The “Extinction of Experience”: Walking Interviews Reveal Why Urban Green Space Matters
Yarden Woolf brings her expertise as a landscape architect and urban planner to her dual roles as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing & PhD Researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments. Her work explores how our built environments shape our collective wellbeing.
The “extinction of experience” describes the quiet fading of our relationship with the natural world as modern life becomes increasingly urbanised and digitally driven. It raises broader questions about what this shift means: does disconnection from nature gradually lead people toward indifference and disengagement? Conversely, can simply walking through a space, noticing it, and spending time within it reignite care for the natural world?
One England-based researcher is responding by walking alongside the next generation, seeking to see the world through their eyes and understand how they experience greenspace and how this shapes nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour.
The Biophilic Blueprint sat down with Dr Yarden Woolf, a landscape architect and urban planner. Woolf is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments, with a focus on walking interviews in greenspaces, and on understanding the relationship between the next generation and nature connectedness.
“The general context of people losing touch with the natural world, and in an academia, is called “extinction of experience”. It's this vicious cycle where people care less, so they go out less to green spaces, so they have less opportunity to connect. It kind of feeds itself. But the optimistic view for me was, how many students are actually aware of the benefits?
“In the context of climate anxiety and people thinking the world’s about to end, there seems to be a lot of knowledge within the younger generation that we might not be aware of,” Woolf shared, explaining why she is passionate about understanding what the next generation is thinking.
After completing an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture, she worked across a range of projects—from residential neighbourhoods to public parks—before earning a Chevening Scholarshipto study urban design and city planning at UCL. There, her master’s dissertation on London’s region’s canals became a formative experience. “I had never seen canals before, and I kind of fell in love with post-industrial canals as public spaces. That’s where it all started for me,” she recalls.
During her master’s dissertation, she had the option of completing either a dissertation, a research project, or a design project. Coming from a design background, she chose to challenge herself by taking the written route and focused her work on canals in London.
“I'd never seen canals before, and I fell in love with post-industrial canal as a public place, and that's where it all started for me. From the time I started doing that research, which was about how people use the canal, and how this relates to its design, I knew this is what I wanted to do, and knew I was going to do a PhD,” she said.
Listening to Place: Walking Interviews in Green Space
This was the first time Woolf utilised the walking interviews method. She walked with participants along the Regents Canals in London, to understand how they experience it and how it relates to the canal’s design. As part of the study, Woolf walked with canal-users from Granary Square to Camden Market asking questions about their activities, perceptions and emotions while walking and cycling along the canal.
Woolf explains her own relationship to the canals. ““It’s man made, but doesn't feel man made at all. They're very unique. They're elongated, especially in London. You can walk along and you're in central London, but you don't feel like you are in central London. You feel like you're out in nature; the water, the vegetation, the wildlife, mostly water farm birds, for me, was quite unique,” she said.
“Biodiversity is not just good for the environment and insects and wildlife, it's good for people,” she said reflecting on how the design encourages a sense of harmony with the environment.
She describes the experience as deeply enjoyable, recalling how the work rarely felt like work at all. Walking alongside participants and listening to their reflections became part of the research itself—an approach that would later resurface in her PhD studies, where she observed participants reconnecting with places they had previously dismissed simply by walking through them again and engaging with the environment in real time.
Walking interviews are a qualitative research method where conversations take place while the researcher and participant move through a physical environment together, often on foot. Rather than sitting in a formal interview setting, participants engage with the discussion while actively experiencing the place being explored.
Researchers have found this approach particularly valuable for studying lived experience, as being immersed in a location can prompt memories, emotions and observations that may not emerge in a traditional interview environment. The method is known for generating rich, place-based insights by allowing people to respond directly to their surroundings in real time, (Evans and Jones, 2011; Braun and Clarke, 2013).
Woolf’s affinity for the natural world began long before her studies and career. “I’ve always loved nature,” she reflects. She describes the place she lives for The Biophilic Blueprint to connect us to place as we speak across Zoom. “Bristol is in the southwest of England, and every second year or so, it wins England's greenest city, and it's not surprising. There's plenty of parks here. There's woodlands around it too.”
She is also a research fellow on the GP4Streets project at the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol), which explores how green, blue and grey infrastructure interventions can improve streets and public environments.
