A New Theory of Landscape Aesthetics

This book reexamines the philosophical bases of landscape aesthetics and integrates it with the work of psychologists and neurologists to produce a much-revised account of landscape appreciation. Landscape aesthetics is a major driver for what we take pleasure in, where to live, and how to live. Paradoxically, there is no evolutionary or economic advantage to such behaviour, and a definitive explanation, from a bewildering array of theories over the last 300 years, has eluded us or has been overtaken by changing world-views. The book thus provides a modern account of the rise, fall and recent slight rise again of landscape aesthetics; the various recent but redundant suggestions from evolutionary theory and enactivism; the philosophical contributions from the eighteenth century as well as recent notions of ‘existential aesthetics’; the Predictive Processing understanding of perception and its consequences and current psychological and neuroaesthetic findings concerning the experience of appreciating beauty. The book drills down into what all this means for the individual in practice, in particular meaning and the resulting emotional responses, and integrates new theory on aesthetic appreciation, including how tastes and preferences develop both for natural landscape and landscape design. Finally, the implications of these fresh understandings for theory in related fields such as landscape character and mental health, and the practice of landscape evaluation, are explained. The book thus presents modern theory on landscape appreciation appropriate to the twenty-first century and suitable for academics, researchers, practitioners and advanced students in landscape and related fields.