Egyptian Restorative Urban Spaces Framework: As a Design and Evaluation Guide for Healthy Urban Spaces Reducing Mental Fatigue

In recent years, mental fatigue has gained recognition as one of the major mental health issues that negatively impact social interaction and cognitive function. According to restorative theories, the "Attention Restorative Theory ART" is still the one that targets the restoration of mental fatigue; not a technical nor design guide, so, there is a gap in converting elements of ART into restorative design guidelines. As the pandemic has changed people’s mindset toward the significance of their relationships with urban public spaces as a restorative experience. The majority of urban public spaces in Egyptian cities have proven insufficient to provide a restorative experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research aims to propose and provide the “Egyptian Restorative Urban Spaces Framework E-RUSF” to support urban designers, architects, and decision-makers in regenerating and providing Egyptian restorative urban space to reduce mental fatigue and improve quality of life. The E-RUSF is composed based on qualitative and quantitative approaches. The theoretical analytical study focuses on mental fatigue definition and its effects, restoration environment; restorative definitions, and ART, and a comparative analysis between features of aesthetic environmental preference based on pioneers’ and users’ preferences in the literature review. Then, semi-structured interviews and general interviews were conducted to identify the relationship between ART and features of aesthetic environmental preference, and refine and rank the features for each element of ART to provide E-RUSF, by using SPSS. The finding revealed that E-RUSF is considered an initial step to provide an evaluating and designing framework for healthier restorative Egyptian communities.