Understand Blue: The Importance of the Perceiving Water Value and its Mediating Effect on Park Satisfaction

Abstract

Urban blue and green spaces (UBGS) are important places for connecting humans and nature in urban settings. People’s satisfaction with parks, as valuable UBGS, has received great attention. How green features such as vegetation will impact environmental satisfaction has been widely discussed and studied, but the attention given to green features far exceeds that given to water bodies. Considering that the boundaries between blue spaces and green spaces can be blurry, with blue spaces sometimes still subsumed under green space, the importance of water bodies on individuals’ UBGS experience has been overlooked. The potential oversight of the importance of water bodies compromises the ability to understand individuals’ interaction with the environment. To improve the understanding of the perceptions of water bodies and how such perceptions are important to environmental satisfaction, we conducted a survey-based empirical study in the Huron River watershed. We used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to conduct the analysis. First, we defined the perceptions of water bodies as perceived water value and quality and investigated what factors will impact them. Second, we analyzed what factors will impact park satisfaction. Our results suggested that compared to other variables, perceived water value is the most important factor that impacts park satisfaction. Furthermore, the results highlight the significant and robust mediating e↵ect of water bodies in mediating the perceptions of vegetation and park satisfaction, providing a new perspective to understand and explain how and why water bodies are important in environmental satisfaction. Our results encourage rethinking water as a mediator in planning, landscaping, and environmental governance, as water bodies may serve as the bridge linking the perceptions of di↵erent landscape elements with broader environmental satisfaction.