Nonetheless,cultural geographers have tended to emphasize the visual aspects of the physical world when they use the term ‘landscape’, defining it as a portion of the earth visible by an observer from a particular position or location. (Of course, the position or location of the viewer– both physical location and social location– is never unmediated,as will be discussed below.

Importantly, then, landscape is not only a ‘thing’, but is also an ideological or symbolic process that has the power to actively (re)produce relationships among people and between people and their material world. In this sense, landscapes carry symbolic or ideological meanings that reflect back and help produce social practices, lived relationships, and social identities, and also become sites of claiming or contesting power and authority over an area.

The largest monumental landscapes in the USA, for example, carry laudatory messages about war heroes and military conquest. We can identify a set of social actors who produce such landscapes – historical and civic societies, town planners, veterans groups, and so on. The messages deployed by the monuments – a particular version of the past that celebrates masculinist values (Monk, 1999) – actively reproduces those values in the present and thus can shape social practice, such as by reproducing a culture of war. Of course such values never go unchallenged and can be undermined in numerous ways. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC became a site for contesting war as it highlights the suffering and loss of war rather than triumphal conquest.

To Meinig, landscapes themselves could be read as collective social ideologies and processes: ‘symbols of the values, governing ideas, and underlying philosophies of a culture’ (1979: 6).

The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes also demonstrated one of landscape studies’ most enduring and ultimately contentious metaphors, that of ‘reading’ and interpreting landscapes as ‘texts’. Just as a book (text) is made up of words and sentences arranged in a particular order with meanings that we read, so landscape has elements arranged in a particular order that we can translate into language, grasp meaning and read. Interpreting architectural forms and their arrangement, for example, as symbolic interactions among humans and their environment (e.g. the height of skyscrapers as symbols of power, modernity, public protection, etc.) would in many ways structure landscape debates in the 1980s and 1990s.

Denis Cosgrove, for example, in his Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, defined landscape as a ‘way of seeing’ associated with the rise of capitalist property relations (1984: 13). He argued that the landscape concept enabled an erasure or naturalization of class difference via media such as landscape paintings of landowners and their country property.

Finally, geographers began rejecting the basic opposition that had persisted for so long in landscape analysis, that between subject and object, the viewer and that which is viewed. Representation in earlier landscape studies had assumed that some unmediated, transparent reality could be detected in empirically observed landscapes. More recent studies have emphasized that there is an inherent inseparability of the represent-er and the represent-ed. Thus the worlds we represent, whether as geographers, corporate executives or graffiti artists, reflect our own positionalities, values, interests, motivations and backgrounds.

Elsewhere he argues that if landscape ‘is indeed a relation of power’ there cannot be multiple interpretations of it, since that would defeat its ideological function, that is one that depends on the imposition of a dominant social order (Mitchell, 1996: 27). Mitchell’s The Lie of the Land (1996) makes an important point about the role of labour within the expanding capitalist economy in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Mitchell uses this example to illustrate how relations of production are involved in shaping any landscape; in effect, that we must pay attention to how landscapes ‘get made’ in addition to how they are then re-presented as landscape. In this case of southern California, that representation is an aesthetic, pastoral depiction of thriving agriculture that is the product of (otherwise invisible, exploited) labour (1996: 16).