Bin JiangThe University of Hong Kong | HKU · Department of Architecture
Bin Jiang
Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S.
Welcome to visit our new lab website! https://uehh.hku.hk/
About
49
Publications
62,936
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1,099
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Citations since 2016
Introduction
Bin JIANG is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture and the founding director of Virtual Reality Lab of Built Environments and Human Health (UEHH) at the University of Hong Kong. BJ holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on investigating impacts of built environment on public health.
https://www.arch.hku.hk/researchcentre/virtual-reality-lab-of-urban-environments-human-health/
Additional affiliations
January 2015 - March 2021
January 2015 - February 2019
August 2014 - present
Education
August 2008 - January 2013
Publications
Publications (49)
Few studies have investigated the impact of landscapes on humans’ mental status while they are moving at high speeds, such as driving on the freeway. This study used a simulation system to measure drivers’ mental responses to six different freeway landscapes. Each of the 33 participants completed six different 90-minute simulated driving tasks in a...
Suicide is a global challenge. Although it is clear that socioeconomic and demographic factors influence suicide rates, we know little about the impacts of the built environment on suicide rates.
We investigated the relationship between characteristics of the built environment and suicide death rates over a 13-year period in 151 rent-only public h...
There is striking racial disparity in the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection rates in the United States. We hypothesize that the disparity is significantly smaller in areas with a higher ratio of green spaces. County level data on the SARS-CoV-2 infection rates of black and white individuals in 135 of the most ur...
New and complex acoustic-visual environments are emerging in contemporary highdensity cities. The independent and interactive effects of acoustic and visual environments on human's mood states have been rarely investigated in that context. This study examined the extent to which 12 pairs of four acoustic environments and three visual environments i...
The coronavirus pandemic is an ongoing global crisis that has profoundly harmed public health. Although studies found exposure to green spaces can provide multiple health benefits, the relationship between exposure to green spaces and the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate is unclear. This is a critical knowledge gap for research and practice. In this study...
Landscape architects and planners have been assessing eye-level vegetation to develop evidence-based designs, including the relationships between urban nature and human health. Measuring eye-level vegetation was often subjective and time-consuming in the past. Recent advances in computer vision have made it feasible to automatically measure eye-lev...
Due to intense urbanization in the last decade, high-density city has become a major type of human habitat globally. In those cities, oppressiveness has been recognized as a dominating environmental perception. Stress Reduction Theory is a leading theory that explains the relationship between environmental exposure and mental stress. However, the t...
Knowledge workers drive social and economic development in contemporary cities but often exhibit poor psychological and physical health because of sedentary work, long-term and intense mental labor, and high-level occupational competition. Thus, providing high-quality restorative green spaces in knowledge workers’ proximity to promote their health...
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a huge loss of human life globally. However, few studies investigated the link between exposure to green space and risk of COVID-19 mortality rate, while also distinguishing the effects of various types of green space, considering the spatial distribution of human population and green space, and identifying the opti...
With the rapid development of urban construction, the waterfront industrial heritage park has played an active role in shaping the city’s image, regional economic development and environmental improvement, and the continuation of the city’s waterfront history. The waterfront park based on industrial heritage using post-occupancy evaluation will hel...
The COVID-19 outbreak has caused enormous deaths and profound social and economic disruption globally. Accumulating evidence suggests exposure to greenspace may reduce the risk of COVID-19 mortality. Greenspace exposure enhances immune functioning, reduces inflammation, and replenishes gut microbiota may protect against the risk of mortality among...
Seasonality is a typical feature of landscapes in temperate regions. Seasonality's effects on visual aesthetic quality (VAQ) are widely recog-nised but not well understood. To address this gap, 10 sample sites were selected to represent the diversity of urban green spaces in Xuzhou, eastern China, which has a typical temperate monsoon climate. Phot...
Studies on the linkages between nature exposure and physical activities often focus simply on the immediate vicinity of home locations, but path-based exercises, such as running and cycling, are continuous activities and cover a broad spatial extent. Thus, the traditional home buffer approach fails to acknowledge the settings where road running act...
This study examined the associations between green spaces and one–years' worth of SARS–CoV–2 infection rates across all 3,108 counties in the contiguous United States after controlling for multiple categories of confounding factors. We found green spaces at the county level have a significant negative association with infection rates. Among all typ...
In 2010, 15 young migrant workers committed suicide in the Foxconn Technology Group factories in Shenzhen City, China (East Week Magazine 2010). This startling tragedy brought global attention not only to Foxconn but also to sweatshops throughout China. In response, a group of Chinese academics advocated for justice for young migrant workers in Chi...
