Acoustics in urban parks: Does the structure of narrow urban parks matter in designing a calmer urban landscape?

Abstract

Urban parks can function as a proper sink of noise pollution. However, lack of universally-agreed upon methodologies and differing urban conditions have fueled controversy surrounding the effectuation of this urban park function around the world. Hence, to address this controversy in narrow urban parks (with a mean width of ~109 m) in Isfahan City, Central Iran, noise levels (L_q30) were measured along two longitudinal transects placed along the interior northern river-and adjacent to the southern edge of the parks bordered by a heavily-conjected road. We used statistical tests and models to determine the association of noise levels measured along the northern transect with the distance to, and the intensity of noise emitted from, the road, vegetation biomass, and vegetation height within two 50 and 100 m buffer rings drawn around northern sites and the richness of bird species. The average L_q30 values differed significantly between the southern (~73.21 dB) and northern (~66.43 dB) transects and correlated negatively with species richness (r(98) = −0.324, p<0.01). Three variables including mean NDVIwithin the 100 m buffer ring, distance from the road and mean L_q30 values of the nearest three southern sites were included to build the best predictive multiple-linear regression model through the step-wise procedure with r² of 0.52. These findings suggest that further attempts aiming to alleviate the parks’ interior noise level should be attentive to distance to road, traffic at the nearest road part, and the interior vegetation characteristics.

Keywords

noise pollution / multiple-linear regression / NDVI / vegetation height / Isfahan

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