The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space

into account—preferably in a trans-disciplinary way—whereas resilience theory requires the construction of generalised statements, is signalled but not resolved. In the final chapter, the editors perhaps rightly presume that normative, value-laden research—as is typical of much cultural landscape research—might serve as a fundamental complement to the resilience thinking practice rooted more in the natural sciences. It remains to be seen whether this will work out. The editors also conclude that resilience thinking and the concepts of cultural landscapes show remarkable similarities. This could indeed be useful for a more indepth analysis of cases in spatial planning or landscape management, where resilience thinking could certainly be helpful in the analysis of changing cultural landscapes. Chapters in an edited multi-author book tend to be more descriptive than papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This is an advantage for those readers, e.g. students, who wish to gain an overview of a subject and to get proper theoretical, philosophical and methodological background information. The editors have successfully managed to meet this demand. However, one should not expect to find sophisticated quantitative analyses in this book. Neither should one expect a comprehensive overview of socio-ecological research relevant to cultural landscapes. Although the book title might suggest otherwise, the authors predominantly have a more or less explicit landscape orientation, be it from a geographical, anthropological, historical, sociological or spatial planning background, rather than from a ‘hard core’ natural sciences background. The advantage of a single book collecting various contributions under a subject is unfortunately somewhat impaired by the fact that the bibliographic references are kept together with the chapter in which they occur and an index of authors cited is missing. A good subject index is, however, available. In conclusion, this book is a helpful and inspiring reader covering, in particular, theoretical considerations of the potential role of resilience thinking in research on changing cultural landscapes.