Phenomenology reframes the understanding of landscape as a relational, embodied, and affective experience rather than a detached visual field, asserting that perception arises through the body’s immersion in the world via movement, habit, memory, and sensual contact; drawing from Merleau-Ponty, it situates the body not as a passive observer but as an active participant that co-produces spatial meaning in conjunction with the environment, making landscape a lived horizon rather than a measurable backdrop; this perspective dissolves Cartesian distinctions between self and world, instead positing a continual interweaving of presence, gesture, and temporality in which landscapes emerge as expressive events shaped by ongoing interactions between human and nonhuman elements; affective intensities, poetic rhythms, and atmospheric conditions thus become critical in understanding how place is not merely occupied but deeply inhabited, evoked through walking, sensing, and storytelling; by attending to how space is enacted and performed, this view opens geography to non-representational approaches that prioritise lived experience, proposing a topography of intimacy where landscape is always in the making, felt rather than mapped, encountered rather than fixed.
