Campus Ecologist

Mapping Campus Landscapes

Thomas C. Greene Department of Psychology St. Lawrence University

Most North American college campuses are architecturally eclectic conglomerates of buildings spread across generous acreage. Although many colleges in the US and Canada reveal evidence of the architectural heritage they owe to British institutions, the predominance of park-Resettings is a particularly North American tradition (Turner,1984). Thus, campus landscapes join parks and cemeteries as pastoral islands within the towns and cities that surround them. Presumably these are appreciated as amenities by those who work and study there, but in the increasingly competitive world of college admissions, attractive grounds are also a marketing necessity. According to one survey, sixty percent of college-bound students rank the visual environment as the most important single factor in choosing a college (Carnegie Foundation as reported by Gaines,1991).

The buildings and grounds of campuses reflect both evolving educational vision and changing architectural fashion. Campus landscapes respond to periods of challenge, stability, and growth. Sometimes they are dominated by the planning vision of one or two individuals. Sometimes they seem to have evolved in a piecemeal fashion with little or no master planning effort. University physical plants manifest the successes and failures of centuries of design and construction. In North America, park-like settings probably represent the most demonstrable shared theme or value. Although an appreciation of nature as a campus design element developed long ago, recent behavioral data clearly demonstrates the importance of urban nature (see Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Ulrich, 1993). Careful studies of campus landscapes may help us to gain new insights into the behavioral effects of urban nature at a time when the urban sprawl of cities, suburbs, and edge cities increasingly dominates our lives. More pragmatically, disparities between the perceived and ideal for the present campus landscape can provide the context for change in order to create satisfying environments for those who work or live within them.

Every campus has areas of greater or lesser attractiveness. Perhaps some sort of opinion survey is the most obvious approach to discovering these preference areas or zones. Questions might 'include: "Please rate the attractiveness of the Student Center plaza on a one to five scale" or "what five areas of campus do you consider to be the most or least attractive?". Unfortunately, a survey composed of small-scale evaluations of every building, quadrangle, vista, facade, and garden on even a small campus would be hopelessly lengthy. Most attempts to shorten a survey's length mean that some area that is particularly pleasant to a participant may not be included in the evaluation, or an eyesore may be overlooked. Furthermore, it may not even be clear what the survey respondent is rating. For example, perhaps he or she considers only an attractive entrance in rating a library or student center, or responds to a building's interior rather than its grounds. Finally, the text of a survey is a rather abstract way to address evaluations of places as visually vivid as most college campuses.

Figure I presents a response sheet from one attempt to gather preference data on a small Eastern U.S. College campus (St. Lawrence University). Students were asked to provide pleasantness ratings for each of the quadrants. The resulting data were subsequently provided

to a campus master planning firm (The Architect's Collaborative of Cambridge, NIA) and interpreted by their landscape architects. As a companion to the preference data, we also provided students, faculty, and staff with an accurate map of campus and asked them to use a pen or pencil to trace the paths they most often followed in a typical weekday.

The planning firm used their professional expertise to integrate these behavioral data with a variety of other types of information in revising the campus master plan. Among the highlights was a massive effort to create a walking campus by closing most roads, and a proposal to remove parking lots from central campus. Following the plan, several large replacement lots were built behind berms the campus periphery. These were intended to protect the views from residence halls to the surrounding golf course and the nature-dominated countryside that surrounds the campus on two sides. When parking lots were removed they were replaced with grass, providing new vistas and new opportunities for landscaping.

Although the illustrate quadrants in our initial instrument were less abstract, they, like more simple survey questions, focus the respondent's attention on a restricted geography defined not by the districts and places of a participant's experiential world, but rather, on the potentially artificial boundaries set forth by the question's frame. A second type of survey question can address some of these liabilities. For instance, students or employees might be asked to name their five favorite and five least favorite campus scenes. Although this approach imposes fewer restrictions on responses, the targets of the evaluation still are ambiguous and the data are difficult to combine and summarize as much more than a tally.

Eventually we settled on another approach to gathering a richer set of evaluative data (Greene &Connelly, 1988). Respondents were asked to indicate zones of preference or some other evaluative dimension on an accurate map. They were instructed to draw lines around those areas that are most attractive in blue, somewhat attractive in green, and so forth. This method allowed individuals to identify and rate regions based upon whatever organization they, rather than some survey's author, found salient. These responses were subsequently digitized as computer graphics files.

As expected, these individual maps have idiosyncratic components. Nevertheless, commonalties begin to appear when the preference maps from a sample of individuals are combined. To accomplish this aggregation, individual maps were electronically digitized, and the resulting maps were electronically summed to yield a combined preference map (Figure 2). In this example, the highly pleasant zone in the lower left quadrant of the map corresponds to an area of mature trees, brick walkways, historic buildings, and no roads. On the other hand, the less well areas included fairly institutional-looking buildings and parking areas. Preference is not the only dimension that can be assessed using this sort of rating. The same mapping techniques can be used to indicate the most frequently traveled and familiar areas, areas sharing a common "feel," or areas of nighttime danger.

For this small campus the familiarity data gathered using this technique were part of the rationale for moving the "front" door of the highlighted building from the east to the west when renovations took place, and also guided the location and design of a small new building that transacted common travel paths near the bottom of the map. A less pleasant composite map documented those areas that were considered to be the most dangerous for nighttime walking. Fear of sexual assault by women students, faculty, and staff results in both worry, and a restriction in freedom of movement, particularly at night(Day, 1994; Koss, et al., 1987). Sadly, our data revealed a correspondence between those areas which were considered to be the most pleasant in the day time and those that were rated as dangerous at night. Presumably, the same trees and bushes that made for pleasant day time ratings created potential screens for criminal activity at night, and bermed external lots may seem remote and unsafe.

Finally, Figure 3 represents the preference ratings for a much larger university in the Western U.S. (Colorado State University). Again, despite individual differences, commonalities in the composite map clearly document preference zones. For instance, high pleasantness ratings were attached to an area with a small artificial pond surrounded by grassy lawns. A second high preference zone is tied to an area known as the "oval," that featurestall mature trees shading another lawn. The least pleasant areas of this campus include the library (which was in the midst of a major renovation and construction project when these data were collected), and parking lots. Regrettably, the less pleasant areas also included most of the university residence halls.

The present report attempts to document the usefulness of a mapping technique in addressing behavioral data in college campus environments. In the last decade our computer mapping technique has grown more sophisticated, but preference zones have remained quite stable. The data as they are presented here remain descriptive, but the consistent preference for nature-dominated scenes is striking. Two of these zones (one for the small campus, a second in the larger institution)are canopied landscapes with mature trees. A second type of high preference zones that manifest itself on both campuses has no trees, but is dominated by rolling lawns and (or on the larger campus) a small pond. Generalizable findings await additional research in other campus environments, but the usefulness of these cognitive data for fine grained understanding of particular campuses is apparent.

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