Assessment of Aesthetic Preferences in Relation to Vegetation-Created Enclosure in Chinese Urban Parks: A Case Study of Shenzhen Litchi Park

Abstract

Building on the mystery/complexity/legibility/coherence model of Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) and up-to-date landscape visualization techniques, this paper presents a case study analyzing people’s aesthetic preferences for scenes with varying levels of enclosure created through vegetation. Participants were asked to view 48 computer-generated urban park scenes with different levels of enclosure and to rate them for three aesthetic preference factors: coherence, complexity, and legibility. The results are as follows: (1) If the visual and/or physical setting is enclosed, participants will give lower ratings for legibility than in open scenes. (2) Physically open scenes are rated as more coherent than physically enclosed scenes. (3) Participants rate complexity for physically enclosed scenes lower than for physically open scenes. It is concluded that enclosure as a predictor variable for landscape preference has a practical significance for future urban landscape research and designs.

Determination of Landscape Aesthetic Value in Developing Questionnaire Survey for Campus Planting Composition

“…Open spaces like Fig. 6 or enclosed spaces create different effects on visual and encourage diverse aesthetic experiences (Liu and Schroth, 2019). This planting scene is the highest rating because it is highly visible, wellstructured and provides a pleasant view (Liu and Schroth, 2019).…”

“…Principles and objectives that landscape designers and planners have been applying for the last several hundred years support the implication that coherence and complexity are essential to creating landscapes that people like (Kuper, 2017). Later, Liu and Schroth, (2019) conducted a survey where coherence, complexity and legibility are rated high for open landscape scene.…”

“…In planting design practice, vegetation is an element that able to manipulate the varying level of landscape aesthetic quality in green spaces (Liu and Schroth, 2019;Soemardiono, Rachmawati, Ardianta and Nugroho, 2019). Planting is valuable to reduce carbon dioxide (Merry, Bettinger, Siry and Bowker, 2015).…”

Impact of Vegetation on Perceived Safety and Preference in City Parks

“…Some have shown that dense woodland with shrubbery understory receives low acceptance from the public [11,42,44], while open spaces are positively correlated with preferences [45]. In studies evaluating the impact of enclosure space on three aesthetic preference factors (i.e., coherence, complexity, and legibility) [46], the participants rated legibility and complexity for physically enclosed scenes lower than for physically open scenes.…”

“…Preference studies usually test for direct effects that include the impact of environmental characteristics on preference (e.g., [38,57,74]) or on the factors that build such a preference. For example, in the Liu and Schroth [46] study testing the impact of physical and visual accessibility (as components of the situations defining permeability of enclosure) on preferences, this effect was measured on three variables that belong to the basic determinants of preferences [35]: coherence, complexity, and legibility.…”