Page 31 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Place, Space, and Geography 15

within it the idea “ Under penalty of law, you must cease movement here. ”
It comes to embody concepts and institutions that are not tangible and
physical but that are present in it nevertheless. To understand it, to “ read ”
its meaning, we have to decipher it, translating what is physically there into
the idea it embodies or the cultural concepts it contains. This activity is
much like reading a book, which consists of physical objects – black marks
on a page – which we in the process of reading translate into ideas. Those
ideas in turn are signs that can be interpreted or deciphered because they
usually refer to cultural concepts that lie behind them, making them
important to us and giving them meaning for us. You turn the marks on
this page into ideas because I have informed them with design and inten-
tion, with ideas from my mind, but those ideas come from an intellectual
culture active in schools and universities in which I participate and in
which you are now participating. Having joined that culture, you can
absorb its ideas by reading these signs.
Every time you move through a built human environment, a trans-
formed physical landscape, you are moving through something like a book
or text, a collection of signs whose meaning derives from the intentions of
those who made the environment what it is and the cultural ideals and
ideas that lie behind those intentions. Simply by living in that environment,
one learns and absorbs those meanings. One shapes ones life in accordance
with the imperatives the landscapes contain – as when one goes shopping
at a mall instead of in an urban downtown area. One gives assent thereby
to a particular modernizing economic project imposed on the community
by a particular economic group – the commercial or business class who

decided malls were more profitable than downtowns. And one learns to
behave in accordance with the dictates for behavior they have successfully
inscribed in the landscape. While landscapes are places where one fi nds
meaning, then, they are also economic events and sites where the relations
of power in a society manifest themselves palpably.
Some of the meanings landscapes contain are historical; some are social
and economic, some a matter of ideology or philosophy, and some are politi-
cal; but they are all cultural in the sense that they are artifacts we have made
with our minds. As a result, they are part of our way of life. They are objects
of our creation that serve our needs as members of a particular human com-
munity. But “ we, ” of course, are not singular. We as human communities
are divided by gender, race, income, and belief. Cultured landscapes embody
those divisions. Greek houses were organized around inner realms, hidden

from the public street world, where women were confined. The physical