Original article
Are greenspace attributes associated with perceived restorativeness? A comparative study of urban cemeteries and parks in Edinburgh, Scotland

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2020.126720Get rights and content

Abstract

The health effects of under-utilized and passive greenspace with specialist functions, for example the urban cemetery have been rarely studied. In this study, we aim to examine the differences in the associations between greenspace attributes and perceived restorativeness (defined as recovering from mental fatigue) across two urban greenspace typologies; namely, parks and cemeteries. Among sub-samples of the study participants, this research further explores if social (i.e., having knowledge of or a previous relationship to a deceased person interred in the cemetery) and geographical distance (i.e., residential street distance to the cemetery) had significant beneficial effect upon participants’ perceived restorativeness. A face-to-face on-site survey was conducted in Edinburgh comprising N1 = 113 and N2 = 120 participants from parks and cemeteries respectively. Geographic Information System (GIS) was used to measure the distance from interviewees’ home to the study sites, while multivariate linear regression models adjusting for sociodemographic covariates assessed the strength and significance of the associations. Among the greenspace attributes, pleasantness and aesthetic quality remained significant predictors of perceived restorativeness in case of both parks and cemeteries. In addition, safety was significantly associated with perceived restorativeness in the park-exposure group, whereas presence of good paths was significant only in the cemetery-exposure group. Significant effects of greenspace attributes upon restorativeness were reported only among participants without a deceased person interred in the cemetery and those residing beyond a distance of 800 meters. The study findings advance our knowledge of the restorativeness of specific greenspace features in the parks and cemeteries and point to the need to integrate cemetery strategy with the local authority’s urban greenspace planning and policy for optimizing the use of these thus far passive green areas.

Introduction

Rapid urbanization and city living have resulted in an incremental increase in stress-related exposures. The role of urban green environments, neighbourhood greenspace in particular, has received considerable research interest, given their stress-relieving restorative potential (Roe and Aspinall, 2012; Korpela et al., 2015). The creation of restorative urban environments is important to enhance the mental well-being of a city’s inhabitants via the recovery of an individual’s attention capacity, and to accumulate economic benefit through savings on healthcare expenditure worldwide (Weber and Trojan, 2018).

Perceived restorativeness has been defined as the ability to recover from mental fatigue or diminished psychological resources in order to better meet the demands of everyday life (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Hartig et al., 1997; Han, 2018). A natural green environment is believed to enhance an individual’s perceived restorativeness by effortlessly attenuating directed attention fatigue induced by prolonged mental efforts (Kaplan, 1995; Kaplan, 2001). Based on this theory, four dimensions of perceived restorativeness, namely, being away, fascination, coherence and compatibility are active when evaluating how an environment facilitates an individual’s restorative experience. The dimension of being away refers to an environment as being physically or psychologically distinct from places people commonly experience, including the workplace they visit regularly (Korpela and Hartig, 1996). Fascination refers to the extent that a place can be considered as interesting and its inherent ability to distract an individual’s attention effortlessly (Hartig et al., 1996; Kaplan, 2001). Coherence was initially included in another dimension called ‘extent’ (Hauru et al., 2012). In the present study, coherence is defined as the perception of an environment as being ordered and also having sufficient scope for sustainable physical and imaginative exploration (Korpela and Hartig, 1996; Hauru et al., 2012; Pals et al., 2014). Compatibility refers to the correlation between an individual’s purpose in visiting a place and the environment’s capacity to support this purpose (Kaplan, 2001). A combination of the four dimensions enhances the potential of a place to provide a more complete restorative experience (Hartig et al., 1997).

Several attributes of an urban environment have been found to be associated with a higher level of perceived restorativeness, including environments with natural green elements (Hernández and Hidalgo, 2005; Lorenzo et al., 2016), less anthropogenic features (Carrus et al., 2013) and better air and water qualities of coastal parks (Hipp and Ogunseitan, 2011). Hartig et al. (1996) suggested that some environments might lead to a more complete restorative recovery than others. For instance, in contrast to urban environments, walking in farmland was associated with lower levels of stress and negative affect (Marselle et al., 2013). Compared with residing next to outdoor greenspace and having green elements in living rooms, individuals having private gardens were shown to have a higher level of perceived restorativeness (Cervinka et al., 2016). Peri-urban areas (Carrus et al., 2013) and a forest environment (Stigsdotter et al., 2017) have been shown to be associated with increased levels of perceived restorativeness when compared to an urban environment. These comparisons may provide insightful findings for decision makers and designers to help facilitate an active place for psychological restoration (Cervinka et al., 2016).

