Overview of Landscape Visual Assessment
Readings:
Porteous, J. Douglas, 1996.
Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics, and Planning.
New York: Routledge. Introduction, pp3-41. Chapter
3, Experimentalists. pp113-147.
An observation:
Given two or three landscape settings to visit and compare, a fair degree
of consensus might be expected -- as to which is most and which least attractive.
scene A
scene B
An assumption:
That somehow the attractiveness of the scenes is determined by the actual
content of the two settings, i.e., the content of Scene B has characteristics
that appeal to most of us -- Scene A is not so fortunate.
A speculation:
That if planners and designers knew what pieces could provoke what types
of response (or what structural relationships provoke what responses),
then they would have better luck in predicting the outcome of their design
work, and would be better prepared for designing settings to deliberately
achieve various scenic effects.
Speculation is what university professors do outside the classroom.
In the visual arts in general, and certainly in Landscape Architecture,
there has been a historic interest in what makes things beautiful, and
what makes them ugly. This kind of thing has been discussed (historically),
in the agora -- by toga-wearing luminaries squatting in the dust scratching
diagrams with bits of twig. More recently the beer-hall has become the
gathering place of choice. However, the cynic might suggest that the activity
is more a pleasurable pastime than a direct contribution to planning and
design.
The Need for Systematic Evaluations of
Landscape Aesthetic Quality
A "crisis":
It takes a crisis to galvanize the philosophers into action. In 1969,
the US National Environmental Policy Act provided the necessary atmosphere
for such a crisis in visual quality evaluation in the United States:
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) contained
a directive to land managers to "encourage productive and enjoyable harmony
between man and his environment" and to "assure for all Americans safe,
healthful, productive, and aesthetically and culturally pleasing
surroundings" through the integration of natural and social sciences and
the design arts. Furthermore, the Act required that agencies would develop
techniques of assessment of the visual resource, hitherto deemed an intangible,
to allow direct comparison with other technical and economic considerations.
Subsequently, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976
(FLPMA) and the National Forest Management Act of 1978 (NFMA) have
set further detailed requirements for the engagement of multi-disciplinary
teams in the planning processes of the US Bureau of Land Management, part
of the Department of the Interior, and the US Forest Service, in the Department
of Agriculture, respectively. Landscape architects formed an integral part
of this planning machinery, with prime responsibility for the aesthetic
resource.
A strategy:
The US Federal mandate immediately set the stage for serious consideration
of the potential for predicting the outcome of management activity in terms
of landscape quality. Prior planning activities had been conducted on an
ad hoc basis, the quality of the plans developed and the effectiveness
of their application dependent on the individual landscape architect's
planning and political bargaining skills. The law required more robust
and defensible approaches -- systems and techniques that could be applied
on an agency-wide basis to ensure consistent quality planning, and that
yielded measures directly meaningful in making comparisons with ecological
or timber harvesting values.
Two methods of attack:
-
Internally driven: Let's look at what we know (or think we do) as experienced,
sensitive professionals and build on that an objective evaluation system.
-
Externally driven: Let's look at what appeals to people (or what they think
might appeal to them) and build an objective evaluation system on that
knowledge.
A digression:
It will help to look a bit closer at these two methods of attack and the
assumptions implied therein:
Internally driven:
There are a number of different groups of individuals involved in forest
management, some of whom had (and continue to have) pretty strong ideas
about what makes for "aesthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings"
for the American People.
Foresters, ecologists and landscape architects each have their own ideas.
These ideas are founded in the traditions and folklore of the various professions,
are steeped in historical dogma, and constitute the "culture" of the professions.
Foresters tend to adhere to the philosophy of wise stewardship, strongly
based in Judaeo-Christian ethics; Ecologists follow the reasoning and dictates
of eminent thinkers such as Charles Darwin, embracing stability, diversity
and evolution as guiding principles; Landscape architects might follow
the same aesthetic principles used by Pericles in designing the Acropolis
in Athens.