Her recently published conceptual framework, Harnessing our Knowledge of the Relationship Between Experience in Greenspace, Nature Connectedness and Pro-Environmental Behaviour: A Conceptual Framework for Healthy Cities, brings together emerging research on how contact with nature can influence the way people think, feel and act toward the environment.
The research was published in January 2026 with her “incredible team of supervisors” she says, honouring each with a mention of appreciation to their style of research and approach. The team consisted of Professor Danni Sinnett, Director of Studies, UWE Bristol, Dr Issy Bray, UWE Bristol and Dr Fiona Spotswood, University of Bristol.
“My PhD was joint between the Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments (SPE) and the Centre for Public Health and Wellbeing (CPHWB). It was a very good balance, and it was just very cool to have a team of just very strong women as well.”
She says the research can be used as a conceptual framework for healthy cities.
Through walking interviews conducted in greenspace across university campuses, Woolf sought to understand how university students experience greenspace, what draws them into certain environments, and why some spaces resonate more deeply than others. “I really like going out and speaking to people, and particularly doing qualitative methods,” Woolf shares, also explaining why she decided to do qualitative and walking interviews for the study.
The responses reveaeled a wide range of perspectives—an important insight for planners and designers seeking to understand how people truly engage with nature design.
For some students, campus greenspaces offer solitude, grounding and relief from the constant pressure of study and deadlines. For others, the interviews uncovered an unexpected emotional attachment to places they had previously dismissed. In one case, a student who claimed he did not care about a particular green space later admitted, while walking through it, that he would miss it if it disappeared.
One student captured a photo of geese on a patch of grass outside a McDonald’s—an unexpected moment for Woolf that quietly redefined what green space can look like through a student’s eyes.
From the observations and interviews, three key mechanisms emerged—insights that could help shape the future design of campuses, cities and public green spaces, while creating opportunities for people to reconnect with nature and perhaps fall in love with it again.
Contact through visiting greenspaces at Castle Park, Bristol. Photo: Yarden Woolf.
The research: What Counts as Greenspace?
Woolf split her research up into two elements. The interviews took almost a year to conduct interviews and observations to include seasonality, like autumn and winter. “I was lucky. Bristol doesn't snow every year, but there was one snow day on campus. So that was great for my research, because I had photos of students in the snow.”
The interviews involved 27 students, each participating in two interviews between 30-60 minutes. In the first, students submitted 3–5 photos of greenspaces in Bristol. “One student sent a photo of two geese on a patch of grass next to a McDonald’s,” Woolf laughs. “That became their idea of wildlife in a green space. It humbled me and reminded me to see through participants’ eyes.”
The second interview was a walking interview through a chosen greenspace. “This method is powerful because it elicits memories and emotions that don’t surface in an office or survey,” she explains. One student, initially indifferent to the Royal Fort Gardens, expressed attachment and care only after walking through it. “Being there activated a connection that wasn’t evident beforehand.”
Woolf recruited students from two universities to capture a broader range of greenspace experiences and campus environments.
“It wasn't a comparative study, though. We weren't comparing between the two. It was about getting as many different types of green spaces covered,” she explains. “This is where my background helped me, because I used to design these types of spaces. It was helpful in choosing where to observe.”
The study included four greenspaces at UWE Bristol and two at the University of Bristol, each selected for their differing scales, layouts and landscape characteristics. Some spaces were heavily paved and hard-landscaped, while others featured softer, more vegetation-rich environments. Rather than choosing what she personally considered the “best” spaces, Woolf aimed to represent a variety of designs and ways people might interact with them.
The decision to recruit students from both universities was also shaped by the contrasting social and spatial dynamics of each institution. UWE Bristol operates largely as a campus university on the outskirts of the city, while the University of Bristol is embedded within the urban fabric of central Bristol, particularly around Clifton.
“They’re different social demographics,” Woolf says. “The University of Bristol attracts wealthier students and is more of a city university, while UWE is a campus university with generally lower rents and a different student experience.”
The interviews themselves were intentionally open-ended. Students were asked to submit photographs of greenspaces meaningful to them, without being given strict definitions or expectations.
“I wanted to keep it very open, so there was nothing leading about it. That’s why we got such a wide range,” Woolf says. “It was interesting to see what students considered green spaces.”
One student submitted a photo of a green wall, while another shared an image of two geese standing on a patch of grass beside a McDonald’s.
