Optimal visual perception in land-use planning and design based on landsenses ecology

ABSTRACT

Land-use planning and design (LPD) is one of the most critical passways toward sustainable development. LPD without thorough considerations can cause many problems, such as disharmony between people’s perception and nature, the chaos of spatial patterns, and the misuse of land resources. Landsenses ecology, a discipline based on natural elements and people’s perception, provide scientific basis to guide LPD. Here we summarized the state-of-the-art concept of optimal visual perception based on conventional optical theory and contemporary visualization technology. Instead of solely using an artistic design perspective to sum up experience, we combined human binocular visual angle and distance with the field of view (FOV) of cell phone cameras to determine an optimal visual perception. We explained the rationality of the concept of optimal visual perception with three examples, located at the Institute of Urban Environmental (IUE) from Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Welcoming-Guests Pine on Huangshan Mountain, and the Sunlight Rock of Gulangyu Island in Xiamen, China, respectively. Both landsenses involving the IUE and Welcoming-Guests Pine satisfy the required conditions for optimal visual perception, whereas the Sunlight Rock shows the chaos of near and far landscapes, which is not compatible with the optimal visual perception. At the end of this paper, we provide pieces of advice on applying optimal visual perception to land-use planners and architects as well as sustainability scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Land use
• visual perception
• spatial scale
• planning
• architect
• perceivable services

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China [71533003] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [41471137].