Enhancing Perceived Restorativeness in Urban Commercial Pedestrian Streets: An Empirical Study on the Intervention of Public Art

Commercial pedestrian streets serve as vital urban public spaces for residents’ daily leisure and social interaction. However, amid rapid urbanization, many such streets exhibit a tendency towards homogenization, raising practical concerns about the capacity of these environments to consistently deliver rich psychological restorative experiences. Existing research on the restorativeness of urban streets has primarily focused on macro or meso scales, leaving the restorative impacts of micro-scale elements, such as public art within streetscapes, insufficiently explored. To address this research gap, this study takes Tanhualin Historic Cultural Street in Wuhan as its research setting. Employing a streetscape image simulation experiment combined with an online questionnaire survey, it assesses the influence of public art on the perceived restorativeness of commercial pedestrian streets. The results indicate that public art substantially enhances the perceived restorative capacity of commercial pedestrian streets. Further analysis reveals clear independent main effects of both the form and theme of public art on perceived restorativeness, with the influence of form being more pronounced, and no statistically significant interaction effect between the two. These findings offer novel insights for enhancing the restorative potential of commercial pedestrian streets and provide design recommendations for future urban street renewal and sustainable development.