Search

"Nature's Ideological Landscape: A Literary and Geographic Perspective on its Development and Preservation on Denmark's Jutland Heath" by Kenneth Olwig is a highly regarded book in the field of landscape studies. It delves into the cultural and environmental histories of the agricultural heathlands of Jutland, exploring how these landscapes have been understood in terms of nature, culture, and nation. Olwig's humanistic approach to geography emphasizes the emotional and experiential aspects of landscapes, drawing on literary sources and historical narratives. While the book lacks explicit theoretical elaboration, it offers a comprehensive exploration of Western concepts of nature and the complexities of ideas surrounding landscape. [Extracted from the article]

This paper provides a critical reading of (1) the ways in which Palestine's cultural landscape and the indigenous people of Palestine have been represented in the eyes of Western and specifically European travelers and explorers in the 19th century; (2) how various such representations subsequently 'filtered' into Israeli geographical texts and writing, and were utilised by Israeli writers and others to (re) write a so-called 'modern', but distorted and incomplete historical geography of Palestine. The net result is that much of Palestine's Arab landscape has been 'de-historicised', or as Keith Whitelam (1998: 11) phrased it, has been 'silenced'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detailed information about land use is available from the mid-nineteenth century onward for the countries of the former Habsburg Monarchy. For Slovenia and Czechia, databases have been created that make it possible to analyze the period from the first half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The processes of changing land use were comparable during the period examined. Nonetheless, the cultural landscape in Czechia was significantly more transformed. Because of the nationalization of land after the Second World War and the establishment of state-owned collective farms and cooperatives, today large complexes of farmland predominate, whereas in Slovenia fragmented properties still predominate, and the cultural landscape therefore preserves many more elements from the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land registers, or cadasters, contain information on land use because this is vital for land assessment and taxation. Some European countries produced land registers covering their entire territories as early as the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy produced the Franciscean Cadaster, also known as the Stable Cadaster, which shows the traditional preindustrial cultural landscape and makes it possible to analyze land-use changes or the transformation of the traditional cultural landscape. This special issue is the result of collaboration between Slovenian and Czech geographers, and it features six articles covering land-use changes from the perspective of natural geography, political geography, ecosystems, farms, and metrics. The articles, which explore the processes of changes at the national and regional levels, are based on the textual part of the Franciscan Cadaster, and the local studies are based on the cartographic part of the cadaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of the cultural landscape, administrative toponyms do not only reflect natural and sociocultural phenomena, but also help with related management and naming work. Historically, county-level administrative districts have been stable and basic administrative regions in China, playing a role in the country’s management. We explore the spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of the county-level administrative toponyms cultural landscape in China’s eastern plains areas. A Geographical Information System (GIS) analysis, Geo-Informatic Tupu, Kernel Density Estimation, and correlation coefficients were conducted. We constructed a GIS database of county-level administrative toponyms from the Sui dynasty onward using the Northeast China, North China, and Yangtze Plains as examples. We then summarized the spatio-temporal evolutionary characteristics of the county-level administrative toponyms cultural landscape in China’s eastern plains areas. The results indicate that (1) the number of toponyms has roughly increased over time; (2) toponym densities on the three plains are higher than the national average in the corresponding timeframe since the Sui; and (3) county-level administrative toponyms related to mountains and hydrological features accounted for more than 30% of the total in 2010. However, the percentage of county-level administrative toponyms related to natural factors on the three plains has decreased since the Sui. To explore the factors influencing this spatio-temporal evolution, we analyzed the correlations between the toponyms and natural factors and human/social factors. The correlation degree between toponym density and population density is the highest, and that between toponym density and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) the lowest. Temperature changes were important in toponym changes, and population changes have influenced toponym changes over the last 400 years in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]