Traditional campus indoor spaces, by necessity and function, provide ample opportunities for structured learning experiences that draw upon students’ direct attention. However, a student’s learning experience is not often balanced by unstructured or structured opportunities for drawing forth effortless, indirect attention that occur in human-nature interactions (Valles-Planells, et. al, 2014)

Most American universities are situated on large number of acres (up to 28,000 acres) and function like miniature cities in their complexity of urban-natural configurations to provide a dynamic sensory experience

Interaction with natural environments (especially green nature) employs faculties of concentration not normally used – involuntary ones – thus allowing the neural mechanisms underlying directed attention a chance to rest and replenish.

Subsequently, we expand the campus ‘learning environment’ to also include a university’s open space, we also include in our definition of nature, the concept of a “landscape.” Valles-Planells, Galinan, & Van Eetvelde (2014) define a landscape as a “holistic, spatial, and mental dynamic entity, which is the result of people-place interactions” (p. 1).

As an influential landscape designer of early campuses, Fredrick Law Olmstead worked with the philosophy that the physical landscape features had a direct impact on shaping human behavior, and offer students an active, experiential education versus passive or theoretical learning.

By preserving and suitably integrating open spaces into the green infrastructure, universities can add value and quality to the campus environment by: forging a campus identity, creating a sense of community, curbing escalating campus density, serving social and recreational needs, providing environmental benefits, and facilitating fundraising and recruitment of both faculty and students (Griffith, 1994).

Today the campus open space still remains a significant center for teaching and learning for students in natural resources management, sustainability/ecology, agriculture, forestry, etc. and more recently, a focus on environmental education and sustainable practices (Painter, et. al., 2013).

The advent of land-grant institutions through the Morrill Act of 1862 required new buildings to be built with laboratories and observatory space for agricultural, technical education, and scientific research (Eckert, 2012; Turner, 1984).

The college experience is a stimulating and demanding time in a student’s life where a multitude of curricular and extra-curricular situations require frequent and heavy use of direct, focused attention and concentration (Wentworth & Middleton, 2014).

Well-designed and connected networks of indoor and open spaces on campuses can be key, yet typically overlooked catalysts, in student learning and a strong influence on students’ initial and longstanding experiences that promote a sense of belonging to the learning community (Boyer, 1987; Greene, 2013).

Americans expect a university campus to look different than other places (Gumprecht, 2007) and that the campus “expresses something about the quality of academic life, as well as its role as a citizen of the community in which it is located” (Dober, 1996, p.47).

Therefore, we propose that the natural landscape of a university campus is an attentional learning resource for its students.

Social norms encouraged some to threaten undesirable persons with violence if they were to enter or remain in certain spaces.

In some neighborhoods, people can park on the street only if they live in the neighborhood and have a residential parking permit or are given a guest permit by a resident.

It was not illegal to tear apart poor neighborhoods at the time that urban renewal was in full swing, and the resultant features of the built environment are now hard to change

Research shows that the opposition to transit is often motivated by the desire to block access by certain “undesirable” people who ride transit (for example, people of color and the poor).

The strategy, according to police, was that “buyers would fear ‘driving all over looped streets, stopping and turning around, trying to find drugs with the possibility of having their nice cars, their jewelry, their money ripped off as they look.’”

Although these walls are generally put in place by private developers to keep out those whom they do not want to access their communities, local governments have the power to prohibit these barriers

Historically, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) provided financing for a new development project only if the neighborhood was sufficiently residential and racially segregated.94 In the case of the Eight Mile Wall, the FHA would not finance the new housing project unless the wall was constructed because the FHA believed that the proposed new development was too close to an existing black one.95

Moses set forth specifications for bridge overpasses on Long Island, which were designed to hang low so that the twelve-foot tall buses in use at the time could not fit under them.81 “One consequence was to limit access of racial minorities and low-income groups”—who often used public transit—”to Jones Beach, Moses’s widely acclaimed public park.

By including these features in a common interest community, a developer can deter unwanted potential residents—generally poor people and people of color—from buying homes in that development

That a highway divides two neighborhoods limits the extent to which the neighborhoods integrate. That a town has a square, easily accessible with a diversity of shops, increases the integration of residents in that town

43 They tend to make decisions that focus on urban infrastructure needs without considering the impact that such decisions might have on citizens.

However, a number of social scientists and planning scholars have argued that “monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, becomes just another part of the landscape.”