This document provides an overview of key concepts from Chapter 7 on interpreting places and landscapes. It discusses relationships between people and spaces, environmental behavior, territoriality, cognitive images, place-making, modernity, globalization, and how globalization has shaped places and landscapes over time. Specific examples and figures are referenced throughout to illustrate these concepts.

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Chapter 7:
Interpreting Places
and Landscapes
Chapter 7 Lecture
Katie Pratt
Macalester College
© 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.

2. © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
• Relationships between people and space
• Environmental behavior
• Territoriality
• Cognitive images
• Landscapes
• Place-making
• Modernity
• Globalization
Key Concepts
Figure: Chapter 7 Opener - Tourists visit the
construction site of the National September
11 Memorial and Museum.

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• Interdependence between
people and places
• Understanding
environmental perception
and knowledge
• Cindy Katz: Growing up
Global
Behavior, Knowledge, and Human
Environments
Figure 7.1: People’s Climate March in
New York City.
Apply your knowledge: Scrutinize how globalization has shaped the environment
you operate in as a student. How has it shaped you—the buildings, the people, the
climate, the social life, etc.—and how do you shape it by interacting with it?

4. © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
Behavior, Knowledge, and Human
Environments (cont’d)
Figure 7.2: A Shepard's map, drawn by a 10-year-old Sudanese boy, illustrating
his detailed environmental knowledge.

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Figure 7.3: Graffiti as territorial markers.
• Places are socially
constructed
• Territoriality
– Social and cultural needs
• Ethology
• Proxemics
• Insiders and outsiders
• Sociospatial dialectic
Place-Making
Apply your knowledge: Describe the relationship between ethology
and territoriality. Evaluate examples that you experience in everyday
life of proxemics as a territorializing force.

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• territoriality refers to the persistent attachment of
individuals or peoples to a specific location or
territory.
• ethology the scientific study of the formation and
evolution of human customs and beliefs.
• proxemics the study of the social and cultural
meanings that people give to personal space.

7. © 2016 Pearson Education, Inc.
Figure 7.4: (a) Public art pieces serve as an important cultural hub in San
Francisco's Mission District (b) Banksy art, London (c) Pepsi-Cola World Cup
branding by street artist Jaz (d) Black Hand street art, Iran.
• Street art is used in place-making in a variety of
ways
Place-Making (cont’d)

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Outsider Art
Figure 7.A: Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh, India.
Apply your knowledge: What makes outsider art “outside”? What are other
cultural expression that are “outside” the mainstream forms? What does this
tell you about cultural and social categories?

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• Cognitive images
• Paths, edges, districts,
nodes, and landmarks
• Distortions
Place-Making (cont’d)
Figure 7.6: Cognitive image of Boston.
Apply your knowledge: Use the five elements to map out your image of the
college campus.

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• Paths: The channels along which they and others move;
for example, streets, walkways, transit lines, canals.
• Edges: Barriers that separate one area from another; for
example, shorelines, walls, railroad tracks.
• Districts: Areas with an identifiable character (physical
and/or cultural) that people mentally "enter" and "leave";
for example, a business district or an ethnic
neighborhood.
• Nodes: Strategic points and foci for travel; for example,
street corners, traffic junctions, city squares.
• Landmarks: Physical reference points; for example, dis-
tinctive landforms, buildings, or monuments.

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• Images and behavior
Place-Making (cont’d)
Figure 7.7: Images of Los Angeles as
seen by residents of different
communities.
Apply your knowledge: What is cognitive imagery? How do cognitive images
direct us to “learn” an environment? How is cognitive imagery built differently
by each of us?

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• Topophilia
Place-Making (cont’d)
Figure 7.8: Preference map of the United States held by a group of Virginia Tech
students, based on the perceived attractiveness of cities and states as places to live.

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• Humanistic approach in geography
• Derelict landscapes
• Ordinary landscapes
Landscapes as Human Systems
Figure 7.11: Vulgaria: size and ostentation are the dominant factors in
upscale U.S. residential development.

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Landscapes as Human Systems (cont’d)
Figure 7.9: Some cities are immediately recognizable because of their famous
landmarks.

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Landscapes as Human Systems (cont’d)
Figure 7.10: These ordinary landscapes in New England and Middle America have become
symbolic of the United States.

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Route 66
Figure 7.1: Historic Route 66 was created as part of the National Highway System Program.

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Wigwam Motel Rialto Route 66
© 20## Pearson Education, Inc.

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• Landscapes of national identity
Trafalgar Square and British National Identity
Figure 7.B: Nelson’s column.Figure 7.C: Trafalgar Square.
Apply your knowledge: What is a place that you consider to be of special
symbolic significance in your own country?

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• Landscape and art
• Art offers insight on
humans’ relationships
with the environment
Landscapes as Human Systems (cont’d)
Figure 7.12: The Cornfield, a painting by John Constable
(1776–1837) is a representation of the Romantic tradition.

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• Funerary landscapes
Trafalgar Square and British National Identity
Figure 7.13: Funerary landscapes.

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• Landscape as text
• Semiotics
– The practice of writing and
reading signs is known as
semiotics.
• Commercial spaces
– “Palaces of consumption”
Coded Spaces
Figure 7.14: Aeroville shopping mall, Paris.
Apply your knowledge: Apply what you have learned about codes and provide
a description of the systems of signification that operate in your neighborhood.

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• Spread of Modernity to peripheral regions
• Cyberspace
– With its own “landscape” (or technospace)
• Commonalities of a shared, global consciousness
Globalization and Place-Making

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• Going slow
– Slow food and slow city movements
• Rallying against globalization and effort to recover a
sense of place
Globalization and Place-Making (cont’d)
Figure 7.15: Slow food festival, Bra,
Italy.
Figure 7.16: Simjicheon, South Korea, one
of the first officially designated “slow
cities” in Asia.

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Places as Objects of Consumption
Figure 7.17: Venice, Las Vegas, the
boundaries between the heritage
industry and the leisure industry
and entertainment industries have
become increasingly blurred.

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Places as Objects of Consumption (cont’d)
Figure 7.18: Chinese mimicry: (a) The village of Hallstatt, Austria, and (b) a copy-cat
version in China’s southern city of Huizhou.
Apply your knowledge: How have places become objects of consumption? Define
what David Harvey means by the term” degenerative utopia” and think of an
example.

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• Homogenization
of culture
• Cosmopolitanism
Future Geographies
Figure 7.19: Western pop culture: Hollywood movies
dominate the schedule at the Gaumont cinema in Paris.
Apply your knowledge: Think of three example of how globalization of cultures
shapes places and landscapes. Compare the values of the Cittaslow movement
to globalization of culture, and analyze how homogenization can change place
and landscapes.