Evaluating restoration in urban green spaces: Does setting type make a difference?

By A. V. D. Berg, Anna Jorgensen, E. Wilson. 2014

394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A growing body of research suggests that natural settings are more effective in providing restoration from depleted emotional and cognitive resources than built settings. However, there is a lack of evidence-based guidelines on which options for urban green space design and management are most effective in providing restoration. To address this need, the present study examined the restorative impacts of urban public spaces differing in naturalness. After having been pre-stressed by watching a scary movie, 102 participants were randomly assigned to viewing one of four photo/video presentations depicting an urban street, parkland, tended woodland, or wild woods. Self-reported mood and restorative state were measured at baseline, after the stressor and after viewing the environment. After controlling for stress reactivity, participants in the natural conditions showed stronger recovery on all dependent measures than those in the urban street condition. Differences in recovery among the natural settings did not reach significance. Keyword analysis revealed that the wild woods were described as more arousing than the parkland and tended woodland. There was substantial variation in recovery of vitality within natural conditions, which was related to perceptions of naturalness. In general, the findings suggest that restoration in urban public spaces depends on individual perceptions and needs as well as physical characteristics of the setting.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a03d26f79d44f0b1803bf8c988a2d05450f0ccf

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In Environmental Engineering

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Citations in the corpus

The Role of Methodological Choices in the Effects of Experimental Exposure to Simulated Natural Landscapes on Human Health and Cognitive Performance: A Systematic Review (2020, background): “…( M. S. Berry et al., 2014, 2015; Jenkin et al., 2018; Pretty et al., 2005; van der Wal et al., 2013); energy or vitality (Kjellgren & Buhrkall, 2010; Ryan et al., 2010; van den Berg et al., 2014); and aggression or prosocial behavior (Eggert et al., 2015; Nadkarni et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017).”
Trees, grass, or concrete? The effects of different types of environments on stress reduction (2020, background): “Van den Berg et al. (2014) likewise observed a significant pairwise difference in recovery from NA after exposure to a city street versus a park, while Gatersleben and Andrews (2013) reported that positive moods increased significantly more for people who walked through high-prospect, low-refuge…”
40-second green roof views sustain attention: The role of micro-breaks in attention restoration (2015, result): “Ours is the first study to examine the attention restoring benefits of green roof vegetation and adds support to recent research showing attention restoration benefits across different types of urban vegetation (van den Berg et al., 2014).”
Perception and preference of trees: A psychological contribution to tree species selection in urban areas (2016, background): “…(Taylor et al., 2015), greater physiological stress recovery (Jiang et al., 2014a) and self-reported stress-recovery (Jiang et al., 2014b; Van den Berg et al., 2014), a reduced number of small for gestational age births (Donovan et al., 2011), and social cohesion (Holtan et al., 2014).”
The Wellbeing Benefits Associated with Perceived and Measured Biodiversity in Australian Urban Green Spaces (2019, methodology): “[15] and [45] Experiment Recovery from induced stress in different environments (videos of urban green and built sites) 102 United Kingdom Differences in wildness and/or structural variation and/or vegetation density.”