Perceived Green-blue Spaces Combined with Road Network for Urban Park Visitors in South China

Exposure to green-blue spaces (GBS) affects the mental well-being of visitors, which should be an area-dependent effect with a critical range for perceiving emotions. This interacts with the road network (RN) to access GBS over a range, but the relevant evidence is unclear according to any case-specific demonstration. In this study, we selected 23 urban parks with varied populations from 19 cities in South China to identify the combined effects of landscape features and overlapped RN in different buffer zones on visitors’ emotional perceptions. Sentiments were analyzed by rating facial expressions to happy, sad, and neutral scores from 2385 visitors’ photos from a social network in 2020. Landscape metrics and RN were assessed remotely in buffer areas with radii of 1, 3, 5, and 10 km. The results showed that positive emotions were low in close areas (< 3 km radius) with large blue spaces and dense national roads. In 10 km radius areas, dense roads at town-city levels were perceived to reduce positive emotions. Dense high-rank roads should be avoided around parks in areas with radii ≤ 10 km if visitors perceive more positive sentiments. This is because the dense RN could diminish visitors’ ability to perceive positive emotions in GBS when close to the park. The results of this study could help improve planning schemes with more opportunities to offer mental well-being in GBS-RN landscapes.