proven tool for pushing through individual (or in-group) interests. Moreover, in this context Weber’s principle of “dominance through knowledge” (Weber 1976 [1922], p. 226) is pervaded by patrimonial elements based not on an official hierarchy but on loyalty to the accepted leader of the clan (see Scott 1986).

4.3.3.1 Social Capital in Academic Landscape Discourse

According to Bourdieu, the structure of an academic discipline reflects the forces currently operating between the various protagonists in that field—or more accurately between the forms of power available to them personally and above all by virtue of their institutional affiliation (Bourdieu 1985). And this power derives, as has already been remarked, from the availability of symbolic (especially social) capital. The landscape-related disciplines of geography, landscape planning and landscape architecture (as well as sociology) inhabit a typically practice-oriented, theoretically ‘impure’ position somewhere between the natural sciences and the humanities. In her feminist psychoanalytic study Love of Power—Landscape Conservation and Dispossession (1989), Schneider applies Adorno’s (1987) concept of the ‘jargon of authenticity’ (or uniqueness) to these disciplines, which, she asserts, are inadequately understood by their professional representatives. Because of this intellectual shortfall, their protagonists resort to a “radical projection of landscape conservation [as] the reinstatement of a lost paradise,” presenting it in a jargon of “religious promises” with profoundly malignant effects (Schneider 1989, pp. 3–4), above all that of expropriation. Schneider (1989, p. 30) goes on to argue that in garden and landscape design the paradise motif takes on the historico-cultural role of a “redemptive religion”—to which Paris adds that the accumulation of exclusive social capital endows the exponents of that ‘surrogate religion’ with a “modern version of infallibility” (Paris 2005, p. 114). Landscape is reconstructed, in this view, as the female object of its male exponents (see also Weber 2007; Sect. 4.2.5).

Examples of strongly institutionalized networks are academies and professional associations like the Bund Deutscher Landschaftsarchitekten (Federation of German Landscape Architects—BDLA), which formulates its tasks in the following terms: “The BDLA engages in public relations for the profession and represents its views and interests in political, administrative and business circles. As well as providing training and ongoing education opportunities, it lobbies at both federal and state levels for the consolidation and expansion of the professional field and the updating of fee schedules. The Federation offers its members a platform for exchanging views and experiences, for collaborative ventures, and for the enhancement of professional commitment” (BDLA 2006b). In this mission statement, the accumulation of social capital is presented as a clear goal alongside the deployment of corporate influence. That this has not changed in the past ten years is evident from the unaltered wording of the paragraph in the organization’s 2016 website.

As well as generating social capital, academies, federations, guilds, institutes, and associations tend to concentrate power in the hands of those appointed to represent them, and hence to control the interface between experts and society (Lahnstein 2000). This power, which is “unrelated to the importance of the individual” (Bourdieu 1983, p. 68), can be used not only to underpin the relevance of the organization’s goals, but also to dissipate ad hoc notions of (landscape) development before they even reach the public sphere. In both ways, it secures and enhances the loyalty of its members (Paris 2005). Conversely, deviance from its norms brings with it a withdrawal of social recognition and concomitant distinction (see Adler and Kwon 2002; Kühne 2008a).

With membership limited by election, academies are more highly institutionalized than many other professional networks, and this structural rigor gives them greater leverage with cultural capital. Conversely, it restricts their freedom, for “they are subject to the conditions imposed not only by their own situation and form of organization, but also by the grammar of power itself” (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 16; see also Krackhardt 1990). Membership of any of these networks requires a minimum of institutionalized cultural capital and compliance with the organization’s statutes. It is conveyed in specific “rites of institutionalization” (Bourdieu 1983, p. 65) which express the acquisition of new social capital: presentation of certificates, invitations to exclusive congresses, and documentary evidence of the new status alongside a mini-biography on the candidate’s institutional website. All of this boosts loyalty to the profession and its institutions—a loyalty rewarded by acceptance into the group of ‘frequently cited’ authors (Hard 2002d [1971]). The way to such distinction has many steps and “to earn that accolade, rigorous tests must be accomplished. Progress is noted and assessed, and the inquisition of knowledge is at the same time a ceremonial demonstration of power” (Sofsky 2007, p. 134). In bodies like academies, with elected membership, the rite of entry implies elevation to an elite status; for, as Paris tells us, elites are “recruited from above, unlike the authorities and leaders that control us politically, whose power comes ultimately from below” (Paris 2005, p. 83). Duty and group loyalty are reinforced by subjective feelings of recognition, respect, and friendship, as well as by the already noted institutional guarantees (Bourdieu 1983; see also Hard 2002d [1971]).

The relation of authority within a network rests on a twofold process: on the one hand “recognition of preeminence” and on the other “the desire to be recognized by the preeminent” (Popitz 1992, p. 29). Crucial to the stability of any hierarchy (Bourdieu 1985; Sofsky and Paris 1994; Hilbig 2014), such relations are reciprocal but asymmetrical, inasmuch as they incorporate “the fixing of our desire for recognition on […] a superordinate person or group” (Popitz 1992, p. 115). The power of the academic pupil generation, for example, vis à vis their teachers is informed, but at the same time limited, by the (by no means altruistic) desire of the teachers to have pupils appointed to good positions (Bourdieu 1992). “The forces at work in such relationships are ineluctably conformist; for to accept an authority is to accept the values it stands for” (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 26; original emphasis). Hence, the junior professional will necessarily follow the mainstream, as defined by those of higher status: it is “their perspectives and criteria, […] their expectations that we take on board. Our sense of self is bound to their recognition and its withdrawal” (Popitz 1992, p. 133; see also Eisenberg et al. 1998). Drawing on the analogous concept of status closure, the process of building an academic and professional elite can in this sense be understood as one of institutional closure (see also Weingart 2003).

As a rule, extensive symbolic (especially sociocultural) capital engenders considerable “theme-setting power” (Paris 2005, p. 31)—i.e. power “to determine what may be said in what circumstances by whom and with what consequences” (Paris 2005, p. 31). The placing of an issue on the agenda entails stating a preference for a specific group (see Hard 2002d [1971]; Burckhardt 1974), an action that “requires the aura of necessity” (Burckhardt 1970, p. 48). In a discipline whose representatives are elected on the basis of reputation—and the “spatial [i.e. landscape-related] disciplines” are such (Prigge 1991, p. 105)—it is the supremely reputable who define what can (and cannot) be said. They “give scientific coherence to the spontaneous ideologies of the appropriated spaces of daily life, thereby securing the cohesion of spatial practice. Their mechanisms of exclusion—determining who may legitimately speak about space [and/or landscape (O.K.)]—formulate the dominant mode of such discourse and the power over its object which this entails” (Prigge 1991, p. 105; see also Graham et al. 2000). A particular intensity of the attempt to the sovereignty of definitions can be observed when the specific déformation professionelle in relation to an ‘object’ meets the ‘desire for impact’: “Regional geographers were deeply involved in power-knowledge relations when creating bounded ‘orders’ on the earth, fixed in apparently neutral maps and texts that identified separate regions” (Paasi 2003, p. 476). The process of generating and disseminating patterns of interpretation of spatial identity is a process of hierarchical communication: “The construction of identity narratives is a political [and administrative! Note O.K.] action, and, particularly in the case of national identities, this activity is an expression of the distribution of social power in society” (Paasi 1999, p. 11).

Leaving aside the political executive, this power is exercised through the corporate groups that run academic journals, convene conferences, and determine who speaks at them, or what textbooks are ‘required reading’. Examples can be seen on the one hand in the recent predilection for topics connected with landscape and the local (home) environment, and on the other in the virtual banishing as ‘damaging to the profession’ of critical articles on landscape conservation or geography (see Hard 2002d [1971]; Böse et al. 1981 on the Federal Horticultural Show in Frankfurt). Other (especially critical) voices are prevented altogether from gaining a hearing within a profession in which coveted jobs go only to those whose voice is heard (see Bourdieu 1985).

