Primary Exploration of Leisure Path Design along Songhua River by a Small Number of Sample Experiment, Considering Several Multiple Indexes

Abstract

The waterfront park in northern China always has two parallel leisure pathways, a sunshine pathway and a tree-shaded pathway, which is attributed to the seasonal variations in water level. To provide some design suggestions according to the local characteristics of the waterfront park in northern China, this study selected six young volunteers to take part in an outdoor field experiment and a questionnaire survey in Stalin Park of Songhua River in Harbin, China. During the experiment, the volunteers’ local skin temperature and core temperature were recorded, with their subjective responses recorded every 5 min, including thermal comfort, thermal sensation, thermal pleasure, and fatigue scale vote. This study found that, compared with the sunshine pathway, the tree-shaded pathway not only optimized people’s outdoor thermal comfort and thermal pleasure, but also improved their fatigue scale vote experience. Some evidence showed that people’s subjective response to the outdoor thermal environment might be influenced by physical factors (temperature, velocity, humidity, radiation, etc.) and may also be influenced by the surrounding landscape view (water, square, lawn, tree, etc.). The first piece of evidence is that, during the first 10 min, people’s thermal sensation in the sunshine pathway group was high, but they kept voting for high thermal comfort, which may be due to the influence of the waterfront view on people’s subjective response to thermal comfort. The second piece of evidence shows that people’s overall thermal sensation was calculated by their local thermal sensation, looking at former research, with the voting results very different to the calculated results, which could be attributed to the influence of diversity landscape elements on people’s subjective response to thermal sensation. Based on these results, some suggestions for the leisure pathway design along Stalin Park of Songhua River in Harbin, China, were given. The shaded device of the sunshine pathway should be designed in 15-min-walk intervals and accessible ways to the tree-shaded pathway should be added. The other facilities should be designed with 30 min walking distance on the tree-shaded pathway and 20 min walking distance to the sunshine pathway. Diversified landscapes should be designed for both the tree-shaded pathway and sunshine pathway, which could improve people’s outdoor thermal comfort and the general subjective response to the environment. It is worth noting that the sample size of this study was small (6), and the participants were all homogenous young people (age, height, weight); thus, this study could be considered a preliminary work and the results and applicability have limitations.