Assessing landscape attractiveness: a comparative test of two new methods

Techniques for assessing landscape attractiveness are becoming increasingly important in environmental planning. They are a manifestation of the growing need to monitor landscape deterioration, to help preserve natural beauty, to learn about our cultural perceptions, and to satisfy an ever-increasing body of environmental law.This report describes two such evaluation techniques developed by the author and used by the National Trust of South Australia to classify and record natural and rural landscapes. One method, a component checklist, relies on a detailed appraisal of individual landscape elements. The other method, using bipolar semantic differentials, measures ‘whole-landscape’ emotional responses. Although very different in design, and in how viewer preferences are ascertained, the two techniques provide vista scores that correlate very highly (S_r = 0.81 for n = 46).For either method, scenes whose scores are more than 6 points apart can be regarded as significantly different in aesthetic qualities. As with all present evaluation methods, there are still problems with both technique design and the transformation of vistapoint data to spatial (mappable) information. Nevertheless, both the checklist and the bipolar methods seem to be reliable and face-valid tools for measuring South Australian landscape preferences.