These processes amount to a sort of consecration of the elect, in which university professors endowed with high symbolic (especially social) capital compile disciplinary syntheses whose outreach extends across secondary as well as tertiary education. Of these Bourdieu (1985) remarks that derived from lectures and intended for use in other lectures, they all too often reflect only the received state of knowledge—a condition that may well suit teachers at every level, for whom the thwarting of new notions offers escape from the threat of obsolescence. A clear sign of this strategy is the appeal to obsolete data and literature—as with the stereotypical characterization of the 1960s as a ‘social wasteland’, which lasted into the 1990s.

Conversely, the “structure of social self-esteem” (Popitz 1992, p. 118) is determined by publications in reputed journals, proceedings, and textbooks, with their institutionalized (and at least partly anonymized) power traps—above all in the form of peer reviews. Weingart sees the danger of abuse of reputation implicit in this procedure as the greatest risk to scientific integrity, for the declared purpose of peer reviewing—to protect the scientific community from “pointless, false, and fraudulent voices” (Weingart 2003, p. 33; see also Fröhlich 2002)—is, according to Hirschauer, frustrated by the sheer unreliability of the procedure: “Most publications in the social sciences (where rejection rates are high) derive from decisions whose divergence from pure chance is so small that peer review procedures could almost as well be decided by a throw of the dice” (Hirschauer 2004, p. 69). On the other hand, as Smith puts it “peer review might be described as a process where the ‘establishment’ decides what is important. Unsurprisingly, the establishment is poor at recognizing new ideas that overturn the old ideas” (Smith 2010, p. 3; and see Weingart 2001). Proponents of new ideas and paradigms are, then, compelled to launch their own forums, and/or to present at least the appearance of conformity—or indeed, in many cases, to seek alternative employment outside academia (see Kuhn 1973; Cosgrove and Domosh 1997).

An example of paradigmatic change in the landscape-related sciences is the transition that took place in German geography, after the pivotal 1969 Kiel Geographers’ Conference, from a classical geography based on countries to a spatially based model of economic and social geography (Hard 2002a [1969b], 2002b [1971]; Bahrenberg 1996; Werlen 1998; Blotevogel 1996, 2000). Exemplifying Bourdieu’s (1985, 1998 [1996]) concept of a permanent scientific revolution, this overturned an approach seen as empirically unprovable, methodologically unsound, and overly susceptible to ideology. Based on an “oversimplified realism” (Kaufmann 2005, p. 102), traditional geography had focused almost exclusively on the local and regional, excluding supraregional influences (Mitchell 2005; see also Eisel 1980). Its world-picture “was that of a well-ordered mosaic of spatially segmented natural and social entities […] that bracketed out not only the increasingly important contexts of inter-spatial influence, but also the controversies inherently associated with spatial constructs” (Blotevogel 1996, p. 13). The paradigm of landscape was largely replaced (especially in anthropological geography) with an empirical neo-positivist approach, with the result that “in many mainstream areas of anthropological geography it could damage one’s career to speak of landscape at all” (Schenk 2006, p. 17). On the other hand, in physical geography (oriented more on the natural sciences) the landscape construct persisted, and the terms ‘geoecology’ and ‘landscape ecology’ were retained in connection with ecosystems approaches.

Any wholesale rejection of critical voices is an abuse of power. Limpet-like adherence to an outdated paradigm, combined with the routine imposition of negative sanctions, leads to the suppression—or belated treatment—of critical issues central to the discipline. An example is the postponement in Germany until the 1980s of serious discussion about landscape and spatial planning under National Socialism. This runs clean counter to the scientific ideal of producing new knowledge (Luhmann 1990). The instinct behind it can be analyzed in line with Sofsky and Paris’ classification of structures of authority, according to which technical (structural) power is manifest in the vital economic and emotional dependence of subordinates for future employment, promotion, or simply keeping a job. Following the same classification, the power of official authority is invested, for example, in the president of an academy or member of the advisory board of an international journal; the power of organizational authority in the convener of a congress or editor of a series; the power of functional authority in the person who introduces the results of a working group into wider discourse; the power of specialist authority in the one who possesses profound knowledge in a specific sector; and the power of charismatic authority in the talented and convincing communicator (Sofsky and Paris 1994; and see Sect. 4.3.2.4).

Popitz (1992) distinguishes five facets of the need for recognition—or types of ‘social subjectivity’—applicable to relations of esteem and self-esteem in academic landscape (and similar) contexts, and to the self-disciplining, they impose:

• (a) The need to be accepted as a member of a specific group—to be “like others, to be ‘in’” (Popitz 1992, p. 141)—applies both to educational qualifications (university degrees etc.) and membership of professional organizations (in Germany e.g. the Association of Town, Regional and State Planning; the Federation of German Landscape Architects) or academies (e.g. the German Academy for Urban and Regional Spatial Planning). The sense of belonging to a group with a common world-view (and hence ‘reality’) is a basic social experience entailing self-confirmation.

• (b) The need to be accepted in an assigned role is only indirectly relevant to the type of sociocultural capital generated in such academic contexts, where age, gender, background, and in some cases social standing may determine the allocation of roles. Thus, honorary chairpersons will often be senior members who have already gained high honors in the group, women will be expected to volunteer to take minutes, and men with a certain bearing will be invited to represent the organization.

• (c) The need to be accepted in an acquired (especially professional role) depends critically on those of higher status who grant the role and approve (or disapprove) its performance. This applies to freelance workers (who need commissions), to state and municipal employees, and to the elected board members of professional associations or academies. It discourages people from making (or supporting) deviant statements.

• (d) The need to be accepted in a public role (e.g. within a professional body or scoping context) requires visible leadership and approbation from the group. Too great a deviation from public expectations will inspire controversy and diminish self-esteem.

• (e) The need to be accepted in one’s individuality runs potentially (and sometimes openly) counter to other roles and needs. Rooted in the need for recognition in the “singularity of [one’s] existence” (Popitz 1992, p. 149), it is limited by the requirements of other roles—or will else face sanctions. Thus, the position of a landscape successionist in an organization dedicated to the preservation of the “historical cultural landscape” may well become de facto untenable.

In conclusion, Weingart’s general strictures on academic discourse may also be taken to apply to the landscape-related disciplines: “Success in the production of scientific knowledge is not simply a matter of the ‘truth’ of this knowledge or of its power to convince. It requires the clever manipulation of the relevant networks—including persons, technologies, and natural objects—in order to gain support for one’s ends. Only when such networks can be stabilized will knowledge proposed as true (e.g. an innovative theory) receive social recognition” (Weingart 2003, p. 72).

In the landscape context social recognition is clearly measurable by the extent to which public authorities are prepared to base political action on the ‘truths’ propounded by academics, and the formal and informal scientific groups and organizations associated with them. However, the academic world presented here should not be thought of simply in the dichotomous terms of progressives versus conservatives. It reveals, rather, what Bourdieu calls ‘the coexistence of several independent hierarchical principles’ (Bourdieu 1985) relating to different forms of capital and their accumulation: economic capital (salaries), social capital (networks inside and outside the university/profession), and cultural capital (publications, lectures etc.—see also Kühne 2006d).

4.3.3.2 Social Capital Within an Informal Hierarchy

Within the relevant formal hierarchies—for example public authorities—the social capital of landscape experts of various professions generates parallel organizational structures that can lead to conflicts of loyalty between corporate/professional and official roles (Krackhardt 1990; Molina 2001; Kühne 2008a). Moreover, it is often the professional group—the association or academic body—that wins: one even hears people say “I think of myself as representing the interests of XY association in the ministry.” As already observed (see Sect. 4.3.3), informal professional networks validate this observation inasmuch as only those projects, as a rule, reach the stage of political decision that have already been passed by the relevant networks as not impacting (or in the worst case only minimally impacting) their established cultural capital (see also Krackhardt 1990). The corollary is that success in the public sector is awarded on the basis not of money but of ‘what colleagues think’. Hence Burckhardt’s admonition: “You can only do what’s possible,” where possibility in a public authority means what does not interfere with anyone else’s plans. For “at least on paper, to cross a colleague’s plan causes far more problems than to pull down a few private houses” (Burckhardt 1982, p. 105).

