Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Identifying Cultural Attitudes And Values In Community Landscapes, Elizabeth Brabec

Elizabeth Brabec

Understanding culture and its attitudes and values towards space, place and nature is a critical aspect in determining appropriate approaches to a wide variety of planning actions. Actions such as gaining support for protected areas, designing new developments, and integrating tourism facilities in existing communities all depend on an understanding of cultural norms and values for their success. But understanding the relationship between cultural attitudes and culturally defined space can be difficult, falling prey to the observer’s own cultural norms and biases. This project uses a method based on individual interviews and expert observation of physical traces, to develop an …

Local Surface Water Policy Under Conditions Of Climate Change, Elizabeth Brabec, Elisabeth Hamin, Chingwen Cheng

Elizabeth Brabec

Climate change means two things for local stormwater managers – that storm events will become more severe, and rainfall will, in many instances, become more erratic, causing enhanced periods of drought and flood. Two approaches are needed to deal with the eventualities: mitigation and adaptation.

While urbanization increases stormwater runoff and decreases the lag time of stormwater discharge, there is also a resulting lack of infiltration and reduction in evapotranspiration (Brunke and Gonser 1997). Stormwater detention, retention and infiltration have attempted to compensate, resulting in the concentrated point location infiltration of stormwater, which replenishes groundwater and baseflow. Equally important to …

Offer Adolescents Suburban Habitat Positive Experiences In Their Neighborhood, Benjamin A. Shirtcliff

Benjamin A Shirtcliff

The adolescent population living in suburban environments is very important. This reality, however, is still too recent to be considered by practitioners of the development, which would explain why the physical environment of teenagers is rarely designed to meet their needs. This article addresses the basic needs of adolescents living in the suburbs and designers suggest ways to improve their quality of life by creating fallback places in their neighborhood. The values ​​and adolescents special needs will be used to assess the quality of suburban open spaces. We mainly interressted in the physical environment, building on the studies in the …

Sensory Gardens: Assessing Their Design And Use, Hazreena Hussein

Hazreena Hussein

This article investigates the design and use of sensory gardens by evaluating their zones and how they are utilized. Preliminary site studies were undertaken in 14 sensory gardens around the UK, followed by more detailed data collection at two case-study sites. The aim was to discover features that enable user behaviours and use of spaces in sensory gardens. The data collection included interview, observation and behaviour mapping, which is used in conjunction with affordance theory. The findings from the data analysis also draw on Moore and Cosco’s multi-method approach.