Individual Momentary Experiences of Neighborhood Public Spaces: Results of a Virtual Environment Based Stated Preference Experiment

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper presents a thorough analysis of an online video-based stated preference experiment concerning neighbourhood public spaces with the special emphasize on the cognitive and emotional response to green elements. 

The article is very well written - with a clear and precise language and good construction. Especially the introduction adequately points out towards a research gap to be filled in by the presented research experiment results.  Authors make also appropriate references to the most up-to-date literature and results of previous research in the field. 

Authors skillfully apply statistical methods to present results of their experiments and show them in a sufficient number of well-structured and described tables. Results are placed within the context of existing knowledge and show that authors undertook their research to bring in new facts and contribute to the exploration of important relations between people and public spaces. They also indicate limitations of the study and suggest further research directions.
Conclusions provide the reader with a concise and clear summary on how research decribed in the paper extends the knowledge of factors characterizing attractive urban spaces and methods applied for measuring and analysing momentary experiences. 

There are, however, three relatively small, but quite significant issues in the paper that could be corrected or explained:

1) LL308-309: Authors state that "the design of the street block mimics the style of characteristics of an average Dutch neighbourhood" - please provide more detail on the space you constructed - what do you mean by an average "Dutch neigbourhood"? do you take colour and material of the facade into account? the height of the building (not only the number of stories as shown in Table 1), the width of the street and pavement etc. type of the trees (deciduous probably?) and their height and dimesion of the crown - these are physical parameters that may influence the perception you were investigating (above all the issue of cool air and shadow on a hot day). 
Please indicate also that the method itself - the video experiment - has limitations - namely, one cannot credibly investigate in that way momentary experience related to humidity and temperature which are closely linked with the presence of trees, grass and other plants because it is a purely sensory stimulation beyond vision. 

2) Materials and methods are described in detail - there is however an uncertainty in the way the sample was chosen. Authors claim that they wanted to ensure representative data - the question is what type of sampling was used to obtain the sample from the population national online panel? Authors focused on people living in particular areas - was there any comparison made of the investigated sample characteristics with the general information on the population of cities with 100,000 inhabitants or more?

3) Table 3 and Table 4:

in Table 3 there are Components listed by numbers - there is no direct reference in the text to what they refer - are those components equal to statements listed in Table 4 (here there are no numbers, just sentences)?

All in all, the paper needs just small imnprovements before publishing. 
A study is interesting and well-written. Congratulations to the Authors!

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting research proving the need for trees in the cities. It is however obvious statement, but in this research it is  stated in scientific way. The method could be applied also by other research topics.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The epigraph 2.2. it's a little confusing. Repeat concepts in the different subsections. They must review the clarity and structure of the wording. The idea of "momentary experiences" must be defined precisely.
They must check all references putting the full titles of the journals and the DOIs.There are numerous errors. See the attached file.

In section 3.1, they say, "the typical spatial scale of the environment residents interact with daily is the block, but the area should be limited with metric units. The apple concept is highly variable depending on the urban structure of the region.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors, I truly enjoyed reviewing your manuscript. However, I have few concerns and suggestions that are mostly about structuring the paper. Also, I could not see the research questions/ hypothesis stated clearly. I don't think that discussing the methods in the introduction is a good idea. The introduction should really focus on problem statement and gaps. I also have the following observations and suggestions. 

 

 Therefore, this study aims at 1) iden-11 tifying the factors underlying momentary experiences in neighborhood public space given both cog-12 nitive (satisfaction) and affective (emotion) responses and 2) understanding the experiences as a 13 function of green and design attributes and analyzing the heterogeneity in preferences. A

 

The manuscript was very difficult to read or follow. Thus, I recommend the authors to restructure and reorganize the content.  Section 2.1 mixes the seven items but not in a consistent way. There is an overuse of italic. For example, when the word “water” was first italicized on line 156, there shouldn’t be a need to do it again in lines 157 and 159.

On line 194, how is satisfaction aggregated into a single dimension. Please elaborate.

For example, in the theoretical background, the authors at times referenced some studies and towards the end of the paragraph, they mentioned that they will be used in their. However, in other reviewed studies, I don’t see any concluding remarks. So I didn’t know if it was relevant or not. For example, the paragraph 219 to 226, is it relevant?! There is no concluding remarks on that paragraph. However, there is some indication of a summary in the paragraph preceding it (213 to 217). Similarly, in another paragraph, the authors indicate how they will use the reviewed study (see 190 to 199).

In the following section about Emotion, I felt there is no consistency on how this is reported when compared to the section about satisfaction. For example, the authors need to elaborate on the nature of the questionnaires that measure emotions. Are they also based on Likert scale? Are they qualitative/ quantitative? Why on 240 the authors decided to use the four dimensions? What are they? Also, what did Shoval et al found (line 238).

