Does Adding Local Tree Elements into Dwellings Enhance Individuals’ Homesickness? Scenario-Visualisation for Developing Sustainable Rural Landscapes

Abstract

Rural residential settings are important elements of livable and sustainable rural areas across the world. Enhancing people’s attachment to these landscapes through fostering feelings of homesickness could help in the pursuit of better rural residential settings. We studied homesickness, an emotion found to be associated with higher place attachment and quality of life, related to rural landscapes in southeast China, looking specifically at the presence and configuration of rural dwellings and trees. We used Photoshop to manipulate different configurations of typical rural dwellings and trees, and three series with twelve types of landscape scenes were generated. We looked at the following six emotional factors linked to homesickness: naturalness; regional culture; identity; psychology; experience; and landscape aesthetics. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and semantic differential (SD) methods were used to evaluate the level in which the landscape evoked feelings of homesickness amongst study participants, i.e., a group of university students from different disciplines. Results show that the homesickness emotional response level was higher in most of the simulated landscapes, as compared to the original landscape, and that response levels differed significantly between the three types of visualized landscape configurations. The emotional response level showed differences for manipulated landscape scenes with twelve different trees added to dwellings. Through cluster analysis of the results, we divided trees into three grades of emotional response for each dwelling type. Adding trees thus was found to change the emotional response to the landscape, and different tree configurations with different types of dwellings results in different responses. The study shows that careful design of the rural landscape can help build stronger emotional relations of humans with their local environment, which is a key ingredient for sustainable countryside living.

Analysis and Optimization of Landscape Preference Characteristics of Rural Public Space Based on Eye-Tracking Technology: The Case of Huangshandian Village, China

“…The selected public green space used to be the place where the old stage in the village was located, and it was the space for holding festival ceremonies in the village. After the relocation, out of emotional attachment to the familiar venue [56], local residents still spontaneously choose to gather in this area for assembly and exchange activities [57]. At the same time, experts believe that compared with the fragmented distribution of other public green spaces in the village, the public green space here has a large area and is located in the area where tourists and local residents are concentrated, which can be used as a representative of this kind of activity space.…”

“…The selected public green space used to be the place where the old stage in the village was located, and it was the space for holding festival ceremonies in the village. After the relocation, out of emotional attachment to the familiar venue [56], local residents still spontaneously choose to gather in this area for assembly and exchange activities [57].…”

Conservation and Management of Agricultural Landscapes through Expert-Supported Participatory Processes: The “Declarations of Public Interest” in an Italian Province

“…Aimar et al (2021) also recognized the need for involving local stakeholders to "better support the management of land-use changes, also involving local farmers directly to reconstruct site-specific land-use maps" [35] (p. 460). Furthermore, the interdisciplinary contributions of history [36], geography [37], anthropology [38], sociology [39], semiology [40], psychology [41], art [42], agronomy [43], botany [44], zoology [45], landscape ecology [46], pedology [47], geology [48], climatology [49], economics [50], and planning [51], among others, contribute to the effectiveness of an integrated management for heritage sites. In recent decades, these disciplines have gained the adjectives "sustainable" and/or "resilient" with respect to their operational status in terms of strategies, objectives, and actions related to landscape and territory.…”

Water Conservation Scenic Spots in China: Developing the Tourism Potential of Hydraulic Projects and Water Resources

“…Other barriers to the development of WCSSs are monotonous planning and construction and the lack of cultural preservation. Most WCSS projects are in suburban and rural areas where they are characterised by inconvenient traffic, lower population, and low popularity [46]. Since these areas are eager to attract tourists and promote the economy, they possibly utilise shortcuts that cater to the public.…”