Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemPublic perceptions of Victorian freshwater wetlands: preference, health and cultural sustainability( 2009)Victorian freshwater wetlands are managed for ecological values. However, successful management depends also on positive public attitudes and perceptions, of which little is known. Wetlands must be culturally sustainable, whereby ecologically healthy wetlands are found attractive and preferred. It is a common belief that wetlands are perceived negatively, despite the presence of water and trees, known to favour preference. Meaning might be an important influence on preference, mediated by the biophysical attributes of a wetland and cultural and personal attitudes. Familiarity might also be important, favouring appreciation with a cognitive aesthetic that includes health as a landscape attribute. Therefore, public perceptions of Victorian freshwater wetlands were studied, including wetland meanings and values and attitudes towards them, relationships between wetland preferences and ecological health, and the influence of familiarity. From these studies, the cultural sustainability of the wetlands was inferred. Management and design guidelines were then developed to enhance cultural sustainability of wetlands to complement their management for ecological sustainability. The project comprised three inter-related studies. Within a landscape assessment framework, adopting a transactional perspective, mixed methods were applied to study objective biophysical attributes of the wetlands and subjective perceptually mediated attributes, or connotative constructs. Using photographic surrogates as stimuli, similarity photo-sorting, open-ended interviews and rating tasks generated numeric and categorical data, which were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively by content analysis and various statistical techniques. Data-reduction analyses, such as factor analysis, cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, simplified the rich data set, and categorical principal component analysis with optimal scaling graphically displayed the relationships between perception, preference and health and underlying perceptual constructs. Victorian freshwater wetlands were not perceived as an homogeneous group but rather as distinct categories. Meaning lay in the amount of water visible, the presence of trees, water quality and habitat value. Associated values were predominantly ecologistic-scientific and aesthetic, and attitudes were predominantly positive. Preference for wetlands was generally high, influenced by water visibility, presence of trees, and health, which was indicated by water quality and vegetation lushness, and by complexity and orderliness. It increased with increased familiarity. Although preference varied between the five preferential categories, only preferences between ‘dry wetlands’, ‘open wetlands’ and ‘treed wetlands’ differed significantly. From these results, it was concluded that Victorian freshwater wetlands can be culturally sustainable, whereby ecological and aesthetic values converge. A cognitive aesthetic seemed to operate in the appreciation of wetlands, in which health is important. Managers and designers can draw on the aesthetically relevant attributes to produce ecologically sustainable wetlands that meet aesthetic preferences. They can also implement education programs to enhance familiarity, for knowledge can change preferences.