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Urban Landscapes As Interpretative Instruments To Express Political Power
Urban Landscapes As Interpretative Instruments To Express Political Power
Abstract:
This article is interested in presenting the principle of using landscape, especially urban landscape to
express identities and political power. It discusses the fact that the process of understanding landscape is a matter
of interpreting a meaning which is always based on founded assumptions and speculations.
It is also discussing the idea that different things will hold a different meaning to different people
emphasizing perception as an important aspect in social constructs of landscapes. Starting from the point where
world is considered a huge album and society is basically a visual culture, the importance of images of places is
presented and considered as a base for further development for how landscapes are both managed and
communicated to people.
Several case studies are considered to illustrate the argument of how urban landscapes can become
instruments to interpret and express political power.
Key words: urban landscape, interpretation, landscapes of power, national identity
1.INTRODUCTION
Despite what most of the people think and
believe, landscape, weather natural, rural or
urban, it is not easy to decipher and
understand. Landscape is easy to look at and
find attractive, boring or dull. But it is
certainly difficult to understand its degrees of
complexity, its functions and the messages it
might be communicating to public, visitors or
tourists. In other words, landscape is difficult
to interpret, due to the fact that reading it
is not a matter of finding a typical cultural
area, but a matter of seeing how landscapes
come to mean different things to different
people and how their meanings change and are
contested (Crang, 1998). Understanding
landscape is a matter of interpreting a meaning
which is always based on founded
assumptions and speculations due to the
complexity of the concept. Even the natural
landscape would imply assumptions when it
comes to be interpreted by humans, but this
paper it is mainly interested and focused on
human built landscapes. Normally all
landscapes incorporate a built, tangible
5. REFERENCES
Appadurai, A., 1986, The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective,
Cambridge: Polity Press
Azaryahu, M., 1997, German reunification
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East Berlin, Political Geography, vol. 16, no.
6, 479-493
Bourdieu, P., 1997, Pascalian meditations,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Bowman, A. and Pagano, M., 1995,
Cityscapes & Capital, The Politics of Urban