Landscape and Urban Planning最新文献

Valuing nature through attention to urban greening offers some remedy to ‘Extinction of Experience’ – the decline in diversity and quality of people’s relationships to nature. Unfortunately, while the role and value of greenspaces are increasingly recognised, recognition and valuing does not always translate into beneficial experiences for urban dwellers. This study examined people’s relationships to greenspaces in the central business district (CBD) of Liverpool, New South Wales, Australia. Liverpool is a rapidly growing hub in outer metropolitan Sydney, where provision of greenspaces is generally acknowledged as inadequate. Space for plants is limited in city CBDs and these environments are especially challenging places to green, meaning that the quality of vegetation available for users is also often limited. Here, we report on an online survey conducted over the summer of 2019–2020, coinciding with the catastrophic Australian ‘black summer’ bushfires. It explored how people valued, used and experienced existing greenspaces in the CBD. Quantitative and qualitative results from 196 respondents illustrate that although most people agree on the benefits of greenspace, value it positively and use it regularly, three persistent concerns mediate their experiences: lack of shade, poor maintenance, and poor facilities. Further, and in addition to within space variation, experiences of greenspaces are negatively influenced by distance travelled and other barriers to what might otherwise be quality spaces. As the urban environment of Liverpool’s CBD undergoes rapid transformation to a higher activity (business/retail/services) and denser residential environment, there is an opportunity to translate the differences between values and experiences illustrated here to improve the design and quality of future greenspace. More broadly, this study indicates why the spatial dimensions of people’s relationships to urban nature requires more explicit and critical consideration within experience research.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread repercussions, affecting all aspects of society, from global economics to everyday social interactions. Due to the significant uncertainty caused by the pandemic, many individuals sought solace from nature. Freshwater environments, or inland blue spaces, are one type of natural environment that may have acted as a vital public health resource for communities during the pandemic. This research used semi-structured interviews combined with narrative analysis to capture detailed insight into the impact of, and nuanced benefits and challenges associated with, accessing inland blue spaces over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants from a range of backgrounds across Scotland were involved to determine the influence of their health and ‘shielding’ status on inland blue space experiences. In the initial stages of the pandemic, those who were taking shielding precautions described experiencing a heightened awareness of, and anxiety towards, other users of inland blue spaces. However, across the sample, individuals emphasised the overall beneficial impact of accessing freshwater areas for maintaining mental and physical wellbeing levels during the pandemic. Positive health outcomes were achieved through participating in a wide range of leisure and recreational opportunities at inland blue spaces. The research further justifies the value of accessing inland blue spaces and demonstrates the benefits of integrating access and exposure to natural environments into future pandemic response strategies. The qualitative insight also highlights the need for context-specific landscape management strategies to promote blue space access across user groups and address existing environmental inequalities.

The Attention Restoration Theory (ART) proposed four essential indicators (being away, extent, fascinating, and compatibility) for understanding urban and natural restoration quality. However, previous studies have overlooked the impact of spatial structure (the visual relationships between scene entities) and neighboring environments on restoration quality as they mostly relied on isolated questionnaires or images. This study introduces a spatial-dependent graph neural networks (GNNs) approach to address this gap and explore the relationship between spatial structure and restoration quality at a city scale. Two types of graphs were constructed: street-level graphs using sequential street view images (SVIs) to capture visual relationships between entities and represent spatial structure, and city-level graphs modeling the topological relationships of roads to capture the spatial features of neighboring entities, integrating perceptual, spatial, and socioeconomic features to measure restoration quality. The results demonstrated that spatial-dependent GNNs outperform traditional models, achieving an accuracy (Acc) of 0.742 and an F1 score of 0.740, indicating their exceptional ability to capture features of adjacent spaces. Ablation experiments further revealed the substantial positive impact of spatial structure features on the predictive performance for restoration quality. Moreover, the study highlighted the greater significance of naturally relevant entities (e.g., trees) compared to artificial entities (e.g., buildings) in relation to high restoration quality. This study clarifies the association between spatial structure and restoration quality, providing a new perspective to improve urban well-being in the future.

