Growing dimensions of modern agricultural production distinguish the peri-urban landscape from traditional farmland. New urban elements interfere with the traditional image of a rural landscape. For this reason, the peri-urban landscape does not relate to the concept of cultivated landscape anymore: it is new scenery containing a mixture of both natural and artificial characteristics.
However this structural landscape has the potential for a different aesthetic perception. Wildness could be part of the new aesthetic concept because it represents a contemporary idea of spontaneous nature. Wildness as a symbol for autonomous nature could therefore produce aesthetic and symbolic contrasts to the functional urban elements in the landscape. This aesthetic concept would transform peri-urban landscapes into contemporary hybrids of culture and new wilderness.
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Fig. 3. Artificial wilderness in an advertising brochure of a holiday park |
Not only industrial nature, but also contemporary ideas of landscape work with images of wildness to create artificial nature. Historical ideals of landscape, like Arcadia as tamed wilderness, also worked with wildness as an aesthetic myth.
These examples show that there are aesthetic concepts necessary for integrating wildness into the landscape.
