The Chinese Garden of Friendship

We actually love the city, we the urban peoples. The city is full of things that make life exciting and make it easy, or efficient at least, to do what we want to do. What cities can be though is stressful and we complain about that a lot. Traffic is stressful. Queues are stressful. Late trains and busses are stressful. And stress is bad. It is bad for your health and that is a science-based fact so we are right to complain.

There are all kinds of known remedies for stress, like drinking too much and eating fancy donuts, but they only add more health problems to the mix. Gardens are an obvious answer to the need urban dwellers have for a circuit break, so they don't break, and while the research tells us how and why gardens or green-spaces are good for us we don't always go out of our way to get to them. What makes a green space great, great enough to skip the bad good-stuff for?

Luckily one of my current active projects is a task to design an urban sensory garden that communities could insert into their exisiting spaces so I've been doing a lot of thinking about what exactly is needed for this sensory garden of eden in some of the most urban places you can think of, like say Newtown. Being in Newtown always inspires me to work more on this project actually. There's nowhere to sit there, it's really really hot when it's hot and it's dirty and depressing. It really needs a sensory garden but then so do a lot of places.

The Chinese Garden of Friendship is what I always look to as an example of a really really great urban garden and here's why:

It smells really nice - the small white flowers (jasmines?) in particular but you can smell the magnolias too

It has a lot of varied elevation giving you a change in perspective as you make your way around the path.Change your perspective to change your perspective as they say

It has water dragons and big fish and dragon flies There's lots of shade in the garden but direct sunlight too The architectural features in the little enclosed spaces frame the outlook - the sky, garden, path - and enhance light and shadow The variety of plants and trees and mosses look well established, like they have always been there even though it is an asian garden The sound of moving water from a number of waterfalls and little streams is enough to block out the construction noise just outside and is just buzzing with negative ions Most places on the path is a possible place to sit and spend more time and there are little rooms with tables and chairs designed to give you a unique look into a particular part of the garden while you eat your lunch or read a book or learn a new language Even though you can see the city skyline it feels enclosed, like a garden hug

The restaurant serves dumplings!

Below: from a paper by Victoria Henshaw - Favourite Places in the City and their Restorative Qualities: A Greater Manchester Pilot Study

"Restorative theory offers valuable insights into the ambient characteristics of those environments which might provide respite from the stresses and strains of city life. This paper adds to the limited number of previous studies on the restorative qualities of favourite places in the city. It draws from a pilot study examining favourite places in Greater Manchester, England, and utilising qualitative methods including semi- structured interviews, participant drawings and direct observations to illustrate the perceptions of a sample of Manchester residents. Although influenced by factors of geography in their selection, participants’ favourite places in the city are found consistent with the four components of restorative environmental theory (being away, fascination, extent and scope, and compatibility) and as having positive effects on these individuals. The findings indicate that favourite places play an important role in providing restorative experiences in cities and suggest related characteristics should be considered more fully in city planning.......

Restorative theory offers valuable insights into the ambient characteristics of those environments which might provide respite from the stresses and strains of city life. This paper adds to the limited number of previous studies on the restorative qualities of favourite places in the city. It draws from a pilot study examining favourite places in Greater Manchester, England, and utilising qualitative methods including semi- structured interviews, participant drawings and direct observations to illustrate the perceptions of a sample of Manchester residents. Although influenced by factors of geography in their selection, participants’ favourite places in the city are found consistent with the four components of restorative environmental theory (being away, fascination, extent and scope, and compatibility) and as having positive effects on these individuals. The findings indicate that favourite places play an important role in providing restorative experiences in cities and suggest related characteristics should be considered more fully in city planning.....

Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) identify ‘restorative’ environments as commonly sought by people as a means of escaping excessive amounts of noise, stress and other people, all characteristic of modern urban life. Previous studies indicate restorative environments improve a person’s attention capacity (ibid) and reduce stress levels (Ulrich, 1979), positively affecting behaviour, emotions, physiology and mental health. Restorative environments are frequently identified as natural environments (e.g. Ulrich, 1979, 1981; Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, Bardwell, & Slakter, 1993; Kaplan, 1995; Marrero & Carballeira, 2010; Carrus et al., 2013). However, as Korpela and Hartig (1996, p. 224), and Korpela and Ylen (2007) argue, built environments also have potential to offer relief from the stress of urban life in the form of people’s most favourite places...

Kaplan and Kaplan (1989, p. 183-185) identify four critical components for environmental restoration: 1) being away: the feeling of being in a world of one’s own or mentally in a different place, 2) fascination: interest in the environment, including features which appeal to and affect involuntary attention, 3) extent and scope: the feeling that the place is connected to a wider context and offers scope for immersion with limited potential for distractions and 4) compatibility: the extent to which a place provides for and satisfies individual needs. Kaplan (1995, p. 172) claims these components play a complementary role in achieving a healthy mental state, arguing that the absence of one component may result in an unguaranteed restorative experience. Kaplan and Kaplan (1989) and Kaplan et al. (1993) conclude that natural environments usually have richer restorative qualities than built and man- made urban environments and affect more people positively......

This analysis of the content of participants’ drawings and descriptions highlights the presence of Kaplan and Kaplan’s four components of restorative environments (being away, fascination, extent and scope, and compatibility) as all being important in experiences of favourite places in Greater Manchester. The results suggest each of these components play a crucial role in people’s choice of favourite places, however, whilst all of the identified favourite places contained aspects of all four restorative components, claims regarding fascination and compatibility were most frequently mentioned, see Figure 3. This finding might be explained by the urban context of the majority of favourite places identified within this study...."