Aesthetics in the assessment of planting landscape designs: The case study of Antalya Konyaalti region

Aesthetic preferences about environment is important and many of the researches has been done about this issue. And because of them many of the research conducted on the landscape preferences and environmental attributes. But there is little research on how to design the landscape with plants. Because of them this research's main aim is to understand the importance of aesthetic in the context of the planting design. There have been many researches into aesthetic preferences about environment. In these researches, it has been revealed that the natural environments are preferred over urban environments which are human-made. However, there are very few studies on the users' preference of plants in natural environments. In addition, the number of studies focusing on the aesthetic issue in planting design is also very few. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to discuss an important element of landscape design; the importance of aesthetics in the context of planting design by using mixed method. Within the scope of the study, a survey was conducted to determine the preferences of users and landscape architects for planting designs. In this context, the survey was conducted with the number of 400 users and 51 landscape architects. When the findings are evaluated, the regression analyses showed that the planting design elements of Emphasis, Balance and Naturalness are the most influential factors on the landscape design preferences of landscape architects. Also, factor analysis was performed on preference data. It was revealed that the landscape architects evaluated 33 photographs under 9-factor structure, while the users rated 32 photographs under 7-factor structure. Although there is a correlation between the average scores of Landscape Architects and Users' preferences for photographs, the t-test revealed that there is a significant difference between the scores of these two groups. In addition, despite the correlation, the differences in the components of the factor structures indicate that the users and the landscape architects have different approaches while evaluating planting designs In order to discuss the results of these findings, a qualitative research has been carried out in the context of mixed method. In this qualitative research, interviews were done with 20 landscape architects who had previously participated in the surveys and the reasons of 5 most liked images were questioned. The image which is the most liked one among the users is less appreciated by landscape architects due to plant diseases. Landscape architects' most favorite images were found to be appreciated because they reflect a plant that is solitude, provides shadow, and already found its form. Besides, most of the landscape architects interviewed indicated that the groupings in factor analysis differ from each other, and the majority indicated that landscape architecture groupings were the closest grouping to them. It is believed that the study contributes to the discipline of environmental aesthetics regarding providing a new use of mixed method and reflecting the profound difference between the groups by factor analysis.