Otto Schlüter

Schlüter introduced the term Kulturlandschaft (cultural landscape) to describe landscapes shaped by human settlement and activity, distinguishing them from Naturlandschaft, or natural landscapes formed by physical processes alone. This distinction became foundational for landscape geography as a field of study.

Schlüter argued that geographers should focus on the visible forms of landscapes—their morphology—rather than abstract distributions of phenomena. His approach emphasized understanding how human activity physically transformed natural landscapes over centuries of settlement.

Schlüter was a German geographer who lived from 1872 to 1959 and was closely associated with the University of Halle. There he developed and promoted his framework for landscape geography over decades of teaching and research.

In Schlüter's framework, Naturlandschaft referred to landscapes as they existed before significant human modification, while Kulturlandschaft described the same terrain after generations of settlement, agriculture, and construction had reshaped it. He saw the transition between the two as the central object of geographical study.