New topological geo-imaginaries have to some extent supplanted landscape as a medium for theorising space and nature-culture realtions. Such accounts of space aim to challenge the static conceptions of space, measurement, distance, surface, and perspective developed by traditional landscape studies.
Those writing in a vitalist Deluezian-Bersonian vein, for example, express space as a matter of force, energy and process, and thus present geographies as being animated through their continual becoming (e.g. Thrift 2000; Dewsbury 2002; Marston et al 2005). While such accounts have done much to re-stress the dynamic materiality of space, its ‘entanglements’, these topological accounts of space (particularly those drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT)) are at risk reiterating the world as a flat grid-like surface; as Euclidean geometries have done for centuries.
Some geographers, like Mitch Rose and John Wylie, therefore want to reinstate notions of ‘landscape’ or the ‘topographical’ back into topological and vitalist geographies…