Most urban green spaces (UGSs) today are under intensive maintenance practices, including mowing, cutting and/or chemical input, among many other practices. A growing body of research has questioned the biodiversity value of highly manicured UGSs and suggested the biodiversity potential of reduced-intensity maintenance regimes. However, the evidence for a relationship between maintenance and biodiversity in UGSs is still unclear and yet to be fully understood. This paper systematically reviews 92 published papers to examine this association. Our results showed a complex association between maintenance and biodiversity, mainly dependent on the type of maintenance practice studied and the measurement of biodiversity. Mowing was the predominant maintenance practice that had been investigated, and the evidence from these papers constantly reported a negative association between mowing intensity and various aspects of plant diversity. Similarly, reduced mowing intensity appeared to favour invertebrate diversity, yet many studies also found mixed associations as well as variations across taxonomic groups. The few studies on chemical input showed a negative association between the frequency of use of herbicides/pesticides/insecticides and the diversity of plants, invertebrates, and birds. Nuanced findings, including a non-linear association between maintenance intensity and biodiversity, and temporal/geographical differences, are discussed in this paper. This review offers insights for the development of biodiversity-friendly management strategies, highlighting existing research gaps and the need for further research concerning the maintenance-biodiversity link in UGSs.

In times of rapid urban expansion, urgent demand for housing and simultaneously efforts to minimise the use of urban land are competing objectives. The concept of large housing estates (LHE) has therefore regained interest. This resurgence raises questions about the living conditions within these historically stigmatised complexes. While liveability studies often rely on surveys, we present a globally applicable quantitative approach to assess liveability along the dimensions of walkability, accessibility and built-up morphology. Using geospatial data and a delineation framework based on walking distances, we identify disparities in liveability. We identified three different planning paradigms for LHEs in Germany: the ‘structured and low-dense’ type, the ‘urbanity by density’ type in Western Germany and the ‘socialistic city’ type in Eastern Germany. Our analysis reveals significant differences in accessibility and morphology, that can be attributed to the historical guiding principles. Walkability, in contrast, seems to be influenced more by environmental elements (rivers, forests) and artificial barriers (railway lines, motorways) than by planning paradigms. The ‘structured’ type is characterised by monofunctionality, limited access to urban infrastructure, low building density, but a high proportion of green spaces. The ‘urbanity by density’ type has significantly higher building densities, better accessibility, but less urban green. The ‘socialistic’ urban type could not be clearly categorised, but seems to be a mixture of the other two types. In our analysis, the ‘urbanity by density’ typology predominantly performed the best and, as such, emerges as the most liveable typology, potentially serving as a guiding model for future construction projects.

Raingardens, as part of urban green infrastructure, are being retrofitted in cities worldwide to contribute to urban sustainability and resilience. Technical function is essential, as is aesthetic function to optimise their community acceptance. Unlike technical design guidelines, aesthetic design guidelines for raingardens are limited. Experience of a landscape can contribute to its bio-physical sustainability, however not all landscape aesthetic experiences are pleasurable. Ecologically motivated landscape change might trigger displeasure. Thus, public support for such change depends on understanding how people perceive and experience beauty in that landscape. Four types of aesthetic experience of landscapes have been proposed in a perceptual model of human/environmental transactions, depending on landscape context and the observer’s situational context. These are scenic and ecological aesthetics, and aesthetics of care and effect of knowledge, and attachment and identity. Understanding which type applies to raingardens can inform their design and management to optimise their acceptance when retrofitted into streetscapes. As part of a study into perception of raingardens in four suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, survey data from 139 respondents were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively to reveal perceptual aesthetic experiences. The four aesthetic experiences proposed in the model were identified. An additional, fifth aesthetic, related to affordance, emerged from analysis. Drawing on criteria underlying each aesthetic lens, raingardens can be designed and managed to ensure that any aesthetic experience is favourable. Aesthetic lenses need not compete or be mutually exclusive. Design need not mimic natural forms but can draw attention to nature-based processes within the raingardens and foster environmental ethics.

