No abstract

Urban community parks have significant benefits for city residents, both physical and spiritual. This is especially true in developing countries, such as China. The purpose of our study is to describe the current situation of the community parks in five main districts of Jinan City while recognizing features of the community parks that influence usage patterns. Our study also means to determine the desired improvements of visitors that promote access to and use of community parks on the basis of the Chinese context. We conducted a survey among 542 community park visitors and obtained valid responses. The findings of respondents show that community parks are mostly used by people over 55 years (34.7%) and children under 10 years (23.6%). The main motives for using community parks are for exercise (24.2%) and to socialize with others (21.6%). The majority of respondents (65.7%) rated the community park as satisfactory and considered only a few improvements needed. Regarding the desired improvements, numerous respondents mentioned adding more physical training facilities (13.3%) and activity areas (7.6%), as well as emergency call buttons in areas frequented by children and older people (7.6%). Furthermore, most of the respondents (79.9%) indicated that they would like to use the community parks more frequently if there is additional progress to make the parks more attractive, cleaner, and friendlier. These results can help park designers, government agencies, and community groups to provide the planning and design strategies for community parks to promote their upgrading in China.

From the perspective of landscape and human health, we use the Self-Rating Restoration Scale (SRRS) as a tool to explore the mental health restoration benefits brought by a landscape environment to individuals and explore the characteristics of individual movement behavior when viewing the landscape through the eye movement tracking technology. We selected average blink duration, average gaze length, average saccade amplitude, blink number, number of fixation points, saccade number, and average pupil diameter as experimental indicators for data monitoring. Based on the eye movement heat map obtained by data visualization processing and the results of correlation analysis, we summarized the eye movement behavior characteristics of individuals when viewing the restorative landscape. We try to construct a quantitative evaluation model of the landscape mental recovery benefit with the objective eye movement index as the independent variable through the method of curve estimation. The study results show that individual eye movement behavior is related to the landscape type and the level of psychological recovery is also different. (1)The more singular that the constituent elements are, the more widespread and concentrated the regional distribution of individual attention areas, and the relative psychological recovery benefit is relatively weak. The more complex that the constituent elements are, the more scattered and smaller the individual interest area, and the psychological recovery benefit is better. Brightly colored, dynamic landscapes are easier to form areas of interest to improve the psychological response to the human body. (2) The psychological recovery benefit of the landscape is directly proportional to the changing trend of the average blink duration, number of fixation points, and number of saccades and is inversely proportional to the changing trend of the average gaze length. (3) The objective eye movement index of average blink duration can quantitatively predict the psychological recovery benefit value of the landscape environment. The number of fixation points, the number of saccades, and the average fixation length could predict the psychological recovery benefits of the landscape, while the other indicators had no prediction effect.

Government attention selectively distributed to various issues in policy-making processes is usually reflected in language, such as metaphors in political discourse. In addition, metaphor change may reveal how conceptualizations of major topics such as economy and ecology evolve over time. After self-building a corpus of China’s 45-year Government Work Reports, this study explores whether there is a difference in attention to topics of economy and ecology over time and investigates the diachronic change of metaphor use on them based on a modified framework for diachronic metaphor change analysis. Results show that attention to economy has been steadily decreasing while attention to ecology has been growing, and that there is an increasing tendency of using more economy and ecology metaphors. Metaphor change on the use of source domains is arranged on a continuum, ranging from constant use (war for economy and ecology, and journey and object for economy), incremental change (living organism and building for economy and ecology, and object for ecology) to fundamental change (building and living organism for ecology). This study may enrich the understanding of diachronic metaphor change by providing a Chinese perspective on the metaphor use in government discourse over time.