Culture is new nature: comparing the restorative capacity of cultural and natural landscapes

Is the cultural landscape a restorative environment for mental stress? What is the restorative potential of cultural landscape, compared to the natural landscape? And what factors determine the restorative potential of cultural or natural landscape? These questions have not been studied previously. To fill the gap the present study conducts an experiment to compare the restorative capacity of cultural and natural landscapes in China, and explores the driving forces of 15 landscape characteristics on the restorative quality of the two landscape types. The results show that there are no significant differences of restoration between cultural and natural landscape. The 10 photographs representing cultural landscape have a bigger standard deviation (lower consensus) of restorative capacity than the 10 photographs representing natural landscape. More water features and the flat terrain are the significant promoters for the restoration of cultural landscape. Abundant colours, which usually imply a higher diversity of plant species, are vital to enhance the restorative capacity of natural landscape.