Landscape Spatial Character: Students’ preferences on outdoor campus spaces

Abstract

The landscape is important in spatial development for campus space. Fundamentally, planting composition generates a character of the outdoor space. It could offer an enormous influence on visual quality, student performance and quality of life. This paper investigated the preferences and usage of outdoor campus space provided by universities during students’ leisure time. The data were collected through structured interviews at Research Universities in Malaysia. The results showed a relationship between preferences for landscape setting and utilisation index. Hence, this study suggested, the planting design is substantial to generate the space character which stimulates the use of outdoor campus space.Keywords: Spatial character; students’ preferences; outdoor campus space; quality of life.eISSN 2398-4279 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/ajqol.v3i13.165