Astiks Geographes

This book explores the social construction of relationship between commuting (everyday mobility) and urban landscape, from ecological, social and psychological perspectives. It combines different concepts like: "urban eco-landscape", "soundscape" (urban geography, social anthropology, cultural studies, landscape and soundscape ecology, remote sensing) and "identity of mobility" (sociology, environmental and social psychology). The research took place in different cities and peripheries in Greece, France, Mexico and India. The book offers a methodology for landscape research and not another theory about landscape studies. It is aimed at a wide readership and especially for students and researchers in the social sciences (geography, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies), in architecture and in urban and regional planning. In a world which proclaims the protection of landscape, it required us to ponder the question: what is it we wish to protect: the history, the memory, the culture, the ecosystem, the landscape as common or as commodity? In a world which also declares the idea of increasing commuting as a characteristic of social improvement another question arises: how was this idea constructed, whom does it really benefit? How were the places of exclusion constructed by means of isolation from auto-mobility and through the construction of a controversial model of equating a slow pace of movement with so-called 'underdevelopment'? Finally, the definitions of the landscape (whether they come from a common everyday use of the term or from a model derived from the social or natural sciences, which are perceived as objective representations) demonstrate on a daily basis a reconstruction related to socially and culturally constructed positions and perceptions one already has about several concepts in everyday life. 112 illus, 100+ colour. Text in Greek