Balancing Street Functionality and Restorative Benefit: Developing an Expectation–Current Approach to Street Design
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
General comments:
The article presents expectation-current approach to assess the street design from restorative point of view. However, authors did not present anything about the cost and maintenance of the sites. It worth to discuss the maintenance cost versus the leisure of these streets in the questionnaire, especially if they are maintained from the taxpayers or directly from residents of the block. In addition, the impact of such street design on the environment and underground utilities and their accessibility.
Here are some specific comments:
Line 137: It worth to put more details about Where/How the questionnaires conducted.
Line 141: It worth to put more details about who was targeted and how they were approached in the online survey.
Line 321: Provide explicit discussion on the results of (B2 and F5). The same is true for (B2 and F4).
Line 395: Is there any expected examples of diverse functions? What kind of functions the street users are expected?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer:
Many thanks for your time and efforts on reading and reviewing our manuscript. Please see below our reponses to your comments:
General comments:
The article presents expectation-current approach to assess the street design from restorative point of view. However, authors did not present anything about the cost and maintenance of the sites. It worth to discuss the maintenance cost versus the leisure of these streets in the questionnaire, especially if they are maintained from the taxpayers or directly from residents of the block. In addition, the impact of such street design on the environment and underground utilities and their accessibility.
Re: We’re very appreciated for your valuable advice. Your suggestions on mentioning about the maintenance do inspire us a lot on possible future studies, but here we would like to make some further explanations on why it should not be included in our study. For ensuring the accuracy of the obtained restorative perceptions, we used the Restorative Component Scale, which has been validated and widely utilised in relevant research, to form our survey questionnaire. The RCS was originally developed from four basic psychological constructs proposed in Attention Restoration Theory, that are being away, fascination, extent and compatibility. Instead of evaluating objective design aspects, for example, maintenance, it adopted a way of presenting how people perceive when they walk in streets. We have made our efforts trying to establish the connection between restorative perceptions and design indicators (which is now a paper in progress), and so far, no evidence has been found between maintenance of people’s perceived restoration in our review of existing literature. We believe it is worthwhile to carry out some independent research further exploring on these directions. For the same reason, we didn't consider the environment and underground facilities as well. In terms of the accessibility, the expectation-current approach focuses more on improving street quality from a micro design perspective, while the accessibility topic normally concerns with land uses, street networks and transportation patterns from a macro or medium level of planning perspective.
Here are some specific comments:
Line 137: It worth to put more details about Where/How the questionnaires conducted.
Re: Many thanks for the suggestion. In order to make the intro concise and straightforward, the detailed information on the survey procedure were added in section 2.3, which is marked in red (see line 275-283).
Line 141: It worth to put more details about who was targeted and how they were approached in the online survey.
Re: Many thanks for the suggestion. In order to make the intro concise and straightforward, the detailed information on the online survey participants were added in section 2.3, which is marked in red (see line 250-256, 261-263).
Line 321: Provide explicit discussion on the results of (B2 and F5). The same is true for (B2 and F4).
Re: Thank you for pointing out the potential confusions this may cause. Descriptions and explanations on the B2, F4 and F5 were added in section 3.1.3. Plese see the lines marked in red (line 331-338)
Line 395: Is there any expected examples of diverse functions? What kind of functions the street users are expected?
Re: Many thanks for the valuable advice. Given that Sujiatun Road mainly contains open frontages with vegetation and exercise facilities set along both sides of the streets, diverse functions should refer to those that are different from the current situations. Examples were added in line 410 which are marked in red.
Reviewer 2 Report
- It is a well-structured article that is trying to understand specific aspects of the urban space and its needs or requirements due to latest post-endemic times. The study follows a well-organized structure, using surveys to define and compare expectations and reality for four “types” of street usage. The results are clear and very well interpreted. In my opinion, the only aspect that is missing in this article is an ecological approach regarding these types of usage, because this can be a valuable point in understanding the street as a public place, made for everyone, human and non-human and can be seen in the first place as a space for social interactions (not commercial, residential, traffic, and so on) and a flexible space in the same time (probably the fifth type). This change of perspective can give another level of perception for those types.
- There are some errors on the graphics regarding the four streets studied, some confusions with the colors used for type of front definition.
Author Response
Dear reviewer:
Many thanks to your time and efforts on reading and reviewing our manuscript. Please see below our responses to your comments:
It is a well-structured article that is trying to understand specific aspects of the urban space and its needs or requirements due to latest post-endemic times. The study follows a well-organized structure, using surveys to define and compare expectations and reality for four “types” of street usage. The results are clear and very well interpreted. In my opinion, the only aspect that is missing in this article is an ecological approach regarding these types of usage, because this can be a valuable point in understanding the street as a public place, made for everyone, human and non-human and can be seen in the first place as a space for social interactions (not commercial, residential, traffic, and so on) and a flexible space in the same time (probably the fifth type). This change of perspective can give another level of perception for those types.
Re: We’re very appreciated for your approval on our work and many thanks for your valuable advice. Your suggestions on the ecological approach do inspire us a lot on possible future studies, but here we would like to make some further explanations on why it should not be included in our study. First, all urban streets are expected to contain ecological functions since they are not only essential open spaces, but also important composition of urban green infrastructure. But very few of them would take their ecological value as the predominant functions. Among the four street types we studied, the landscape and leisure street is the type with more emphasis on streets’ ecological functions. However, for streets in urban area, their aesthetic, service, commercial and traffic value can easily weigh over the ecological aspect. From our previous studies on street classifications, the four street types in our study are the most common results appeared in the worldwide street design guidelines (i.e., London Streetscape Design Guidelines, NYS Street Design Manual, Complete Streets by Design, Shanghai Street Design Guidance) and related studies. Hence, we believe this widely used classification results provide a good way to start our explorations. Besides, the restoration we adopted describes a psychological process for human to recover from stress and mental fatigue. We have to admit that we know very few about whether these positive effects can also influence non-human objects. But with more support from our biological and psychological fellows, we believe the innovative perspective of treating street as an ecological system in restorative studies will surprise us and may also broaden the concept of urban restoration.
There are some errors on the graphics regarding the four streets studied, some confusions with the colors used for type of front definition.
Re: Many thanks for you reminds and apologise for the careless mistakes we made. All figure captions were corrected, and changes were highlighted in red. Street frontages were reorganised into types of “in and exit, vegetation, fence/wall, retail and open”, and legends were revised and united accordingly. Please see the revised figure 2, 4, 6 and 8.
