Urban green space vitality—the intensity and diversity of human activities—is crucial for delivering public health benefits. While the provision of facilities is widely acknowledged as a key determinant of urban green space vitality, the empirical evidence remains fragmented, obscuring a coherent understanding of how and under what conditions these features influence use. This scoping review systematically maps and synthesises this body of evidence to clarify the functional typology, operative mechanisms, and contextual moderators linking facilities to urban green space vitality. Following the PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines, we analyzed 79 empirical studies identified from 8,748 screened records across four databases between 2000 and 2025. The review synthesizes a functional typology of facilities, spanning activity-enabling facility, facility for comfort and socialization, aesthetic and natural feature, and supporting and access infrastructure. It further elucidates five key mechanisms through which facilities influence vitality: attraction and drawing power, enabling specific activities, prolonging stay and encouraging duration, facilitating social interaction, and shaping user perceptions. The findings reveal that facility impact is not universal but is moderated by population heterogeneity and geographical context, a relationship integrated into the proposed Facility–Mechanism–Population–Context (FMPC) framework. While substantial evidence confirms facilities as central to urban green space success, the field is constrained by a reliance on cross-sectional designs and significant geographical biases. Critical knowledge gaps are identified, including a need for robust causal evidence, fine-grained spatial analysis, and focused research on under-represented populations and regions in the Global South. This review provides a foundational resource for future research, evidence-based design, and equitable policy aimed at maximising the health and social value of urban green spaces.
Sea-level rise poses a severe challenge to biodiversity conservation in coastal regions. Taking the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (the GBA) as a case study, this research simulated a 0.5 m sea-level rise scenario by 2050. Utilizing a GIS platform, we integrated the Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM), the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) species distribution model, and the Zonation systematic conservation planning tool to analyze the changes of ecological conservation patterns from 2020 to 2050. The projected results were further compared with existing nature reserve and territorial spatial plans to identify conservation gaps. This research obtained the following results. 1) The responses of highly suitable habitats to a 0.5 m sea-level rise diverge significantly across four taxonomic groups. Specifically, the highly suitable habitats for mammals and reptiles are projected to decrease by 11.59% and 44.30%, respectively, whereas those for amphibians and birds are expected to expand by 34.61% and 21.61% driven by wetland expansion. 2) Ecological conservation priority areas (ECPAs) for terrestrial wildlife are predominantly concentrated within three distinct ecological settings: mountainous forests, coastal and shoreline ecosystems, and peri-urban nature reserves. 3) Although the predicted 2050 ECPAs largely overlap with current nature reserves (2025), critical protection gaps remain in the southern mountainous and coastal regions of Jiangmen, the central-western areas of Shenzhen, the southern coastal and eastern mountainous regions of Huizhou, national forest parks in the central-northern Guangdong, and the mountainous areas in northern Zhaoqing. This study provides a scientific basis for the adaptive planning of coastal cities in response to sea level rise.
Many university students experience stress and anxiety due to life-transition demands that affect their psychosocial health. Campus green spaces can serve as nature-based interventions to reduce student stress and improve socio-emotional well-being. This research identifies specific campus green space characteristics as nature-based therapeutic mechanisms that support positive spatial associations between student stress reduction and campus green space interaction. A student survey assessed perceptions of stress, stressful periods, stress-relief behaviors, and preferences for campus green space conditions, types, and potential interactions that may mitigate stressful feelings. Students reported that smaller outdoor spaces designed for social activities and physical exercise were most preferred, whereas larger social spaces were less so. Preferred green space characteristics included naturalistic, smaller spaces that feel peaceful and quiet and offer privacy, whereas the least preferred spaces were single-function sites. These results provide insight into students' current and preferred relationships with stress-mitigating campus green spaces and can inform improved spatial configurations. A case-study spatial analysis and conceptual illustrations communicate the results through evidence-based design. Students' emotional and psychosocial well-being is key to their transition into future careers and their interpersonal capacity to manage life situations. Strategically designed and managed campus green spaces can help regulate students' stress levels during the semester and support academic success.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have introduced new opportunities for landscape architecture, yet high-context domains such as Chinese classical garden design remain challenged by dataset bias and spatial hallucination in general-purpose models. To overcome the limitations of single-platform approaches to balancing cultural semantics and spatial topology, we propose a logic-driven, multi-platform collaborative framework that encodes traditional design principles as computational constraints. The framework integrates semantic divergence to capture "yijing" (意境) with topological control to ensure spatial coherence. Performance is evaluated using metrics including Fréchet inception distance (FID), Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity index measure, together with expert assessments and ablation experiments. Results indicate that compared with a single-platform text-to-image baseline, the full three-layer workflow achieved about 30% reduction in FID and improved expert-rated cultural fidelity and spatial logic by approximately 1.8–1.9 points, while reducing human post-editing time by about 57%. Layer-wise ablation shows that spatial improvements are mainly attributable to the Topological Constraint Layer, whereas gains in cultural authenticity are driven by the Ontological Refinement Layer. This study not only establishes a reproducible, model-agnostic workflow for cultural heritage design but also provides a theoretical bridge connecting current 2D generative paradigms with future 3D spatial cognition.
In response to the challenges brought by the extension of the Landscape Architecture professional degree to the doctoral level following the adjustment of the national professional degree catalogue in 2022, this study examines the paradigm transformation of knowledge production for Landscape Architecture professional doctoral students. Regarding the mode of knowledge production, by clarifying the fundamental logic differences in knowledge production between the academic doctorates and the professional doctorates, this study argues that professional doctoral knowledge production should shift from the sole pursuit of academic excellence toward the exploration of solutions to real-world problems; drawing on three international paradigms, it further offers insights into China's Landscape Architecture doctoral education. Regarding the attributes of knowledge production, grounded in Basil Bernstein's theory of knowledge structures, this study reveals the essential differences between discipline knowledge and domain knowledge in their organizational forms, and proposes that knowledge production attributes should shift from the single basic principle knowledge of the discipline toward the dual applied knowledge forms of the domain, i.e., applied principle knowledge and applied strategic knowledge. Regarding the pathway of knowledge production, this study analyses the disciplinary knowledge production pathway from a reductionist epistemological orientation and proposes that the domain knowledge production should shift from reductionist decomposition toward integrative construction, by innovatively proposing a staged knowledge production pathway: 1) problem domain identification and knowledge system construction; 2) cross-domain selection and knowledge system integration; and 3) domain expansion and knowledge system reconstruction. This study provides theoretical support and paradigmatic reference for Landscape Architecture professional doctoral education.