Connections between Aesthetics and Geography

There are some interesting connections between epistemological issues concerning geography and the main interests of environmental aesthetics. Environmental aesthetics has already dealt with the issue whether certain kinds of scientific knowledge are relevant or not to aesthetic appreciation. What we hold here is that aesthetic appreciation of the environment plays a relevant role to the scientific knowledge of it. The argument unfolds in three steps. First, I will establish a phenomenological notion of geographical experience. This includes an overview of the debate in human geography between two epistemologies: a quantitative, nomothetic and an-aesthetic one and a more qualitative, idiographic and phenomenological one. Second, I will discuss some of the aesthetic metaphors that geographers and social scientists, who have adopted the second epistemology, have been using to build the geographical concept of place. Third, I will show that aesthetic appreciation serves as the basis for the geographical notion of landscape.