Research on Landscape Preference of Urban Mountain Park Based on Visitors’ Perception—Taking Xishan Park in Mianyang City as an Example ()
1. Introduction
As a fresh word, there is no clear national definition of the concept of mountain park, and there is no widely recognized naming statement for mountain park in the academic world. Only some degree holders have made the following definition: scholars believe that a mountain park should have the following features: built in the urban or suburban land area with the base terrain as a mountain or with unique mountain features; open to the public; with certain basic service facilities; with ecology and recreation as the main function; with sound ecology, landscaping, disaster prevention and mitigation, and other integrated role of greening land. The following is a discussion of the research conducted by various scholars on urban mountain parks (Table 1).
Urban mountain park refers to the process of urban construction, relying on the original landscape of the mountain to create it into a mountain park, providing citizens with a diversified environment of living space. As a place for urban residents as well as tourists to contact nature and socialize, urban mountain park provides social values such as leisure and recreation, aesthetics, ornamental,
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Table 1. Research definitions of urban mountain parks by various scholars.
scientific research and education, historical and cultural propaganda, and retains the characteristics of higher regional natural features ( Huai & Van de Voorde, 2022 ). As a unique form of urban green space, urban mountain parks promote the creation of green and healthy cities, and can be used as the supply point and output station of urban ecosystem service value, providing a variety of social values and ecological benefits to enhance the resilience of the city for the city’s residents ( Sun, 2023 ). Since tourists and urban residents are the main targets of urban park services, and are closely related to their quality of life. Therefore, we need to better understand how tourists as well as urban residents experience and perceive the social value of parks as well as landscape preference features ( Arnberger & Eder, 2015 ). Based on this research gap, this paper will use web semantic analysis and online review data to quantify the perceived features of urban parks by tourists and urban residents, and to explore which environmental features of Xishan Park in Mianyang may lead to positive or negative emotions among tourists.
This study will answer the following research questions: 1) How can tourists’ perceptions of urban parks be analyzed from online comments? 2) Which environmental features may lead to positive or negative emotions among tourists and the public? 3) How do demographic characteristics of different social backgrounds differ in the perception of urban park landscapes? 4) What are the specific social values present in the parks based on the environmental characteristics analyzed as perceived by the public?
2. Overview of the Study Area
Mianyang Xishan Park is located in Mianyang City, Sichuan Province, four elephants West Drum West Hill, 1986 by the Municipal Bureau of Culture to invest in the construction of cultural monuments, natural scenery in one of the cultural relics and monuments of the park, the planning covers an area of 595.5 acres, has now been built in the open area of 358.5 acres, the number of tourists as high as 130,000 people per year.
The main scenery of the park is “Ziyun Pavilion”, which is famous for “Zhuge’s Lodge in Nanyang, Ziyun Pavilion in Xishu” in the Tang Dynasty poet Liu Yuxi’s “Inscription on a Private Room”. The existing Ziyun Pavilion is an imitation of the Qing Dynasty, with four floors and a height of 23 meters, with classical and elegant modeling, and very distinctive. The park also has Shu Han minister Jiang Wan’s tomb, Gong Hou Ancestral Hall; Western Han Dynasty sage Yang Xiong reading platform, wash ink pool; Taoist shrine Xishan Guan; Jade Spring Sui and Tang Dynasty Taoist statues and other cultural relics protection sites. Mianyang cultural relics are displayed “five best”, evaluated as China’s largest, the largest Han Dynasty bronze horse, the largest money tree, the earliest bronze Buddha statue, the most vivid shape of the figurines of rappers, the most complete lacquer carving of the human body meridians. The green area of the garden accounts for 90% of the total land area, and the main plants include
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Figure 1. Location map of Xishan Park, Mianyang (Source: Self-mapping).
osmanthus, yew, peach tree, plum blossom, etc. The lake, buildings and pavilions are intermingled with the green trees and red flowers, and the scenery is pleasant in spring, summer, autumn and winter.
3. Research Methods
3.1. Network Semantic Analysis
In this study, the blog posts and comments of Xishan Park in Mianyang City are obtained from the websites of Dianping, Weibo, Ctrip and other websites to collect data, and the obtained data are subjected to data cleaning, removing useless words, repetitive comments and deactivated words, etc., and imported into the micro word cloud for spatial feature word extraction, classification and agglomeration, constructing the environmental feature vocabulary library, and carrying out the process of sentiment analysis. The results can be derived from the distribution of positive and negative perceived emotional values of tourists for the environment of Xishan Park in Mianyang City; then positive and negative words are classified, and high-frequency words are extracted based on the positive environmental perception vocabulary and the negative perception vocabulary for the cluster analysis, and finally the environmental feature clusters can be derived, and the perceived social value of tourists for Xishan Park can be analyzed.
