The Aesthetic Value of Socio-Cultural Identities and the Cultural Dimension of the Landscape

Abstract

This paper summarizes an individual theoretical study on how the landscape could be shaped by economic globalization and political restructuring. Providing a socio-cultural approach to the landscape notion I am trying to discover through the international literature the subjective dimension on landscape definition, in order to understand its ‘cultural dimension’. In this paper, the notion of ‘virtual landscape’ is introduced in order to investigate the incoherence that exists in the nowadays megacities regarding their social reality and their iconic existence through architecture and urban planning. In addition, it is also explored in theory how an ideological turn is re-inforced through political orientation focusing on ‘virtual landscape’ images in order to obtain a favorable publicity in a contemporary context of ‘globalised cities’ consisting in the elimination of the ‘cultural landscape’. Therefore, this contribution has as main objective to define, negotiate and start the debate on radical socio-cultural approaches of landscape notion in the nowadays ‘megacities’, inside a strict capitalistic context.

Keywords

• Cultural landscape
• Globalisation
• Re-scaling
• Urban planning
• Virtual landscape