In the recent years with increased urbanization, higher densities in cities have been synonymous with reduced per-capita greenspace allocation (Fuller and Gaston, 2009). This has potential implications on mental health, given the reduction in availability of per-capita restorative environments they provide. As a result of this, compared with active greenspace facilitating a variety of uses, the role of alternative, passive green areas with specialist functions where recreational opportunities may not be provided has become crucial (Gearin and Kahle, 2006), especially the ways in which they may be retrofitted and utilized to provide additional health benefits to the resident population. In addition to common greenspaces such as parks and botanical gardens (Carrus et al., 2017; Liprini and Coetzee, 2017), other places with natural elements including cultural heritage sites (Cho et al., 2015) and cemeteries (Nordh et al., 2017) have also been shown to possess an attached restorative potential.

Since records began, of all the anthropogenic land uses, cemeteries have been the principal used for the interment of the dead in a city (ASPO, 1950). Following Ebnezer Howard’s Garden City Movement, Victorian cemeteries of the 19th century were built and designed by the same teams of architects who developed the country’s public park system in the UK, even being considered as within the ‘park family’, and with an underlying objective of providing green and peaceful public landscapes beyond fulfilling their functional role as burial sites. One of the earliest records produced by J. Henry Llyod in the 1950 issue of Town and Country Planning Review estimated the annual demand for cemetery land in Great Britain at 500 acres (or around 202 hectares) with 98 acres (or around 40 hectares) for Greater London alone. With increasing urban expansion, the inherently close relationship between the parks and cemeteries diminished as they became neglected and dilapidated spaces. A perpetual urban planning problem associated with the cemetery has been related to its state of disuse, dereliction and passivity when further interment is no longer possible. Additionally, most current cemeteries were previously located on the outskirts of the cities; but now find themselves landlocked in strategically important urban locations as a result of several decades of continued city expansion and sprawl (Capels and Senville, 2006). With the diminishing availability of land for greenspace, cemeteries, in particular can constitute not just spaces for burying the dead, but also act as salutogenic places for contemplation, social interaction and physical activity (Evensen et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2019).

Nonetheless, studies of the restorative potential of urban cemeteries have been very scarce and those published in recent years have generally tended to concentrate on its biodiversity, as well as cultural, historical and everyday functions (Table 1), ignoring the intangible health benefits inherent within these spaces. Compared with the large body of studies exploring the associations between common urban greenspace and perceived restorativeness or other mental health-related outcomes (de Vries et al., 2003; Lachowycz and Jones, 2013; Sarkar et al., 2018; Houlden et al., 2018), the potential health effects of greenspace with specialist functions have been virtually non-existent. Recently, there has been a growing awareness of the sustainable use of historical urban cemeteries (Jones, 2011) where interment is no longer possible. UK’s Planning Policy Guidance 17 (DCLG, 2006a) on open space, sport and recreation enlists cemeteries and churchyards within its definition of ‘open space typology of public value’ pointing to the potential to integrate them within local greenspace strategies and land-use policy.

In the present Scottish study, we hypothesize that in addition to traditional urban greenspace such as parks, specialist green areas such as historical cemeteries inherently possess a certain degree of restorative potential. We compare the associations between participants’ perceived restorativeness and greenspace attributes in these two greenspace typologies; namely, parks, functionally employed for recreational purposes, and cemeteries, primarily for burial use. Given the importance of connectivity with the deceased people interred in the cemetery (Swensen, 2018) as well as the physical distance as a proxy in measuring the proximity to varying neighbourhood amenities (Gómez et al., 2015), this study additionally hypothesizes differential associations between greenspace attributes and perceived restorativeness based on distance (or connectivity). Two types of distances from the cemetery were examined; social distance was expressed in terms of participants having prior knowledge of or a previous relationship to a deceased person interred in the cemetery, while geographical distance was expressed in terms of participants residing within a street distance of 800 meters from the cemeteries and beyond.