3.2. Social Survey Data
The social survey data is obtained by questionnaire, which includes visitor satisfaction, play feeling survey and socio-demographic characteristics survey, play feeling mainly includes: the frequency of tourists going to the park, time period, play time, the reason for going to the park, and for the park management, facilities, satisfaction survey; socio-demographic characteristics include gender, age, occupation, education, identity (park), workers, experts, ordinary tourists, etc. workers, experts, general visitors) and other information statistics. The authors conducted a pre-survey online and offline from March 8-12, 2023, collecting 50 questionnaires, then adjusted and developed the questionnaire according to the issues raised by the respondents, and finally conducted the formal research and data collection from March 18-April 5, 2023, covering weekdays, weekends and holidays to ensure the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the data. A total of 215 questionnaires were distributed, with 207 valid questionnaires and an effective recovery rate of 96.2%.
3.3. Data Analysis
3.3.1. Web Semantic Data Analysis
1) Data collection
This study collects comments under the entry of Mianyang Mianyang Xishan Park from the websites such as Dianping.com, Weibo.com and Ctrip.com, with a total of 3408 comments as of November 11, 2022, removing a total of 2885 invalid and repetitive comments, with a total of 275,347 words, a total of 62,458 total words, 8599 featured words and 581 spatial featured words.
2) Data analysis process
The data analysis process follows: data collection—raw text data summarization (raw data)—text pre-processing (i.e., data cleaning, removal of duplicate comment entries and deactivated words)—importing into the micro-word cloud (word segmentation, word frequency, lexical statistics and annotation)—sentiment analysis (extraction of spatial characteristic words)—analysis of spatial characteristic words (extraction of spatial characteristic words) Sentiment analysis (extraction of spatial feature words)—Construction of environmental feature lexicon—Result analysis (applying the first two levels of analysis of the Zagan theory model) and other processes. Taking Xishan Park as the research object for textual research, the collected textual data were subjected to web semantic analysis by using the Micro Word Cloud online analysis tool to get the distribution of the positive and negative perception sentiment values and quantities of tourists’ positive and negative perception of Mianyang City Mountain Park (e.g., Figure 1), and the positive and negative comments were categorized through the textual sentiment analysis based on the high-frequency vocabulary words extracted from the positive and negative comments.
3) Text semantic analysis
a) Sentiment analysis. The pre-processed text data is imported into the micro-word cloud for network semantic sentiment analysis to get the overall positive and negative perceptions of tourists’ emotions about Mianyang City Mountain Park as a percentage of the overall emotions, as shown in Figure 2 below. According to the sentiment value and quantity distribution graph, i.e., the left half-axis is the distribution of negative scoring and bar data, the middle axis is the distribution of neutral scoring and bar data, and the right half-axis is the distribution of positive scoring and bar data.
b) Extraction of high-frequency words. High-frequency words are mainly extracted from positive and negative comments, which are used to construct the vocabulary of environmental features perceived by tourists, and the positive and negative words are subjected to text preprocessing, lexical annotation and word frequency statistics. First of all, the raw text data are cleaned, de-weighted, and deleted from the deactivated words, and the processed data are imported into the micro-word cloud analysis software, which can produce the statistics of tourists’ positive and negative comments on the environmental features, and the lexical annotation of descriptive words, such as nouns, adjectives, and even verbs, in order to identify the features of the urban parks that the tourists perceive, and the high-frequency words are extracted from the positive and negative comments of the urban parks in Mianyang City. Extracted from the positive and negative comments of urban mountain parks in Mianyang City, the extracted high-frequency words were subjected to word frequency statistics and then the words with a number of occurrences greater than 3 were selected as the final high-frequency words for further analysis.
As can be seen from the picture display (Figure 3), Mianyang Xishan Park is mentioned by tourists the most high-frequency words are scenery, environment,
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Figure 2. Text semantic sentiment analysis result map (Source: Self-mapping).
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Figure 3. Illustration of high-frequency word extraction from Xishan Park in Mianyang (Source: Self-mapping)
nature, ecology, quiet, culture, the Three Kingdoms, history and other words, due to the Mianyang Xishan Park is a collection of historical and cultural monuments, natural scenery as one of the monuments of the park, coupled with the park’s artificial landscapes created by the lush green trees to create a quiet environment atmosphere, coupled with the history and culture of the rich and attracted the tourists to stop at this place.
c) Construction of a vocabulary of environmental features.
