Landscape Research is the journal of the Landscape Research Group (LRG). The first issue published under its current name in Winter 1976 contains a modest but illuminating editorial by the then editor, Ian C. Laurie. Referring to the change of name from Landscape Research News to Landscape Research, he notes:[…] the change reflects more clearly the main aim of the publication: to print short papers which can draw the reader's attention to research studies in a number of different subject areas, but which all have a common interest in the changing processes and activities which control the landscape. It is our intention to give equal attention to studies concerned with design and management, and to landscape planning and landscape science. This is based on the recognition that the study of the landscape is not contained within any one discipline or profession or even within any two or three of them. Thus, 'landscape' was understood as an integrative concept from the very beginning of the journal, and recognised as the subject matter of many disciplines and professions. The journal is conceived as multidisciplinary in that a common topic is addressed drawing on knowledge from disciplinary-specific bases (Choi & Pak, 2006, p. 359). This integrative mission remains applicable to Landscape Research today. However, emphasis has shifted from multi-to interdisciplinarity, understood in this context as an approach that 'analyzes, synthesises and harmonises links between disciplines in a coordinated ABSTRACT Papers of four decades published in Landscape Research are reviewed in order to chronicle the journal's development and to assess the academic performance of the journal relative to its own aims. Landscape Research intends to reach a wide audience, to have a broad thematic coverage and to publish different types of papers with various methodological orientations. Cutting across these first aims are the interdisciplinary ambition of the journal, and its overall focus on landscape. These aims are evaluated based upon categorisation of article content, authorship and methodology, using data derived through interpretative inquiry and quantitative analyses. The results tell the story of how Landscape Research has developed from a newsletter of the Landscape Research Group, mainly aimed at practitioners, into an interdisciplinary, international journal with academic researchers as its primary community of interest. The final section discusses the current profile of the journal and identifies issues for its future direction and development.

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This paper develops a historical and systematic typology of perceptions of wilderness that exist in contemporary western European cultures. After describing notions of wilderness associated with worldviews that emerged during the Enlightenment period (theological, early Enlightenment, liberalism, democratism) and as a critical response to it (Rousseauism, early Romanticism, English and German conservatism), we outline four recent transformations of these traditional notions of wilderness: wilderness as an ecological object, as a place of nature's self-reassertion, as a place of thrill and as a sphere of amorality and meaninglessness. In our conclusion, we suggest what practical relevance arises from such a nuanced understanding of the inherently ambiguous concept of wilderness.

In recent decades the landscape architectural discourse has tended to eschew ideas of aesthetics while focusing instead on notions of functional and sustainable design. We offer the view that Aesthetic Creation Theory, whose principal exponent is the philosopher Nick Zangwill, has the potential to redress this imbalance by interpreting landscape architecture as 'art'. Zangwill's account of 'art' differs, however, from many other definitions found in philosophical aesthetics: it holds that works of art have aesthetic functions that are essential to them, but also allows that they have other, non-aesthetic functions, for example practical or ecological ones. It thus removes the strict distinction between fine art and the useful arts. After introducing Zangwill's theory, we discuss some rival theories of art and then explore the virtues of Aesthetic Creation Theory for the theory, practice, and pedagogy of landscape architecture.

In this text we take a closer look at the development of the wilderness metaphor of the Zwischenstadt, that is, fragmented urban landscapes in Germany. We trace the metaphor's meanings back to its origins in the conservative cultural criticism of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl of the mid-nineteenth century and analyse the different meanings of 'wilderness' in today's urban and landscape planners' positions. Our aim is to demonstrate that the meanings of the concept of wilderness, as well as those of city and cultural landscape, differ depending on the context in which they appear. We point out that different values can be attached to each individual meaning. These evaluations depend on cultural and political patterns and on one's own world view. We apply the insights thus gained to identify three different types of design strategy for the Zwischenstadt used by urban and landscape designers.