Visible Greenery and Visual Composition in Urban Views: A Matched-Scene Experiment on Restorativeness and Preference

Visible greenery is widely considered beneficial in urban design, but it is less clear whether adding more greenery to the same view always improves restorative appraisal. This study tested that question using matched three-dimensional scenes. Nine Field photographs from three urban sites were used to construct nine Modeled reference scenes, each edited into Reduced and Added scenes. A total of 114 participants evaluated 27 rendered scenes for perceived restorativeness, Perceived Sensory Dimensions, and scene preference, while panoptic segmentation quantified visual composition. Reduced scenes received lower perceived-restorativeness ratings (b = −0.278, p < 0.001) and preference ratings (b = −0.289, p = 0.006) than Modeled reference scenes. Added scenes did not reliably improve either outcome. Importantly, the manipulations changed the whole visible composition rather than vegetation pixels alone: Added scenes increased Nature and Rich in species but reduced Prospect, visible sky, and built features. Effects also varied across sites and viewpoints. These findings do not imply that adding vegetation is ineffective. Instead, they show that the restorative value of additional greenery depends on how it reconfigures the broader scene. The matched-scene approach provides a pre-implementation method for comparing greenery changes within a specific urban view.