In order to clarify the potential factors in the environmental features perceived by visitors to the park, and to visualize the correlation between the environmental features for text clustering analysis, the construction of the environmental features vocabulary base is based on the extracted high-frequency words after performing the steps of word division, word frequency statistics, deletion of deactivated words, and calculation of text similarity to obtain the environmental features cluster map of the urban mountain park shown in Figure 4.
3.3.2. Analysis of Social Survey Data
1) Statistics on the characteristics of the sample of investigators
Statistical analysis of the 207 valid questionnaires to get the sample characteristics statistical table (Table 2). Socio-demographic survey analysis of surveyed
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Figure 4. Visualization of environmental feature clusters in urban mountain parks (Source: Self-mapping).
tourists helps to effectively analyze the characteristics of tourists’ play preferences.
From the data in the table, it can be seen that:
a) 74 male respondents, accounting for 35.75% of the total sample of the survey; 133 women, accounting for 64.25% of the total sample of the survey, women accounted for the vast majority of the reasons for this part is mainly for the public recreation in Xishan Park parks for leisure and recreation parks, the research season for the spring grass is long and the warbler flies between the quietly awakening of everything in the park in every corner of the flowers bloom, the scenery poetic and attractive, attracted a lot of Middle-aged beauty lovers come here to shoot short videos as well as baby moms who take their children out to walk them, so the proportion of women is relatively large;
b) The age of the respondents covers all age groups, of which 80% are younger than 40 years old, indicating that the respondents are generally young, with clearer and more active thinking, which makes it easier for them to understand the questions in the questionnaire;
c) The education level of the respondents is generally high, with 48.31% of the respondents being specialists and undergraduates, and 39.61% being postgraduates and above. The youthfulness of the participants and their high education level contribute to a better understanding of the questionnaire and reduce the problem of data bias caused by failure to comprehend; the occupations of the respondents cover a wide range of jobs, with a high proportion of ordinary workers and students, mainly because Xishan Park is adjacent to the Xishan Campus of the Southwest University of Science and Technology, which is often
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Table 2. Survey on demographic characteristics of respondents.
used as a base for the study. The main reason is that Xishan Park is adjacent to the Xishan Campus, where students often go for walks and rambles;
d) The monthly income of these workers mainly focuses on 5000 - 7000 (24.15%) and 7000 - 10,000 (28.99%), which is in line with the normal category based on the overall income and expenditure of Mianyang City. And most of the surveyed tourists are local residents of Mianyang, totaling 104 people accounting for 50.24% of the total number of respondents.
2) Visitors play satisfaction survey analysis
In the satisfaction survey of the tourists mainly includes the frequency of trips, recreation season, travel time and whether the park landscape facilities can meet the needs of tourists playing survey, as shown in Figure 5 below.
In the survey on the frequency of visitors to Xishan Park, due to the survey scope for the last 12 months to March this year, 2022 epidemic reasons have not been unsealed, so 1 - 2 times accounted for the highest number of times accounted
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Figure 5. Tourist play satisfaction survey analysis (Source: Self-mapping).
for 60.93%; more than 10 times of tourists accounted for 23.19%, the vast majority of retirees to the park every day to exercise; tourists travel time on non-working days accounted for 56.52%, weekday travel Visitors travel time non-working days accounted for 56.52%, working days travel less accounted for 4.35%, mainly park staff and researchers; both accounted for 39.13%, mainly for retirees and mothers; recreation season contains four seasons, indicating that the park has four seasons of different landscapes, and each season has a different attraction to tourists’ landscapes, the number of tourists travel in spring and summer is more frequent, the spring can enjoy the park’s flora and fauna, the scenery is better, and in summer, you can enjoy the lotus to enjoy a cooler; In the fall and winter, everything is withered, so the number of trips is less.
