A Vertical City Park Model for Promoting Physical Activity and Sports Practice in People of All Ages

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

this publication relates to an architectural project prepared by the authors.  In my opinion the concept is interesting, but I cannot agree with the authors that there is a lack of similar projects. I suggest taking another look at the architectural designs of parks/vertical gardens posted on the internet. I am sending the rest of the explanation in a .PDF file

Best regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Authors,
this publication relates to an architectural project prepared by the authors.  In my opinion the concept is interesting, but I cannot agree with the authors that there is a lack of similar projects. I suggest taking another look at the architectural designs of parks/vertical gardens posted on the internet. I am sending the rest of the explanation in a .PDF file
Best regards

-Thank you for the comments and the time spent on our manuscript. We worked a lot in the manuscript to better explain the idea and answer to the comments. Everything has been done within the manuscript in track changing. We hope the reviewer appreciate the work done.

Please specify what characteristics have a park and what characteristics have a sports and recreation building. In my opinion, there are more similar points here for the building.

-Thank you for this comment. For the consideration about gym and sports complex I took the definition of park from Wikipedia (we cannot use this citation in the manuscript, but we think it gives an idea of its definition): A Park is an area of natural, semi-natural, or planted space set aside for human enjoyment and recreation or for the protection of wildlife or natural habitats. It may consist of grassy areas, rocks, soil, and trees, but may also contain buildings and other artifacts such as monuments, fountains or playground structures.

On the other side, the sport facility / building has the objective to provide sport-centered services.

The idea behind the vertical park model proposed is to propose a location where people can practice sports, but also social and cognitive activities.

We hope the rationale behind this decision is appreciated by the reviewer.

Abstract: “non-communicable disease”: Please expand.

-Thank you for the suggestion. We expanded the concept in the introduction because in the abstract we had a limited number of words.

Correct method, but is it applicable to this study? Many similar conceptual designs are presented by architects, or architecture students. They are not included in the publication databases. However, I recommend looking at popular websites showing architectural design and competition entries.

-Thank you for the suggestion. It is an interesting option. On the other side, we applied this methodology in this study to support and present our findings in a more “scientific” way. The method adopted is widely adopted in most discipline and it would be interesting to propose it, also in this field. We agree that on the internet is possible to find other works on this topic, but our goal was to move the interest on the scientific contest adopting scientific websites and only peer-reviewed articles. We hope the reviewer can understand our idea, it is a different but we think that someone has to start this to make it more common.

“ Consequently, considering the above aspects, the present study will propose a first example of a city park model.”

-Thank you for the suggestion. From the analysis of scientific databases, widely adopted in other disciplines, there is an effective lack. If we consider also the grey literature, the reviewer is perfectly right, but we would like to remain in a peer-reviewed and international literature. We hope the appreciate our effort.

1. https://100architects.com/project/vertical-times/
2. https://moaa.my/malaysia-architect/pam-hsl-sarawak/
3. https://inhabitat.com/vertical-solar-park-for-mexico-city/
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277789650_Students_perspective_on_sustainable_tropical_architectural_ideas/figures?lo=1

-Thank you for the examples and the links. The above projects have been collected by the internet, not from scientific databases. We cannot be sure that they are peer-reviewed and we cannot always verify the source. The idea of this article is to provide some first scientific evidence supported with scientific peer-reviewed articles for a model proposal that can be adopted by public institutions freely. We think that we should start to share knowledge in a more “scientific” way, supporting models with a proper peer-reviewed literature to make it useful tools for the public.

Reviewer 2 Report

The research methodology is a bit strange, perhaps at best it can be characterized as 'research by design', but the premise of the project is not well set up as to what it is solving and how it works. It reads a bit like a final year architecture project. 

The writing at the start is short and terse, which does not help set  out the problem (the urbanisation and public health statistics are too generic) and it would help to expand on the problem definition. 

Author Response

The research methodology is a bit strange, perhaps at best it can be characterized as 'research by design', but the premise of the project is not well set up as to what it is solving and how it works. It reads a bit like a final year architecture project. 

-Thank you for the comment. Thank you for the time spent on our manuscript. We worked a lot in the manuscript trying to improve its quality and the rationale. We hope the work done is appreciated by the reviewer.

