Constructed Landscapes in Zoos and Heritage

For both zoos and heritage sites, landscape is playing an increasingly important role in ‘visitor experience’. The way in which the ‘appropriate’ landscape to any species (or site type) is constructed is itself culturally variable. For this reason, these landscapes give us vistas over the cultural assumptions and aspirations of the societies that create them. Just as any African savannah in a zoo is not Africa as it is but Africa as we think it should be, so any heritage landscape is not a reconstruction of a prehistoric landscape but a construction of what we think it should be. Crucial for understanding landscape construction is therefore an understanding of how they are perceived—and meant to be perceived—by people in the present.