As a typical industrial landscape flew past me on the train last week I started thinking about beauty and instinct. What makes us consider some typical things to be beautiful or charming/cute, like 'chocolate-box' thatched cottages and idyllic rambling country gardens? Compared to highly industrial landscape of factories, cranes and barren wasteland?
Is it an inbuilt thing or something we learn? And sure, before someone says 'I like urban landscapes', I don't mean this as a hard and fast rule but as a general feeling. Personally I think you can see beauty in virtually anything...
If it is a learnt thing then perhaps it's because the conventionally 'pretty' things represent(ed) ideals, like wealth, leisure and brightness - a positive arcadia; compared to hard work, labour, lack of power & control and drudgery.