We tried to make the methodology as simple as possible adopting, instead PRISMA for systematic review, PRISMA for scoping review. PRISMA is a point-by-point guidelines on how to structure the method to make the data collection, in this case the paper collection as standardized as possible. This methodology is widely adopted in other disciplines and we wanted to move this on the architecture field. The methodology of a scoping review is lighter, we hope the reviewer appreciate this section. Following this methodology, the main and most used electronic databases in the scientific contest are searched with some keywords, not the general internet where the gray literature can be found, but only peer-reviewed articles. Adopting this methodology, we would like to introduce a way to work of other disciplines in which there is a hypothesis, the scientific literature is evaluated, and a solution (in this case a model) is proposed. We hope the reviewer can appreciate the work done, it is not only an architecture project, but systematic research of the literature and a project build after this work. All the text is supported with scientific, peer-reviewed articles.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The writing at the start is short and terse, which does not help set out the problem (the urbanisation and public health statistics are too generic) and it would help to expand on the problem definition. 

-Thank you for this comment. We implemented the introduction and the discussion adding some more articles and text to better front the topic. We also implemented our introduction; we hope that the new text highlighted in the article made our review more interesting and complete. Furthermore, the English has been reviewed by an expert.

Reviewer 3 Report

There isn't sufficient justification for the stated research goals. 

The methods must be explained and explained further - there is currently insufficient detail here.

It's not clear where the details of the design concept come from (beyond the general idea of a vertical park). 

In general I am not seeing the contribution of knowledge in this article.

The writing does need some proof reading throughout. 

Author Response

There isn't sufficient justification for the stated research goals. 

The methods must be explained and explained further - there is currently insufficient detail here.

-Thank you for the time spent on our manuscript and for the suggestion. We implemented the introduction and the discussion, we better wrote the methodology section adopting a step by step guidelines easily applicable to this kind of research. We hope the reviewer appreciate the work done on this regard.

It's not clear where the details of the design concept come from (beyond the general idea of a vertical park).

-Thank you for this useful comment. More scientific articles have been adopted to support the design concept trying to provide as much details as possible.

In general I am not seeing the contribution of knowledge in this article.

-We are sorry if the reviewer cannot appreciate the contribution of this manuscript. For us it has been really hard to work in a field with poor scientific contribution but we wanted to insist despite this limitation. We added a sentence in the limitation about this. Furthermore, we wanted to try to present also in this field something widely adopted in other disciplines in which reviews of the literature are widely adopted to build the base of a standardized, available for free proposal. In this way, the audience has a tool (the project) available and, hopefully, other authors will start to follow this way of work to share, in a sort of scientific manner, the project. We think this could increase the quality of the works / articles in this area. We hope the reviewer will accept this point of view.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The writing does need some proof reading throughout

-Thank you for the suggestion. The manuscript has been reviewed by an expert to improve the quality of the English.

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to read your paper.  I do have some suggestions for revisions:

- Lit Review: It is wrong to say there is no research on this been done before.  There has been plenty of research on the topic, but maybe not on creating a model

- If you don't want to report on the correct lit review, then don't bother saying you wanted to do a scientific review of literature.  Remove that piece altogether and do a normal lit review (which you have somewhat but it is limited)

- Maybe it is the nature of this journal but you are just showing the model without any implications or policy relevance.  So it reads like a very hypothetical piece of work without any nuances tied into it.

Other comments are on the attached file 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Please have this paper reviewed extensively for English.  It is quite poor.  

Author Response

Thank you for the opportunity to read your paper.  I do have some suggestions for revisions:

-We thank the reviewer for its time and the suggestions and comments provided. We found some of them really helpful to improve the quality of our manuscript. For other comments, we hope the reviewer understand our idea and the concept that this article wants to bring.

Lit Review: It is wrong to say there is no research on this been done before.  There has been plenty of research on the topic, but maybe not on creating a model

-Thank you for this point but most of the models proposed are on the web, they are not scientific peer-reviewed articles shared on scientific databases.

If you don't want to report on the correct lit review, then don't bother saying you wanted to do a scientific review of literature.  Remove that piece altogether and do a normal lit review (which you have somewhat but it is limited)

-In our manuscript, we adopted PRISMA. It is a point by point guidelines on how to structure the method to make the data collection, in this case the paper collection as standardized as possible. This methodology is widely adopted in other disciplines and we wanted to move this on the architecture field. Following the reviewer suggestion, we decided to modify the manuscript from systematic review in which a risk of bias assessment should be executed to a scoping review (the methodology is lighter). In this way, we want to maintain the scientific soundness of the work. Instead to follow PRISMA for systematic review we follow PRISMA for scoping review. Following this methodology, the main and most used electronic databases in the scientific contest are searched with some keywords, not the general internet where the gray literature can be found, but only peer-reviewed articles. If we remove the methodology, the manuscript loose the message that wants to bring. We would like to introduce a way to work of other disciplines in which there is a hypothesis, the scientific literature is evaluated, and a solution is proposed. We are sorry not to follow the reviewer suggestion, but this is the main point that wants to make this an article and not only a project for a model.

