The Importance of Percpetion in Environmental and Landscape Research

Abstract

Landscapes evolve as a result of material and mental/intellectual exchanges between human beings and nature. Landscape is the real spatial human environment providing the basis for our life through the potentialities it provides. Environmental quality manifests in the landscape. People living and acting in the given places perceive the landscape and react to it according to their culture and needs. Perception—which is determined by several factors—plays a crucial role in making judgements about our environment. Perception is the bridge between material reality and mental construction, a bridge amongst the various aspects of the landscape as it exists from a biophysical, socio-cultural, virtual, and cognitive point of view. The present paper provides an overview of the different concepts of landscape perception as this is understood in a variety of disciplines that include philosophical, cultural and ecological anthropology, environmental psychology, aesthetics, and cultural geography. The paper examines how these theories and concepts explain the relation of humans to their biophysical environment. It also discusses how perception is connected to aesthetics and to preferences, and how the environment is assessed according to an objectivist or subjectivist paradigm.