When the authors started the section on Emotion, they referenced happiness, annoyance and fear as three examples of emotional responses. However, the paragraphs after this discuss happiness, then comfort, then noise and annoyance, then safety before transitioning to satisfaction and emotion paragraph (which also needs to be re-written for clarity).

I felt that section 2.2.3 was too short compared to others. There was no review on the nature of the associations between sociodemographic variables and users’ evaluation of public spaces. Are younger happier than older generation? Are healthier folks pickier? Again, this is the place for the review to see if the findings of the authors align with the findings of Qin etl al and Schipperijn et al.

What do the authors mean by “for each attribute, two levels were defined” line 304.

Line 311 (the statement further rendered in Unreal) is not accurate. I think the whole paragraph needs to be rewritten. As of now, it makes it appear that Unreal was used for rendering purposes. Also, I noticed the authors using the word video in different places. I don’t think the word describes what the authors are trying to do. Also, I don’t think that “first-person perspective video” is correct.   Perhaps the authors can think about using the following instead: “Several environments were modeled using Sketch up Pro. All models were then exported into Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) to produce a first person virtual reality environment where each scene incorporated detailed vegetation, walking pedestrians and moving automobiles”. Each walkthrough was exported into an 1 minute 10 second .avi video clip format compatible with YouTube?!!!

The above is my suggestion just to add clarity. I didn’t know how the respondents were recruited for the study. Also, how they did they access the survey. Did the authors obtain and IRB approvals?

Did the authors test the reliability of each scale questions?

In the discussion, the authors should highlight with consistency what was aligned with previous research and what was new (the vertical green).

The finding in lines 535 to 539, how is it aligned to literature.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 5 Report

This Manuscript is an interesting contribution to the field of public space analysis and built environment. Relevant literature is consulted as also strong and innovative analytical methods is used. Before it will be accepted, I recommend  minor improvements. I consider that this Manuscript could benefit from the following:

• Abstract:
• In line 14-15, please clarify which methodology is used to evaluate the three objectives declared. The role of the online-Video as a method is not clarified in the abstract. What is innovative?
• Also, The impact of results and The significance of this reserach for environmental research and/or urban design should be more emphasized at the end of the abstract.

 

• Introduction:
• Introduction section is complete in terms of presenting problem statement of research topic. This is clearly mentioned in lines 50-51 in p.2. However, I suggest to extend this discussion, addressing to why the empirical research on individuals ‘preferences, regarding to green attributes at small-scaled neighborhood, is relevant to urban planning and/or design in The Netherlands? Which are the problems at public space level in neighborhoods in NL that this research contribution could solve?
• In the same section, the paragraph between lines 93-105 needs to be clarified and revised. Research question needs to be more clearly stated, as well as the hypothesis.
• Paragraph between lines 117-123 could be improved, by giving more insights about conclusions and the relevance of research for environmental research.

 

• Theoretical framework:
• Conceptual framework is very well written, and discussion is clearly stated. Relevant international literature has been critically discussed. Despite to this, Some minor improvement at this section I can suggest:
• 1) Paragraph between line 200-206 needs to be more discussed. Walking as a mode of transport is very important in terms of its benefits to physical health, but what about the barriers to inhiit or promote walking? Also, what about the use of bicycles at public spaces and its benefits for physical health?
• 2) Paragraph between lines 213-216: the role of mixed uses to support the flexibility of public spaces in terms of uses is also a criterion of spatial quality widely discussed in international literature. I suggest that this paragraph discussion should be extended a little more.

 

• Results and discussion:
• The core of results of the paper are mentioned in paragraph Line 477-495. Interesting is the value of private gardens. This result could be contrasted with other international evidences generated during COVID-19 pandemic, in which private gardens has been perceived as a fundamental resource for mental well-being in times of health crisis. Recent studies of Poortinga et. al "The role of perceived public and private green space in subjective health and wellbeing during and after the first peak of COVID-19 outbreak" and "Experiences of the built environment, falls and fear of falling outdoors among older adults: An exploratory study and future directions" by Curl et al. could be added incorporated and discussed according to your research results in Discussion section.
• I suggest to move two paragraphs from this section to conclusion, to strength the future research discussion, aspect completely absent in conclusions: Paragraph between lines 541-551; and paragraph between lines 552-257.

Conclusions:

• Conclusions need more development and improvements in terms of:
• 1) , Suggestions for future research need to be added, and hypothesis demonstration/ research question are missing.
• 2) Recommendations of this research to urban design/or planning must be added, especially, which are the impacts or relevance of the methodology used in this research for environmental research studies and urban design of public spaces? What could be the conditions/limitations of replicability of this methodology to be used in other contexts in the world?

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

No commets or suggestions