Significance of Oppressiveness: A Pathways Model to Interpret Impacts of Streetscapes on Mental Stress in the High-Density City

Abstract

Mental stress is a significant threat to public health in high-density cities. As more and more people are moving to the city, the increasing density of urban environments is a common trend worldwide. High-density streetscapes are more often perceived as oppressive than streetscapes in low or moderate-density cities. The term 'perceived oppressiveness' in this study refers to the negative psychological pressure caused by compactness cityscapes that feature high-rise buildings, crowded car and people traffic, many visual noise such as billboards and etc.. Streetscapes are one of the most common settings that urban residents experience. Many studies have examined the general relationship between streetscape and stress, while little attention has been paid to the underlying pathways of this relationship, especially in high-density cities. Perceived oppressiveness might be a possible pathway linking the streetscapes and stress. Thus, this study aims at examining the underlying pathways linking urban streetscape in the high-density city and stress, as well as the perceived oppressiveness’s contribution to explaining the impact of urban environments on stress. Thus, this study applies SRT to develop a hypothesized pathways model to explain the relationship between streetscapes and stress: Hypothesis 1: Specific urban streetscape elements are significantly associated with stress. Hypothesis 2: Urban streetscape elements impact stress through serial mediators (pathway1): streetscape to environment quality to oppressiveness to stress. Hypothesis 3: Urban streetscape elements impact stress through environment quality mediator (pathway2): streetscape to environment quality to stress Hypothesis 4: Urban streetscape elements impact stress through oppressiveness mediator (pathway3): streetscape to oppressiveness to stress. We used Google Earth Pro and ArcGIS to identify 90 street locations in Hong Kong and created 90 GIF images with nine images for each location, including four horizontal angle images, four 45 oblique angle images, and one vertical angle image. Then we measured the density of each streetscape element. We recruited 2600 HK residents participated in a web-based experiment, and 1446 participants complete this experiment. Each participant randomly viewed three of the 90 images, and was asked to report perceived environment quality, perceived oppressiveness, and acute stress response after viewing each image. Participants also reported personal chronic stress status and socialdemographic information. We used Structure Equation Modeling to examine the hypothesized model and identified three pathways by which streetscapes impact mental stress. We found that perceived oppressiveness serves as a major mediator between streetscape and mental stress, and perceived environment quality serves as a supportive mediator. Further, we identified tree canopy and sky as the elements most associated with stress relief, while vehicles and billboards are most associated with stress arousal in streetscapes. We also identified pathways through which specific streetscape elements impact mental stress. These findings can not only enrich our understanding of Stress Reduction Theory but provide evidence to support the creation of stress relieving urban environments.