THE COMPARISON OF TREE ENCLOSURE ON VISITOR’S PERCEIVED SAFETY AND RESTORATIVENESS IN URBAN PARK, BANDUNG

• Main Author: Chanifah U. Bachtiar, Jasmine
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Subjects: Arsitektur
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/48953
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

The restoration facilities in urban areas are highly needed. The stress level of city dwellers is higher than that of rural residents so that they need a place to reduce stress. The stressors in the city area, such as work demands, income, et cetera, make the city full of stressors. However, the restoration facilities in urban areas such as cafes, shopping centers, open space, parks, urban forests, et cetera, hopefully, can lessen the stressor level. Those restoration facilities show the importance of restoration needs. Among these facilities, the park is the best place for restoration because the park has many restorative components. Besides, the park also provides a variety of supporting facilities that can engage people's needs and activities. However, not all natural environments can support restoration. The natural environments that are too shady, not maintained and dark can make someone feel threatened. The high number of landscape elements should have increased the visitor's perceived restorativeness. Perceived personal safety and perceived restorativeness have a mutually supportive relationship; a person would feel safe in an environment if he put his focus only on restorative elements and not aware of the surrounding. However, some studies show that two factors did not have a direct relationship and perceived personal safety as a mediating factor, and other studies did not reveal those relationships. This complicated relationship between those three factors needs to be explored and studied further. This study will show how to optimize the three enclosure is based on perceived personal safety and restorativeness. Also, the dominant factor of restoration that has an important role will be shown in this study. This research proposes the null hypothesis that the tree enclosure that consists of moderate density, remote position, and medium in scale will optimum perceived safety and restorativeness, and extent is the most dominant restoration factor. The parks were selected based on criteria: medium enclosure and some landscape elements. After that, preliminary observations are conducted to choose some parks that can be intervened in the study. The result shows there are three parks required with two pictures in each park for background scenes in this study. These parks are Maluku Park, Traffic Park, and Cilaki Park (Pet Park). After that, the selected background scenes edited according to Stratum C. Then, those trees were intervened based on tree enclosure combinations by density, position, and scale. The tree was edited by tree density (two categories: medium and high), distance from the park circulation (in two categories: remote and nearby), and tree scale (in three categories: low, medium, and high). This intervention led to 12 photo-combinations for each park point (each park will have 24 different combinations of photos). Those edited photos are assessed by respondents (park visitors) with several questions related to perceived personal safety and restorativeness. Each questionnaire takes 10-15 minutes to fill in. The collected data (N = 272) were examined by ANOVA, correlation, and distribution analysis. The results show that safety in the urban park is important. The combination of tree-enclosures to support safety and restoration is the tree with high density, remote in position, and medium/high in scale. Otherwise, another criterium of enclosures is the tree with medium density, nearby in position from the park circulation, and high in scale. These two criteria appear based on the highest perceived personal safety and restorativeness mean combination. Based on these criteria, being away is a restoration factor that plays a major role in safety and restoration in city parks. Besides, extent is the lowest rated factor based on the three combinations. The low assessment of extent may be affected by the context issue of questions. This study also supports the statement that safety in the natural environment is the most important thing to achieve restoration. Even though the perceived restorativeness is not optimal, a safe environment can support the restoration. The results of this study are expected to be applied in city parks to optimize park safety and restoration. Besides, the results of the study also revealed that only these combinations are considered to have optimal enclosure so those combinations should be applied for optimal safety and restoration in the future design of urban parks.