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In my paper, I will discuss the role of the image in the determination of people’s approaches and attitudes towards places. After a short introduction (§1), in the first part of the essay I will discuss the main points of criticism against the image in relation to the issue of environmental appreciation. In doing so, I will relate Allen Carlson’s criticism towards the so-called ‘landscape cult’ in environmental aesthetics (§2) to the post-structuralist critique of the concept of landscape that has been carried out in the field of human geography (§3). In the fourth section, I will emphasize the structuring and performative character of representations, and will show how, in the present, the image remains one of the fundamental ways of regulating relations between subjects of experience and places (§4). The task of a theory of place-image, informed by knowledge acquired in the fields of visual and media studies, is to learn to read images as tools for understanding and defining the environment around us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will pin down some elements to recover the concept of landscape in the context of environmental aesthetics. Such insertion of landscape in environmental aesthetics entails the questioning of the dualism between nature and culture that still lays at the basis of much literature in environmental aesthetics. My argument will unfold in three steps: first, I will show how the original question of environmental aesthetics, as elaborated by Ronald Hepburn in 1966, presupposes a distinction between nature and culture rooted in the moral contempt for excessive modernization and urbanization. Second, I will criticize some theories, not all coming from environmental aesthetics, according to which landscape is reducible to the cultural codes of the vision in the scopic regime of modernity and pave the way for the rediscovery of the substantive nature of landscape. Third, I will discuss some elements of a substantive account of landscape by adopting a phenomenological framework and following authors like Kenneth Olwig and Arnold Berleant. In this last part, I will also offer some arguments for overcoming the idea according to which landscape beauty only results into compositional, pictorial harmony among its elements. The quest for landscape beauty can still play a key part in aesthetic appreciation and also in architecture and planning, but the kind of harmony to which it refers does not entirely belong to the sphere of the visible and includes reference to ecological, socio-political, and aesthetical balances at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]