Bridging landscape preference and landscape design: A study on the preference and optimal combination of landscape elements based on conjoint analysis

Landscape preference is the focus of landscape research, in which the relationship between landscape elements and landscape preference is an important issue. Most previous studies have analysed correlation between the landscape preference scored by the public and scores on the quality of landscape elements by experts; some have compared the effects of individual landscape elements on landscape preference by photo simulation. In this study, landscape preference is regarded as the selection preference of landscape element combination. The conjoint analysis method is used to further explore the ranking and optimal combination of the significant degrees of impact of landscape elements on landscape preference when multiple landscape element combinations are used. The results show that the influence degrees of landscape elements on landscape preference in urban parks followed the order water, square, openness of the landscape, vegetation, road and seats. The optimal combination of landscape elements is the open landscape with flowing water, a shaded square, rich vegetation, a road and seats. This study demonstrates the advantages of the conjoint analysis method over the univariate method in controlling multiple variables, improving experimental efficiency and obtaining more meaningful results. A combination of urban park landscape elements based on landscape preference is helpful to inspire landscape architects to make choices among multiple landscape elements, provides evidence-based design methods for landscape design and offers basic parameters for the wide application of the parametric design or computational design of landscape architecture.