3.3. Evaluation of cultural services
The Declaration on the Human Environment issued in 1972 emphasized the
relationship between development and protection from the perspective of
environmental protection. Subsequently, many countries started
large-scale ecological restoration and urban ecosystem restoration in
order to provide a happy living environment for urban residents through
building a healthy ecosystem. Ecosystem health initially meant that the
organization of the ecosystem was not damaged or weakened, and had a
certain restoration ability (Costanza and Norton, 1992). Then, in the
concept of ecosystem health, human health factors were introduced. It
was believed that ecosystem health depended on the judgment by the whole
social system, so human welfare should be considered. Therefore, more
researchers focused on the urban development and residents’ perception
of urban blue-green spaces and gradually emphasized cultural services
supplied by blue-green spaces, including aesthetics, landscape, and
mental health benefits (Table 3).
Xia Jihong (Xia, 2005) believed that an ecological riparian zone was a
dynamic open water-land interlaced ecosystem, established a set of
comprehensive evaluation index system for riparian ecosystem, and
expounded the evaluation method of an ecological riparian zone from four
perspectives, including structural stability, landscape suitability,
ecological health, and safety. On this basis of the above system,
ecological characteristic indices such as strong self-healing ability
were introduced to carry out health evaluation of urban lakes and
provide a theoretical basis for ecological restoration, planning, and
construction of urban lakes (Wu et al. , 2020). According to the
development characteristics of urban waterfront space, in order to build
a modern economic-ecological-social city, ten principles of waterfront
vitality were proposed and mainly involve ecological indices, public
indices, full-time indices, accessible indices, hydrophilic indices,
permeable indices, economic indices, mixed indices, sign indices, life
indices and other indices (Zhang, 2009). A slow-travel-friendly
waterfront strip park space evaluation system and scoring criteria were
also established based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP), so that the
friendliness of waterfront parks could be evaluated from three aspects:
slow-travel paths, slow-travel facilities, and slow-travel landscapes
(Zhong et al. , 2021).
In the history of the blue-green space evaluation index system, the
evaluation indices have been gradually expanded from biological indices
to habitat indices and human-related ecological service indices. The
above history was basically consistent with the stages of urban
development. Urban development has experienced the initial agricultural
society, to industrial society and information society. Therefore, the
demands for the environment has changed from material supply to habitat
provision and cultural services. Therefore, the later blue-green space
evaluation index systems retained the previous key indices that had an
impact on ecological restoration and contained some relevant indices
that were in line with the vitality of modern society, thus emphasizing
the influence of the integrated natural ecosystem in blue-green spaces
on ecological service function and urban development potential. The
later system provided the basis for urban planning. In the future
blue-green space evaluation index system, based on the concept of
economic-society-ecological integration, the benefits of water bodies
and green spaces related to social development and human well-being
should be comprehensively considered. Qualitative and quantitative
indices make the evaluation results more accurate and can better reflect
the quality of a blue-green space (Table 3).