Warum ist Landschaft schön? Die Spaziergangswissenschaft

by Lucius Burckhardt

Hard to find

Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Lucius Burckhardt was a Swiss sociologist and economist. He was an important thinker in Architectural theory and Design theory and the founder of strollology.

Reviews

[Lariatte16]

Sehr spannende Inhalte, aber irgendwann wurde es ziemlich schwer zu lesen und wiederholte sich öfter mal. Die erste Hälfte kann man aber auf jeden Fall mal lesen!

[Astrid]

Read it as research for a paper I wrote so I’m not rating it but it was rlly good and rlly interesting and I read most of it so I’m counting it

[Kai Weber]

Spaziergangswissenschaft (in English strollology) was introduced as an academic subject by this author. It draws heavily from the hermeneutics developed in the humanities and in the first place works as a critique of human perception. The author demands landscape, garden/park and town designs that facilitate the breaking of the automatisms of perception and boost the awareness for aspects of our surrounding that we usually don't perceive actively anymore. Therefore the author's demands and theory remind the informed reader of Russian Formalism or Geertz' view of "culture as text". Yet Burckhardt (who died in 2003 and therefore could have seen the early development of the world wide web, but not that of social media) also seems to foresee some developments of hiking apps like Komoot, when he compares his students' marking of "lovely places" on a map with each other and concludes how much our perception of beauty in a landscape is interpersonal and therefore culturally predisposed.
While his arguments, that draw heavily on the difference between the town and the countryside, and between townspeople and peasants, sound convincing in a historical context, they are less so when it comes to explain the modern landscape perception. The problem is that Burckhardt is not willing to give up this historical townspeople/peasant distinction, so in order to explain that many people living in the countryside nowadays have a townspeople mode of landscape perception, he claims that the metropolis of today has expanded to include the countryside. It doesn't seem right to me to incorporate all modern countryside in Western countries into the metropolis concept - I myself grew up in a small village of 400 inhabitants, with the next "town" having a population of 5000, and the next real town of more than 100,000 inhabitants being 50 kilometres away. As my parents were participating in a hiking group I was strolling and enjoying the landscape from early childhood on. I do think that my perception of beauty in a landscape is much determined by the aspects that Burckhardt describes, but I don't think it is appropriate to attribute this view to my being part of a "metropolis" - a neighbour and one of my uncles were still doing agriculture, so even though my parents were leading town-like employee's lives, I still had access to "living based on the countryside" where I grew up, while at the same time I had no idea about actual metropolitan life. Yet again, my view of landscape is determined by strolling and hiking in a town-person's manner: "Strolling creates beauty", as Burckhardt writes. At least, when the stroller has no professional relation to the earth and its products.
Another disturbing aspect of this book is the extreme redundancy. It's a collection of essays that Burckhardt wrote over a time span of more 25 years. He repeats a few examples or statements again and again, often verbatim. Therefore this book is a bit conducive to create boredom when it is being read from front to back in a few days. It's probably better to stretch the reading of these essays over a longer period of time.

[André Bernhardt]

Promenadologie - man lernt ja nie aus. Wer sich über Spaziergangswissenschaften informieren mag, liegt hier richtig. Das Buch setzt sich aus mehreren Aufsätzen von Lucius Burckhardt aus verschiedene Jahren zusammen und wiederholt sich dementsprechend an einigen Stellen. Querlesen würde ausreichen, um die Kernpunkte zu verstehen. Diese sind allerdings lesenswert.

Wer mit "Spaziergangswissenschaft" aus dem Jahre 1995 (s.257) beginnt, hat die Grundlagen schnell erfasst.

[Rita Rombir]

Überfliegt die Landschaft!