Читать книгу The Unsettling Outdoors - Russell Hitchings - Страница 11

What should be done with this knowledge? If we now consider how societies have most often thought about the right response to these findings, a common next step is to turn to the provision and design of public parks and gardens. This makes sense. If most of us now live in cities, if researchers know that being in and around greenspaces can benefit people, and if one of the tasks of good government is to ensure the inhabitants of a planet whose humans live increasingly urban lives have access to the services that are good for them, then city parks and gardens become an obvious focus for policy. In line with this argument, a lot of effort has gone into thinking about the forms of park provision that stand to produce the maximum social benefit. In doing so, effective landscape design and urban planning has come to seem like the obvious means of putting these ideas into practice. Indeed, the path between studies of greenspace experience and suggestions about what should be done with their findings is now fairly well trodden. And it commonly moves from an argument about benefits to an interest in the most effective means of designing and planning the most visually attractive and welcoming city greenspaces.²

Recent examples include a study in which Chinese citizens were shown urban scenes (from those with lots of concrete to those with more vegetation) in an attempt to identify how public greenspaces could be most effectively designed to reduce stress (Huang et al. 2020). Then there is a consideration of the value of features like colourful flowers based on how people in British parks and gardens respond to different pictures of plants (Hoyle, Hitchmough, and Jorgensen 2017). Another example is an exploration of the extent to which ‘actual’ or ‘perceived’ biodiversity in the greenspaces experienced by French residents impacts most positively on their wellbeing (Meyer-Grandbastien et al. 2020). A fourth study began by tinkering with images of various local cityscapes (adding vegetation to places where it is currently lacking) before seeing how Chileans responded to these pictures (Navarrete-Hernandez and Laffan 2019). The authors took such an approach based partly on the argument that, even though a great deal of work has focused on the visual experience of parks, many cities cannot boast these facilities. Their argument is consistent with the findings of Hartiget al. (2014), who note how parks have been the predominant focus when researchers have thought about what they should do with the suggestion that greenspaces promote public health.

But what if, for other reasons altogether, and which have comparatively little to do with effective greenspace provision and design, people are becoming disinclined to derive these benefits? What, for example, about broader processes of cultural change: the trends that gradually push us to live our lives in some ways instead of others and which, often without us necessarily noticing, are quietly shaping the future of greenspace experience? Scholars occasionally argue for the need to consider such broader sweeps of change. Grinde and Grindal Patil (2009), for example, pursue the contention that, though greenspace benefits appear to exist, we must still stay mindful of their ‘penetrance’. Their point is that we should not forget how various cultural factors may very well be over-riding their apparent draw. Hartig (1993) has similarly argued for studying greenspace experiences in a ‘transactional perspective’, namely alongside, rather than apart from, the broader processes that either push people towards or away from these experiences. His idea is that, though positive responses may be hardwired into humans, the likelihood of different groups seeking out the experiences that produce them is another matter. If spaces containing certain kinds of living vegetation are where we feel most at home, we might imagine that tempting people into such environments shouldn’t be so hard. Not so, according to some others.