Public opinion surveys investigating the levels of environmental awareness target the most diverse aspects of environment pollution, but they rarely examine people's attitudes to the quantity, ways and forms space itself is used or consumed, especially in the context of residential or settlement patterns. Measuring and interpreting environmental awareness in this way is therefore inadequate, because it does not consider nor register one of the key problems, i.e. people's attitude to the extensive use of residential space. This article analyses the connection between the prevailing long term value orientations about residential preferences in Slovenia, which we associate with an ideology of 'anti-urbanism'. The absence of comprehensive 'ecologisation' of the ways of space consumption for residential purposes in Slovenia is of a structural nature. Its captivity is identified at the ideological, institutional, planning, and individual levels. In surveys on spatial values, we encounter the phenomenon that parochial ruralism is equated with affirmative environmentalism, when respondents consider living in individual family houses environmentally more acceptable than living in multi-dwelling houses in an urban environment.
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