Informal agreements among middle-ranking officials on the one hand minimize the risk of presenting legally questionable or technically faulty concepts to the political decision makers; on the other hand, however, these networks are not subject to any form of democratic control and harbor the risk of bureaucratic sclerosis. In both respects they may well function as stabilizing factors in an inherently hierarchical system, but democratically they nevertheless represent a stumbling block, for they in principle “leave no room for politics in the sense of a normative expression of the will, relegating it to the ancillary level of a stopgap for imperfections in a basically technocratic state system” (Schlesky 1965, p. 457; see also Bourdieu 1992b).

Unofficial networks of status and recognition operate not only in the question whether or not a project reaches the point of decision, but also in how it is then to be realized. The activities of landscape experts are as a rule integrated in official (political) systems, with their positive as well as negative sanctions, and oriented on the perceived needs of the population (or at least on political interests), but the actual execution of the project will follow the accepted patterns and standards of the profession. After all, neither politicians nor people see a landscape with the eyes of the professional or are versed in the differentiated code of the landscape specialist. In this context, Burckhardt cites the example of architecture: “The building itself [and also its plans (O.K.)] is a fount of information, it expresses something, but its message is unclear. The most public of all art forms, architecture, like modern painting, literature, and music, is addressed first and foremost to connoisseurs, to colleagues, to the readers of specialized journals” (Burckhardt 1978a, p. 89).

Depending on its specific area, landscape discourse is, in this view, a more or less hermetically sealed subject, despite the fact that both its output (physical objects, research results) and input (financing) are located in the public sphere. Such systems, Burckhardt continues, tend toward “ruthlessness vis à vis the system as a whole, promoting above all their own development, irrespective of disruption and dereliction. Thus the construction sector is a system bent on erecting new buildings, and this is reason enough for existing buildings to be destroyed” (Burckhardt 1978a, p. 90).

The efficient functioning of the administrative system is constantly threatened by the competition within the unofficial networks of landscape experts—agriculturalists, nature conservationists, game and hunting specialists, landscape planners etc. The “compulsive measuring of the self against others, of the less powerful against those perceived as (perhaps only marginally) more powerful” (Paris 2005, p. 23), is a fertile source of resentment. Again, however, this may work as much for the hierarchical system as against it, inasmuch as the daily wrestling for economic and symbolic capital prevents a more radical questioning of the system itself—whether the competition is for the allocation of competencies, human resources, financing, or EDP within a project, the acceptance of contributions for a publication, or the more existential issue of personal promotion. These conflicts rarely become public; they typically remain within the middle administrative echelons and only enter the political sphere when an issue radically threatens the social, economic or cultural capital of a specific group and no compromise can be reached on the lower administrative level. An example is the “Guidelines and Operational Strategies for Spatial Development in Germany” (Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development 2006) issued by the Conference of Ministers for Spatial Planning. The bias of this document in favor of metropolitan regions led the Conference of Agricultural Ministers to criticize it as giving inadequate representation to rural areas—basically a quarrel about symbolic resources.

4.3.4 The Concept of Landscape in Schoolbooks and ‘Fact’ Books for Children and Young People

As the socially described, accepted, and experienced notion of landscape, the social landscape is the expression of a dominant symbolism assimilated in the process of socialization, of which education is an essential part. Here—especially in school—aesthetic, cognitive, and normative interpretations of landscape are systematically communicated and received “as a given result, a secure corpus of knowledge, a bundle of true statements” (Tillmann 2007, p. 179; see also Buttimer and Fahy 1999; Paasi 1999). In any social-constructivist analysis of the genesis of the concept of landscape in and through the process of subjectivation, critical scrutiny of one of the core media of this system—the school (here geography) textbook—is virtually indispensable. The process of subjectivation prepares school students to take their place in a “society of professors, doctors, teachers, and social workers”, as well as landscape experts, “all of whom, in their own field, fulfill the role of judges upholding the realm of normativity” (Foucault 1977, pp. 392–393; Althusser 2011 [1970]; Sofsky 2007)—a function that inevitably entails a certain reduction in individually developed life opportunities.

4.3.4.1 The Concept of Landscape in School Textbooks

Based on an analysis—undertaken by the present author in 2007 (Kühne 2008a)—of 27 ‘fact’ books for children and young people and school geography textbooks, the following sub-section presents a sample of the approaches offered to these readerships by German-speaking publishers. Three structural concepts can be distinguished:

• (a) Landscape is treated in a limited and defined context. Thus Engelmann and Latz’s school text Landschaftsgürtel—Ökologie und Nutzung (‘Landscape belts—ecology and usage’ 1997) deals with the ecology and usage of different landscape zones, whereas Wiese and Zils’ ‘fact’ book Deutsche Kulturgeographie (‘German cultural geography’ 1987) is explicitly concerned with the genesis, change and preservation of German cultural landscapes. Degn et al. (1965) is an example of the many books that take landscape zones as a springboard for a discussion of the concept of appropriated physical landscape.

• (b) Landscape is one among several focal topics, as in Landschaftszonen und Stadtökologie (‘Landscape zones and urban ecology’ Bender et al. 2000), a textbook for senior high school classes.

• (c) Landscape is not itself a focal topic, but is treated in connection with other contexts, as in Heimat und Welt (‘Home and world’) edited by Kowalke (2001), or Richter et al.’s (2001) Geografie 5—both of them textbooks for senior high school classes. The children’s ‘fact’ books Planet Erde (‘Planet Earth’: Parker 1996) and ‘Wie ist das? Land, Meer und Luft’ (‘Land, sea and air—what are they?’ Dixon 1991) take a similar line.

School textbooks based on landscape zones dispense altogether with an introduction to landscape or any discussion or definition of the term: they take it either as immediately understood or as implicitly defined by the treatment they provide. Thus, Engelmann and Latz (1997) begin their chapter on landscape zones with a map of the world divided into ‘geo-ecological zones’ and a table listing these. Bender et al. (2000) have neither a map nor a table but launch straight into a description of the tropics. Bständig et al. (2002, p. 146) take a naturalistic approach, describing appropriated physical landscapes as the result of the interaction of climate, soil, and vegetation. Accordingly, the opening paragraph of their section headed ‘Climate and vegetation: a natural fit’ defines landscape zones as zones “in which climate, soil, vegetation, and possible agricultural usage are similar.” A table of these zones—representative of many such compilations—along with their specific types of vegetation is then presented (ibid. 148–149). As well as photographs of the typical landscapes of the different zones, the table details seasons, average annual temperatures, precipitation, possible plant growing periods, factors like cold or dry periods impacting growth, possible types of cultivation and its products, and livestock husbandry. The following climate and vegetation zones (other ‘fact’ books and school texts speak in this context of ‘landscape zones’) are listed: polar (frozen desert and tundra), subpolar (boreal coniferous forest), temperate (deciduous and mixed woodland, steppe), subtropical (Mediterranean vegetation, semi-desert and desert), and tropical (semi-desert and desert, savanna—subdivided into thorn-bush, dry, and wet savanna). The table is accompanied by two maps of the world, one of climate and the other of vegetation (or landscape) zones; in both maps the zones are strictly separate. Human impacts are as a rule considered as disturbing the ecological balance—see especially the subtitles in Bender et al. (2000): ‘Destruction of the tropical rainforest for timber’ (62), ‘Interdependencies and interactions of natural factors in complex ecosystems: the example of woodland death in Central Europe’ (100). Engelmann and Latz (1997) are less value-laden, with sections headed ‘On the way to the ecological crisis?’ (51), which introduces a treatment of rainforest protection and a possible transition to the shifting (migrant) cultivation of field and forest traditional in some parts of the tropics; and ‘The origins of tree damage’ (146), which covers such areas as the construction of filtration plants, raising fuel prices, and enacting stricter emission norms. Nowhere, however, is there any (even suggested) discussion of the reciprocal impact of such measures on politics and the economy.

