The restorative potential of commercial streets

ABSTRACT

With cities continuing to grow at rapid rates across the globe, daily exposure to traffic, noise, crowding, information overload and other stressors have exacerbated urban dwellers’ need for restoration. Yet, how to enhance the restorative potential of urban environments remains a vastly understudied research topic. This article explores the perceived restorative potential of commercial streets in the Boston metropolitan area (US) and Belo Horizonte (Brazil). Triangulation of data (derived from face-to-face interviews, unstructured observations, and social media) and cross-cultural analysis indicate that commercial streets can be planned, designed and managed as destinations for restoration. This study shows that immediate social context, urban design qualities, land use, managerial strategies, meaningful aspects, built and natural elements, in certain combinations, tend to enhance the perceived restorative potential of the commercial streets. While there were numerous similarities in output from the two countries, there were also significant differences.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban design
• health and well-being
• restorative environment
• restorative perceptions
• streetscape
• psychological restoration
• built environment
• urban planning
• stress recovery
• place attachment

Acknowledgments

This collaboration arose from discussions at a British Council Newton Fund Researcher Links workshop held at the Universidade de Brasília, Brazil, in 2019. We would like to thank the people who took part in interviews for this research. We are deeply grateful to Carolina Amaral Guimaraes de Lima Souza and Thiago Lima e Lima for their help with the pilot tests; Maria Clara Santos Rodrigues for her support with organising the interview data; Verônica Flores for her assistance in visual data systematisation. We immensely appreciated comments on earlier versions of this paper shared by two reviewers.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais under grant ADRC 05/2016 and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais under grant PIBICEM 09/2017.

Notes on contributors

Paula Barros

Paula Barros (@llpaulabarrosll) is a Lecturer in Urban Design at Departamento de Projetos, Escola de Arquitetura, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil. Her recent work focuses on how to boost health and well-being through small-scale and fine-grained interventions. Dr. Barros has authored book chapters and papers on streets, urban squares, temporary interventions, spatial co-design with (and for) children, design pedagogy and high-rise housing.

Vikas Mehta

Vikas Mehta is a Professor of Urbanism the Fruth/Gemini chair and Ohio Eminent Scholar of urban/environmental design at the School of Planning, University of Cincinnati. His work focuses on the role of design and planning in creating a more responsive, equitable, and communicative environment. He is interested in various dimensions of urbanity through the exploration of place as a social and ecological setting and as a sensorial art. Dr. Mehta has authored and edited books, book chapters, and papers on numerous topics including public space, urban design pedagogy, urban streets, neighbourhoods, retail, signage and visual identity, public space in the Global South and more. Most recently, Dr. Mehta co-edited Public Space Reader (Routledge, 2021) and Companion to Public Space (Routledge, 2020), while his The Street: a quintessential social public space (Routledge, 2013) received the 2014 Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

Paul Brindley

Paul Brindley (@DrPaulBrindley) is a Lecturer in Landscape Planning at the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Sheffield. He specialises in geospatial analysis of landscape data with a particular interest in using data science approaches within GIS and has published extensively on greenspace equity and the health and wellbeing benefits of greenspace (with over 30 peer reviewed articles, h-index = 18). He has worked on over 50 research projects, including Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature (IWUN), 2016-19 (NE/N013565/1) which explored the health and wellbeing benefits of greenspace within the city of Sheffield, UK.

Razieh Zandieh

Razieh Zandieh (@RaziehZandieh) is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Urban design and Planning at the University of Manchester, UK. Her focus areas of investigation are healthy urban planning and design, walkability and sustainability, social and spatial inequalities, and age-friendly city.