Cheng and colleagues dismantle the habitual opposition between restorative nature and stressful city by reviewing 50 quantitative studies of urban restoration published between 2010 and 2024. Greenery remains important, but the review identifies positive associations with architectural façade design, design quality, service facilities, street-scale vegetation and psycho-environmental properties such as serenity, prospect and refuge. The conceptual shift is decisive: restorative value becomes an urban relation produced by combinations of natural, built and person–place conditions rather than an intrinsic property of “green” settings. Methodologically, the paper follows PRISMA-referenced screening and SWiM narrative synthesis while comparing cognitive, affective and physiological outcomes and tracking emerging neuro-urban and big-data approaches. Its bridge to urban epistemology lies in showing that new sensing and computational methods expand scale without resolving validation: finer data can make restoration more legible, but only if measurement remains connected to situated environmental mechanisms and person–place relations.
URBANISM MEETS ART