Cultural variations in landscape preference: comparisons among Chinese sub-groups and Western design experts

Abstract

Twenty-eight Chinese groups (landscape architects, landscape horticulturists, college students, male and female middle school students, male and female rural and urban primary school students, workers and farmers) and one Western expert group (Harvard design graduate students) were invited to rate 50 scenes from a Chinese national park. Correlation and factor analyses were used to investigate the general relationship among these groups. Overlapped scattergrams were used to specify cross-cultural and sub-cultural variance based on preference levels of individual scenes. As expected, landscape preference is significantly influenced by the cultural backgrounds of the subjects, though different cultural factors vary in their weight on such influence, and these influences are related to landscape types. Findings from this study point towards the following conclusions. (1) Living environment (urban vs. rural) is a powerful predictor of variance in landscape preference, and high preference among rural subjects for novelty and modernity (tourism service scenes) can be explained by their lack of experience with such landscapes and their utilitarian interest. (2) General education level instead of landscape expertise, combined with environmental experience, can significantly influence landscape preference. (3) The influences of macrocultural difference (Chinese vs. Westerners), and of expertise education in landscape (experts vs. public), are unexpectedly very weak, and their influence on landscape preference could be overridden by the two factors above (living environment and general education level). However, for some specific Chinese landscapes, macro-cultural differences do occur because the ‘foreigners’ lack the knowledge of cultural meanings embodied in the landscapes. Experts (both Chinese and Westerners) do show their unique preferences in some specific cases, such as their extreme negative reaction to tourism services and extreme positive reaction to water and rocky scenes in cold and foggy weather. (4) Utilitarian interest can greatly bias landscape preference. Farmers' interest in agricultural production and daily farm work may contribute to their negative reaction to water-dominated and misty rocky scenes in bad weather. (5) Sex has no significant influence on landscape preference, although some difference on specific landscapes (the water-dominated scenes) appears in some cases. (6) Last but not least, this research suggests that most previous findings based on Westerners' landscape preference correlate well with those of reasonably welleducated or highly educated urban Chinese, but not with those of the less well-educated rural Chinese.