The Pearl River Delta (PRD) is historically the manufacturing heartland of China and currently hosts some of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. The resulting industrial structure, its related networks and physical space have a significant impact on the social, economic and ecological landscape of the region. The eventual post-indus...
The mechanistic and neural bases of why green environments drive positive mental health outcomes remain poorly understood. We show that viewing green urban landscapes that vary in terms of green-space density elicits corresponding changes in the activity of the human ventral posterior cingulate cortex that is correlated to behavioural stress-relate...
Driving on freeways is a daily activity across the world. Poor driving performance on freeways can cause severe injuries and deaths. However, few studies have examined whether and to what extent different types of freeway landscapes influence driving performance. A simulated driving task was designed to measure the impacts of six types of freeway l...
This book discusses essential strategies and approaches to creating mentally restorative environments for highly stressed and depressed workers at sweatshop factories. Drawing on the Foxconn factory in Longhua, China and an adjacent urban village as a sample site for research and design practice, the book employs a bottom-up and participatory proce...
At the “International Ph.D. Academic Colloquium Program of Peking University”, Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers around the world may come together to build professional connections, to discuss featured issues, to exchange resources, and to share experiences. The colloquium has been held continuously for 10 years since 2010; the topic of...
Urban central waterfront space is a transitional area where the land meets the water, with a mixture of diverse landscape resources and urban functions. It is an essential type of space to accommodate and stimulate public life, so its quality has multiple significant and lasting influences on human health and wellbeing. The existing literature has...
Grit, a fundamental personality trait, is beneficial for individual's lifelong health and well-being. A great amount of studies have shown that contact with nature has significant positive impacts on cultivating an individual's grit. According to the human's psychological and physical conditions at different ages, the grit-oriented nature education...
Overuse of portable electronic devices depletes one’s attention capacity, a critical cognitive resource. Although contact with nature promotes attentional functioning, we do not know the extent to which exposure to nature and the use of electronic devices interact to promote or inhibit attentional functioning. In this study, 81 participants perform...
There is no doubt that science and technology have progressed rapidly in the past decade and it is constantly challenging and refreshing people’s understanding of urban environment, human life, and even human nature itself. Meanwhile, its impact on urban environment planning and design should not be ignored and needs to be addressed
promptly. The c...
In high-density cities around the world, alleys are common but neglected spaces that are perceived as unsafe. While cities have invested resources in environmental interventions to improve safety in urban allies, it is not clear how these interventions impact perceived safety. We review two important criminology theories that discuss the environmen...
This paper reviews the causes of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) from a perspective other than traditional clinical pathology. We look at social factors that could arouse stressful feelings, and could further lead to cardiovascular diseases. Major social factors including job stress, daily hassles, life events, social inequity, and trauma are covered...
Green Infrastructure (GI) refers to the natural spaces in a city that improve urban ecology and bring social, economic, and environmental benefits to residents and communities. Although we know a good deal about people's preference for urban forests, we know little about how people reaction to other types of GI and even less about how varying level...
The easy availability and widespread use of remotely-sensed imagery, especially Google Earth satellite imagery, makes it simple for urban forestry professionals to assess a site and measure tree cover density without visiting the site. Remotely-sensed tree cover density has become the dominant criterion for urban forestry regulations in many countr...
In the West, the notion that urban space can significantly influence public health has been widely accepted by scholars and applied in
urban planning and landscape design practice. This article uses Kevin Lynch’s The Image of City as a research framework to present
important scientific evidence reported in the last two decades. The article includes...
This article introduces the main progress about research of impacts of ordinary urban green landscapes on public health and points out four main directions for future research. They are: developing research of dose of nature-health response curve; drawing attention back to human perceptions on site and small data; using green landscapes to shape ch...
http://www.wtoutiao.com/p/164vqTh.html
This interview article focuses on discussion of several important issues related to the influence of urban landscape on human health from a perspective of pediatrics. Richard J. Jackson introduced his career in the field and explained how to promote physical, mental, and social health through improvement of urban environment. Bin Jiang, the intervi...
"Healthy City, Healthy Landscape" concerns how the built environment and urban landscapes can influence the psychological, physiological, and social health of individuals and lead to more sustainable cities. Through planning and designing physical spaces and landscapes, we can promote healthy and sustainable lifestyles and create clean, safe, pleas...
