Sensescapes
Restorative public spaces in the Lijnbaan
E.S. Agterdenbos (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
M.G.A.D. Harteveld – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
T. Bouma – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
This thesis investigates how restorative urban design strategies can minimize or compensate stressors and overstimulation in dense urban public spaces, with a focus on the Lijnbaan in Rotterdam’s city center. Rapid urbanization has led to increasingly dense cities where people are exposed to continuous sensory input such as noise, crowding, visual clutter, traffic, and pollution. By 2050, more than two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas, which intensifies the issues of environmental overload, attention fatigue, and psychological stress. While these challenges are well documented in environmental psychology research, their translation into spatial and multisensory urban design strategies is still limited.
The research combines literature review, walk along interviews, site analysis, and a research by-design approach. Important theoretical frameworks are Attention Restoration Theory, Stress Reduction Theory, and Perceived Sensory Dimensions. The study explores how urban stressors and stimuli are perceived through the senses and how their interactions can either intensify or reduce sensory overload.
Findings show that stress or overstimulation is caused by multiple sensory stimuli working together, and not by single stressors alone, and that spatial conditions strongly influence how these stimuli are perceived and experienced. Restoration is therefore not achieved only by reducing input, but by shaping the quality, rhythm, and legibility of sensory experiences.
This led to the development of the Urban Restorative Sensecape Theory (URST), which has five principles: modulation, rhythm, gradation, engagement, and spatial language. The core principle of URST is that restoration does not arise from the absence of stimuli or stressors, nor from escaping them by relocating to other spaces. Instead, restoration arises from the quality, gradation, manageability, and meaningful interpretation of sensory stimuli, while still allowing urban environments to remain lively and rich in sensory experience, and supportive of calm.
The thesis also includes a design proposal for the Lijnbaan, where the five principles from URST are translated into a network of interconnected restorative public spaces. These support sensory balance, restoration, and inclusive urban experience.