A Research On Relationship Between Recreationists Activity Involvement, Environment Perception And Place Attachment

Recent years, with the development and population expansion of Hangzhou city, along with the rapid increasing number of external tourists in West Lake scenic area at weekend, the outdoor activity space for urban residents is subject to certain compression. Because of the beautiful scenery, maturity of the climbing routes, mountains around the West Lake become a ideal place for residents to go hiking. Recently, in order to meet the needs of the residents’climbing, Hangzhou government invested to get through the West Lake Mountains climbing routes,turn most of the hiking trails into stone step roads, construct more tag systems and service facilities and realize cascades of all the hiking trails ultimately.Selecting the West Lake mountains climbers as object, this study explored the relationship among activity involvement, environment perception and place attachment on the basis of previous research, aiming to discover perceived characteristics and place attachment arisen from the culture, landscape, environment, service, and other elements of the climbers’ outdoor activities and to provide theoretical basis for the construction of hiking trails and management of city park. Activity involvement refers to the degree of tourists’concern of the recreational activities; environmental awareness is the individual’s perception of their activities environment:place attachment is the emotional significance to the places given by the participants. To explore the relationship between them, confirmatory factor analysis was executed on the basis of hypothetical model with survey data. The significant difference of the influence taken by climbers’social subculture variables and recreational characteristics on activity involvement, environmental perception of place attachment and attachment were analyzed.The results showed that attraction has a significant positive influence on the natural environment perception and artificial context-aware, but shows a reverse impact on place identity; centrality has a reverse impact on the natural environment perception significantly, but exerts significant positive impact on local identity; artificial environment perception has a significant positive impact both on place dependence and place identity.On the basis of the analysis results, some practical suggestions are proposed as follows:(1) Building the cultural landscape corridor of mountains around the West Lake.(2) Defining the level of the mountains around West Lake.(3) Controlling strictly motor vehicle’s access to the mountains.(4) Creating a leisurely atmosphere by the integration of lakes and mountains.