Urban spontaneous vegetation helps create unique landsenses

Abstract

ABSTRACT Non-cultivated, spontaneous vegetation in urban environments plays a key role in supporting urban and rural disturbed ecosystems because of the advantages of low input and low energy consumption. There is a contradiction between such plants and conventional cultivated species in terms of sensory characteristics that could affect people’s acceptance of such vegetated landscapes. Taking the most developed city of China Mainland, Shanghai, as a case study, this work aims to better understand how the public perceive these spontaneous plants in terms of physical and psychological senses based on the recently developed framework of landsenses ecology. Overall, these species activate people with positive senses, such as naturalism and nostalgia. Most people support the importance of their visual aspect, such as colourful fruits/flowers are more important for prompting such species. Our study indirectly supports the idea that the public seem not concern whether plants have soft or hard, smooth or rough tactility in parks. Similarly, people do not make high demands on the plants’ olfactory output. These results may provide a wide range of space for design and management strategies since there are abundant choices. The key influencing factor in our study was ‘childhood living environment’ whereas the commonly related factor ‘level of education’ showed no connection. Based on the framework of landsenses ecology that specifically emphasizes incorporating sensory experience into places, this study may help practitioners connect people’s multi-senses to non-cultivated vegetation and help accommodate a wider range of specific ecological attributes, constraints, priorities and people’s concerns in a more human-centric way.