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The Scenic Experience: |
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| Dennis W. Hudacsko, AICP | |||
| Session: | Author Info | ||
Scenic preservation has becomean increasingly important part of open space planning as the public desire for such amenities grows and the prospect of loss of scenic resources increases in response to growth pressures. An objective vocabulary for describing these scenic resources can enhance the objectivity of such planning efforts. A recent study acknowledged the difficulty of the situation,
"Although science shows how deeply our visual environment can affect us, and while numerous localities have proved its importance in community revitalization, most of us are unaccustomed to thinking about our visual experience of the world at all. Finding, adequate words to discuss it is difficult enough. Grasping its value as a tool for economic development may be an even greater challenge." - "Interim Report: Impact of Aesthetics on the Economy and Quality of Life in Virginia and its Localities", Virginia Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 1998.
Finding adequate words to describe our visual experiences has indeed been a challenge. It is one which planners will be expected to meet. With major public funding initiatives for open space acquisition, the need for an objective aesthetic vocabulary is clearly upon us.
The Nature of Aesthetic Experiences
The word "aesthetic" is taken from the Greek and literally means "to feel." It's surprising to many that it is the antonym of "anesthetic." Aesthetics is clearly about feelings. Aesthetic planning must therefore explicitly take feelings into account.
Aesthetic experiences are emotional experiences. Their value is in our reactive feelings. Aesthetic reactions can be positive or negative. What we regard as scenic beauty is a result of emotional reactions. We recognize these feelings when presented with spectacularly dramatic scenery. Teddy Roosevelt is credited with expanding federal efforts to protect spectacular scenic locales like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Crater Lake, Mount Rainier and the Grand Canyon.
Less spectacular landscapes trigger less spectacular yet highly valued feelings. The parks created by Frederick Law Olmstead are known for their powerful impact on visitors. New York City's Central Park was the result of massive land forming - none of its natural features were native to the locale and resulted only from moving millions of tons of earth and rock, rerouting watercourses and planting countless trees. It was designed to bring the emotional experiences of the Adirondack Mountains to an urban audience who might otherwise never experience them.
In this century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded on the national park system, increasing public access to scenic areas like the Blue Ridge Parkway. The feelings evoked while sightseeing were well worth the trip to countless travelers.
Robert Moses created scenic parkways around New York City. While the sights along these roadways were not unique, the feelings they inspired led to their emulation in New Jersey and other states.
Slowly, a universal appreciation of less spectacular aesthetic experiences
has emerged. We now realize that a place need not be unique or spectacular.
Aesthetic experiences need to be more commonplace. Planners are now engaged
in preventing bucolic landscapes from being displaced by suburban sprawl
and working to restore quaint character to our downtowns and neighborhoods.
Open space planning efforts such as the Connecticut River Valley Design
Manual clearly appeal to aesthetic sensitivities on a more localized universal
scale by presenting strikingly different visions of rural to suburban transformation.
Aesthetic Perceptions
When it comes to aesthetics, it is often said that "we can tell what we like", yet do not know why. This is changing as modern neuroscience has begun to correlate feelings to specific chemical neurotransmitters that account for our physical sensations. Affect theory, an offshoot of psychology rooted in artificial intelligence, relates feelings to specific changes in stimuli.
Affect theory offers an objective way to identify and classify the feelings that constitute aesthetic experiences. The theory allows us to relate the feelings that are the aesthetic experience to changes in stimuli that comprise the visual environment. Affect theory states that feelings can be seen as a composite of thought and affect, the biochemical response to changing stimulus density gradients. It identifies nine discrete types of affect which can vary by intensity. It is this limited number of affect types and their direct correspondence to identifiable stimulus patterns that makes aesthetic analysis manageable.
Stimuli can occur in oscilloscope-like patterns. Sudden abrupt rises and falls, gradual changes or steady-state signals of varied intensity -- each pattern produces a distinct predictable biological response characterized by changes in temperature, pulse, respiration and other bodily functions. These sensations, coupled with the particular kinds of thoughts triggered, account for our perceptions of external stimuli.
Affect theory says that if neural firings suddenly increase, a person will startle, become afraid or become interested depending on the rate of increase. If such firings reach and maintain a high constant level of stimulation beyond the optimum, a person will respond with distress or anger depending on the intensity. If neural firing were to suddenly decrease, a person will laugh or smile depending on the suddenness of the decrease.
Affect can produce either pleasant, rewarding bodily responses or it can produce unpleasant punishing sensations. These sensations determine the character of the aesthetic experience. Responses to stimuli can be quite subtle, brief and often imperceptible or can be intense and prolonged. Artistic efforts in painting, sculpture and music occasionally produce negative feelings but architecture and landscape design are most often exclusively directed toward positive experiences.
Affect attracts and focuses attention on the stimuli that trigger it. The triggering stimuli become the focal point while other stimuli retreat to the background. Recognizing the type of affect triggered by visual stimuli is therefore an important consideration in understanding how scenic sites are perceived and experienced.
Positive Aesthetic Experiences
Because the planner's mission is to enhance and preserve positive aesthetic experiences, a sensitivity to three types of beneficial experiences can help in detecting and identifying the essential elements of scenic areas.
When the intensity of new visual stimuli is increased in an optimal fashion, we experience interest-excitement affect. Scenery can evoke interest-excitement affect when complexity produces a stream of new readily processible stimuli. Complexity may come from the juxtaposed elements of a static streetscape scene or from a sequence of changing views that provides increasingly new visual stimuli as found on a winding path. Interest-excitement affect is rewarding. People tend to remain fixated losing their sense of time. For the scenic planner, explicit acknowledgment of presence of interesting/exciting experiences can help focus attention on the need to preserve the uniqueness, diversity and complexity of the triggering features.
