a Geographer's Place

In grad school, I was introduced to something called the “vernacular landscape”. The great J.B. Jackson kind of coined the term in regards to landscape back in the mid-late 20th Century, and his book  1984  suggested the term meant a variety of things related to landscape. For example, a vernacular landscape might be irrational and/or disordered, or have a lack of a political structure/organization/space, or be a place that retains common customs, or focus on the common folk, or be ephemeral and mobile. For example, something like this: Yes, that’s Hello Kitty in a hijab ! I haven’t seen this in other Arab countries I’ve visited, only in Jordan. And I’ve searched. Hard. Because I adore Hello Kitty. Well, non-pink Hello Kitty. In later times, scholars sometimes took “vernacular landscape” to mean the “ordinary” or “every day” landscape that was set apart from the norm – the hustle and bustle of big cities of the time – such as suburbs, trailer parks, or res...