“I thought that was fascinating, and I was humbled by this, because I was not expecting it,” she recalls. “At first I was like, is this a green space? But then I was like, yes, it is. If it is for the participant, then it is for the study.”
For Woolf, these moments became an important reminder about the value of qualitative research and the need to remain open to perspectives outside professional assumptions.
“That’s where some of the research magic happens — when you try to be open-minded and see what you're studying through your participant’s eyes,” she says. “Coming from about seven to eight years in practice, I came in thinking I knew what a green space was. It was really interesting to realise maybe I didn’t know as well as I thought.”
For the second stage of the research, Woolf conducted walking interviews through one of the selected greenspaces with each participant — a method she first explored during her earlier research on London’s Regent’s Canal.
“Because I did walking interviews on the Regent’s Canal, I knew how powerful they can be in eliciting emotions, feelings and memories that people don’t necessarily remember unless they’re in the place,” she explains.
One participant initially claimed he would not care if the Royal Fort Gardens at the University of Bristol disappeared and said green spaces were not an important part of his life. However, his perspective shifted once the walking interview began.
“When we walked there, he said so many positive things about it,” Woolf recalls. “He said, ‘Now that I’m here, I would mind if this place wasn’t there.’”
For Woolf, the moment demonstrated the emotional depth that can emerge when people physically reconnect with a place.
“I think that really demonstrates the power of these methods,” she says. “But it can work the other way as well.”
Following the interviews and observations, Woolf identified three key mechanisms that emerged throughout the research: contact, noticing and nostalgia.
Noticing details in greenspaces at The Farmhouse, UWE Bristol. Photo: Yarden Woolf.
Mechanism 1, Contact: Everyday Encounters With Nature
“Contact is the most self-explanatory one. If we want people to have a relationship with nature, they need to be in nature, or see nature, at least,” Woolf explains.
The research found that contact with nature within university settings often took simple, everyday forms: studying beneath a tree, walking between buildings along vegetated pathways, sitting in courtyards, or spending breaks in quieter pockets of campus greenspace. While seemingly ordinary, these repeated moments of exposure and pause became important foundations for emotional connection, wellbeing and environmental awareness.
Woolf found that many students were already highly aware of the mental health and wellbeing benefits associated with green spaces, intentionally seeking them out for moments of restoration, reflection and escape from academic pressure.
“I think, not surprisingly, with the global mental health crisis—and university students are unfortunately at the top of that, particularly post-COVID—a lot of them were very aware of the benefits of green spaces,” she says.
“They’re quite aware of the benefits of green spaces. So they go into green spaces to gain those benefits, whether on weekends and evenings with friends, alone, or even between classes.”
However, the research also revealed that simply being near nature was only part of the experience. Emotional attachment, care and connection often deepened when students actively engaged with their surroundings through what Woolf later identified as “noticing”.
Mechanism 2, Noticing: When Attention Becomes Connection
While presence is essential, Woolf found that active attention—what she calls “noticing” — deepens the connection between people and place.
“A lot of the emotional attachment and place attachment, and starting to care, comes when people are actively noticing,” she says. “That’s where the noticing mechanism comes in.”
For many students, this manifested through quiet and reflective activities such as journaling, meditation, breathing exercises, or simply spending intentional time outdoors between classes. Through repeated contact with greenspaces, students became more attentive to sensory details, emotional responses and personal memories connected to place.
It was within these moments of slowing down and paying attention that students often developed stronger emotional relationships with the natural environments around them — laying the foundation for deeper care, attachment and environmental awareness.
Yarden Woolf in Scotland.
Mechanism 3, Nostalgia: Memory, Belonging and Place
Perhaps the most surprising mechanism to emerge from the research was nostalgia, Woolf says.
“It was also the one I wasn’t expecting. It just emerged from the study,” she reflects.
For Woolf, nostalgia extended beyond simple memories of the past. Instead, it revealed how childhood experiences, cultural backgrounds and emotional associations with nature can shape a person’s sense of belonging and connection to place.
“It’s about childhood, but not just any kind of past memories,” she explains. “That manifested really strongly with international students who sometimes come from different climates or different cultures where green spaces look different, mean something different, or sometimes mean less.”
The findings also highlighted the importance of recognising cultural differences in how people experience nature and public space.
“We forget in the UK that people grow up with nature and hiking, and it’s quite deeply rooted in culture here,” Woolf says. “That’s not necessarily true for other places. When you’re planning for cities and universities that attract international students and migration more broadly, you’re not just planning for the local community or for people who were necessarily born there.”
