Cities are environments in which people like to live and work. Yet, cities can also be stressful environments. Natural environments help people to relax.
So, it would be logical if we brought more nature into cities. Cities have always had green spaces (cemeteries, allotments, parks), but in present-day society many people are too busy and allow themselves too little time for going to a park. By better integrating natural elements into our everyday surroundings, nature is brought, as it were, to people instead of the other way round. In every street, for example there are some green spaces, whether it is a tree, flowerbed or hedge; forms of green spaces that people are likely to encounter in their daily lives (unawares).
This research studies how we can design green streets as well as possible, so that it helps people to relieve their daily urban stress as well as possible.
Nature in cities serves a multitude of purposes, one of which is that it provides citizens opportunities to recover from stressful daily urban life. Such stress recovering effects of nature can be experienced through urban green, which in urban planning and design contexts can be divided into large natural areas - urban green space - and small scale elements in urban streets: the urban greenscape. The current study aims at finding the extent to which various small scale natural elements in residential streets and their possible configurations influence citizens' preferences for those streets. The research was conducted through an online survey in four cities in the Netherlands (n = 4,956). It used stated choice methods in a virtual environment street design. The method yielded high quality data, indicating that the use of virtual environments and imagery is suitable for stated choice research in the built environment. The results show that especially trees very strongly influence preference, indicating they deserve more attention and space in cities. Grass, which is typically favored by local governments, and vertical green have the smallest effects in residential streets. Furthermore, the concept of greenscape intensity is introduced as the intensities of both the element and the configuration were found to be highly relevant. The results clearly show that the higher either of these intensities, the more likely a respondent will prefer the greenscape design. Furthermore, low intensity on the one can be compensated by high intensity on the other. With these results, urban design professionals and local governments can better trade-off the different aspects of costs versus positive effects of urban greenscape designs.
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