A system for evaluating aesthetic quality would thus involve simply
codifying the basic principles of harmony and contrast, through analysis
of the visual elements -- form, line, color, and texture.
Backed by such long traditions handed from generation to generation,
it is easy to perpetuate and fall victim to the feeling "we know what's
best for the public". It may be so; surely we experts have learned something
in all those years about the things we do. Surely our values represent
a distillation of evolving public values tempered by a greater knowledge
of these aspects of our surroundings -- nevertheless, it is an assumption.
Externally driven:
The socio-political atmosphere of the late 1960's and 70's that prevailed
during the landscape assessment crisis determined that the American People
would be asked for their opinion, and would indeed demand to have it heard.
Further, the coincidental blossoming of the social sciences and the emphasis
on the sciences in general, ensured that disciplines outside the agencies
would become interested in addressing this crisis (the cynic might suggest
that the promise of abundant research money was in some way responsible).
The key issues, however, were those of approach. First, it was inevitable
that a politically aware public might have to be involved in some way.
Second, it was inevitable that "the scientific method" would be the approach
of choice.
An aesthetic evaluation system would in this scenario involve collecting
and organizing numerous individual opinions about beauty, looking for underlying
themes and topics on which there was consensus, and then simply dictating
that more of the good qualities thus identified would be built into the
landscape.
At least two assumptions follow on from these issues. First, we
assume that the public knows what it wants and will express its opinions
clearly, unequivocally, and consistently over time and across different
landscapes. Secondly, we assume that the problem of designing a good whole
environment is solvable by using the results of a reductionistic "scientific
method" which looks at the parts of the world one by one.
The Emergent Evaluation Systems:
The story of landscape assessment is most easily followed through the example
of the public agencies in the United States and the management of US public
lands. For some reason the expression "aesthetically....pleasing" was written
into law and the only discipline explicitly entrusted with the aesthetic
quality of the landscape was landscape architecture. The United States
Forest Service was already, in 1969, the largest single employer of landscape
architects in the world and there were plenty more academic professionals
only too ready to leave their bleak northern university campuses for field
work in the woods.
Some of the happy-hour philosophers had already committed their ideas
to print and there was something of a newborn group of writers and researchers
proposing various "theories" of landscape aesthetics. These theories attempted
to describe why "B" is generally regarded more attractive than "A" and
took a number of different forms. I have arranged these into three groups
on the basis of the method of attack (as described earlier).
Compositional -- Formal Aesthetic
Faced with an urgent need for a system by which to assess the landscape,
the agencies turned to the existing literature of visual assessment and,
notably, the work of R. Burton Litton (Litton, 1968) with the US Forest
Service Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experiment Station. Litton's
work, and the resulting assessment systems, attempted to generate objective
measures of aesthetic qualities by looking at what the professions already
knew about landscape aesthetics.
The traditional aesthetic judgement approach of landscape designers
was analyzed in the search for identifiable consistent qualities that could
be described and measured.
Concepts:
-
Landscape character is primarily determined by the four basic visual elements
of form, line, color and texture. Although all are present in every landscape,
they exert varying degrees of influence.
-
The stronger the influence exerted by these elements, the more evidence
there will be of the aesthetic principles harmony and contrast, and hence
the more interesting the landscape.
Closely allied to this "formal aesthetic" model is a "biological-ecological"
model in which assessments are made of the varieties of species available
and of the interrelationships of these with their environment and each
other. Both models are implicitly based on the following ideas:
-
Increasing variety or diversity of composition, either aesthetic or biological,
will lead to increased beauty.
-
Beauty (or ecological quality) is an inherent quality of the landscape
and will be apparent to most observers regardless of their background,
mood, or professional orientation.
-
Man-made alterations to natural systems are intrinsically non-beautiful
(or ecologically unsound) and are destructive of harmony.
Examples:
The US Forest Service developed and uses a system called VMS (Visual Management
System), the Bureau of Land Management has VRM (Visual Resource Management)
and the Soil Conservation Service has a similar procedure. In Australia,
the Victorian Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands uses VMS (Visual
Management System).
