Abstract
There was a period around the start of the final quarter of this century when landscape evaluation attracted a great deal of attention. Laurie wrote that: ‘Landscape evaluation may be defined as “the comparative relationships between two or more landscapes in terms of assessments of visual quality”; in this context, assessments are the “process of recording visual quality through an observer’s aesthetic appreciation of intrinsic visual qualities or characteristics within the landscape”‘ (Laurie, 1975 p. 103). Each landscape has its own particular character and qualities and viewers will tend to evaluate landscapes according to their perceived merits, which will include aesthetic and ecological considerations as well as others, like cultural characteristics. In addition to the qualitative judgements made about landscapes in an informal context, landscape evaluation has also been practised as a deliberate exercise in assessment directed towards obtaining data that might be incorporated into planning or conservation strategies. Governmental concern with the assessment of landscape inspired an enormous amount of research into landscape evaluation during the 1970s and this area of study continues to receive considerable interest from workers engaged with the applied aspects of landscape study. Cosgrove noted that: ‘Among British geographers interest in landscape was stimulated partly by perception studies, particularly the short-lived excitement over landscape evaluation for planning purposes which surrounded the 1973 reform of local government’ (1985 p. 46).
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© 1999 Richard Muir
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Muir, R. (1999). The Evaluation of Landscape. In: Approaches to Landscape. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27243-3_6
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