Exploring the restorative benefits of Kuang-Ao features in urban slow-moving greenways based on the healthy city concept

Abstract

In the post-pandemic era, people’s demand for health is intense, and slow-moving greenways have become a preferred choice for daily recreation and physical and mental healing under the healthy city concept. Based on the theories of Kuang-Ao and restorative environments, this study integrates questionnaires, galvanic skin response, and eye-tracking methodologies for physical and mental evaluations. ErgoLAB and Excel were utilized for preprocessing data on emotional pleasure, galvanic skin response change rate, perceptual dimension, and average pupil diameter. SPSS 27.0 was employed to conduct difference and correlation analyses, exploring the relationship between Kuang-Ao features of slow-moving greenways and recreationists’ restorative perceptions. The results indicate that both the Kuang-Ao unitary features, assessed by the Kuang-Ao level, and the Kuang-Ao sequence features, assessed by the trend of Kuang-Ao changes, have significant impacts on restorative benefits. Additionally, the degree and amplitude of Kuang-Ao changes also significantly affect emotional and functional improvement, perceptual restoration, and energy restoration. According to these findings, three types of Kuang-Ao units for slow-moving greenways are proposed, which offer references for spatial design and sequence organization in slow-moving greenway planning and design to maximize the benefits of restorative perception of greenways and promote the construction of urban healthy recreation systems.

Keywords

• slow-moving greenways
• kuang-ao features
• restorative benefits
• unit sequence organization patterns