The soundscape approach considers sound as a resource from a user perspective in the planning of public spaces. While this approach is garnering increased research attention, practitioners rarely integrate sound into their practice beyond noise mitigation. Yet, sound design of public spaces has long been a major focus of sound installation artists, who offer creative site-specific interventions to (re)design public spaces. In this study, we present the systematic evaluation and comparison of four temporary sound installations deployed over two consecutive summers in the same urban public space. The sound installations featured compositions by the artist collective Audiotopie using different combinations of ambient music, nature, and vocal sounds. To measure the effects of the sound installations on users’ experience, we deployed 825 questionnaires including soundscape ratings and sound source listings. The results show that all four sound installations improved the public space’s soundscape, with commonalities (increased calmness and pleasantness, decreased perceived loudness) and specificities (increased sense of being-away for one installation, increased extent-coherence and reduced ratings for chaotic for another) related to compositional and contextual factors, such as the intended design goals, users’ location, or the presence of construction noise. As well, three of the four installations distracted participants from other non-dominant sound sources such as construction works, air conditioners, but also birds and human voices. Overall, the results confirm that sound installations can have a common enhancing effect on the experience of public space users, in addition to specific, tailored effects to reinforce the intended design goals in public spaces.

Urban agriculture has garnered increasing attention as a nature-based solution to achieve urban sustainability. Besides producing quality food for urban residents, urban agriculture could provide diverse and non-tangible ecosystem services that still need to be explored. While prior research has investigated direct stakeholders’ (e.g., urban farmers and growers) perspectives on ecosystem services from urban agriculture, the general public’s perception and underlying factors remain less understood. Such understanding is crucial as the broader community, beyond direct stakeholders, will benefit from urban agriculture and influence the policy and planning that determines its development trajectory. This study investigated the general public’s perception of ecosystem services associated with urban agriculture in the Miami Metropolitan Area, a region experiencing rapid urbanization and emerging urban agriculture development. Among 23 services surveyed, community-level cultural and regulating/supporting services were the most recognized. Conversely, individual-level cultural and provisioning services were the least recognized, underscoring the recognized contribution of urban agriculture to a much larger community and society. Respondents’ demographics, personal experience with farming/gardening, and awareness of urban agriculture in their surroundings were the significant factors, whereas geographic factors (e.g., land-use cluster) exerted less impact. Our findings highlight the perceived multifunctionality of urban agriculture from a public perspective and suggest a nuanced understanding of how urban agriculture contributes to social well-being. Our research provides empirical evidence of public support for urban agriculture development and has critical implications for urban regions interested in integrating urban agriculture to achieve urban sustainability.

Most Europeans reside in urban areas. Due to anthropogenic air and noise pollution, as well as crowdedness, urban residents experience lower levels of well-being and life satisfaction. The literature indicates that greening urban spaces can help to mitigate these negative effects on life satisfaction. This study employs a deep learning approach in conjunction with high-resolution satellite imagery and land use data to obtain the distribution of different green space types in the residents’ neighborhood and examine their effect on life satisfaction. Furthermore, the study sheds light on the indeterminate relationship between mixed urban land use and life satisfaction. In both cases, the study considers heterogeneous age group effects. The empirical results reveal that in Switzerland, (1) solely older residents’ life satisfaction is positively affected by a greener neighborhood; (2) trees and grass located in gardens and parks are the primary drivers of this effect; and (3) the positive association between land use mixture and life satisfaction decreases with age, with no association found for older individuals. These findings provide practical implications for future city planning in Switzerland and other European countries and highlight the importance of considering the neighborhood’s age distribution in this process to maximize the positive impact of urban greenery and mixed land use on residents’ life satisfaction.

Driving in urban environments is an essential part of urban residents’ daily life. We still know little about impacts of a wide range of greenness on driving performance in real urban environments, after controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, driving record, and other environmental factors. This missing knowledge prevents policymakers and professionals from using appropriate planning and design of green landscapes to create safe driving environments for numerous urban residents. This study aimed to address this significant knowledge gap by using real-world driving experiments. Each of thirty-four residents performed seven driving tasks so 238 driving tasks were completed in total. Each task lasted one hour and followed a randomly assigned sequence. Road greenness and other environmental characteristics were analyzed using deep transfer learning semantic segmentation based on live videos (30 frames per second), recorded by a camera positioned to capture the driver’s eye view. A serial communication technology, known as Controller Area Network bus (CANbus), was employed to continuously measure driving performance using four parameters. A series of hierarchical regression analyses yielded three major findings: First, an increased mean of greenness was associated with improved driving performance, as demonstrated by all four parameters. Second, an increased variation of greenness was also associated with better driving performance in three parameters. Finally, the mean of greenness displayed a stronger positive relationship with driving performance than the variation of greenness in three parameters. The findings imply that both the quantity and quality of green landscapes are critical for promoting driving performance in urban areas.