Appraisal of visual landscape qualities in a region selected for accelerated growth

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Wright, G., 1974. Appraisal of visual landscape qualities in a region selected for accelerated growth. Landscape Plann., 1: 307–327. It has become necessary to appraise visual landscape quality in a manner which is reliable and acceptable. Aesthetic quality is a value judgement based on an emotional response received from the landscape stimulus. To evaluate the response reliably involves testing of the results in some manner. To be acceptable, the opinions expressed must be replicated throughout the community, or the status of the persons giving the opinion must be acceptable. In this paper, the testing has been carried out, and a number of explicit and implicit assumptions are formulated to take some account o The measurement of landscape aesthetics is attempted using a quantitative technique for a region selected for accelerated growth in north-eastern Victoria, Australia. It is shown that a team of inexperienced persons can be trained to evaluate landscape in an internally consistent manner. The technique has advantages of being complementary to other modern methods of data analysis and storage. It is of assistance in the exposition of bias and difference in opinion which is necessary if landscape quality is to become a subject of serious study. Major limitations of the method are discussed in terms of the subjectivity (which is reduced but not eliminated), the untested assumptions that underlie the scoring, and the dubious mathematical logic involved. Some of the difficulties associated with the evaluation of landscape aesthetics are discussed.