1 Cultural Landscapes: Core Concepts

What makes a landscape cultural

A cultural landscape is shaped through ongoing interaction between people and the natural environment. It includes buildings and other visible features, but also land-use patterns, memories, beliefs, and practices associated with a place.

Cultural landscapes range from designed parks and farms to neighborhoods, sacred sites, and places valued for cultural associations—even when little has been physically built there. They change as communities, economies, and environments change.

Language and place

Language helps make landscapes legible and meaningful. Place names can preserve histories and local knowledge, while signs, inscriptions, and the languages heard in public spaces show which communities are present and which languages receive public recognition.

Place also shapes language. Migration brings languages together, while schooling, government policy, economic change, and displacement can strengthen or marginalize them. A multilingual street may reflect successive waves of settlement as well as current efforts to maintain community identity.

A language does not belong exclusively to one territory or define everyone who lives there.

Religion and sacred places

Religious beliefs and practices shape landscapes through temples, churches, mosques, shrines, cemeteries, pilgrimage routes, gardens, and rules about land use. A place may be considered sacred because of its physical features, or gain spiritual importance through stories, ceremonies, or long-standing community relationships.

The environment also shapes religious practice. Terrain, water, climate, and local resources influence where people gather and how rituals and sacred spaces develop. Landscapes can have significant spiritual or cultural associations even when their physical traces are limited.

Identity and belonging

Shared histories, livelihoods, languages, and religious practices can make a place a focus of belonging. Cultural traditions may leave visible marks on land use, buildings, gardens, and materials. At Manzanar, Japanese American gardens reflected cultural traditions adapted to the harsh conditions of a California desert incarceration camp.

Place and identity shape each other: people give locations meaning, while the landscapes and histories they inherit help shape their understanding of community and belonging. These meanings may be shared, disputed, or changed over time. Different groups can attach different histories and claims to the same place, and decisions about naming, development, access, or preservation can influence whose stories remain visible.

How to interpret a landscape

Interpreting a place means considering both tangible evidence—such as buildings, paths, signs, vegetation, and land divisions—and intangible meanings, including language, memory, beliefs, and customs.

To examine a landscape, ask who created or uses its features, how the physical environment influenced them, and how migration, policy, or environmental change has altered them. This approach treats a landscape not as a fixed backdrop, but as a record of relationships between people, culture, and environment.

Interconnected and changing relationships

Cultural landscapes embody changing relationships between people and place. Language names and interprets places; religion gives some places sacred meaning and shapes how they are used; and identity grows through attachment, memory, and shared or contested histories. Physical environments and social change, in turn, influence language, religious practice, and belonging.

• sense of place