Exploring the Factors of Inducing Place Bonding with Landscape Elements

Place bonding is the affective bond between people and their environment based on cognition and experiences. People may develop place bonding through long-term interactions with the specific location, or transferred place bonding rapidly from previous experience. Familiar landscape elements are meaningful to individuals, which help people to recall their past experiences. By comparing respondents’ reactions to a series of digitally manipulated pictures, Cheng and Kuo (2015) found that familiar landscape elements could be the reason for rapid bonding transformation from place to place. Landscape typicality and Constructive authenticity are the feelings that constructed from previous experience. When familiar landscape elements appear in exotic environments, the feeling of landscape typicality and constructive authenticity may be different, which have been suggested to be associated with place bonding. Therefore, the study suggested that landscape typicality and constructive authenticity may influence people’s place bonding that is induced by the familiar landscape elements. To explore this mechanisms of place bonding transformation, the study aimed to discover whether landscape typicality and constructive authenticity might affect the transformation of place bonding. A series photo-based surveys were conducted for the purpose of this study, with a similar procedure as the previous study. Rice field, plants, mountain, red bricks and traditional building represented meaningful Taiwanese landscape elements. These landscape elements were synthesized into foreign landscape pictures which are similar & different from Taiwanese landscapes. Subjects were asked to provide their feeling of landscape typicality, constructive authenticity and place bonding toward the landscapes in the picture before and after synthesizing. The result turned out that, people’s feeling to different environments are significantly different. Those synthesized landscapes that were close to previous experience, may induce higher levels of landscape typicality, constructive authenticity and place bonding. In additional, the feeling of landscape typicality or indexical authenticity were positively related to the increase of place bonding also. The current study illustrated that the typicality and authenticity of a landscape might be the reasons for inducing place bonding in the familiar landscapes. The current findings might be a reference to environment planning and design, especially in recreation experience management.