Balancing Street Functionality and Restorative Benefit: Developing an Expectation–Current Approach to Street Design

The importance of creating a better living environment that is conducive to public health has become increasingly prominent in the post-epidemic era. The restorative potential of urban streets has been emphasized recently, as these spaces of our everyday lives may provide people with restorative experiences. However, there is still no efficient way of delivering restorative street design, because no specific standard has been set to indicate the form such streets should take. A street has limited spaces but multiple uses; hence, the delivery of restorativeness is largely restricted by street contexts. This research proposes that this standard should be determined by the balance between street functions and restorative benefits. An expectation-current approach that involves street functions, street typologies, restorative evaluations and users’ expectations was developed in conjunction with its application to four pairs of streets. Each pair included one typical street type determined by its inherent function, and one corresponding case-study street. The restorative expectations and the streets’ current levels of restorativeness were evaluated, and their differences were used to indicate how and to what degree street-related restorative benefits should be optimized. Restorative design implications of the four case-study streets were then summarized accordingly. The expectation–current approach not only serves as a rigorous and sustainable method by stressing the balance between street functions and restorativeness, but also has the potential for application in broader assessment studies, especially when multiple environmental qualities need to be considered, with the advantage of the extensive involvement of people.