Section snippets

Study design

A face-to-face on-site survey was conducted in Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom. Victoria Park and the Meadows were selected to represent typical urban park sites. The former site was built in the early 20th century, whereas the latter one has been used as a public park since the 18th century. Warriston Cemetery and the Morningside Cemetery both opened in the early 19th century were selected to represent cemeteries. The four historical study sites have been illustrated in Fig. 1. A

Results

The mean (standard deviation; SD) age of participants were 40.38 (SD = 18.68) and 50.38 (SD = 17.21) years in the park- and cemetery-exposure groups respectively (p-value of difference 0.000). Those unemployed constituted 54.9% and 41.7% among the park- and cemetery-exposure groups respectively (p-value of difference 0.044) (Table 2). A majority of study participants in both the park- (69.9%) and cemetery-exposure (67.5%) groups obtained an undergraduate degree or above (p-value of difference

Discussions

While many of the previous studies focused on greenspace measurements employing sophisticated approaches ignoring the importance of greenspace categorizations (Lachowycz and Jones, 2011), the present study advances our knowledge of specific environmental features in relation to the two greenspace typologies. We present the first study exploring differential links between greenspace attributes and perceived restorativeness in parks and cemeteries employing a quantitative approach. Though

Conclusion

With the growing emphasis on the sustainable use of urban space and mental health, optimizing the allocation, siting and design of greenspace to enhance the mental capital of people living in cities is of considerable importance. The use of specialist green environments as salutogenic spaces aimed at enhancing population-level psychological restoration and wellbeing may constitute a key urban health strategy, thus far neglected by policy makers. Reaping the environmental and health-based

Author statement

K.Y. Lai was responsible for study conceptualization, data collection, data curation, formal analysis and writing the original manuscript. C. Sarkar extensively revised the manuscript. K.Y. Lai, C. Sarkar, Z. Sun and I. Scott critically edited the manuscript.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

References (79)

  • S. Kaplan

    The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework

    J. Environ. Psychol.

    (1995)
  • K. Korpela et al.

    Restorative qualities of favorite places

    J. Environ. Psychol.

    (1996)
  • I. Kowarik et al.

    Biodiversity functions of urban cemeteries: Evidence from one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe

    Urban Forestry & Urban Greening

    (2016)
  • K. Lachowycz et al.

    Towards a better understanding of the relationship between greenspace and health: Development of a theoretical framework

    Landscape and Urban Planning

    (2013)
  • Y. Liu et al.

    Healthy urban living: Residential environment and health of older adults in Shanghai

    Health & Place

    (2017)
  • M.R. Marselle et al.

    Does perceived restorativeness mediate the effects of perceived biodiversity and perceived naturalness on emotional well-being following group walks in nature?

    J. Environ. Psychol.

    (2016)
  • P. Mason et al.

    "Safe Going": The influence of crime rates and perceived crime and safety on walking in deprived neighbourhoods

    Soc. Sci. Med.

    (2013)
  • T.H.M. Moore et al.

    The effects of changes to the built environment on the mental health and well-being of adults: Systematic review

    Health and Place

    (2018)
  • H. Nordh et al.

    A peaceful place in the city—A qualitative study of restorative components of the cemetery

    Landscape and Urban Planning

    (2017)
  • R. Pals et al.

    Physical features, coherence and positive outcomes of person–environment interactions: A virtual reality study

    J. Environ. Psychol.

    (2014)
  • V. Quatrini et al.

    Is new always better than old? Accessibility and usability of the urban green areas of the municipality of Rome

    Urban Forestry & Urban Greening

    (2019)
  • E. Ratcliffe et al.

    Memory and place attachment as predictors of imagined restorative perceptions of favourite places

    J. Environ. Psychol.

    (2016)
  • C. Sarkar et al.

