The perceived restorativeness of gardens - assessing the restorativeness of a mixed built and natural scene type.

摘要

Natural environments have been found more restorative than built environments, but studies have also highlighted mixed built and natural environments. Studies were conducted in Sweden to examine the perceived restorativeness of gardens and evaluate the performance of the perceived restorativeness scale (PRS) when applied to 2 examples from the same mixed built natural scene type rather than to a contrast between the built and natural types. The results showed that the gardens were perceived restorative and the PRS also discriminated between the 2 gardens. This pointed to the PRS asca useful tool and emphasized the shortcomings of broad scene type definitions. The results also showed that one scene type can include environments that are significantly different in perceived restorativeness. This underlines the need to collect data on a greater number of different scene types and examples within each type and to have more controlled definitions of content and scene types to understand the relationship between the physical expression of a place and its potential of being restorative. The results showed that the PRS is sensitive to place characteristics at the subscale level, showing a high being away score for both gardens and a scope score that differed substantially. The results showed a high correlation between restorativeness and preference.