Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Understanding landscape identity. Through understanding the landscape identities and how residents identify their landscape, future plans can be considerably sustainable by preserving and promoting the characteristics of identity of the landscape and conducting the planned changes towards sustaining those values, meanings, and identities that are important for an integrated society. I show that perceiving the distinctive characters and ascribing them as identities occurs through a dynamic interaction with the landscape. I discuss how landscape can be seen as a social product and that the characters by which a landscape is identified can also be cultural and existential apart from being personal and spatial. Spatial refers to visual aspects and spatial characteristics of a place. The meaning and value that the landscape may have for someone, is basically related to personal experiences. When a common value is accepted by a group, they constitute cultural aspects of identity. It can be shaped as landmarks, toponyms, common memories of events, etc. The existential aspect concerns memories and associations and signifies an inherent quality of a landscape perceived by individuals. Taking Luthagen in Uppsala as an example, I demonstrate how a conceptual framework of Stobbelaar and Pedroli (2011) can be applied in understanding landscape identities to know what to protect, strengthen or develop. I run a survey consisting of interviews and a questionnaire to the residents of Luthagen. The four aspects of identity are taken as test variables as categorized by the mutual relations of the four essences of identities. Through data analysis, I present how many times and to what importance each aspect of landscape identity was mentioned by the residents. I developed a method compatible with opinion measurement techniques to infer descriptive information from the multiple-choice-answers to find which aspect of identity was meant using machine learning techniques to handle more extensive data and towards inclusiveness. The results comparability shows that this method can be used in future works using quizzes and questionnaires, which are fast, effective, and can gather a populated dataset for field research. Ethnicity and understanding the landscape identity were mentioned in one of my research questions. I dug in and achieved some points that can help architects and planners design a more meaningful and valuable environment for immigrants. I found that regardless of backgrounds people tend to know their landscape by its spatial identities rather than existential. The attention is gradually drawn from personal toward cultural aspects over time.