Maybe it is the nature of this journal but you are just showing the model without any implications or policy relevance.  So it reads like a very hypothetical piece of work without any nuances tied into it.

-Thank you for this useful comment. We implemented the discussion section, adding the implication and the policy relevance. We hope the reviewer will appreciate the work done.

Other comments are on the attached file 

-Thank you for the comments. Most of the comments proposed were solved directly in the text.

Thank you for the comment about adolescents. As suggested by the reviewer we added other population.

Thank you for the suggestion, we corrected “his role” directly in the text.

“After the data collection process, no suitable studies were detected adopting the terms on the four databases”

this is hard to believe.  There are many studies on this topic.... maybe not strictly to do with architecture or a hypothetical model.  Yet, you should be pulling literature that talks about the general framework which there is plenty of

-Thank you for the suggestion. We agree that the number of studies on parks on the web is important, but not on scientific databases were only peer-reviewed literature is published. We thought about this possibility when we wrote the method section but according to us it was a clear and standardized procedure. The idea behind this study is to adopt a method widely adopted in other disciplines such as a PRISMA and propose it in this field. The research proposed wants to evaluate a specific topic otherwise it is hard to maintain a scientific base. The methodology adopted has been created to make it replicable and only specific terms is suggested to adopt otherwise is become too subjective the selection of the manuscript. Only peer-reviewed articles were included to increase the quality of the topic. We added a sentence in the limit of the study to highlight this limit, but we preferred to maintain a scientific soundness than to have a huge number of articles. We hope the reviewer can better appreciate the rationale behind this decision.

“Recently, in a research note, a vocabulary of design methods has been proposed with the aim of facilitating the languaging of methods for a better dissemination of the work”

please rephrase.  This makes no sense

-Thank you for the comment. We wrote again the sentence directly in the text.

“An amount 122 of about square meters of common areas on a 790 square meters plot of land.”

Sentence seems incomplete

-Thank you. We wrote again the sentence directly in the text.

Line 122-Line 132:

You cite 4 articles here yet you say there was no research done on this.

-Thank you for the suggestion. As the reviewer can see, the the references adopted (please, see below) are not models or projects. We adopted the scientific peer-reviewed literature to support the rationale behind the project. We examined what other researchers of other disciplines done, we extrapolated the main findings and we built the model according these indications. We hope the reviewer can better appreciate the huge amount of work that there is behind this model.

23: Zhang, R.; Wulff, H.; Duan, Y.; Wagner, P. Associations between the physical environment and park-based physical activity: a systematic review. Journal of sport and health science 2019, 8, 412-421. 375 


24: Parra, D.C.; Van Zandt, A.; Wang, P.; Goodman, M.; Abhishek, J.; Haire-Joshu, D.; Brownson, R.C. Evaluating park use and satisfaction: The case of trojan park in St. Louis Missouri. International journal of environmental research and public health 2019, 377 16, 2798. 378 


25: Lal, A.; Moodie, M.; Abbott, G.; Carver, A.; Salmon, J.; Giles-Corti, B.; Timperio, A.; Veitch, J. The impact of a park refurbishment in a low socioeconomic area on physical activity: a cost-effectiveness study. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity 2019, 16, 1-8.

“A vertical park allows a transversal intervention including people of different ages and with different problems.”

This paragraph still shows your model is enclosed and not open space.  Your model seems more like a gym or sports complex with added green and the fat that it would be free.

You might want to put this in context for some places where this might be useful.  So more dense cities of the world or then northern states in the US, where a year-round facility protected from the elements might be attractive

-Thank you for this comment, it is really appreciated. We added text following this principle to better support the rationale behind the idea. This model would like to be more a park than a facility building or a sport center. Everything is free, it could be managed directly by the local government. the spaces can be used by everyone as in a park is. We hope the new text can help in clarify this point.

“In conclusion, the current scientific literature does not provide design models for urban parks. This is an important lack; indeed, a standardized model could be helpful in proposing a fast and easy-to-adopt construction.”

Limiting your study to ONLY show a hypothetical model is probably the biggest drawback of the article. You could tie in more literature on the use and benefits of urban parks/gardens. You could also list the disadvantages of a structure such as this.  You just need more implications and practical solutions to make it more interesting to your readers.

