Exploring the use of restorative component scale to measure street restorative expectations

Contemporary high-density urban environments frequently have limited green resources, such as parks and woodlands, that are conventionally associated with psychological restoration. The restorative potential of everyday spaces such as urban streets, therefore, takes on heightened significance. Our study proposes that the delivery of streets for psychological restoration differs from that of wider urban open spaces. This is because streets serve functions not primarily associated with optional leisure activities. During the study, we used an online questionnaire (n = 153) based on Restorative Component Scales (RCS) to assess peoples’ restorative expectations on four different types of Shanghai street. We also adopted a scenario approach which asked participants to imagine and evaluate the ideal condition of each street type for providing them with restorative experiences. Our results show that users expected the highest restorative quality in the street scenario ‘landscape and leisure’, with the lowest expectations expressed for ‘traffic-oriented’ streets. People’s expectations on ‘commercial’ and ‘living and service’ street scenarios were similar. These findings reveal clear design implications for the delivery of socially restorative streets, with special consideration on street typology and user expectations.