Furniture Design Ideas

In the group discussions with selected groups, ideas and perceptions of ur­ban nature and links with questions of nature conservation in the city and the use of urban nature were considered (for details see Rink 2003; for a more general discussion of the idea of nature among social groups see Rink 2002; Brand et al. […]

Dieter Rink in cooperation with Rico Emmrich Department of Economy, Sociology and Law, UFZ Centre for Environ­mental Research Leipzig-Halle Beautifully wild? A discussion of a wilderness in the city “Wilderness” has become a catchword in the current debate on urban de­velopment. Recently the subject has been discovered by urban planners in connection with urban restructuring […]

The results from this qualitative phase have many parallels with Kellert’s (1980) typology of human-nature relationships. We would like to mention just a few of these parallels here: The conservative wilderness opponents evaluate nature from a utilitarian point of view. They assess the absence of economic exploitation negatively and are opposed to wilderness spread. This […]

The typology described above indicates which criteria and characteristics are involved in evaluations of wilderness and its spread, and what the typi­cal attitudes are and what the reasoning used to justify them is. In the rep­resentative survey it became clear that general definitions of wilderness are strongly oriented towards scientific criteria: Most people in the […]

The categories diversity and usefulness (in the sense of usefulness for rec­reation purposes) played a main role in distinguishing the style of reason­ing of this type from the others. Their desire to intervene in nature is moti­vated by their belief that nature needs to be looked after. Planned human interventions care for nature to ensure […]

Since the values and the weighting of the key categories described differ­entiate well among three different forms of reasoning, we have developed a typology of human-wilderness relationships (Fig. 2). The category beauty was crucial for all the interviewees in deciding whether to favour or reject the spread of wilderness. How the three groups concretely described […]

Elderly people and those professionally connected with nature tended to consider the landscape of the period when cultivation was intensive as the norm. This preference for the past is not only motivated by considerations of usefulness, but more importantly by reverence and respect for the hu­man effort made by previous generations. It is this aspect […]

Some of the respondents, moreover, particularly favoured those landscapes they felt contrasted with their local, everyday landscape. No. 6: “…it’s as if you would walk from silence into Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­phony, isn’t it? The contrast is so strong, which is what I like.” Wilderness areas do provide, without doubt, a contrast with cultivated landscapes, but […]

The category beauty was an important factor for interviewees in deciding whether to view wilderness spread favourably or not. When the interview­ees considered diversity and/or contrast in a landscape to be a prerequisite for judging it beautiful, the category beauty tended to correlate closely with the categories diversity and contrast. Diversity For some of the […]

The inductive-explorative phase led to the formulation of numerous hy­potheses and questions that could then be explored in the representative questionnaire survey in Switzerland. The questionnaire In the multiple-choice questionnaire respondents were asked, among other things, how often they spent time outdoors in “nature”, what they did out­doors, and what their attitudes toward nature and […]