A similar approach to landscape via zones can be found in some informative children’s books. Thus Beautier and Derrien (1989) dispense with an introduction to landscape and describe the “typical landscapes” of the various zones from the perspective of two aliens called ‘Buld’ and ‘Gorm’. These are illustrated with drawings (among other phenomena) of the pampas, Amazonian rainforest, south polar ice, Scandinavian tundra with coniferous forest (a highly improbable combination as depicted), and a European lowland plain.

In contrast to the foregoing, landscape is presented at least implicitly as a social construct in the senior school textbook Diercke Erdkunde. Klasse 11 (‘Diercke’s geography for year 11’: Claassen et al. 2005). Landscape is first presented in a classical geo-ecological perspective, with a chapter on ‘Landscape zones—different usage, threats, and protective measures’, before consideration is given to the agricultural consequences of these differences. The section on ‘Tourism—Germany, Mallorca, and the world’ (156 ff.) deals in a factual way with the social and ecological consequences of both short- and long-haul tourism, and with the artificial holiday worlds of, for example, Hawaii or the Alps, where “the tourist industry […] has created roofed-in climate zones” (Claassen et al. 2005, p. 163). Without referring to these explicitly as sociophysical constructs, the book demonstrates at least implicitly that appropriated physical landscape is by no means only the result of geophysical factors.

Negative evaluation of human impacts on the landscape begins already in ‘fact’ books for children. Thus, after describing, in the chapter on ‘Changing landscapes’, the physical genesis of landscape elements like temperature, rainfall, frost, ice, wind, and water, Parker (1996) has a chapter on ‘Destruction of the landscape’ which (with an impressively superimposed transparent image) depicts the situation in a tropical landscape before and after human impacts. From a scientific viewpoint, however, Parker’s presentation of tropical ecology is skimpy to the point of falsification. Kowalke’s Heimat und Welt (2001), despite the absence of any explicit treatment of landscape (see above), has three sociologically interesting aspects: it is the only school textbook in this overview to provide—in its keyword list ‘Geography at a glance’ (adopted from Kissner et al. 1980)—an explicit definition of landscape as “a fundamental concept of the earth- and bio-sciences, as well as a colloquial term for ‘terrestrial space’. In geography landscape is defined as an ecosystem in order to clarify the structural interaction of geosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere which underlies that concept, and at the same time to allow for different ways of looking at it—for example as natural and/or cultural landscape (Kowalke 2001, p. 396). Kissner et al. (1980, p. 280) defines landscape as “a segment of the geosphere characterized by the structural holicity of its components”—an empirical postulate with exclusivist overtones. Both definitions derive from a naturalistic tradition that ignores or bypasses the radical post-1960s discussion of the concept of landscape. Thus, neither definition elaborates on the meaning of the term for the world in which we live, although Kowalke’s reference to other possible perspectives indicates an opening in this direction. An implicit contradiction arises, however, when one compares two passages in his book referred to in the index under the term ‘landscape’. On p. 290 the city is described as a man-made ‘landscape’, where the quotation marks suggest a conceptual disjunction between city and landscape—probably due to the author’s ecosystemic definition of the city, which (see Luhmann 1984) entails a contrasting concept of the surrounding space as not-city (i.e. ‘natural landscape’). An illustration on p. 383, on the other hand, explicitly shows settlements, common land and—as a sort of settlement subsystem—society as constituent components of landscape.

While all the books mentioned so far take an ecological or other natural-science-based approach to landscape, Wiese and Zils (1987) opt for a discussion of the German cultural landscape as a fundamentally human phenomenon: “Cultural landscape as a visible whole is an historically formed, continuously changing structure that can be characterized in [spatial] terms ranging in extent from the regional to the national” (Wiese and Zils 1987, p. 9). Unlike the schoolbooks by Bender et al. (2000) and Engelmann and Latz (1997), Wiese and Zils do not focus evaluatively on the ecological side-effects of human (especially economic) activity, but simply on the genesis of a physical landscape as appropriated and changed by man. The care and preservation of the cultural landscape—and the term includes towns and cities—is regarded as part of the cultural heritage, which “as a sign of continuity amid dynamic transformation, is a task of European outreach” and central importance (Wiese and Zils 1987, p. 164).

Dixon (1991) also refrains in principle from any evaluation of the appropriated physical landscape. In his chapter on ‘Changing landscapes’ he briefly describes the motives for such change (population growth, quest for natural resources etc.) and their de facto ecological side-effects. Bständig et al. (2007, p. 108) deal with the use of space under the headings ‘soil sealing’ and ‘urban sprawl’ and with the ecological effects and side-effects of ‘landscape usage’ under ‘landscape in stress’. This again implies a dichotomous construct of city and landscape, and this is further reflected in the illustration caption “Streets, highways, apartment blocks, and factories devour the landscape”—an emphatically moralizing, aesthetic perspective on human impacts. Brants et al. (2004, p. 165) use this same caption and approach the overall issue under the equally value-laden heading ‘Steamrollered and urbanized’ (ibid. 164). Frommelt-Beyer et al. (2003) deal in a rather less overtly moralistic tone with the ‘consumption of landscape’ by the automobile, comparing the space required for parking lots with that needed for public administrations. On the other hand, the cartographical comparison of a highway intersection with a small town (p. 19) seems irredeemably interest-laden.

An aesthetic rather than ecosystemic morality—this latter was a product of the somewhat later infiltration of geography by the natural sciences—is already evident in Degn et al., who see a need “to protect the most beautiful parts of a harmonious cultural landscape from ruthless disfigurement—to protect culture from devastation” (Degn et al. 1965, p. 161). That this attitudes is purveyed in books for grade (primary) school children can also be seen from Pommerening and Ritter’s image of the effects of sand and gravel extraction: their description of flooded gravel pits speaks of “the destruction of landscape […] and the desolate crater-filled landscape that now stands where fields and meadows once lay” (Pommerening and Ritter 1996, p. 12). The stereotype of an “intact cultural landscape” threatened by human activity is reinforced in a way that reflects the dichotomy of ‘good’ (fields and meadows) versus ‘bad’ (gravel pits and craters) without any indication of the criterion of differentiation. The same can be said of Auer et al., who describe Alpine hill farming in the following terms: “The farms are derelict and the pastures, no longer grazed, are overgrown. One begins to realize the importance of hill farmers for landscape conservation” (Auer et al. 2002, p. 45). Any discussion of the social reasons for these developments, and any reflection on the overall purpose of landscape conservation, is evidently considered obsolete.

Often implicit, sometimes even explicit in the schoolbooks examined in this subsection is a normative construct of landscape that reads like an expression of the archetypal Western values of ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’. A good landscape is one deriving from the immemorial structuring of regional nature and culture, which is necessarily authentic and hence also true. This good landscape, in contrast to one formed by the current needs of society, is ipso facto also beautiful. In this sense, the treatment accorded to landscape in most of these books oscillates between essentialism and positivism, reflecting a tradition that had its origins in German landscape research of the 19th century (see Sect. 3.1.4).

4.3.4.2 The Concept of Landscape in Schoolbooks and the Perpetuation of Social Power Structures

Against the background of Bourdieu’s (e.g. 1973, 2001) and Althusser’s (2011 [1970]) reflections on the significance of schooling for socialization, the foregoing comments on school and children’s geography books shed light from several angles on the power relations implicit in concepts of landscape and their genesis (see Kühne 2008a):

• (a) Almost all the illustrations in ‘fact’ books for children present stereotypically idealized landscapes that will condition the way children see and construct physical landscapes. This is reinforced by their later school textbooks and informative leisure reading. Landscape zones in particular are presented as inherent unities clearly distinct from one another (without any transitional zones). The implicit world-view conveyed by such books is dichotomous and exclusivist—as opposed to what Sloterdijk (1987) calls inclusive ‘hybrid’ thinking.