Cite as: Jiang, B., Zhang, T., & Sullivan, W. C. (2015). Healthy Cities: Mechanisms and Research Questions Regarding the Impacts of Urban Green Landscapes on Public Health and Well-being. Landsc. Archit. Front., 3(1), 24-35. doi: 10.1007/slaf-0024-0301-xx
Abstract: This paper presents a summary of critical environmental problems in Chinese cities...
Although it is well established that viewing nature can help individuals recover from a stressful experience, the dose-response curve describing the relationship between tree cover density and stress recovery is totally unclear. A total of 160 participants engaged in a standard Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress. Participants were then rando...
The mechanism of urban environments influence mental health and latest studies.
This article focuses on discussion of several important mechanisms or issues related to the influence of urban landscape on human health, including the importance of biodiversity and related research methods; opportunities of developing a comprehensive green infrastructure and its effects on human health; how electronic technology would alter resea...
This dialogue emphasized the importance of exploring multiple impacts of urban landscapes on human health. We identified four main aspects of research on this topic: (1) The importance of this issue; (2) Empirical evidence regarding connection between landscape and human health; (3) How urban landscape influences social interactions; (4) The health...
Questions
Questions (14)
Landscape and Urban Planning 8.119
Urban forestry and urban greening 5.766
Environment & Behavior 6.548
Journal of Environmental Psychology 7.649
Environment International 13.352
Science of The Total Environment 10.753
Nature Sustainability 27.157
Nature Human Behaviour 24.452
Cities 6.077
Urban Studies 4.418
Landscape Research 1.701
Landscape Ecology 5.043
Landscape and Ecological Engineering 2.147
HERD-Health Environments Research & Design Journal 2.408
Welcome to add more...
The whole world seems to go to another direction, which might be against globalization and commercial/manufacturing network on a global scale. More and more corporations may choose to develop the manufacturing plants in the motherland countries rather than do that in China or other developing countries in Asia or South America.
It might have huge impacts on current workers' living and working conditions, and of course, will have huge impacts on future workers' living and working conditions in new places. What are those impacts in the near and far future?
BTW: Please allow us to share a recent article about Foxconn workers' living and working conditions in Shenzhen, China.
This is an environmental psychology and behavior question.
Any published research can be recommended? Many thanks.
Based on recent reading and my own study, I find this is an emerging but critical question for multiple fields.
Electronic screen devices are becoming more and more affordable, portable, and friendly to users (even a child can learn how to use it in days).
Each year in the Silicon Valley and other high-tech parks, billions of dollars were invested to produce new apps or other virtual experiences to grab people's attention and money. Comparing to the era before the birth of smartphone, pad, and laptop, people now have much more freedom to stare and touch the electronic screens no matter where they are (in other words, they almost become "salves" of electronic screens).
This new lifestyle seriously alters how people perceive and interact with the physical environments (urban or rural spaces). In many circumstances, we are physically in a real space but mentally in a virtual space. We will never experience a street, a park, or a beach as what people experienced two decades ago. I wonder what will happen in the near and far future on this issue in psychological, behavioral, social, economic ways?
Some references:
The situation is: Sometimes we ask a subject to answer a same question many times in a questionnaire. It creates the effect that the respondent can guess what is the intention of the survey and somehow she/he will manipulate the answer to please or against the investigator.
For example, ask a subject to rate each of 10 images for a same question (Likert scale): How much do u like this image? It creates the effect that subject can easily know the intention after answering a few ratings.
Any techniques to avoid this effect?
Subjects reported their feelings about a scene of urban place after they saw the scene (a photo) and was asked to imaging herself/himself was in that place (a place where they were living or working at, so they were familiar with that place. In fact, the subject shot and provided the photo to researchers).
In a photo-questionnaire survey, we measured three feelings: Anxiety level, stress level, and likability level (how much she/he likes the place). We also calculated the average value of three measures as a combined indicator of mood. In total, there are four measures. The regression analysis aims to find association between some key environmental factors with these four measures (indicators) of mental health after controlling for social-demographic factors.
In your opinion, how to logically differentiate and connect these three measures? any suggestion on analysis? Many many thanks!
Projects
Projects (7)
Examine the independent and interactive impacts of various visual-acoustic environments (landscapes) on mental health and wellbeing (mood, anxiety, stress, fatigue, etc).
This project will explore:
1. the effects of greenspace on COVID-19 infection rate
2. the effects of greenspace on racial disparity in infection rate (e.g. black vs. white in USA)
3. greenspace visiting behaviors during the pandemic
4. other health benefits of visiting greenspaces during the pandemic
Examine the impacts of different environmental design interventions of urban street and alley on citizens' perceived safety and actual crime rate/violent behavior.