Operation:
For all the agencies mentioned the systems are conceptually and operationally
similar -- each has two parts:
-
Inventory/Evaluation
In the US the Forest Service and the BLM, shortly after adopting their
two systems in the mid-1970s, started to compile inventories of visual
resources under their jurisdictions. The process was substantially complete
by 1981 although some pockets of land are still outstanding and work on
these is hampered by budgetary considerations. Most Forests now have a
map of Management Classes which places restrictions or guidelines on proposed
activities on their land.
-
Contrast Rating/Visual Absorption Capability
When development is proposed, the contrast between that development
and its surroundings, or the ability of the landscape to absorb the impact,
is assessed. The rating guides the Land Use Planner in making judgments
about project suitability or possible modifications.
Ultimately the visual assessments are the tools used by Forest Management
to represent aesthetic goals in the trade-off between economic (crop value),
environmental (biological), and aesthetic considerations.
Psychophysical - Content-based
Although unable to respond to the immediate needs of the federal agencies,
scholars and researchers from a broad range of disciplines sought ways
to better incorporate public opinions into the management of public lands.
They started to look at the relationships between landscape and peoples'
responses to landscape as a problem in perception or environmental psychology.
The "scientific method" seduced researchers by its "objectivity" and
an experimental stimulus-response model of landscape perception was conceived.
A strength of these techniques is their reliance on the responses of members
of the general public to judge landscape stimuli -- any rules or guidelines
derived from these studies could truly be said to be based on public preference.
Concepts:
-
Landscape "quality" is primarily determined by the physical "things" present
in the landscape setting.
-
Landscape "quality" will be signaled by higher evaluations of beauty, preference
or satisfaction when members of the public visit or view landscape settings.
The following assumptions are made in developing these methods:
-
Beauty is an inherent quality of the components of the landscape.
-
That people know how to evaluate the things they perceive and that they
are truthful and consistent in their evaluations.
Examples:
Studies by Daniel of Ponderosa Pine forests in the southwest United States,
by Buhyoff of beetle damage in the southeast , and by Daniel and Orland
of beetle damage in Colorado and Alaska have each been widely used as the
basis of timber and aesthetic management programs in those areas. Studies
of the impacts of sound by Anderson in Georgia and by Orland and Esposito
in Illinois show promise for the introduction of sonic considerations into
the planning of outdoor areas.
Operation:
For all of these studies there is a common procedure:
-
Inventory
Landscape settings are sampled by a variety of random or structured
means to provide, usually, a photographic record of site conditions. (Color
& B&W photos, color slides, sketches and video have all been used.)
-
Evaluation
Groups of the general public view the sampled landscape scenes and
give evaluations by a variety of means, all resulting finally in the establishment
of a beauty "score" for each scene.
-
Analysis
Scores given for various scenes and the content of those scenes are
then subjected to statistical analysis in order to discover relationships
between perceived beauty and the physical content of the landscape.
The results of these assessments are used as tools to represent the aesthetic
goals in the trade-off with economic and biological considerations. The
public-preference basis of these studies is an aid to their defensibility.
Cultural-Phenomenological
There is a further approach which draws on characteristics of internally-
and externally-driven models. Geographers and other observers of the landscape
have long subscribed to the view that it is rather difficult to describe
the landscape as only a composite of physical, material parts and precise,
almost geometric, interrelationships between those parts. To many the landscape
is the repository for all sorts of meaning -- historical, literary, cultural,
religious, at many different levels of relevance -- to the public at large,
to special groups, to families, to individuals.
Scholars in this area observe the behaviors and attitudes of people
in the landscape, and people in their easy chairs thinking about the landsacape,
and attempt to glean guidance about the values of people vis-a-vis difffferent
aspects of the landscape. The variety of commentaries on response to landscape
is enormous, the ground between them is far from solid. Such descriptive
studies have ranged from treatises on The American West, to the beauties
of junkyards and trailer parks.
