Abstract |
The importance of urban nature has been empha-sized alongside the concept of sustainable city and urban livability. Urban nature can refer to all kinds of green spaces, such as lawns, community gardens, urban parks, urban forests and urban cemeteries. It is known that urban nature deliv-ers the cultural ecosystem services that largely link to human well-being. Hence, many scholars focus on multi-functionality of urban nature (Fagerholm et al., 2019; Hansen et al., 2019), and try to find the link between motives and experi-ences (Vierikko et al., 2020) in order to have a broad understanding of the day to day practice of urban nature. However, due to the extinction of the experiences and loss of human-nature inter-actions, more research should pay attention to nature experiences in order to develop sustaina-ble urban recreational destinations with high citizens experiential values.The built environment with access to in-frastructure and green spaces are preferred dur-ing the lockdown (Amerio et al., 2020). The hu-man-nature interaction is greatly motivated by intentional uses of urban nature provided by in-frastructures, and the fact urban nature can pro-vide spaces for social activities and so on. Yet, little is focus on how restorative experiences, emotions, surprises and sensory experiences can encourage urban dwellers a close contact with nature. Does the increasing recreational use of urban nature at this special moment indicate an increasing need of restorative benefits and better well-being from the urban nature? And is the intentional recreational use of urban nature gen-erated by any incidental experiences gained from urban nature or indirect use of urban nature, due to the fact that well-practiced behaviors are gen-erated by incidental experience? This study cate-gorizes nature experiences into intentional na-ture experiences and incidental nature experi-ences, and aims to answer the following ques-tions (1) what is intentional and incidental nature experience and what are the most common mapped activities in terms of the intentional and incidental use of urban nature (2) which type of urban nature and which landscape feature(s) can provide more intentional or incidental nature experiences (3) what is the relationship between these two kinds of nature experiences? |