Vildvuxet och ordnat : brukares upplevelser av gradienten från vildvuxna områden till gräsmattedominerade områden i staden

Sammanfattning: Green areas are needed in cities for several reasons. For humans, they can be esteemed recreational spaces and they can be habitats for animals and plants. Two types of the city’s green areas are examined within the framework of this work: the orderly lawn area and the wild grass area. The orderly lawn area is cut intensively during the summer and is a dominant feature in Swedish cities. The wild grass area is here used to refer to a green area that has not been cut intensively but has been allowed to grow wild with spontaneous vegetation, which tends to contain a number of different habitats and which is mainly in an early succession stage. These two types of urban green areas are examined to find out more about what makes people like them or dislike them and what people think about the gradient between them. The hope is that the work will provide clarity in how ordinary and relatively species-poor habitats can be changed and potentially more species-rich habitats can be preserved for people to like the result. The work is mainly based on an interview study that was conducted in a residential area in Karlskoga, Sweden in November 2021. The results of the study showed that a green area with a mixture of orderly lawn and wild grass area was what most participants in the study could agree on that they liked. The best thing that could be done to make as many people in the study as possible think that an area was aesthetically pleasing and useful was to make the area interesting, as in worth discovering, and clearly taken care of. It was also important to ensure that there were open areas that the users of the place could easily enter and feel that they themselves could choose what they would do there – in other words, that the surfaces were accessible and unprogrammed. A view that can serve as inspiration for how such an area can be designed more precisely was chosen in the study. By using that inspiration, parts of ordered lawn areas can be changed to contain more habitats and more species. Converting the city’s wild grass areas to partly consist of lawn would not have the same beneficial effect on the number of habitats in Sweden’s cities, but it could make people appreciate the wild parts that were left behind more than they did before and probably even inspire people to care more about them.