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Research indicates that people are drawn to green spaces with attractive amenities. This study extends that finding by comparing walking patterns in two neighborhoods with different numbers of parks; parks did not differ in rated attractiveness nor did neighborhoods differ substantially in rated walkability. Adults, aged 32e86 years (n 1⁄4 90), drew their 3 most recent walking routes on maps of their neighborhood. Analyses showed that participants’ round trips were longer by 265.5 m (0.16 mile) in the neighborhood with a single, large, centrally located park (p < 0.02). However, participants in the neighborhood with multiple, small, more distributed parks, visited more streets, p < 0.001, more streets with green spaces, p < 0.038, and used more varied routes, p < 0.012. Results suggest there are potential benefits to both layouts. Large centralized parks may invite longer walks; smaller, well-distributed parks may invite more varied routes suggestive of appropriation and motivation processes. Both layouts might be combined in a single neighborhood to attract more walkers.

This study investigates outdoor recreation participation within a multifunctional landscape, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve. The reserve, the Kristianstad Vattenrike located in southern Sweden, has made a deliberate effort to make the experience of biodiversity possible for residents and visitors. Recreation is a key part of the biodiversity conservation effort in the area, represented by the infrastructure of the Kristianstad Vattenrike's 21 visitor sites. Given the biosphere reserve context, this study investigates the question of whether there is a relationship between outdoor recreation participation and place attachment. Survey data was collected using concurrent application of multiple sampling strategies including both probability and purposive sampling of local adult residents of the biosphere area. Quantitative analysis showed a significant positive relationship between the level of outdoor recreation participation and place attachment. Qualitative data supported this relationship with more details about place attachment within the studied area. The study confirms a relationship between place attachment and outdoor recreation and provides insight into how the biosphere reserve context supports this relationship. The results of this study show that significant biodiversity management in close conjunction with outdoor recreational opportunity can be achieved and provides opportunities for human engagement and experience of biodiversity. Management Implications: This research can help managers design recreational settings that support biodiversity conservation goals. Our research found that: • A leading motivation for outdoor recreation participation is nature experience and this motivation can be used by managers to highlight a biodiversity conservation interpretive message in the design of outdoor recreation infrastructure. • Providing proximate access to nature based outdoor recreation, to support deliberate and direct experience of biodiversity, is an important component of engaging the public in biodiversity conservation. • Recreation proximity alone will not create public engagement in biodiversity conservation. However, proximity as a part of a deliberate institutional design including biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and logistic support for research and monitoring may be critical for public engagement.

This study investigates the degree to which community can be found in Dutch neighbourhoods and attempts to explain why there is more community in some neighbourhoods than in others. We apply a perspective on community which assumes that people create communities with the expectation to realize some important well-being goals. Conditions that account for the creation of a local community are specified, i.e. the opportunity, ease, and motivation to do so. These conditions are realized when (i) neighbourhoods have more meeting places; (ii) neighbours are, given their resources and interests, motivated to invest in local relationships; (iii) neighbours have few relations outside of the neighbourhood, and (iv) neighbours are mutually interdependent. Data from the Survey of Social Networks of the Dutch on 1,007 respondents in 168 neighbourhoods are used. Results show that there is a sizeable amount of community in Dutch neighbourhoods and that all the four conditions contribute to the explanation, while interdependencies among neighbours have the strongest impact on the creation of community.

While the age of physical environments is the central tenet of historic preservation, there is a lack of empirical evidence about how everyday people actually value, perceive, and experience age as an intrinsic part of an urban environment. In order to ameliorate this knowledge deficit, this study employs phenomenology to understand the lived experience of being in a “new” versus an “old” or “historic” urban residential environment. The new environment is the I’On new urbanist development in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and the old environment is the location of the United States’ first historic district in Charleston, South Carolina. These locations are approximately within five miles of each other. In both places, the physical characteristics of the built environment are remarkably similar in density, form, layout, and design, but the age is dramatically different. Through photo elicitation techniques and interviews, the results of this study reveal that residents of historic Charleston and I’On value their built environments in remarkably similar ways. Surprisingly, elements that evoke a strong sense of attachment tend to be landscape features, such as gates, fountains, trees, and gardens rather than buildings. The informants valued the “mystery” that they felt was part of the landscape and which consisted of layered elements such as fences, gates, and paths, such that these features (including buildings) had to be “discovered.” Lastly, the informants strongly valued landscapes that showed “people care” through regular maintenance. The essential difference in people’s experience and valuation of the new environment (I’On) and the old environment (historic Charleston) is in the older environment’s ability to instill creative fantasies in the minds of the informants based on a hypothetical past of their own creation. The informants in I’On did not share these kinds of meanings.

As built environments become increasingly hybrid physical, social, and digital spaces, the intersecting issues of spatial context, sociality, and pervasive digital technologies need to be understood when designing for interactions in these hybrid spaces. Architectural and interaction designers need a mechanism that provides them with an understanding of the `sociality- places-bits' nexus. Using a specific urban setting as an analytical case study, we present a methodology to capture this nexus in a form that designers of hybrid spaces can effectively apply as a tool to augment digitally sociality in a built environment.