Abstract
According to Max Weber, power offers the possibility to enforce one’s own will against resistance. Power, which is particularly present in the political system, is used in different political worldviews to achieve different social goals, whereby spatial arrangements are also interpreted differently (conservatism prefers rural spaces, socialism urban ones, which unites it with liberalism, which, however, also values suburban spaces positively). The approaches to critical landscape research presented in this chapter are united by the rejection of current social power relations. What they have in common is a critical attitude towards the state, albeit from different backgrounds. Critical theory sees in it the vicarious agents of economic interests, by means of state organs (especially schools) social structures (i.e. the dependence of the human being on the economy) are to be perpetuated. Bourdieu expands the basis of critique by not only evaluating economic interests as drivers of an educational system that maintains power relations, but also including other components of ‘symbolic capital’. Liberal approaches, on the other hand, criticize the educational system’s function of suppressing alternative interpretations of the world by forming discourse sovereignties and thus restricting individual freedoms. Accordingly, the discursive hegemonialization of ‘expert special knowledge’ (see Chap. 4) is criticized here, as are the bureaucratic inscriptions into physical space (such as subsidies), which in turn are conveyed as ‘beautiful landscapes’ in education. From Bourdieu’s perspective, the question of how landscape becomes a medium of social distinction in order to secure the symbolic power of the ‘ruling class’ is in the foreground. From the point of view of ‘critical theory’, the question of how to prepare physical space for economic interests and its social landscape’s aesthetic charge is specifically focused.
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The Grand Tour describes a journey of the sons of the European (at first especially English) nobility, later also of the bourgeoisie, to the sites of European culture in a special way ancient as well as through landscapes classified as worth seeing. The Grand Tour served to refine the skills acquired in education (e.g. in foreign languages or fencing) and at the same time to deepen knowledge of different regions of Europe (Dirlinger 2000; Brilli 2001; Löfgren 2002).
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Kühne, O. (2019). Power and Landscape: From Political Worldviews and Critical Landscape Research. In: Landscape Theories. RaumFragen: Stadt – Region – Landschaft. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25491-9_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25491-9_5
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