3.2 Cultural Landscapes

The cultural landscape is the physical environment as people have changed it. The geographer Carl Sauer made the idea central to American geography in the 1920s. In his view, culture is the force that acts, the natural area is what it acts on, and the cultural landscape is the result. Reading it means looking at a scene and asking what it tells you about the people who made it.

• Physical features people have adapted, like terraced hillsides or drained wetlands.
• Agricultural and industrial practices: field patterns, barns, factories, mines and warehouses.
• Religious features: churches, mosques, temples, gurdwaras, synagogues, shrines and cemeteries.
• Linguistic features: the language on signs, menus and place names.
• Architecture and land-use patterns, such as street grids, plazas, suburbs and farmland.

Sequent occupance is the idea that a place's landscape is built up in layers by the groups that lived there over time. The geographer Derwent Whittlesey used the term in 1929. Each group leaves marks that later groups reuse, change or build over.

Istanbul's Hagia Sophia is the classic example. It was completed in 537 as a Christian cathedral under the Byzantine Empire, converted to a mosque after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, made a museum by the Turkish Republic in 1934, and turned back into a mosque in 2020. Mexico City is another: the Spanish built their cathedral and main square over the center of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, and the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor now sit beside the cathedral.

Traditional architecture uses local materials and styles passed down over generations, often suited to the climate. Examples include adobe homes in the U.S. Southwest, stone cottages in Ireland and wooden stilt houses in Southeast Asia. These buildings help make places look distinct from each other.

Postmodern architecture, which spread from the 1970s on, mixes styles from different periods, uses bold colors and playful shapes, and rejects the plain glass-and-steel boxes of modernism. The Portland Building in Oregon, designed by Michael Graves and finished in 1982, is a well-known example. Global architecture firms and building styles can make skylines in different countries look similar.

• Ethnic neighborhoods: immigrant groups often cluster, bringing places of worship, shops and signs in their languages, like Koreatown in Los Angeles.
• Women's roles in the workforce: as more women work outside the home, demand grows for child care centers, and commuting patterns change. Some cities, including Tokyo, Mexico City and Cairo, have women-only subway cars to address harassment, which shows how attitudes about gender shape public space.
• Indigenous communities and lands: reservations, reserves and Indigenous-managed territories have their own land uses, governments and sacred sites. The Navajo Nation, the largest reservation in the United States, covers about 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.