3.3.3. Analysis of the Types of Social Values of Parks
1) Analysis of the rooted theory model
a) Open coding: that is, the process of conceptualizing events or matters, further analyzing the relationship between concepts to the formation of categories, and obtaining the concepts and categories of the study relationship. That is, the original data is analyzed level by level to refine the concepts at a higher level. In this study, the online review data of urban mountain parks are analyzed by text processing, text sentiment analysis, lexical annotation and word frequency statistics, and then categorized and coded on this basis, and the categories are refined from the above environmental clustering feature map: flora and fauna resources, cultural heritage, historical sites, recreation and leisure, exercise, spiritual healing, cultivation and fun, and spiritual healing. healing, cultivating interest, natural scenery, water scenery, leisure and recreation, releasing pressure, protecting ecology, publicizing knowledge, science education, cultural relics display, book culture, searching for the ancient, architectural recreation, aesthetic interest, etc.
b) Main axis coding: i.e., deeper development of the characteristics of concepts and categories, and further excavation of the relationship between categories through typical models, laying the foundation for the extraction of core categories, so as to merge preliminary categories with related relationships to form a higher level concept - the main category - and realize the generalization of the preliminary categories. The 18 open codes derived from the open coding were analyzed and compared and categorized, and with reference to the 12 social value types derived from the analysis of the social value assessment of ecosystem services in the Santa Ysabel National Forest, Colorado, USA, by reference to Sherrouse et al. (2011) , the aesthetic value, biodiversity value, historical value, learning value, sustainable value of life, Healing Value, Leisure and Recreation Value, and Recreation Value, and the coding process is shown in Figure 6.
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Figure 6. Types and description of social values of ecosystem services in Xishan Park, Mianyang City, China.
2) Main axis coding: Summarize deeper developmental concepts and category characteristics, and further explore the relationships between categories, so as to merge the preliminary categories of related relationships to form a higher level concept - the main category, and realize the generalization of the preliminary categories.
That is, the 12 categories of open coded categories were comparatively analyzed and categorized, and with reference to the 12 social value types derived from Sherrouse’s analysis of the social value assessment of ecosystem services in the Santa Ysabel National Forest in Colorado, U.S.A. ( Sherrouse et al., 2014 ), we finally mined out the 8 types of social values that tourists have for the social values that existed within the Xishan Park: aesthetics value, historical and cultural value, recreational and leisure value, biodiversity value, spiritual healing value, sustainable value of life, potential value, and learning value.
4. Analysis of Results
4.1. Tourists’ Perception of Urban Mountain Parks
From the online review data of Mianyang Xishan Park, it can be seen that by dividing the public review data into positive and negative reviews, 60.38% of the 2885 reviews from tourists on Mianyang Urban Hills Park are positive; negative reviews only account for 18%; 11% are neutral; and 9% have not yet identified their emotional value. Among the positive comments, visitors are mainly attracted by the landscape design of Xishan Park; negative perceptions are mainly due to the late management of the park, such as sanitary environment, dirty garbage, dilapidated buildings and other external factors. According to the visitors’ positive and negative perceptions, the colorful environment in the park can stimulate the positive emotions of the visitors, and the color of the environment is an important factor influencing the visitors’ perceptions; the positively perceived environmental features mainly include beautiful scenery, historical and cultural heritage, water landscape, recreational facilities, and places for playing chess, tea and cards, and so on.
4.2. Similarities and Differences in the Perception of Parks by Different Demographic Characteristics
Statistical analysis of the 207 valid questionnaires shows that the respondents are mainly divided into: tourists of different ages, workers in the park, urban residents and experts related to landscape architecture, etc. Ordinary tourists mainly aspire to the historical and cultural monuments of the Mianyang Xishan Park and the design of the landscape, the park has a Xishu Ziyun Pavilion, the Dasi Ma, etc.; urban residents are mainly elderly people taking a walk in the morning and evening to play games, play chess, exercise, walking children, etc.; but the tourists, but the tourists are not the same, the park is a beautiful landscape. and walk their children, etc.; however, visitors have common hobbies and characteristics in their perception of the environment, such as viewing plants and flowers, borrowing the park’s beauty to relieve stress and spiritual healing, etc., followed by the park’s colors and water bodies have a greater attraction to visitors, and the visual aesthetics drive visitors to stop here, which is crucial in landscape evaluation.
4.3. Social Values Present in the Park
Using the rooted theory model ( Huang & Zhang, 2022 ) to analyze the data based on online online comments on the Internet, the following eight social values are finally unearthed in Xishan Park in Mianyang City, as shown in Table 3 below.
As Mianyang Xishan Park is a mountain park, the tall trees create a quiet environment, the natural ecology gives people a release of pressure, that is, the trees can kill bacteria and viruses in the process of growth, and at the same time can purify the air; the park’s humanities and natural landscapes can produce a pleasant mood and positive feelings for the human psyche, which makes the spirit to be satisfied, and therefore the park can bring great benefits and social value to the city residents and tourists.
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Table 3. Types and descriptions of social values of ecosystem services in Mianyang Xishan Park.
