Users' perceptions and attitudes towards edible campus

Urban agriculture has been regarded as a strategy towards sustainable urban development. it can transform abandoned or underutilized public or semi-public lands into productive space with landscape plants as well as edible crops. similar to other green space, the edible landscape can provide a range of ecosystem services. However, it could also encounter vandalism and require more inputs into the maintenance, such as irrigation, fertilizing, weeding, pest control, pruning, and harvesting. thus, the way in which how users perceive edible landscape can affect the delivery of the concept. among the edible landscape, edible campus is one of the most popular types. they are semi-public space, which surrounds public institutions and is open to the public while imposes a set of stricter rules on users' behaviours than outside. given the qualities, edible landscape may be more likely to be delivered and maintained in such a semi-public space than in a public space. in Taiwan, edible campuses are often at an elementary school level. colleges and universities, on the other hand, have their own farms to support agriculture-related practicums and thus pay less attention to the creation of edible campus. However, campuses at a college or university level tend to be more open to the public than at other educational level. given its semi-public quality, they serve as a pertinent case to explore how users view edible landscape. through survey, this study collects 406 data from onsite distribution between march and april in 2017 in national chiayi University, Taiwan. the results reveal that although the concept is unfamiliar to most of the users, they are willing to support the idea of edible campus. in addition, the findings show that users' positive knowledge of edible landscape has association with their support for edible landscape. However, the users' knowledge perception does not have association with their support. © 2019 WIT Press