Today, on J. B. Jackson’s birthday, I find myself reflecting on how much his work has influenced the way I understand landscape.
J. B. Jackson passed away in 1996 and I have nenver met him, however, he has been one of the important intellectual influences on the way I understand landscape. What attracted me to Jackson’s work was not simply his contribution to cultural landscape studies, but the way he looked at the world. His work taught me to see landscape as something lived, experienced and continuously produced through the interaction of people, culture and nature.
Jackson’s statement that “We are not spectators; all human landscape is not a work of art” has particular resonance with me. It challenges the idea that landscape is primarily something to be designed, photographed or admired. For Jackson, landscape was fundamentally a place where people live, work and spend their everyday lives. This has deeply influenced my own understanding of landscape architecture and planning. I have increasingly seen landscapes not as finished objects, but as living environments shaped by ecological processes, human practices, memories, economies, infrastructures and cultures.
I encountered Jackson’s work during my intellectual development at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley was particularly significant because Jackson himself had taught landscape history there, within the College of Environmental Design and the Department of Geography. Reading his work while undertaking my doctoral studies gave me an important intellectual connection to the Berkeley tradition of cultural landscape studies and to the wider legacy of Carl Sauer.
Sauer’s understanding of the cultural landscape as something produced through the interaction between culture and the natural environment provided an important foundation for my thinking. J. B. Jackson helped me take this idea further into the everyday landscape. Whether walking through Lyon, Kalmar, San José, Amman, Abha, Pretoria, Christchurch, Marsa Alam, or elsewhere, moving through cities and towns has taught me to see the interaction between natural and built landscapes through a different lens. It has also encouraged me to observe and reflect more closely on the ways people inhabit, move through, adapt to, and shape their landscapes.
Jackson’s work encouraged me to look beyond landscapes already identified as beautiful, historic, or worthy of preservation. Instead, I became increasingly interested in ordinary places, ordinary communities, and ordinary forms of occupation and movement, and in the everyday relationships between people, culture, and the landscape around them.
This way of thinking has stayed with me. It has influenced the way I look at landscapes in very different contexts, from the Nile and the urban landscapes of Cairo to coastal environments, neighbourhoods, tourism landscapes and rapidly changing cities. I became increasingly interested in the question of how natural landscapes become cultural landscapes, and how cultural practices in turn transform the natural environment.
The Nile, for example, cannot be understood simply as a river or simply as an urban landscape. It is simultaneously an ecological system, a social space, a cultural landscape, a transportation corridor, a source of livelihoods and a powerful part of collective memory. The same applies to many of the places I have subsequently worked on. Their meaning lies precisely in the interaction between environmental systems and human life.
Jackson also influenced me because of his journey rather than simply his achievements. His career was not a straightforward progression along a conventional academic path. He moved between architecture, writing, history, geography, landscape and public intellectual life. He experimented with different forms of writing and teaching, and not everything he attempted necessarily succeeded. For me, this is an important part of his legacy.
I learned from his failures and uncertainties as much as from his successful work.
His journey demonstrated to me that an intellectual career does not necessarily have to follow a predetermined disciplinary route. It can develop through curiosity, experimentation, observation and sometimes through mistakes. This has been important in my own journey, which has also crossed disciplinary boundaries between landscape architecture, planning, geography, urbanism, environmental planning and tourism.
Jackson gave me confidence in the idea that not fitting neatly into one discipline can be an intellectual strength. His career showed that landscape can become a meeting point through which different disciplines can speak to one another.
During my time at Berkeley, particularly through my work with Paul Groth, I therefore did not simply read Jackson as a historian of landscape. I learned from him as someone searching for an intellectual position of my own. His work encouraged me to observe before prescribing, to take ordinary landscapes seriously, to question conventional categories, and to understand places through the relationships between their physical, cultural, and human dimensions.
Perhaps most importantly, Jackson helped me understand that landscape is not something we stand outside and look at. We are part of the landscape we study. Our movements, decisions, memories, institutions and everyday practices continually contribute to its transformation.
That insight has stayed with me throughout my academic and professional journey. It is behind my interest in landscapes where ecological and cultural processes meet, and it continues to shape the way I approach planning and landscape research today.
In that sense, Jackson’s influence on me is both intellectual and personal. I learned from his writings, but I also learned from his journey: from his curiosity, his willingness to cross boundaries, his experiments, and even his failures. His life reminded me that developing an intellectual voice is itself a process of exploration—and that sometimes the most productive landscapes, intellectually as well as physically, are those that emerge between disciplines.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JACKSON.
