Are interest groups different in the factors determining landscape preferences

In the last decades, rural landscape in Europe has evolved from an agricultural by-product to an important public good. This development creates not only new challenges to farming practices, it also makes participation and public involvement an indispensable tool for sustainable landscape planning. This is especially true for many European mountain regions, where tourism represents an important source of income and conflicts between locals’ and tourists’ interests should be avoided. In our study, we analyze whether discrepancies in the perception of the Alpine landscape can be located between locals and tourists and, if these differences exist, in which aspects these two groups are differing. A model employing three general factors able to describe landscape preferences regardless of the personal background is suggested and validated by confirmatory factor analysis. Our major finding shows that an attractive landscape for tourists does not have to be contradictory to a landscape that supports a high living quality for locals. Compromises in landscape planning between locals’ and tourists’ requirements seem often not to be necessary as they, generally, do not differ in the way they experience and assess the  landscape.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Landscape Online

• Publication date

  2016-02-15

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Geography, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3097/LO.201647
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• No references are available for this paper.

• Landscape character: a knowledge mapping analysis using CiteSpace

  2022cites this paper
• Fifteen years of Landscape Online: Looking back at the development of an e-journal

  2022cites this paper
• The Emotional and Cognitive Scale of the Human–Nature Relationship (ECS-HNR)

  2021cites this paper
• Towards an integrative assessment of land-use type values from the perspective of ecosystem services

  2020cites this paper
• The Impact of the Process of Academic Education on Differences in Landscape Perception between the Students of Environmental Engineering and Civil Engineering

  2020cites this paper
• The Social Genesis of the Definition of Landscape

  2018cites this paper