-Thank you for this idea, they were useful to improve the quality of the manuscript. We hope the reviewer can appreciate the new text added in the manuscript following the ideas proposed.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

This is improved and I would support publication at this time - I stand by my original comments that I am not convinced this is advancing knowledge all that much but it's an interesting concept.

Author Response

This is improved and I would support publication at this time - I stand by my original comments that I am not convinced this is advancing knowledge all that much but it's an interesting concept.

-Thank you for the comment and the support despite the doubts. We really appreciate it.

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for revising your manuscript.  I think it reads much better now.  I still have just a few comments on the attached pdf that will help lay the context much better.  Also, the English language needs some editing please! 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Still needs review!

Author Response

Thank you for revising your manuscript.  I think it reads much better now.  I still have just a few comments on the attached pdf that will help lay the context much better.  Also, the English language needs some editing please!

-Thank you for the time spent again in this manuscript, thank you for the new comments and the feedback for the English language. Below the Reviewer can find the corrections and improvements performed this time. Furthermore, because all the correction and changes made to the old manuscript version there were several English errors, we apologize for this. The article has been corrected again by an expert for the English language

Comments (extrapolated from the pdf file sent by the Reviewer)

-“to be adaptable to the contest.” What contest?

Thank you for the comment. We added “urban”.

-“It is a project to share with the community” Inclomplete or complete sentence?

Thank you, we modified the sentence with “This solution wants to be feasible and economical giving the community a more easily-to-adopt instrument.”

-“… and they are more than 70% of global mortality [5].” Rephrase

Thank you, we modified the sentence in “resulting in the 70% and more of the global mortality”

-“contest” has been modified in “context” through all the manuscript

- “that Governments could adopt to reach the citizens, to guarantee the population's health.” I don’t think governments can guarantee that. Maybe you could soften this language.

Thank you for the comment, we modified it in: “that Governments could adopt to reach the citizens and intervene for their health.”

-“The included studies will be discussed narratively”

So your methodology ONLY talks about the literature review... why not anything about the model creation? That is the main component of this paper, especially since you did not find anything in the scoping review

Thank you for the useful and constructive comment. The sentence has been modified and integrated with the following sentence: “The included studies will be discussed narratively. Alternatively, if it is not possible to use any study on this topic to build the model, generic scientific literature on urban parks will be considered. A standardized model will be created including the essential structure and services proposed in the article.

- “Future studies could analyze…” I am wondering if you could speak to any disadvantages structures like this could have?  What if it attracts illegal activities or even can become a safe-haven for the homeless.  Thats a protection for a vulnerable population group but then also a safety issue for others who are visiting the space.

Thank you again for the comment, it is a really interesting point. We developed the concept with a paragraph that we hope the reviewer will appreciate. It is highlighted in yellow in the manuscript:

The park is also a place where is common to meet homeless individuals or intoxicated persons. While homeless individuals are not a serious problem for parker users, the presence of intoxicated persons decreases the number of park users [68]. This vertical park solution, with the presence of closed spaces, could allow the acceptance by non-profit organizations of those vulnerable populations. Furthermore, according to the literature, to fight illegal activities, and make the park safer, it is important to organize supervised activities [68,69] and this model allows its attendance at any time of the day with structured and unstructured activities fronting also the problem connected to illegal activities. A structure like this, with limited entrance, can be easily monitored with video surveillance facilitating its control and making it safer.

-Also, is there any literature to suggest even a closed space could benefit the ecosystem services a urban area gets with preserved green space that is open?  If you could just use a paragraph to explain the benefits of a closed urban park in terms of sustainability and ecosystem services (since you do mention it a few times in your write-up) would be good context to lay out.

One last aspect to consider in the future, with proper and specific studies, is the real benefit of a closed urban park in terms of sustainability and ecosystem services, fundamental aspects to promote urban health development[88]. It is well known, from the literature, that urban nature is fundamental for city sustainability, indeed it has an important role in the social and psychological needs of citizens [87]. It is also known that land sparing is fundamental for future urban designs to guarantee ecosystem services [89]. Adopting intelligent arrangements and technology to further increase natural capital is necessary [89] and this park model wants to provide a solution. However, it is fundamental to understand if a closed park (the present model) is as useful as an open park (the classic park with no walls and roofs), especially in terms of benefits for the ecosystem. Unfortunately, looking at the main scientific electronic databases such as PubMed and Scholar, no “closed parks” structures are detected making necessary proper data collection in terms of ecosystem benefits.