• (b) All these books share an essentialist-positivist concept of landscape which as a rule bypasses the issue of social construction and, as such, socializes pre-school children (as well as school students in geography lessons) in existing structures of dominance. The subjective experience of real-world landscape is devalued in favor of assimilating current social concepts of objectivity.

• (c) Also implicit in the positivist-essentialist attitude is the hierarchical distinction in rank and status between expert (systemic) and lay approaches.

• (d) The emphasis on visual aspects of the appropriated physical landscape, especially in secondary socialization, tends to systematically exclude other, more transient sensory dimensions and hence to devalue as the product of multi-sensory perception not only the normal landscapes of daily life but also certain stereotypical landscape elements (see Fayet 2003).

• (e) Especially the discussion of ecological modification of the appropriated physical landscape suffers from an implicit (and sometimes explicit) urban-rural dichotomy that stigmatizes the expansion of settlements as ‘destruction of landscape’.

• (f) This can be seen as the contribution of contemporary school geography to the fundamental dichotomies of Western thought (culture/nature, good/bad, masculine/feminine etc.).

• (g) Discussion of ecological issues—also from the perspective of landscape experts—entails an implicit or explicit critique of prevalent political and/or economic systems. However, this is not accompanied by critical reflection on expertise in general—an omission that leads to the elevation of (landscape) experts to a status above that of elected politicians.

• (h) The ecological perspective on landscape tends, even in scientific contexts, to introduce a moral slant into any discussion concerned with modifying the appropriated physical landscape. The shift in focus away from the substance of different views to their praise- or blameworthiness seriously impedes factual professional communication (see Luhmann 1993).

• (i) With regard both to ecology and to the preservation of the—as a rule essentialistically conceived—cultural landscape, the solutions discussed and proposed in children’s informative literature and schoolbooks are based on a linear concept of causality, to the exclusion of either feedback effects or causal networks. Presented as patent recipes, they perpetuate a cultural trust in the universal applicability of linear causal models, and as such serve the interests of those experts who both believe in and stand—in linear causal sequence—to gain from them.

• (j) The texts in question show no sign of a socially systemic interpretation of landscape. Until well into the 1980s schoolbooks in both East and West Germany (the then GDR and FRG) treated landscape overwhelmingly as the result of natural geo-factors, along with occasional cultural influences. The ecosystemic perspective that entered West German geography in the 1970s filtered down into the schoolbooks of (reunified) Germany—usually with an admonishing slant—in the late 1980s, and with growing impact in the 1990s.

• (k) Essentialist and positivist interpretations of landscape often (as in Degn et al. 1965) go hand in hand, but without any cross-referencing; nor do any of the books in the survey compare the two positions. The essentialist view of cultural landscape is, in fact, based on pure aesthetic exclusivism. Recent human changes to the physical substratum of landscape are rejected wholesale as a threat to the preservation—or, in the case of more massive intrusions, the full reinstatement—of the appropriated physical landscape (e.g. by renaturing flooded gravel pits or otherwise making human intrusions invisible—see Kühne 2013a, 2015a).

The perpetuation in young people’s minds of stereotypical social target notions of landscape, whether ecological or historico-cultural (see Paasi 1999), can be understood as the individual and collective investment of symbolic capital by experts against the day when this capital might otherwise be devalued. Applying Habermas’ theory of the systemic colonization of life-worlds (Habermas 1981), one could speak here of colonization: the colonization of the normal, stereotypical concept of landscape gained in primary socialization by the systemic scientific-ecological concept conveyed in the secondary socialization of the authors of the literature in question. Subjective notions of primary socialization are either dismissed as unscientific and inexact (see Fayet 2003), or replaced with essentialist ideas of cultural landscape as sacred and aesthetic. One way or the other, the individual experience of landscape is dismissed as culturally worthless (Kühne 2008a).

4.3.5 The New Governance Paradigm—Perpetuating or Overthrowing Power Structures?

The modern Western principles of order and tidiness, which long infused spatial and landscape planning in its methodology as well as execution, have experienced a crisis under the at least latent impact of inclusive postmodern thought. Purity sought to eradicate impurity: dirt “should be banished as unseemly, for fear it might disturb the basic order of things” (Bauman 2009 [1993], p. 241). Purity, however, has two other aspects, for “in the first place it produces waste, […] and secondly it reduces the wealth and fruitfulness of accepted reality—it impoverishes the world” (Fayet 2003, p. 157; Engler 1997; Beck 2009). The new paradigm of governance can also be understood as a reaction to the criticism of an excessive bureaucracy in the modern welfare states of Europe (Jann and Wegrich 2004). On the practical level of interaction with the appropriated physical landscape, this implies a turning away from exclusive in favor of inclusive concepts that may well harbor contradictions—in contrast to the mostly normative, non-contradictory concepts of planners (Ipsen et al. 2003; see also Allmendinger and Haughton 2012; Schönwald 2015). An expression of these changes was “a new planning vocabulary […]. Keywords such as networks, webs, corridors, hubs, flows, zones, and soft spaces soon began to characterize planning practice at various spatial scales and the representations of space embedded in such practice” (Paasi and Zimmerbauer 2016, p. 76).

Methodologically it implies a reduction in the role of experts in favor of the more intense integration of laypeople in planning processes. As an institutional framework, the so-called ‘republican model’ involves the consensual cooperation of citizens and corporate interests (Simmen and Walter 2007). In this context Gmeiner goes so far as to see lay participation as “both the goal and constitutive condition (conditio sine qua non)” of planning activities (Gmeiner 2005, p. 140; see also Ipsen et al. 2003). Two further models must also be mentioned: the expert model consisting of specialists from relevant disciplines, and the stakeholder model consisting of experts together with representatives of corporate interests. While these two latter models run a high (indeed virtually constitutive) risk of subjection to particular interests, the republican model allows control from above via selection of participants and determination of the agenda—but such control is comparatively indirect (see Gmeiner 2005).

Far from being an isolated phenomenon, the integration of laypeople in the planning process took place against the background of the Fordist crisis, with its reduction not only in the scope of fiscal action available to politics and the bureaucracy, but also in the fundamental significance of the national state. The concomitant pluralization of lifestyles has seen a weakening both of the norms and values associated with great collective social ideas and of the “underlying concept of rationality, based on scientifically developed models of an ‘optimal spatial order’” (Wood 2003, pp. 142–143; see also Reichert and Zierhofer 1993; Irrgang 2014). For all these reasons, postmodern planning has increasingly entailed lay involvement (see Brown 1989; Ryan 2011; Hartz and Kühne 2007; Stemmer 2016). In Sutter’s words, “in view of the failing legitimacy of activist political and economic decision makers and technocrats, [participation] has recently become a course between Scylla and Charybdis” (Sutter 2005, p. 222), the consequence is a ‘disorganized heterogeneity of situational projects’ (Hannah 2009), instead of an apparently comprehensive planning (also: Allmendinger/Haughton 2012). The democratization of expertise is above all connected with the desire to enhance motivation, broaden the basis of knowledge and values, avoid—or more readily negotiate—potential conflicts, and heighten the legitimacy of political decisions, with processes that are visibly fair, inclusive, free from compulsion, and open to the aims and concepts of their participants (see Heinelt 1997; Kropp 2002; Abels and Bora 2004; Healey 2006; Fainstein 2010; Walk 2008).

