English

Noun

flatscape ‎(plural flatscapes)

1. Any flat surface or area; a platform.
   • 1988, A. Papadakēs, Deconstruction in architecture:

     This non-place could be the flatscape of a parking lot, or a suburban sprawl littered with supermarkets, parkways, little houses and garden plots.

   • 2010, Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!:

     Other rooms filled with other men roaming a flatscape only recently wired with electricity and now braising in radio waves.

2. A flat landscape.
   • 1999, Maude Schuyler Clay, Delta land:

     Tractor trailers pass through the flatscape, the few people whom we do see are wearing modern clothing, a billboard advertises Coca-Cola, and some of the dogs are wearing collars, so they must live somewhere outside the barren world [...]

   • 2003, Perri O'Shaughnessy, Unfit To Practice:

     A flatscape of houses with the San Francisco Bay beyond unfolded outside Ford's office window.

   • 2004, Dayne Sherman, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise:

     The interstate was at least a couple of football fields wide. I turned down Old Sawmill Road, a country road that wasn't a thoroughfare. It was a two-lane blacktop with no shoulder, winding its way through the piney woods flatscape.

3. A landscape lacking distinguishable or interesting features; a plain or monotonous landscape.
   • 1992, Lothar Fietz, Paul Hoffmann, Hans-Werner Ludwig, Regionalität:

     In industrial civilization, environmental variety has been replaced by what has been called "'a flatscape", lacking intentional depth and providing possibilities only for commonplace and mediocre experiences.

   • 1997, Michael Parker Pearson, Colin Richards, Architecture and order: approaches to social space:

     Several phenomenologists have remarked on the problems of modern living, where architectural trends are towards a placeless geography, a meaningless pattern of similar buildings, a 'flatscape'.

   • 2007, Arnold Berleant, Allen Carlson, The aesthetics of human environments:

     On the whole, in comparison with traditional agricultural landscapes, the appearance seems that of a “blandscape” rather than a landscape, a “flatscape” of dreary and monotonous sameness.

Related terms

• blandscape