Category: The Dynamic Landscape

Gender

Lyons’ study (1983) did not find gender to be significant. However, gender has been found to be very significant in studies of perception of safety in urban landscapes, with women being far more fearful than men (Valentine 1989; Madge 1997; Jorgensen et al. 2002). Given the connection between landscape preference and perception of safety referred […]

Familiarity

Research has also confirmed that residence or familiarity can have a significant affect on landscape preference. ‘Residence’ is really just another way of evaluating familiarity because living in a particular environment means that we become familiar with it. Broadly speaking, the findings suggest that familiarity increases preference (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Herzog et al. 2000). […]

The impact of personal factors

Education, income and occupation Although in the early 1970s research reported that environmental agendas were primarily supported by the middle or upper-middle class, this notion was rebutted by Buttel and Flinn (1978) who found that age and place of residence were better predictors of awareness of environmental problems and support for environmental programmes than education, […]

Cultural and personal responses to landscape

The existence of other factors differentiating landscape preference has been acknowledged for some time: factors relating to the individual as opposed to the landscape. Lyons (1983), for example, found that age, gender, place of residence and familiarity affected landscape preference. Further, she concluded that if variables such as age, place of residence and familiarity influence […]

Innate responses to landscape

The innate theories propose that we derive our aesthetic responses to landscape from an earlier evolutionary phase of Homo sapiens. It is argued that evolution favoured individuals who had the ability to evaluate their environment successfully in terms of its capacity to fulfil their need for shelter, safety and nourishment. Because human civilisations have been […]

Plantings

Anna Jorgensen What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. (Manley Hopkins, 1948) Introduction At the beginning of the twenty-first century many urban-dwellers’ experience of naturalistic or wildlooking vegetation in towns […]