Arthur Benz defines ‘governance’ as a general concept for “new forms of social, economic, and political regulation, coordination, and control in complex institutional structures commonly involving the cooperation of both state and private entities” (Benz 2004, pp. 12–13). In German the term is used in this way to refer to changes in the governmental practices of the modern state, concretized on the one hand in new forms of international politics, and on the other in changes to the organization and internal relations of public administrations, enterprises, markets, regions, and associations (see Diller 2005; Fürst 2007). As impacting the landscape, governance processes are also relevant to landscape research (see e.g. Healey 2006; Naranjo 2006; Ryan 2011; Gailing and Röhring 2008; Piniek et al. 2008; Säck-da Silva 2009; Leibenath and Otto 2011; Gailing 2012, 2015; Stemmer 2016), and in this context they have attained a status evident in the formation of international institutions: “Participation and cooperation have developed into constitutive principles of modern landscape management as understood by the European Landscape Convention” (Säck-da Silva 2009, p. 210). Huang (2010) even argues that participation is a precondition for sustainable landscape development as such (see also Wragg 2000; Jones 2007).

Walk (2008, 2012) distinguishes three sets of motives underlying governance processes:

• (a) democratic—greater lay participation enhances legitimacy;

• (b) economic—participation improves the efficiency of decision making processes and reduces the risk of planning errors; and

• (c) emancipatory—participation increases the political leverage of ordinary citizens.

Broadening the basis of expertise is a governance measure that contrasts with the hierarchical, dirigiste procedures of central government: in a circular planning process the integration of civil forces entails a loss of power by elected politicians and public administrations. According to Habermas’ theory of communicative action (Habermas 1981), it represents the attempt to integrate real-life perspectives into systemic structures, or at least to bring the two into greater proximity. In postmodern terms it can be understood as a de-differentiation of social subsystems (see Kühne 2006a, 2013).

In this context, Brown (1989) suggests postmodern symbolic realism as a theoretical framework for inclusive planning. Heuristically informed by the concept of the textual metaphor, and based methodologically on a combination of hermeneutic understanding of motives and structural analysis of factors unconsciously restricting action, Brown’s proposal contrasts with the positivist model:

• The positivist model seeks to define a target state by means of a rational plan based on objective realities and allowing no alternative, whereas the symbolic realist model views reality as a construct, and any planning based on it as a process of step-by-step negotiation without any pre-defined target state.

• The positivist model distinguishes the roles of experts and laypeople: the former have specialist factual competency, the latter have value-competency. The symbolic realist model, on the other hand, is committed to learning from each other.

• The positivist model sees ends as independent of (value-free) means; symbolic realism calls for civil control of both ends and means.

• The quality of positivist planning is measured by the level of its target-attainment; that of symbolic realist planning by the degree of integration of those affected by the planning.

• Positivist planners base their decisions on criteria internalized in secondary socialization; symbolic rationalist planners base theirs on attainment of the negotiable framework.

• Positivist planning separates political and technical decisions, allocating the former to politicians, the latter to planners. Symbolic rationalist planning makes no such distinction, as citizens are involved in decisions on both levels.

• Where positivist planning seeks maximum rationality, symbolic rationalist planning combines rational with aesthetic elements (Brown 1989).

The circularity of a spatial planning process conducted according to these principles, with many different parties, ideas, and interests, virtually precludes the genesis of a carefully composed, comprehensive, and unified design. Instead of a univalent landscape with a consistent symbolic message (like the capital of an absolutist state), what comes into being is a polyvalent landscape with open symbolism. As such, the planning process makes high demands on all parties: not only the planners must be prepared to rethink and where necessary redefine their role; citizens, too, must be prepared to shed their role as bourgeois (in the sense of property-owning class) in favor of that of citoyen, and to make their decisions not so much in their own personal interests as in those of the community (Skorupinski and Ott 2002).

A neo-Marxist critique of participation in planning procedures has been advanced by Holm, who sees it as stabilizing existing structures of dominance: “Their disciplinary force lies in the procedures themselves, which—in the manner of a hidden curriculum—require and foster specific patterns of thought and behavior” (Holm 2006, p. 30). The mere avoidance of the use of restrictive legal instruments in negotiation processes between public and private interests does not render these instruments powerless: they remain “a behind-the-scenes threat indirectly serving the achievement of the desired goal” (ibid., p. 100). The internalization of the threat of sanctions means that controlling power is exercised by the controlled, not their masters (see Lemke 1997). Moreover, it is rarely possible for even suitably qualified laypeople “in their few after-work hours to embark on a sustained partnership on an equal footing in discussions and negotiations” (Holm 2006, p. 134). Less articulate and/or less powerful laypeople (e.g. the poor/uneducated/non-German-speaking etc.) will in any case be excluded from the process and their landscape requirements neglected.

New structures of governance do not automatically lessen the power of experts: in fact the body of experts is augmented by those whose professional skill lies in communicating the will of the people. Kühne (2013) points out that the involvement of citizens and NGOs in landscape planning may widen the outlook of planning departments, but it also tends to restrict the effectiveness of NGOs simply by overloading them with work. The answer may be to provide for appropriate remuneration of both NGOs and participating citizens in the planning budget.

Research into modern governance focuses powerfully on networking (Rhodes 1996), which is seen as an alternative structure to both the hierarchical state and the market (for further detail see Williamson 1991; Jansen and Wald 2007). While in the marketplace goods and services are exchanged for money and the social relation is confined to that transaction, and in a hierarchical structure money is exchanged for work, networks can develop other media of exchange like friendship, and their time span is correspondingly longer than that of market transactions (though not necessarily than that of hierarchies, which may well be permanent). Where markets operate with prices and hierarchies with instructions, networks are based on trust—which has its downside in terms of social closure, for trust in one’s network partners is generally accompanied by mistrust in outsiders: “Networks that do not admit new members develop into closed circles” (Gottschick and Ette 2012, p. 27; see also Juarez and Brown 2008; Schnur and Drilling 2009; Meyer and Kühne 2012). And for potential members of the network, lack of social capital can lead to (at least temporary) exclusion. In the market, exclusion applies to those who lack financial means, while hierarchies admit on the merit principle only those who possess adequate cultural capital. In increasingly well educated societies (see e.g. Bell 1985 [1973]), the one-sidedness of actions with visible effects—construction of estates, infrastructural measures, patterns of agriculture etc.—will be increasingly questioned, and the right to be integrated in the decision making process will be demanded and (even if only partially) granted. But hierarchies rarely yield wholly to other modes of action; they are more often accompanied than replaced by network structures and non-official participants (see Diller 2005).

Nevertheless, current developments in governance can be seen on the one hand as both limiting the outreach of expertocratic articles of faith, and widening the scope and level of equality of opportunity. Yet much remains to be done to enable the inclusion of non-experts in landscape planning on equal terms (Nussbaum 2006)—from the use of a language open to all participants, through adequate remuneration for invested time, to an assurance of a (non-selective) hearing for non-expert voices. Conversely, lay participants must be prepared to critically question the stereotypical attitudes they bring from their primary socialization (itself often pre-formed by experts); it is, after all, these attitudes that to a great extent inform judgments about potential changes to the physical landscape.

4.4 Interim Summary with Further Reflections on the Interrelations of Socialization, Distinction, Power, and Landscape

The thesis presented here that landscape is a social—and socially derived individual—construct highlights the question of the development of that construct in the individual awareness and the manner of its social conditioning. Landscape experts stake a strong claim to interpretive hegemony over at least segments of the research field—an exclusivist claim (see Sloterdijk 1987) that entails a competitive stance not only toward other (geo-)disciplines but also toward notions instilled in primary socialization. If only for the sake of the sustained legitimacy of the landscape disciplines themselves, those strategies employed by experts in the contexts of planning and systematic socialization would appear most appropriate—in light of today’s increasingly differentiated and pluralist society—that take seriously the need for acceptance by non-experts and/or seek a synthesis of expert and non-expert approaches. Landscape socialization should avoid the reflex of standardizing the requirements of the notional male whose family has been settled for generations in the same location—a reflex that de facto underlies both the paradigm of the historical cultural landscape and the imperative of its preservation. After all, such attitudes run counter to the formal principle, as well as the substance, of equality of opportunity (as propounded by Rawls 1971).

