Herbert W. Schroeder

Perception of Personal Safety in Urban Recreation Sites.

Photograph of 17 urban recreation sites in Chicago and Atlanta were evaluated by college students (n = 68) in Illinois, Georgia, and Michigan, for either perceived security, scenic quality, or both. For most raters, high visibility and developed park features significantly enhanced perceived security. Scenic quality, on the other hand, was enhanced for the majority of evaluators by a high degree of naturalness and vegetation. For both perceived safety and scenic quality, a small minority of raters held preferences quite different from the majority.

Preference and meaning of arboretum landscapes: Combining quantitative and qualitative data

Abstract A group of members and volunteers at the Morton Arboretum near Chicago rated their preferences for photographs of landscapes in the arboretum, wrote open-ended descriptions of their favorite arboretum settings, and described the thoughts, feelings, and memories they associated with those settings. Most participants rated densely forested, natural landscapes highest in preference, but some also liked either open, natural fields or maintained, formal landscapes. The open-ended descriptions revealed a variety of significant meanings and experiences, some of which appeared to be associated with specific kinds of environments. The combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods yields a more complete understanding of how people experience arboretum landscapes, than would either method used by itself.

Stated choice models for predicting the impact of user fees at public recreation sites.

A crucial question in the implementation of fee programs is how the users of recreation sites will respond to various levels and types of fees. Stated choice models can help managers anticipate the impact of user fees on peoples choices among the alternative recreation sites available to them. Models developed for both day and overnight trips to several areas and types of sites in the Midwest have included user fees as one of the site attributes used to predict choices. Two of these models are presented to illustrate how stated choice models can help assess the impact of fee changes on the likelihood of choosing a site, and the importance of fees relative to other site attributes in peoples choices.

Environment, Behavior, and Design Research on Urban Forests

To many people the term urban forest seems incongruous and contradictory. But a look around any major city quickly reveals that trees and other vegetation are an important feature in many urban settings. For example, an aerial photo survey of Dayton, Ohio, showed that 22% of the city’s land area is covered with trees, and that 35% is covered with other kinds of vegetation (Sanders & Stevens, 1984). According to one overall estimate, 30% of the average city in the United States is covered with trees, a proportion larger than the average tree cover for countryside (Dwyer, Deneke, Grey, & Moeller, 1983).

Application of wildland scenic assessment methods to the urban landscape

Abstract This research explores the feasibility of studying the urban landscape using procedures from wildland scenic quality assessment, and ascertains the influence of some physical characteristics of urban landscapes on esthetic evaluations. Diverse groups of raters, including a mens civic club and a group of minority high school students, evaluated the scenic quality of 240 photographs of a small Georgia city. The slides were scored for physical features using both objective measurements of the area of each image covered by different elements, such as pavement, structures and vegetation, and subjective ratings of physical characteristics such as lawn and shrub maintenance. The results indicated a high degree of agreement among observers in their evaluations of the city scenes. Linear regressions of scenic quality on physical features accounted for about half of the variance, with development intensity detracting from scenic quality, and the amount of vegetation in the scene enhancing it. Landscape maintenance also emerged as an important factor. Suggestions for improvements in future application of the method are discussed.

Predicting scenic values in forested residential landscapes.

Mathematical models that predict perceived scenic beauty have been developed for near and distant forested environments. To date, however, human artifacts such as homes, roads, or vehicles have bee...

Viewer preference for spatial arrangement of park trees: An application of video-imaging technology

Research on perception of parks and recreation settings has examined several important tree attributes that influence peoples visual preferences. This research, however, has usually not considered the spatial arrangement of the trees, partly because of the lack of adequate methods for representing tree arrangements with systematically manipulated geometries. In the study reported here, computer video-imaging techniques were used to construct simulated landscape scenes that varied on specific dimensions of the spatial configuration of trees. The simulations were rated for visual preference by three respondent groups: a university class, a bicycle club, and a womens civic group. Preference ratings were significantly influenced by the number of trees in the scene, by the number of clumps into which trees were grouped, and by the diameter of the clumps. The video-imaging technology implemented in this study offers important methodological advantages for the design of carefully controlled experiments to study human response to variation in landscape treatments.

Giving voice to the experiential value of natural environments

People value natural environments in many different ways. In addition to the various tangible products and benefits that can be produced from a natural environment, people may also find value in their immediate experience of the environment while they are in it. This experiential value is an important aspect of quality of life for many people, but it is often not taken into account in making decisions about managing natural environments. In part, this is because the experiential value of the environment can be difficult for people to express in words. In this article, I explore how first-person methods from experiential and phenomenological psychology may help in giving voice to the ineffable experiential value of natural environments. Drawing on the work of Charles Lewis, Eugene Gendlin, and Kenneth Shapiro, I illustrate how an initially inarticulate, bodily felt sense of the experiential value of a natural environment can be explicated in a way that both expresses and carries forward the implicit sense of value. Such practices might serve as a basis for an environmental decision-making process that incorporates the hard-to-express experiential values of nature.

Sensing Value in Place

The concept of value provides a natural connection between place and conservation decision-making. Different ways of thinking about value lead to varying approaches to making decisions, some of which may be better than others for dealing with place-based values. Individual experiences of value are grounded in an implicit, felt dimension of awareness, and this dimension must be taken into account if place-based values are to function effectively in conservation decisions. Experiential practices for accessing this implicit dimension may help people to articulate and communicate their felt sense of place, providing a basis for a group decision-making process that better reflects and includes the value of place.

Visual quality of human-made clearings in central Michigan conifers.

Assesses and compares visual preferences for human-made forest openings that differ with respect to the size of the opening, the presence or absence of slash, and the length of time since harvest.