The PhD research project "Restoration in the urban environment: informing design guidelines for small urban green spaces", conducted at the Landscape department of the University of Sheffield, seeks to find which design elements of small urban green spaces will lead users to appreciate these spaces and find them to be relaxing environments. There is increased recognition that cities need to be designed better with health in mind, and that urban nature is an important contributor to this.
Until now, research has shown that in general people react favourably to urban nature, and that stress responses diminish in these environments. What we still don't really know however is exactly which elements contribute the most to this.
This is what this project seeks to find out. While research in this domain has often been conducted with questionnaires offering pre-determined choices, here we use a more open approach to see what people say when this framework is removed.
Additionally this project will also investigate how preferences and responses from people from different age, gender, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds may differ