How a Forest Remembers: Childhood Memories and Hidden Divides in Indonesia’s Urban Jungle

Deep in the hills above Bandung, Indonesia, a sprawling forest park is quietly revealing something profound about how human beings connect with nature—and why some of those connections may be quietly breaking down. Taman Hutan Raya Ir. H. Djuanda, known locally as Tahura, is one of West Java’s most cherished green spaces, a place where families picnic on weekends, tourists explore Dutch and Japanese colonial-era caves, and trail runners wind through tropical canopy. But according to a new study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, this urban forest is far more than a scenic escape. It is a living laboratory of memory, identity, and well-being—one where the same trees mean radically different things to different visitors.

The research, led by Kevin Muhamad Lukman, Eldo Delamontano, and corresponding author Taqiy Gusdi Baitulloh of Universitas Padjadjaran, together with colleagues in Indonesia, Japan, and Australia, surveyed 218 visitors to Tahura using a mixed-methods design that combined perception questionnaires with structural equation modeling—a statistical technique that allows researchers to map causal pathways between attitudes, experiences, and outcomes. The team wanted to know something deceptively simple: what do people actually get out of an urban forest, and how do those benefits differ between locals who visit regularly and tourists encountering the landscape for the first time?

What they found was a landscape of invisible divides. Visitors across the board showed strong recognition of what ecologists call cultural ecosystem services—the sensory and experiential gifts a forest provides: fresh air, birdsong, shade, the psychological balm of being surrounded by green. But the forest’s regulating functions—carbon sequestration, water retention, microclimate cooling, the very ecological machinery that makes urban forests central to climate adaptation strategies—remained almost entirely invisible to the people walking beneath the canopy. This gap, the researchers argue, represents a fundamental disconnect between ecological planning and social interpretation. Planners may champion Tahura as climate infrastructure; visitors experience it as a place of beauty and recreation. Both are correct, but the asymmetry matters for how the forest is valued, funded, and protected.

The recreational patterns captured in the survey paint Tahura as a hybrid landscape, serving two overlapping constituencies simultaneously. For Bandung residents, it functions as everyday nature—a proximate, affordable retreat woven into weekly routines. For non-local visitors, it operates as a tourism destination, a novel landscape to be consumed and photographed. This duality is characteristic of urban forests across the Global South, where green spaces often bear recreational, tourism, and ecological burdens at once, yet most research on such landscapes has historically focused on cities in Europe and North America. By centering an Indonesian case, the study fills a conspicuous gap in the literature on how social-ecological systems function in rapidly urbanizing tropical contexts.

The most striking finding, however, lies in the distinct well-being pathways the structural model uncovered. For local visitors, well-being emerged from ecological awareness built through repeated engagement—an accumulated, almost relational familiarity with the landscape that deepens over time. Tourists, by contrast, derived well-being primarily from affective uplift linked to novelty: the immediate emotional lift of encountering somewhere new, beautiful, and different from home. In statistical terms, the two groups arrived at post-visit well-being through entirely different routes, suggesting that a single management strategy designed around one type of visitor may systematically fail the other.

Then there is the paradox of childhood memory. A substantial body of environmental psychology research holds that experiencing nature as a child fosters pro-environmental attitudes and stronger nature connection in adulthood. The Tahura data confirmed part of this: among tourists, childhood nature experience did indeed increase ecosystem awareness. But among long-term local users, the effect ran in an unexpected and sobering direction. Childhood memories of the forest—memories formed decades ago, when the landscape may have looked, sounded, and felt different—contributed to what the researchers describe as displacement. When today’s conditions no longer align with the environmental memories carried into adulthood, long-time users can experience a kind of estrangement, feeling displaced from a place they thought they knew.

This concept of environmental memory, central to the paper, reframes urban forests as archives of personal and collective history. Tahura’s landscape contains geological features and wartime relics—the Dutch and Japanese caves that draw dark-tourism interest—layered alongside ecological change driven by development pressure, visitation, and natural succession. A visitor who grew up beside the park in the 1990s walks a different forest, cognitively and emotionally, than a tourist arriving from Jakarta for the first time in 2026. The researchers argue that sustainability in such landscapes hinges on aligning ecological functionality with these socially constructed meanings, which are shaped by what they call diverse temporalities of use—the different timescales over which different user groups come to know a place.

The methodological machinery behind these conclusions is worth noting. The team’s survey instrument probed perceptions of ecosystem services, perceived threats, recreational patterns, childhood nature experience, and post-visit well-being. They then applied partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), an approach increasingly favored in environmental psychology and tourism research for its ability to test hypothesized relationships among latent variables—constructs like “ecological awareness” or “environmental memory” that cannot be directly observed but must be inferred from multiple survey indicators. The sample of 218 visitors met established minimum-size criteria for PLS-SEM, allowing the authors to distinguish statistically robust pathways from noise.

For urban planners and forest managers, the implications extend well beyond Bandung. Cities across Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America are investing heavily in urban greening as a climate adaptation strategy, and the international literature is full of quantifications of what urban forests deliver: heat mitigation, stormwater regulation, biodiversity habitat, carbon storage. What the Tahura study demonstrates is that none of those benefits are socially legible by default. The invisible regulating services—the ones that matter most for climate resilience—are precisely the ones visitors do not perceive. If public support for urban forests depends on perceived value, then a forest valued only for its scenery and recreation may be politically vulnerable, even when its ecological functions are performing superbly.

The study also complicates the standard narrative around nature contact and well-being. The well-documented finding that childhood nature experience shapes adult environmental attitudes is often deployed as a simple prescription: get children outside. But the displacement effect among long-term local users suggests that memory is not a one-way asset. Landscapes change, and the people who loved them in an earlier form can feel alienated by what they have become. Managing an urban forest, on this view, is partly an exercise in narrative care—acknowledging that regulars’ grief over a changed landscape is real, meaningful, and consequential for stewardship behavior.

Ethically, the research was conducted with informed consent from all respondents, approved by the Ethics Committee of Universitas Padjadjaran, and supported by the park’s management board during data collection. The authors, who span the Graduate School and Sustainable Tourism Study Center at Universitas Padjadjaran, STIEPAR Yapari, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Kobe University in Japan, and Deakin University in Australia, report no competing interests. Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Ultimately, the Tahura study offers a message that resonates far beyond one park in West Java: urban forests in the Global South are not merely ecological assets with people attached, but social-ecological infrastructures whose futures depend on reconciling what ecosystems do with what people believe, remember, and feel. A forest can cool a city, store carbon, and shelter biodiversity—yet its survival may rest on something far less quantifiable: whether the locals who love it still recognize it, and whether the tourists who pass through it leave caring about what it does when no one is watching.