The increasing emphasis given to non-cognitive as well as non-expert dimensions of landscape awareness highlights the needs of those un- (or under)-represented in existing societal power structures. In the contemporary Western European context, three groups especially come to mind: recent migrants to the area and their descendants (with regard e.g. to the building of mosques and refugee accommodation), girls and women (who are still largely excluded from certain educational forms of landscape appropriation), and children in general (whose requirements are systematically under-represented in planning processes). A change in the prevailing construct of childhood could also do much to raise awareness among landscape experts that children, too, have a claim on their attention (see Nissen 1998). A major step in this direction would be to see childhood as a phase of life in its own right—and one fundamental to the lifelong development of every individual biography—rather than merely as a lack of adulthood.

A problematic relation, not only in the context of landscape, is that between culture and power. Here Bourdieu does not mince his words: “In every respect culture is the result of a fight for power—a direct consequence of the fact that culture is intimately bound up with human dignity” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 26). Nassehi describes the principle of inclusion and exclusion as “a congenital defect of culture” arising from the disjunction between self and other implicit in any system of identity: “cultural differentiation, cultural not-belonging […] is a virtual epistemological condition of any conceivable cultural perspective” (Nassehi 1999, p. 219). So when a landscape is described as ‘cultural’ or a new ‘landscape culture’ is called for (e.g. Haber 2000), power and dominance are always in play. Culture is “hierarchically organized and inclines to submission and domination” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 27): a condition evident with regard to landscape in levels and conditions of access to its cultural and communicative codes, as well as in rights to enjoy—and especially to change—the physical landscape.

Neither in its social nor in its physical dimension is landscape a value-free physical object that is simply given, simply ‘there’. From a sociological point of view its—especially aesthetic—significance does not (pace Kant) lie in the simple enjoyment it evokes, without any further interest. On the contrary, landscape is the physical and symbolic expression of relations of social distinction and dominance, defined as distinctive by the legitimate and legitimating taste of the dominant class; for it is by implementing an aesthetic construct that ‘landscape’ is elevated above middle-class and popular taste. This process had its origins in (German and English) Romanticism, with the canonizing of both untamed and tamed landscapes as aesthetic; and a similar movement is afoot today with regard to the monuments of industrial archaeology (Kühne 2006c, 2007a, b). The socialization of the enjoyment and recreational use of landscape also serves to uphold social power structures: a country walk is so infused with sensory and cognitive relaxation that the social constraints of everyday are banished from the mind. In this sense the social landscape can also be seen as a disciplinary measure, for primary socialization not only teaches what one should feel in the face of the phenomena commonly synthesized as landscape; it also instills a healthy respect for the teacher-expert who, like a judge in court, lays down the standards of aesthetic interpretation and ecological concern.

The wealth of competing paradigms relating to landscape reflects the expansion of education and hence, too, the “debate about the ‘right’ education and the hegemony of the educated classes” (Resch 1999, p. 263). On both the physical level of landscape objects and the meta-level of their social and individual interpretation, different norms and values are in evidence. The postmodern leveling of the dichotomy between popular and high culture—also with regard to landscape—does not erase the potential of culture for creating social distinctions. As Liesmann puts it (2002, p. 17): “To maintain the opposition between kitsch and art is to stick fast in yesterday’s—if not the day before yesterday’s—mold” (albeit that too is a form of distinction). The predilection of today’s intellectuals for distinctly profane landscapes (disused pitheads, suburban estates etc.) and ‘artistic’ stereotypes (South Sea sunsets, roaring stags against an Alpine background—see Sect. 4.2.1.1) indicates “that they are also familiar with popular culture, perhaps even more familiar—or at least additionally so” (Resch 1999, p. 282). Of equal importance as the choice of objects is the question how they are approached, and this is for the most part in the ironic postmodern mode, but sometimes through its reverse (see Liessmann 2002; Seidman 2012; Kühne and Schönwald 2015a); either way guarantees aesthetic (and hence also social) distinctiveness.

Moreover, either way the landscape perspective of postmodernism “takes sublime revenge on the presumptiveness of avant-garde Modernism” by indulging what that movement abhorred: “the fascination of things, garish pleasure, sensual religiosity, sentimental atmospherics, sunsets, C major chords, tears of joy, untrammeled delight in the exotic” (Liessmann 2002, pp. 73–74). Translated into landscape, this means fun pools, shopping malls, public parks, Alpine panoramas, subtropical holiday idylls, wall-to-wall TV landscapes, and model railways (see Sect. 5.5). Postmodernism has re-enabled experiential access to landscape via feeling (as proposed by Lipps 1891, 1902) and intuition (as proposed by Croce 1930); the cognitive approach (most commonly under expert positivist or essentialist guidance) is no longer de rigeur for the competent (and hence also distinctive) deployment of landscape semiotics.

The entire Western system of socialization and education is weighted toward an objectified concept of landscape. Socialized unsystematically in childhood and youth through the agency of the peer group and significant others, the objectivity of landscape is systematically reinforced by schooling and other educational measures—as demonstrated by Schultz (2008) with the example of wartime cartography in schoolbooks. Continued into adult life, the generally unsystematic acquisition of knowledge and development of aesthetic preferences and emotional ties informs the common lay understanding of the ‘normal home landscape’. Alongside this, a stereotypical concept of landscape is conveyed both unsystematically by films, television programs, magazines, and travel brochures, and systematically by schoolbooks and teaching. The expert concepts mediated systematically in higher education are based on the norms, values, and standards of the specific (geo-)discipline whose internalization is a precondition for successful graduation and professional qualification. Finally, the mainstream research focus on a positivist-realist construct of landscape, together with the definition of the ‘historical cultural landscape’ as target state, implies an understanding of landscape as given that ipso facto discredits more recent vernacular intrusions as ahistorical.

Taken together, the standard landscapes of literature, painting, film, photography, computer games and cyberspace, as well as the landscape zones of school geography textbooks and factual books for children and young people, amalgamate to a stereotypical corpus creating a feedback relation to ever more films, computer games, paintings, and imaginative literature. Seemingly backed by exact scientific descriptions, these multiple images of landscapes and zones sediment into a diffuse backdrop of everyday knowledge that is continuously reflected and confirmed by visual impressions from photos and postcards, paintings, travel brochures, guidebooks (see Nohl 2004), novels, and films (both feature films and documentaries), as well as computer games, virtual landscape construction programs, and modern zoos which present animals as far as possible in their ‘natural’ habitats (Grotmann and Fuchs 2004; Wauschek 2004; Vogt 2007; Steinkrüger 2014). The recursive impact of these various factors is all the greater as it embodies the colonization of the everyday world by systemic landscape stereotypes in constantly recurring media and images, a process underpinned by the input of institutionalized education as described above (see Dreitzel 1962).

Kühne (2008a) distinguishes eight stereotypical landscapes:

• (a) Central European: hills, woods, agricultural patchwork of fields and orchards, farms and villages ‘set in the landscape’, with meandering streams and rivers. Climatically characterized by four distinct seasons: spring blossoms, summer heat, autumn storms, and snowy winters. Its basic Arcadian charm is seen as aesthetically threatened (among other things) by industrial agriculture, urban sprawl (other than one’s own suburb), traffic arteries, industrial plants and estates, acid rain, and the straightening of watercourses.

• (b) Mediterranean: Arcadian archetype of the Italian/Provençal landscape in summer, conveyed in painting, literature and personal travel. Rolling hill country with Tuscan pines and acacias, beaches, small fishing/farming villages (again ‘set in the landscape’); hot summers under blue skies and/or fields of lavender. Seen as aesthetically threatened by forest fires, karstification, and concrete hotel jungles (other than one’s own favorite vacation habitat).

