Bumpy ride?SIR: 'Yes', Charles Jencks is right (AR January). New angles on the wheel make for a bumpy ridc. But Malcolm Andrews' comment a few pages on, that landscape is commodified twice--once as real estate and again as aesthetic amenity, made me go back for another read. It's safe to say that Medicis, Sun Kings and owners of English country houses weren't too concerned whether the appropriation of territory--metaphorical or otherwise--was morally or politically correct politically correct Politically sensitive adjective Referring to language reflecting awareness and sensitivity to another person's physical, mental, cultural, or other disadvantages or deviations from a norm; a person is not mentally retarded, but . Their artfulness at indicating how much of it they possessed has landed us the conflation (database) conflation - Combining or blending of two or more versions of a text; confusion or mixing up. Conflation algorithms are used in databases. of beauty and asset value we suffer now. Whether land is merely enclosed as status amenity (Nature 1), exploited as commercial amenity (Nature 2), commodified as visual aesthetic amenity (Nature 3) or defaced de·face tr.v. de·faced, de·fac·ing, de·fac·es 1. To mar or spoil the appearance or surface of; disfigure. 2. To impair the usefulness, value, or influence of. 3. (!) as intellectual aesthetic amenity (Nature 4), it's all real estate owned Real Estate Owned Property owned by a lender - usually a bank - after an unsuccessful sale at a foreclosure auction. This is common because most of the properties up for sale at these auctions are worth less than the total amount owed to the bank: the minimum bid in most by someone to do what they jolly well like with it. I've no issue with zero nature as theory but if it's going to require several acres for entry-level communing plus some for mandatory cross-coding, I'm deeply skeptical. Why now? Newspapers report a surge in borrowings for buy-to-let properties and anyone with cash to invest is now farming tenants in hastily-mortgaged spaces. Landless land·less adj. Owning or having no land. land  less·ness n.Adj. 1. landlords! Good gracious! So along comes a theory using cosmic notions to reassert the pre-eminence of lording it over good old-fashioned land. Heroic lawn mowers move across the landscape as symbolic field workers. It's too late. These isles have embraced the New Feudalism feudalism (fy  `dəlĭzəm), form of political and social organization typical of Western Europe from the dissolution of Charlemagne's empire to the rise of the absolute monarchies. and there's no going back. Yours etc GRAHAM MCKAY London, UK |
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