Do Greener Urban Streets Provide Better Emotional Experiences? An Experimental Study on Chinese Tourists

Abstract

Compared to the usual environment, the potential momentary emotional benefits of exposure to street-level urban green spaces (UGS) in the unusual environment have not received much academic attention. This study applies an online randomized control trial (RCT) with 299 potential tourists who have never visited Xi’an and proposes a regression model with mixed effects to scrutinize the momentary emotional effects of three scales (i.e., small, medium and large) and street types (i.e., traffic lanes, commercial pedestrian streets and culture and leisure walking streets). The results identify the possibility of causality between street-level UGS and tourists’ momentary emotional experiences and indicate that tourists have better momentary emotional experiences when urban streets are intervened with large-scale green vegetation. The positive magnitude of the effect varies in all three types of streets and scales of intervention, while the walking streets with typical cultural attractions, have a larger impact relative to those with daily commute elements. These research results can provide guidance for UGS planning and the green design of walking streets in tourism.