Objective As urban renewal enters the stage of “quality improvement” and “human-centred health”, traditional park design strategies can no longer satisfy people’s requirements for environmental quality improvement of parks, and guiding landscape design through audio-visual perception evaluation has become an important method to meet the complex needs of young people. Mountain city parks are rich in sensory information, and the gathering space is the place where the human-land relationship in mountain city parks is concretely presented. However, in mountain city parks, how residents perceive different types of gathering spaces, the preference of residents for visual and acoustic spatial elements, and the correlation between the evaluation of audio-visual perception and the satisfaction with various types of gathering spaces need to be further studied. This research aims to, in combination with the audio-visual preference and audio-visual coordination of young people in gathering spaces of mountain city parks, the evaluation of the correlation between audio-visual perception and satisfaction (including the satisfaction with visual and acoustic landscape, satisfaction with the environment of gathering spaces, and overall satisfaction with park environment), and the integration between the preference of young people for visual and acoustic landscape and relevant spatial elements, guide the implementation of the strategy for comprehensive improvement of environmental quality, and explore how the complex relationship between acoustic landscape, visual landscape and environmental satisfaction can be addressed in mountain city parks.

Methods Taking 5 types of gathering spaces in Pipa Mountain Park and Eling Park in Yuzhong District, Chongqing as the research object, this research, through combining audio-visual walk survey with spatial measurement, selects 22 audio-visual perception indicators, and establishes a questionnaire evaluation scale. Based on the investigation of the environmental characteristics and the semi-structural interviews of residents, the research selects and integrates the perception indicators widely applicable to landscape assessment and design to form 12 visual perception indicators adapted to mountain parks, among which naturalness, openness, diversity and accessibility are the four indicators with the most characteristic dimensions of mountain landscape. The selection of auditory perception indicators follows the standard dimensions, and the selected indicators are combined with the most mountainous dimensions (diversity and naturalness) to form 10 dimensions of auditory perception. The research presents data analysis and results through multi-level and multi-dimensional technical path. On the basis of reliability and validity test, frequency count analysis is used to explore audio-visual preference and audio-visual interaction. Principal component analysis, Spearman correlation analysis and multiple linear regression methods are used to explore the influence of each dimension on the audio-visual satisfaction, satisfaction with environment of gathering spaces, and overall satisfaction with park environment.

Results The evaluation statistics and audio-visual coordination analysis show that the audio-visual perception evaluation of different types of gathering spaces has its own characteristics, and the visual landscape and acoustic landscape of the two parks are general coordinated. The analysis of the correlation between audio-visual perception and the satisfaction with the environment of gathering spaces shows that the indicators affecting the satisfaction with various types of spatial environments are different. The most distinctive space in mountain parks involves 4 relevant perception dimensions. Specifically, important nodes and path platforms are significantly correlated with the accessibility dimension; important nodes and path platforms are significantly correlated with the naturalness and diversity dimensions in both parks; path platforms, boundaries and important nodes are all significantly correlated with the openness dimension. The analysis of the correlation between the overall audio-visual perception and the overall environmental satisfaction shows that the naturalness dimension has a certain influence on the overall environmental satisfaction and the satisfaction with visual and acoustic landscape.

Conclusion On the basis of revealing the main influencing factors of environmental perception and satisfaction evaluation of mountain city parks, this research refines the focus of audio-visual environment creation in mountain city parks. Combined with the characteristics of mountainous terrain, the research proposes the optimization strategies for youth-friendly spatial elements. Moreover, the research proposes relevant strategies for construction of youth-friendly order in mountain spaces, with a view to creating an organized and logical mountain space order by incorporating multi-dimensional spatial characteristics, enhancing spatial guidance, and improving the memorability of the environment. The research also proposes local adaptation strategies, emphasizing that the advantages of mountain space should be reasonably utilized to create satisfactory audio-visual landscape, and the needs of young people should be taken into account and the acoustic and visual environment elements be optimized to evoke residents’ memory of local cultural lineage. These strategies can provide theoretical basis and practical ideas for construction of acoustic and visual landscape and comprehensive improvement of environmental quality of mountain city parks.