For some students, particular landscapes or environmental features triggered strong emotional responses connected to home. Woolf recalls one participant from Ukraine who had grown up near forests and found herself repeatedly drawn to the Clifton Suspension Bridge because of its backdrop of surrounding woodland.
“That really made her feel like she belonged in Bristol,” Woolf explains. “It made her want to come there all the time, spend more time there, and feel connected to and care for that place.”
For Woolf, these moments revealed how nostalgia can transform memory into emotional attachment, strengthening people’s relationship with both place and the natural world.
Practical Planning for Campus Greenspace Design
Woolf’s findings extend beyond theory, offering practical insights for campus planners, designers and university administrators. Together, they reveal ways campuses — and urban spaces more broadly — can better support people engaging with greenspaces. As explored throughout the research, the hope is that these spaces can encourage nature connectedness and, in turn, foster a more caring relationship with the planet, alongside the wellbeing benefits of spending quality time in nature.
Provision and Signposting
Awareness of green spaces is crucial, says Dr Woolf.
“One of the most interesting things, and again, this is not groundbreaking, but I have to start with it is provision and signposting, at least for students.”
“If we want people to derive benefits from green space, and they need to know that they exist.”
Woolf explains that the University of Bristol’s greenspaces are often easier for students to discover because they are surrounded by university buildings and integrated into everyday campus movement. At UWE Bristol, however, some spaces remained hidden from students altogether.
“At UWE, some of these green spaces are hidden, which is nice for the students that like to kind of escape from the campus, but there's no signage, necessarily, so some of them are just not aware that they're there.”
The findings suggest that simple interventions such as signage, pathways and campus maps can significantly increase awareness, accessibility and engagement with greenspaces.
Observation session at University of Bristol. Photo: Yarden Woolf.
Design for “Noticing”
Another key finding centred on what Woolf describes as “noticing” — the sensory and emotional awareness that develops through direct engagement with natural environments. She found that natural elements including water, vegetation, birdsong and insect sounds often triggered familiarity, comfort and emotional connection, helping students feel grounded and connected to place even within busy urban environments.
“One of the main things that came up is how important natural elements are,” she says. “Different sensory cues — for instance, the sound of running water — enabled students to connect with places, even if they were in noisy city centres.
“This was particularly noticeable for students who grew up near oceans, seas, rivers or other water bodies, both international and domestic students.”
For many students, it was not necessarily large wilderness experiences that mattered most, but the smaller sensory encounters within everyday spaces—“just the presence of water, the presence of vegetation, anything that attracted bird and bird song and insects and the noise from insects.”
“It's not groundbreaking in what we need,” Woolf reflects. “But we do need these elements to enable ‘noticing’.”
The research closely aligns with principles of biophilic design, where layered sensory experiences—sound, movement, biodiversity, fresh air and light—strengthen human connection to nature. Woolf also found that physical infrastructure played an important role in supporting these moments of pause and reflection.
“If we want to enable people for noticing activities, they need benches, chairs, a place to sit, a place to relax. Some students can relax anywhere. Others need more hidden corners within a green space. Some are fine with loud road noises. Others want a more secluded spot.”
Her observations suggest there is no singular way people engage with nature. Instead, successful greenspaces create a balance between openness, refuge, movement and stillness.
Encouraging Nostalgia and Emotional Connection
The research also revealed how memory and nostalgia shape emotional attachment to place. For many students, greenspaces became emotionally significant not only because of what they offered in the present moment, but because of what they reminded people of—childhood environments, familiar landscapes, cultural connections and experiences of home.
Perhaps most strikingly, nostalgia emerged strongly among international students, particularly those who grew up around very different climates, ecosystems or relationships to nature. For some, a landscape feature as simple as woodland, water or birdsong triggered a sense of familiarity and belonging within an otherwise unfamiliar city.
One student from Ukraine, who had grown up near forests, found herself repeatedly drawn to the Clifton Suspension Bridge because of its backdrop of surrounding woods. The space reminded her of home and deepened her sense of connection to Bristol.
Woolf’s research suggests that people engage with nature in deeply individual ways, meaning more diverse and layered greenspaces are more likely to support a broader range of emotional, sensory and social needs. In turn, these environments create more opportunities for people to form meaningful and lasting connections with place.