Concepts:
-
Landscape "quality" is a complex composite response to a whole range of
landscape "meanings" -- complexity, mystery, coherence, affordance, prospect,
refuge, etc.
-
That the landscape user brings to the landscape the cultural background,
knowledge and experience which interacts with the landscape to evoke feelings,
notions of quality, etc.
The assumptions made in these types of study are almost the "negative"
of those made in the others:
-
The response "beauty" is not a quality of the components of the landscape
but the product of the person-landscape interaction.
-
That the most valued parts of the landscape are those that are most "meaningful".
Examples:
Studies by Lynch and by Appleyard of the "image" of various parts of the
urban landscape have given valuable insights into the way people find their
way in cities and which parts of the city fabric are most meaningful to
them.
Operation:
It is impossible to generalize about a range of studies from the literary
descriptions of J. B. Jackson or Yi-Fu Tuan to the cognitive mapping studies
of Lynch and Appleyard. As yet there is no readily defined process leading
to a consistently recognizable product.
Studies of this type have been used as expert testimony in an advisory
capacity but there is, as yet, little guidance as to what physical pieces
put together in what configuration will provide an "imageable" or "meaningful"
place.
Bibliography
Phenomenological models of landscape perception
Tuan, Y. 1974 Topophilia
Seamon, D., 1979 A Geography of the Lifeworld
Burton, and Kates 1964 Natural Resources Journal 3: 412-441
Seamon and Mugerauer, 1985 Dwelling, place and environment
Relph, R. Place and Placeness
Way-finding/cognitive mapping models of landscape perception
Lynch, 1960. The Image of the City
Lynch, 197? Managing the Sense of a Region
Alexander etc., 19?? A Pattern Language
Moore and Golledge, 1976 A number of chapters in Environmental Knowing
Saarinen, T., 1976 Environment and Behavior ???
Other models of landscape perception
This is by no means the extent of discussion of landscape perception. There
are numerous other views beyond the scope of this paper. I will provide
a few references for you to follow up later.
Ecological models of landscape perception
Mc Harg, I., 1967 Design with Nature
Leopold, L., 1969 Natural History 78: 36-45
Leopold and Marchand, 1968. Water Resources Research 4: 709-717
Brush, R., and J. Palmer, 1979, In Elsner and Smardon (eds) Our National
Landscape
Psychological models of landscape perception
Kaplan, S. and Kaplan, R. 1978 Humanscape
Kaplan, S., 1982 Cognition and Environment
Ulrich, R., 1977 Man-environment systems 7: 279-293
Ward and Russell, 1981 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
110: 121-152
Wohlwill, J., 1976 "Environmental Aesthetics: The environment as
a source of affect", In Vol 1, I. Altman and J. Wohlwill (eds) , Human
Behavior and Environment. 37-86
Psycho-physiological models of landscape perception
Ulrich, R., 1984 Science 223: 420-421
Ulrich, R., 1981 Environment and Behavior 13: 523-556
Ulrich, R., 1979 Landscape Research 4(1): 17-23
Berlyne, ? 1971 Aesthetics and psychobiology
Carr, ? and ? Schissler, 1969 Environment and Behavior 1(1):
7-35
Aesthetic quality/Experiential models of landscape
perception
Chenoweth, R., and P. Gobster, 1985. The aesthetic experience of
landscapes: An empirical approach, In: B. Orland (ed.) Prospect,
Retrospect, Continuity: Proceedings of the Council of Educators in Landscaspe
Architecture, Urbana, IL, pp54-57.
Osborne, H., 1970 The Art of Appreciation
Hospers, ?, 1970 Introductory readings in aesthetics
Readings for next Monday:
Gobster, Paul H. and Richard
E. Chenoweth, 1989. The Dimensions of Aesthetic Preference: a Quantitative
Analysis. Journal of Environmental Management 17, 47-71.
Modified: 10 october 1999, Brian Orland
