Studies of Urban Waterscape Based on Human Behavioral Responses

Abstract

Water is basic to all living things, but how should waterscape be changed in accordance with increasingly intensified urban land use. The purpose of this study is to find the relationship between waterscape and resultant behavioral responses.
Basic information was obtained by two field surveys, which were conducted in Amagasaki city. One survey was made using a field notification system called“KARTE”. The other was by a questionnaire survey. The “KARTE” system use the responses of the survey team. The second approach measures both a couple of responses, which contains the sense of awareness and an amount of contact to the object (river), and an amount of sensibility of each vicinity with the water. As it's important to understand that information on behavioral responses are much influenced by place of habitation and by individual experiences, three elements which are basic to all backgrounds were chosen. these are: 1) the number of years of residence, 2) age, 3) sex. A combination of the statistical method, frequency distribution, factor analysis, cluster analysis and dual scaling were used.
It was learned that water spaces have many traits in relationship to human beings. Some of them are as follows:
1) A classification system of waterscape elements consists of three main groups and a few remnant. Main groups are natural landscape qualities, urbanities and negative elements.
2) The differences of behavioral responses to waterscape based demographic information are that:
a) Males generally responded more conservatively, pragmatically and structurally than females. Females responded more emotionally, less consistantly and with greater acceptance of the changes than males.
b) The aged tend to be more objective than the young, but both the aged and the young tend to be more emotional than the middle age group. The responses of aged is based on their physical needs and their memory of the past.
c) Sex plays a greater role than age or length of habitation, in the sense of awareness and an amount of contact of water spaces. However, an amount of sensibility are based primarily on experience of those spaces.
3) From the analysis of the pattern of contact with water, by district, some understandings about the relationship between districts, and the area of effective power of the river, was learned. At the district scale, the degree of connection is more influenced by geographical conditions than an amount of sensibilities.
4) It could be shown the process of an applicative system for the landscape analysis of the urban water spaces.