Discrepancy between likely and actual occupancies of urban outdoor places

Abstract

This paper addresses urban parks and squares and their use(r)s, focusing on the subject from two different angles: What do users do in urban outdoor spaces? What do designers think they do? It focuses particularly on the comparatively level. Firstly, the paper discusses the actual uses mapped in places, using repeated observation on different days, times and weather conditions as applied to parks and squares in two European cities. Secondly, it addresses designers’ views about usage of urban parks and squares, resulted from workshops with urban landscape designers. It shows that designers’ beliefs and awareness about uses in places, in some aspects, differ from actual use and demonstrates the value of the methodology of behaviour mapping in revealing relationships between design and use that are based on empirical evidence. The value of the paper is in concretizing the gaps between use and design of urban landscapes, and particularly in suggesting an additional way in which urban landscape designers and decision-makers may be informed or trained to gain perception about the functional relationships between people and (designed) places to effectively address design, evaluation or re-design of places.