Everyday Restorative Landscapes and Preferences of Students in a University in Southern China

Abstract

According to the “China National Mental Health Report”, in recent years, the stress level of Chinese university students has been increasing. Regarding students’ routines, since the campus is the place in which university students spend most of their times, it is necessary to optimize the potential of the campus landscape to provide students an everyday restorative environment where they can gain their psychological recovery while doing daily activities. Working with students in a southern Chinese university through landscape preference survey, this paper explored the nexus between landscape preferences, possible restorative effects and students' daily activities. To allow each respondent to reflect his/her landscape preferences in the university context, photos of different landscapes chosen from six Chinese universities located in the southern part of China were provided as choices. Then, the preferable photos regarded as responded well for the designated activities were chosen. The results show that the students tend to prefer to do activities in landscapes with different characters depending on the types of the activities. Moreover, students with high stress levels tend to spend time in landscapes with nature-liked characters; while student with lower level of stress tend to prefer spaces with social and cultural elements.