5. Discussion
5.1. Application of Online Comment Data in Landscape Preference in the Network
At present from the network to obtain the public’s view of a thing mainly from online comment data, pictures, videos and other ways to obtain, online comment data we can get the positive perception of tourists for the park and negative perception of emotions, through the summary of combing out the tourists of the environmental perception of the characteristics of which can be used in the park in the landscape design.
5.2. Common Tendency of Preference for Landscape Environment Features
The semantic analysis of the network of Mianyang Xishan Park shows that tourists’ views and perceptions of urban parks are positive, indicating that the ecological landscape design in the park is compatible with the aesthetics of the public tourists, and there is no aesthetic conflict ( Fei et al., 2023 ).
5.3. Environmental Landscape Perception Needs to Be Synergized between Experts and the Public
In order to coordinate the degree of fit between landscape design and public visitors in the park, different research scholars have bred a variety of genres and paradigms to objectively extract the public’s landscape perception. The difference between the landscape perception of experts and the public mainly comes from the value of access and position differences, experts mainly hold objective philosophical ideas, they man-made landscape design must be transformed into some common parameters, such as lines, forms, uniformity, etc., they hope to establish a set of objective and feasible index system for the management of public land; the public school of thought is more subjective, and only consider the creation of the park’s landscape on their own use or not. Therefore, it is important to combine the views of experts and the public in the landscape planning and design of parks.
5.4. Whether the Local Community Will Influence the Design of Mountain Parks
The construction of urban mountain park is mainly due to the process of urbanization, due to the existing technology or development costs are huge and will be built as an urban mountain park, its service object for the city residents and the masses of tourists. The construction of the community is mainly located in the relatively flat area, the construction of mountain parks can provide a diversified living space for the community residents, can be used for leisure and recreation, release the pressure, give their sense of belonging and happiness, but also to increase the impression of the city, leaving the imprint of history, and improve the visibility.
5.5. Implications for Park Planning and Design
The public’s emotional perception of the environment, analyzed through the online comment data, is to some extent a mapping of the intrinsic features of the park. For the environmental features that stimulate negative emotions of visitors, managers can focus on them, and rectify and optimize them in later stages; for the landscape preferences of visitors from different social backgrounds, specific analyses can be conducted according to the local management policies; for the positively perceived environmental features of the public, such as visually appealing environmental features can be optimized more often; and the park’s post-management is well-maintained, avoiding isolated and less conspicuous areas, which may lead to safety issues in the park.
6. Conclusion
6.1. The İmportance of Urban Mountain Parks
With the expansion of urban land, urban green space resources are very scarce, for the mountains included in the urban construction land to create an urban mountain park. As the service object of urban parks is urban residents, and according to research, green space helps to reduce the pressure of urban society and improve health. Therefore, the design of urban parks should seek the public’s landscape preference characteristics, pay attention to the role of green space resources for stress relief and spiritual healing, so that the public indirectly involved in the planning of urban parks, strengthening the link between the city and the residents, but also to strengthen the awareness of the urban residents to protect the environment, so the construction of urban mountain parks is very necessary.
6.2. Construction Cost of Urban Mountain Park
When stepping into the urban mountain park, the more attractive landscape in the park mainly includes: terrain elements, plant landscape, water, structures and so on. First of all, the terrain is the most important feature of urban mountain parks differentiated from other parks, in the construction process of urban mountain parks, the full use of terrain elements of the characteristics of the targeted design, both to make full use of the resources and can save their costs; plant landscape design, the main use of local plants, the combination and design, but also to meet the demand for landscape design; maintenance of the water body and the design of the buildings need to be The maintenance of water bodies and the design of structures need to be combined with local historical characteristics to build, and the construction cost is slightly different in different areas. However, the construction cost of urban mountain parks is lower than that of ordinary parks, because it retains a lot of the original topography and terrain.
6.3. Problems in the Current Landscape Planning and Design of Parks
The general problems existing in parks at present mainly include:
1) The ability to meet the needs to be improved. Demand varies from person to person, different groups of people have different needs, in order to meet the different needs to be improved, the need for parks around the characteristics of the activities of the crowd, targeted construction of the lack of facilities.
2) Insufficient display of humanistic features in parks. City park is to show a city’s history and culture window, should strengthen its humanities construction.
3) Insufficient participation of multiple subjects. The atmosphere of common construction, governance and sharing is not strong. It is necessary to incorporate the indirect participation of multiple beneficiaries in the design of the parks to avoid the phenomenon of lack of vitality in the parks.