Towards Delivering Restorative Street Design Principles in Shanghai, China

This thesis explores the restorative opportunities that can be delivered to urban inhabitants through their routinely used urban street settings in the context of high-density urban development. This is important because despite the obvious benefits accompanied with high-density urban development, numerous urban stressors also come with it. Psychological issues such as depression, stress and mental fatigue facilitate people’s desire to contact with nature for seeking a period of recovery. However, the diminishing nature resources in urbanisation process constrained the creation of and access to the sort of green vegetated spaces conventionally associated with restorative experience. This research sets out from exploring solutions for this dilemma and contributes to delivering an efficient way of providing people with restorative opportunities in an everyday urban setting – street, in a typical megacity, Shanghai in China. Restorative potential of urban street is a rather overlooked part in the long development of restorative environment research. Urban streets are essential components of urban outdoor spaces that are easily accessible to people. Any restorative potential urban street environments have (or can be designed to have) can have a significant impact in urban daily life. This research proposes that there is a necessity in exploring restorative benefits of urban streets under the current circumstance. Moreover, it asserts that the restorative benefits of street should be delivered differently to conventional restorative settings since they are not spaces simply created for leisure purposes. Street has multiple functions and characteristics other than bringing users with restorative experiences, thus the delivery of street restorative quilt should be achieved without compromising its other necessary qualities. Therefore, users’ street restorative expectations are assumed to be an essential standard in the delivering of street restorative potential. This research devotes itself to firstly justify the significance and necessity of exploring street restorative potential and establishes its conceptual framework through investigating the overlaps between urban street design and restorative environment research. In order to meet the fundamental aim of developing a Restorative Street Design Approach (RSDA) for providing people with restorative experiences according to their expectations, a multi-method approach including document analysis, case study, questionnaire and interview is used. The whole process is designed into three consecutive stages. The first stage investigated people’s expectations of having restorative experiences in different types of urban streets using a developed restorative measurement instrument, Restorative Component Scale (RCS). This research then attempted to bridge users’ restorative perceptions with street design attributes in the second stage by constructing the Street Restorative Measurement Framework (SRMF). SRMF includes restorative related street design indicators identified from the literature and validated using an on-site questionnaire-based survey. The last important stage discussed possible restorative design instructions based on information obtained in previous two stages, including: users’ evaluations on the expected and current street restorativeness, as well as the relationship between restorative perceptions (measured with RCS) and restorative related street design indictors (measured with SRMF). The whole research process is conducted in the context of Shanghai, therefore four typical Shanghai street types classified in Shanghai Street Design Guidelines are focused and representative case-study streets are selected. In such respect, this study takes a step forward in broadening the scope of restorative environment research, and to understand the difference between restorative streets and conventional restorative settings. More important, this study has managed to bridge between peoples’ restorative perceptions and street design aspect, so that necessary design interventions can be developed according to their relationships. It also confirmed that people’s restorative experiences in different types of street environment do vary with each other and their restorative expectations on these different streets reveal differences as well. This research is carried out through a step-by-step procedure, of which each stage was founded on the outcome of the last one and responded to issues that emerged in the previous. The most important research outcome, Restorative Street Design Approach (RSDA), can not only be used as an integrated process to provide restorative street design solutions, but can also become an independent tool in many other aspects of street design practices. The process of developing RSDA also illustrates an example of applying perceptive qualities in practical environmental design.