• (c) Desert: for Central Europeans the dominant Saharan archetype is characterized by sand (esp. shifting dunes), extreme heat, and dryness, and aesthetically determined (if anything) by transcendent sublimity. Not generally thought of as itself threatened, it is conceived rather as a threat both on the individual/existential level—from which the only escape is an (equally stereotypical) oasis—and on the collective level, with expanding desertification due to climate change impacting esp. (from a European perspective) the Arcadian/Mediterranean landscape.

• (d) Exotic/tropical: characterized by hot, humid climate and the contrast of impenetrable jungle and palm-lined beaches. Aesthetically sublime, yet harboring perceived individual threat from wild animals and indigenous peoples and collective threat of rainforest clearance and other exploitation.

• (e) Steppe and savanna: European stereotypes are the Russian steppe and the Serengeti (popularized in Germany esp. by zoo-director and TV personality Bernhard Grzimek); both are characteristically flat, bare, dry, and either hot (Serengeti) or cold (Russian steppe). Aesthetic of sublime spatial openness threatened (if anything) by hunting/poaching of wildlife; individual threat from climatic exposure and/or wild animals.

• (f) Subpolar: esp. (for the European) Siberia, Northern Canada, and Alaska. Basic landscape elements are boreal (coniferous) forest and open grassland (pampas), either flat or mountainous, and with lakes. Dominant aesthetic motif of sublimity threatened by forest clearance (esp. Canada); individual threat from wild animals and cold.

• (g) Arctic/Antarctic: stereotype of polar icecap, hostile to human life. Threat to global climate from polar ice melt is mitigated in common perception by enduring aesthetic of sublimity and environmental hostility.

• (h) Mountain: for the European, archetypically the Alps, culturally transmitted in painting, literature, travelogues, and films (esp. the so-called German Heimat-movies); also the Rocky Mountains (esp. in Western movies). Characterized by steep peaks and rock faces, winter snow, lakes, glaciers, mountain villages and Alpine meadows; aesthetically either sublime or romantic. Threatened by global warming (vanishing glaciers) and intensive tourism; individual threat from avalanches, earth slippage, and sudden weather change.

Apart from these, another landscape with a distinctive appeal is that of industrial archaeology. Rejected by the common taste as an ugly memorial to social and ecological decadence, it is cultivated by the initiated as an aesthetically sublime symbol of desolation, the eschatologically charged expression of human economic transitoriness.

The social construct of landscape stereotypes outlined above arises from a process of abstraction which, driven by dominant interests, combines analytic description with a normative component dedicated to preservation of the construct and its physical (and economic) manifestation. Thus the descriptive model of (e.g.) an urban center becomes prescriptive when the actual state (the central district of Y is X) and target state (the central district of Y should really be Z) converge. All it needs for this to happen is the reinforcement of the central role of Z by urban planning measures. Moreover, the ascription of a distinctive aesthetic value to a landscape as a distraction from social constraints reveals two correlative dimensions in which power systems function in the constitution and use of landscape, both symbolically and really securing prevalent structures of social dominance. In short, appropriated landscape in its physical shape is the reification of social power. And here too there is a feedback process, for physical landscape symbolizes the (latent or manifest) drive for social distinction; and social distinction expresses itself in a differentiated scale of rights to ownership, access, and use of physical landscape. In fact, the socially constitutive structure of landscape is inherently recursive. What landscape is and what it should look like is defined by experts and communicated through the processes of primary and secondary socialization (see Sect. 4.3.4.2). The will of the governing class of experts becomes the will of the governed, inasmuch as they, too, seek to participate in the exclusive aesthetic of the dominant interpretation (see Foucault 1977). With the exception of intellectuals with critical landscape training, such participants are, however, conditioned by socialization to accept—in the direct encounter of a planning group—the interpretations of those who were at least indirectly responsible for their conditioning. The socially constitutive structure of landscape is in this sense inherently recursive. The apparent democratic legitimacy of landscape experts is, one may conclude, precisely that—apparent.

A central mechanism securing the power of experts, whether planners, geographers, or sociologists, is what Schimank calls “fictions of rationality” which, “however indispensable as practical guidelines, […] harbor the chronic danger of infecting social activity with an unremarked loss of rationality” (Schimank 2012, p. 385). In the landscape context what this means is that paradigms established as fitting one context are applied unquestioningly to every context, with flagrant disregard for their contingency. In that sense, the very concept of cultural landscape is a euphemism (Kühne 2006c). The technical (structural) power (Popitz 1992) of landscape experts expresses itself in the manifold forms of a twofold mastery: over nature and over man—meaning, in the latter case, decisions affecting the life of local people (see Popitz 1992; DeMarrais et al. 1996). The sacralizing of this process as ‘culture’ is “one of the great achievements of the European imagination—the myth of a possible harmony between human beings and nature” (Hauser 2001, p. 240). Obscuring social realities, it underpins the hegemonic forces behind them.

Another historical manifestation of the same hegemonic tendency can be seen in the bureaucracy, whose growth to power is correlative with that of the experts that counsel and inform it. Expert social capital is a heady ingredient in the ethos of any public administration. Again, one can observe the diminished democratic legitimacy of the ‘technical state’ (Schelsky 1965). Already in 1911 Michels noted what he called the “iron law of oligarchy” as the universal fate of any political collective: “The organization is the mother of the government of the elected over the elector, of the agent over the principal, of the delegate over the delegator” (Michels 1911, p. 384). The same holds for the role of deputies in an organization, for the organization is more than “the sum of its parts—of its individual deputies” (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 178).

The measures taken to meet the transformational processes of society (whether growth, diminution, or stagnation—e.g. intensification or extension of agriculture, increase or shrinkage of population) suffer from a correlative imposition of standardized, institutionalized solution models, ranging from incentives to commands and prohibitions, which elevate the stereotypical to the norm and establish the ideology of an elite over the contingency of the particular situation. The only difference is that, unlike ideologies, the stereotypical norm knows no “complex reciprocal processes or multi-layered social structures, but follows the naïve law of first impressions that creates a world of likes and dislikes, of positive and negative [feelings], before launching an immediate search for a scapegoat” (Bergler 1976, p. 84)—a fairly typical bureaucratic reflex.

In the relationship between the worlds of politics and science, specialist knowledge serves as a principle of simplification as well as legitimacy, externalizing the responsibility of the political decision maker. Despite the skepticism with which experts are currently confronted, “scientific expertise remains the key resource of politicians in risk-fraught or controversial circumstances” (Bogner and Torgersen 2005, p. 7). And the key counterweight of a democratic society is on the one hand to know and critically analyze the vested interests, communication codes, and referential systems of the echelons of decision makers and experts ranged against it, and on the other to retain a clear focus on the particularities of the issue and its social contexts (see Saretzki 2005). What is needed is not a dichotomous moralistic reduction to good versus bad, but an awareness of the complex shades of knowledge, ranging from not knowing, through uncertainty, to reasoned conviction, that color the arguments and judgments of all parties—experts, politicians and citizens alike (see Paris 2005; Kühne 2014a).

As a last resort the less powerful in this hierarchical structure—the laity, the demos—retain what Hirschman (1970) calls the ‘exit option’: the withdrawal of loyalty. But this last resort will rarely be implemented for the simple reason that—for all their wooing of the public on the micro-level of case studies and individual expertise, as well as on the meso-level of institutional contact (open days and the like)—the elite can call on an overwhelming accumulation of symbolic capital (see Nowotny 2005). Only a massive transformation of the processes generating status and hierarchy could alter this. In the world in which we live, the non-expert is conditioned by socialization to trust the expert, and although expanding education has brought with it an expansion in the number and range of experts, and non-experts in matters of landscape may well be experts in another field, and as such—equipped with the self-confidence that goes with symbolic capital—may be prepared to stand up and speak, yet symbolic capital is in a sense undifferentiated, and it will be the rare expert who risks loss of face by embarking on a fundamental critique of institutionalized expertise.