Landscape and Place

 Jennifer Burton

1/19/2021

J.B Jackson “The world Itself” and

Tim Cresswell, “Defining palace”

Response paper

Landscape and Place

In this essay I will discuss the key terms Landscape and Place and how these terms are defined and what these terms mean now in the context of geographic analysis. The words “landscape” and “place” seem to have easy meanings, but when you take a closer look they are not easily defined in the way we use the words today..

  The word landscape comes from a need to indicate a kind of environment or setting. The word land means a plot of land, earth, or soil.  The word scape means a composition of similar objects. In the 18th century, the word landscape brought to mind an artist's creative idea of a perfectly human manicured plot of land. J.B. Jackson, the author of the article “‘The word itself’ from discovering the Vernacular Landscape,” indicates that the word landscape needs a new definition to account for how the word is used today. Today the word landscape is used to not only mean a plot of land or manicured lawn, it is also used to describe abstract ideas such as the landscape of dreams or landscape of thought (Jackson). 

  The word place is defined as a particular position or point in space (google dictionary). This definition of place appears easy enough to understand, yet when you look at the ways people use the word place, it becomes more complex. Creswell, in the article “Defining place,” showed us that place can mean anywhere we need it to be, and the “place” is not the same for me or for you. Place can also mean a form of struggle or resistance, like in the phrase “I put him in his place.” In this context, place is not a location of something that comes to mind when learning about geography (Creswell). 

In both instances, the words landscape and place are not as they seem when we first look at them. Both can be defined in a physical way and in a physiological way, showing that geography is not just about the landscape or a place on earth. Geography is both a study of the earth’s surface and a study of human geography, which is the study of the people who live on the earth and how the earth affects them psychologically. Humans give words meaning to help themselves understand the world. This is how we give the world connections, attachments, and meaning (Cresswell). 

Works Cited

Jackson, J.B. ‘THe word Itself” from Discovering the Vernacular Landscape.(1984)

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Cresswell, Time. “Defining place” (2015)

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Google dictionary. “Place”. (2020)