In the past decades, many studies have proposed urban greening as a method to mitigate the rising temperatures in cities and urban heat islands. The cooling effect of urban green spaces can be divided into two components; cooling intensity and cooling extension. These two components are affected by different factors. This paper provides a review of research on the impact of urban greening on temperature and on the parameters that have an effect on that. Based on this review, two categories that have an effect on cooling intensity and
cooling extension were identified: internal factors and external factors. These play an important role in the effectiveness of urban green spaces. As internal factors or indexes, the following were extracted; Size index, Shape index, Vegetation species and Tree canopy coverage are the most common indexes in most of the studies. The external factors can be divided into climate and surrounding properties. A discussion of the reviewed studies reflects the impact of each index on the cooling intensity and cooling extension. The existing methods and techniques for determining these indexes have also been considered in this paper. As such, this study is helpful for designers and planners for decision-making during the design phase. ... Read more

Perceptions of different environments are different for different people. An abstract designed environment, with a degree of freedom from any visual reference in the physical world requests a completely different perception than a fully or semi-designed environment that has some correlation with the physical world. Maximal evidence on the manner in which the human brain is involved/operates in dealing with such novel perception comes from neuropsychology. Harnessing the tools and techniques involved in the domain of neuropsychology, the paper presents nee evidence on the role of pre-central gyrus in the perception of abstract spatial environments. In order to do so, the research team developed three different categories of designed environment with different characteristics: (1) Abstract environment, (2) Semi-designed environment, (3) Fully designed environment, as experimental sample environments. Perception of Fully-designed and semi-designed environments is almost the same, [maybe] since the brain can find a correlation between designed environments and already experienced physical world. In addition to this, the response to questionnaires accompanied with a list of buzzwords that have been provided after the experiments, also describe the characteristics of the chosen sample environments. Additionally, these results confirm the suitability of continuous electroencephalography (EEG) for studying Perception from the perspective of architectural environments. ... Read more