Study on the Factors Affecting the Restorativeness of Pedestrian Streets in Winter Cities

Abstract

Faced with an increasingly tense global public mental health crisis, the restorativeness of built environments has attracted much attention. The outbreak of COVID-19 outbreak impeded the balanced physical, psychological, and social development of individuals, inducing and exacerbating mental health problems. Because of the high incidence of seasonal mental illness in a winter city, the health risk is more intense than in other climate areas. Therefore, special attention needs to be paid to health-supportive environments that are closely related to daily life in the design and planning processes of cold land cities. As a critical part of the city, streets have a significant impact on the public's behavior and psychological perception, especially when there is no traffic interference and users are completely exposed to the environment on pedestrian streets, which will more directly affect people's psychological feelings. Therefore, from the perspective of the user's psychological perception, based on the particularity of cold climates and the users' needs, this study provides a system of influencing factors for the restorativeness of pedestrian streets in winter cities, including visuality, mobility, ecology, and usability factors. Subsequently, three types of pedestrian streets in Harbin, a typical winter city, were selected to collect and analyze multi-source data on various pedestrian street factors. The study considers users as the main body of evaluation to measure the public perception level of the three types of pedestrian streets in cold and non-cold seasons using the Perception Recovery Scale. Finally, the correlation between various factors and public perception is discussed using a geographic detector model to explore the factors influencing the restorativeness of pedestrian streets in winter cities and the correlation degree of various factors. These findings can help develop targeted design strategies to improve pedestrian street design for better restorativeness.