    Residential greenness and prevalence of major depressive disorders: a cross-sectional, observational, associational study of 94 879 adult UK Biobank participants

    Lancet Planetary Health

    (2018)
  • U. Stigsdotter et al.

    It is not all bad for the grey city - A crossover study on physiological and psychological restoration in a forest and an urban environment

    Health & Place

    (2017)
  • G. Swensen

    Between romantic historic landscapes, rational management models and obliterations – urban cemeteries as green memory sites

    Urban Forestry & Urban Greening

    (2018)
  • A. Tomao et al.

    Restorative urban forests: Exploring the relationships between forest stand structure, perceived restorativeness and benefits gained by visitors to coastal Pinus pinea forests

    Ecological Indicators

    (2018)
  • H.E. Wright Wendel et al.

    Accessibility and usability: Green space preferences, perceptions, and barriers in a rapidly urbanizing city in Latin America

    Landscape Urban Plann.

    (2012)
  • R. Yeshurun et al.

    The social role of food in the Natufian cemetery of Raqefet Cave, Mount Carmel

    Israel. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

    (2013)
  • L. Arffmann

    Whose cemetery?

    Mortality

    (2000)
  • ASPO

    Cemeteries in the City Plan: Information Report No. 16, Illinois

    (1950)
  • G.W. Barrett et al.

    Cemeteries as repositories of natural and cultural diversity

    Conserv. Biol.

    (2001)
  • CABE

    Briefing: Cemeteries, churchyards and burial grounds

    (2007)
  • V. Capels et al.

    Planning for Cemeteries

    Planning Commissioners Journal

    (2006)
  • G. Carrus et al.

    Relations between naturalness and perceived restorativeness of different urban green spaces

    Psyecology

    (2013)
  • G. Carrus et al.

    A Different Way to Stay in Touch with `Urban Nature’: The Perceived Restorative Qualities of Botanical Gardens

    Front. Psychol.

    (2017)
  • K.-S. Cho et al.

    Perceived Restorativeness of Visits to Cultural Heritage Sites

    Asia Pacific Journal of Tourism Research

    (2015)
  • DCLG

    Planning Policy Guidance 17: Planning for open space, sport and recreation

    (2006)
  • DCLG

    Planning policy statement 3 (PPS 3)

    (2006)
  • DCLG

    Land use change statistics in England: 2015–2016, London

    (2016)
  • Cited by (27)

    • The environmental pollution caused by cemeteries and cremations: A review

      2022, Chemosphere
      Citation Excerpt :

      Besides that, the ideal cemeteries should pursue a positive relationship with the urban through the application of vegetation. As the recovery of green areas favors improvements in air quality and enhances the presence of barriers that can mitigate the risk of contamination of the population residing in the surroundings of cemeteries, in addition to acting as regulators of urban temperature (Bennett and Davies, 2015; Brown, 2013; Lai et al., 2020; Löki et al., 2019). The main purpose of this study is to highlight the literature focused on environmental risks in urban cemeteries as an indicator to fill future research needs on a worldwide scale.

    • Urban greenspace and mental health in Chinese older adults: Associations across different greenspace measures and mediating effects of environmental perceptions

      2022, Health and Place
      Citation Excerpt :

      Although both park coverage and vegetation coverage were derived from overhead view images, park coverage was less strongly associated with mental health than vegetation coverage. This is not in line with previous studies, showing that park quantity and usage can have significant positive effects on mental health (Esther H.K et al., 2017; Lai et al., 2020). Vegetation coverage in the neighborhood was also found to be associated with mental health in previous studies (Su et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2021a).

    • Compact cities and the Covid-19 pandemic: Systematic review of the associations between transmission of Covid-19 or other respiratory viruses and population density or other features of neighbourhood design

      2022, Health and Place
      Citation Excerpt :

      Local public space and community venues will facilitate informal and formal social interaction, which benefits mental health (Evans, 2003). Compact design that includes accessible, high quality urban green space should also benefit health as there is strong evidence of benefits to physical and psychological wellbeing from exposure to green spaces (Kang et al., 2022; Lai et al., 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic brings new issues for policy, practice and research.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text