Reimagining Recreational Landscapes: A Generative AI-Aided Comparative Study of Academic Greenspaces at IPB University and UP Los Baños

Abstract

A systematic examination of recreational landscape users’ behavioral patterns on university campuses is needed to fill the knowledge gap in implementing healthy academic greenspaces. To do so, a study is made to see the general behavioral patterns vis-à-vis cross-cultural factors in two campuses in Indonesia and the Philippines using the following methods: 1) behavioral mapping (BM) to record landscape activities data, 2) literature review to create the coding system, and 3) generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) application to aid generate images for the recommendations. The time frame, time-frequency, density, facilities, academic greenspace codes, and images were recorded using the BM. The study revealed that outdoor recreation in academic greenspaces is experienced in disparate physical spaces with various combinations of four dimensions: social space, symbolic space, active space, and experience space. The devised coding system helped align the study areas, determining commonalities, dissimilarities, and unusual findings. Common lacking features extracted from the data analysis were used as text prompts, while site images were used as image prompts. Using the prompts, landscape scenarios were generated using the GenAI application-Midjourney. Rendered figures suggest prominent landscape intervention ideas that feature enhancements of visual resources and the addition of placemaking elements.