Reflections on Landscape: From Object to Methodology

The word “landscape” was introduced in the English language at the end of the 16th century. The nearest equivalent German word was adopted by academics in central Europe at the end of the 19th century, and the word has been used a good deal in scholarly writing. Unfortunately, since the attention to the universal nature of the methodology of landscape as an academic term is insufficient when different disciplines concretize their individual landscape research, and also because they have their own choices and definitions when dealing with landscape as a study object, and this has sometimes created difficulties in communication between different disciplines. This paper contributes to resolution of this problem by examining the spatio-temporal evolutionary process of landscape in a number of disciplines. This should help to promote in-depth landscape research grounded in concerns shared by different disciplines.