Dr Yarden Woolf.
The findings also challenge planners and designers to think beyond aesthetics alone. Spaces that incorporate biodiversity, sensory richness, variation, quiet retreat areas and opportunities for reflection may be more likely to foster emotional attachment and long-term care for the environment.
Beyond the Research: Translating Research into Practice
The paper laid the foundation for much of Woolf’s ongoing research into how people emotionally and behaviourally connect with the natural world.
“We created a framework that shows how these connections work and how they can actually be applied in practice.”
Alongside this, Woolf has also developed new research around what she coins “guerrilla use”—the unofficial and often unintended ways students interact with green spaces.
“It’s when students use spaces in ways planners didn’t necessarily design for,” she explains. “Sitting on a retaining wall instead of a bench, moving furniture around, or reconfiguring a space to make it work for them.
The informal interactions reflect how people can engage with a place.
These behaviours, while informal, reveal important insights into how people naturally want to occupy and interact with space — reinforcing the importance of flexibility and adaptability within campus and urban design.
Further research is already underway says Dr Woolf, including papers focused on nostalgia, walking interviews, and the role of greenspaces in wellbeing, alongside a forthcoming book chapter. Woolf also hopes the findings will contribute to future planning guidance for campus design and public space development.
“Coming from practice, I really value research being applied,” she says. “We’re not writing just for other academics. We’re writing for planners, city councils, and the people designing these places. We want things to actually happen.”
For Woolf, the growing relationship between academia and practice is where the research becomes most meaningful — translating lived experience, observation and emotional connection into healthier, more responsive cities.
Aligning with The Biophilic Blueprint
Dr Yarden Woolf’s research strongly reflects the mission of The Biophilic Blueprint: exploring how human wellbeing, environmental care and our relationship with the built environment are shaped through meaningful connection to nature. Through the mechanisms of contact, noticing and nostalgia, her work reveals how everyday experiences in greenspaces can foster emotional attachment, environmental awareness and a deeper sense of belonging — particularly at a time marked by climate anxiety, urbanisation and the growing “extinction of experience.” Rather than simply advocating for more green space, Woolf’s research highlights the importance of designing environments that invite people to slow down, notice, reflect and reconnect through biodiversity, sensory richness, memory and movement. In doing so, her findings offer an optimistic and practical framework for how campuses, cities and public spaces can support both human wellbeing and long-term care for the natural world.
Comment below: What do you think shapes your own connection to green space the most—proximity, memory or the way you actively use and notice it?
References
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2013). Successful qualitative research: A practical guide for beginners. SAGE.
Capaldi, C. A., Dopko, R. L., & Zelenski, J. M. (2014). The relationship between nature connectedness and happiness: A meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 976. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00976
Evans, J., & Jones, P. (2011). The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place. Applied Geography, 31(2), 849–858.
Heijnen, I., Stewart, E., & Espiner, S. (2022). On the move: The theory and practice of the walking interview method in outdoor education research. Annals of Leisure Research, 25(4), 529–547.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Kinney, P. (2017). Social research update – Walking interviews. https://grandmas-story.eu/media/com_form2content/documents/c3/a203/f38/SRU67.pdf
Lewicka, M. (2011). Place attachment: How far have we come in the last 40 years? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31(3), 207–230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001
Mayer, F. S., & Frantz, C. M. (2004). The connectedness to nature scale: A measure of individuals’ feeling in community with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(4), 503–515. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.10.001
Veitch, J., Flowers, E., Ball, K., Deforche, B., & Timperio, A. (2020). Exploring children’s views on important park features: A qualitative study using walk-along interviews. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(13), 4625.
Woolf, Y. (2025). How UWE Bristol students use and experience campus greenspaces. Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments Blog. https://www.uwe.ac.uk/spe/blog
Woolf, Y. (2025). Walking interviews as a research method. Centre for Sustainable Planning and Environments Blog. https://www.uwe.ac.uk/spe/blog
Woolf, Y., Sinnett, D., Bray, I., & Spotswood, F. (2025). Harnessing our knowledge of the relationship between experience in greenspace, nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour: A conceptual framework for healthy cities. [Journal/Publisher pending]
Woolf, Y., et al. (accepted 2026). Students’ agency in campus greenspace: How guerrilla use informs the design of university greenspace. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.
Woolf, Y. (n.d.). https://www.gp4streets.org