Visitors' Perception of natural environment in City

The importance of urban tourism has been now well acknowledged and an increasing volume of publish work in this domain has been seen. However, their perception of natural elements within urban tourists’ experience seems a... [ view full abstract ]

The importance of urban tourism has been now well acknowledged and an increasing volume of publish work in this domain has been seen. However, their perception of natural elements within urban tourists’ experience seems a subject that has been relatively neglected. This research explores what visitors perceive and their assessment associated with the natural surroundings within the context of an rapidly-changing urban environment of the city of Wuhan, China. An face-to-face interview with a set of open-ended questions has been carried out to collect qualitative data from 743 interviewees and content analysis has been employed by using NVivo 8.0 software to identify the natural environment they have perceived by visitors and discover their importance in the holistic urban image of visitors. The findings shows that only 14% of the high frequency words is relevant to natural environment of Wuhan city, and the natural elements mainly perceived by visitors include flora(especially green plants), weather condition, air quality, water(river and lakes). It reveals that both abundant natural element(such as river and lakes)and scare one(such as clean air) in Wuhan are easy to be perceived intensively. The study concludes that natural landscape is the integral part of holistic tourist city image in Chinese visitors’ mind, even not the most important one. It is believed as an indispensable portion of urban aesthetic in tourist city. It also indicates Chinese ecological idea that man and nature are integrated as an fundamentally cultural filter in the process of perceiving the relationship between natural and artificial landscape. The practical implication derived from it will contributes to the policy of urban recreational public space planning and management.