When stimulus intensity drops abruptly, we experience a feeling of relief - and if intense, a feeling of joy. Scenery can trigger relief-joy when interest-excitement abruptly ceases, punctuating the experience. It can also occur when punishing stimuli suddenly cease. Frank Lloyd Wright and Olmstead both incorporated this kind of experience with memorable impact by using constrained paths to enter expansive spaces. A narrow wooded path suddenly turning onto an open meadow was Olmstead's favorite. For Wright, it was the low-ceilinged corridor opening into a dramatic cathedral-like space. This affect tends to reverse the punishing feelings and amplify their intensity exponentially. Such experiences frequently require peripheral features such as the approach paths. Planners will find that recognizing the presence of the relieving/enjoyable experience will help focus attention on the need to also preserve and enhance the supporting peripheral features.
The sudden unexpected onset of intense stimulus triggers a feeling of surprise and, when very intense, startle. This surprise-startle affect is neutral in effect - neither rewarding nor punishing. This affect has the power to neutralize negative affects. Wildlife encountered on a nature trail will produce this surprising experience. Such happenstance deserves to be taken into account.
Negative Aesthetic Experiences
Planners need to be equally aware of the nature of negative aesthetic experiences. The widespread presence of these experiences accounts for the value we place on the positive experiences. The value of scenic areas is in the relief provided from other negative environments. Planning strategies might beneficially focus on removal of negative experience features which detract from the positive experiences that an area might otherwise provide.
When the intensity of a constant stimulus is over-optimal, we experience distress - and at higher intensities, anguish. We experience this distress-anguish affect in the landscape where visual features are confusing and visual patterns are not fully coherent with cultural patterns. This can occur with the presence of modern street fixtures in a historic district. Low levels can produce a distressing experience. An awareness of its presence will allow planners to carefully catalog the triggering visual features and develop plans for their amelioration.
When distress is intensified, it can readily be transformed into frustration, anger and at higher intensities, rage. The anger-rage affect produced in urban locales has enormous societal consequences. Because of the intensity of the anger-rage affect, it is rare that such features will escape the planner's attention but the cumulative effect of distressing incongruities can be insidious in that they lower the threshold for anger-rage. Commercial intrusion into our national parks has repeatedly aroused such feelings. Low levels can produce a frustrating experience which can be abated by removing the triggering features.
When over-optimal stimuli arrive at an accelerated rate, we experience anxiety - and at higher intensities, fear. For a person walking alone at night, the disconcerting shadows cast along a poorly illuminated path can produce stimuli at a mounting frequency and intensity which triggers fear. Low levels can produce an overwhelming experience which can be lessened by altering the triggering features.
When rewarding affect is interrupted despite continued expectations of positive affect, we experience disappointment or disillusionment. The experience reverses and intensifies the preceding rewarding feelings, turning them into an intensely unpleasant experience - the more intense the initial positive feelings, the more intensely amplified the resulting negative feelings. Visual elements which like entries to scenic areas that unduly raise expectations can produce affect of this type. At low levels, it produces a disillusioning experience. Extra sensitivity in this area is important. Often evading conscious awareness, this type of experience can create a pervasively negative environment where least expected. Awareness can allow features to be altered to meet conventional expectations.
While the preceding experiences are quite predictable, and therefore treatable in fairly objective fashion, one affect is quite subjective - disgust. This affect is not triggered by the stimuli density gradient but by a negative, revolting association of the focal object and its context. This is learned behavior and is quite personal - understandable to the individual or an entire culture but not to the unindoctrinated. Low levels can produce a revolting experience and planning can address the removal of offending elements. Because disgust can be overcome by acclimation, it is important to be alert for such elements to which we may have become accustomed.
Similarly, the lack of external stimuli can result in affect being triggered by internal stimuli from unconscious memory activation. The resulting background affect is quite often negative and is experienced as boredom. The lack of change in visual stimuli from the environment will produce a boring experience. Conscious attention to variety of scene can alleviate this situation.
Scenic Inventories
The affect based classification scheme can provide an objective basis for inclusion and treatment of scenic resources. In place of merely subjective assessments, classification along with identification of triggering features provides a factual basis for planning.
Affect based classification can be used with any of the variety of sound approaches for organizing inventories and assessments. Generally such inventories might identify places, landmarks, views, vistas and corridors such as streetscapes and scenic byways.
Using the affect-based classification, the character of the resource can be accurately described in terms of the type of experience and the specific features that contribute or detract from the experience. The entry to Olmstead's famous Prospect Park could, for example, be described as "An intense relieving/enjoyable experience resulting from emergence from an imposing arched tunnel into a vast open meadow framed by a mature tree line." It is specific, concise, and understandable. It provides the kind of narrative illustration that lends objectivity.
Selected Bibliography & References
Hudacsko, Dennis W. "Aesthetic Objectivity: a valid basis for Visual Impact Assessment." In Approaching The Millennium: Proceedings for the 1999 National Planning Conference, edited by William Kasson, Jr. and Ray Quay, Herberger Center, Arizona State University , 1999.
Nathanson, Donald L. Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex and the Birth of the Self, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992)
Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect/imagery/consciousness vol. 1: The positive affects, (New York: Springer, 1962)
Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect/imagery/consciousness vol. 2: The negative affects, (New York: Springer, 1963)
Tomkins, Silvan S. Affect/imagery/consciousness vol. 1: The
negative affects: anger and fear, (New York: Springer, 1991)
Copyright 2000 By Author
Dennis W. Hudacsko, AICP
Mr. Hudacsko is a planning consultant in Bedminster, NJ