Abstract
It is essential to give full consideration to the potential barriers facing urban parks from their better functions and meeting residents’ needs in terms of collective perception and satisfaction. This paper presents the methods of using social media (Dianping) data to investigate the potential factors affecting people’s satisfaction with urban parks in Shenzhen, China. Textual analysis and sentiment analysis make it feasible to identify the factors influencing people’s experience in parks. By measuring emotions towards these factors, a multiple linear regression model helps to explore the relationships between the factors and people’s satisfaction, and among them, determines the key ones. The results present the nine key factors of urban parks that affect the users’ satisfaction, in addition to the common factors by previous studies including park size, vegetation, recreation facility, landscape visual effect, maintenance of facilities and plants, and environment cleanliness. A series of contextual factors also significantly influence people’s satisfaction, such as sign system, mosquito and air quality. Among these, sign system has the strongest influence. The results increase the understanding of the human-urban park relationship and identify the characteristics of urban parks that facilitate the degree of satisfaction promotion. Our findings may provide the managerial guidelines for planners and decision-makers to optimize people’s imperative qualities of urban life.
Highlights
Urban areas confront issues of increasing population concentration in the last decades.Agglomerations that have over 300,000 people accounted for 57% of the entire population by 2014, and the reports estimate that, by the year 2030, 62% of the global population will live in urban areas [1]
Our findings indicate that nine factors, including sign system, maintenance of facilities and plants, mosquito, environment cleanliness, air quality, vegetation, park size, landscape visual quality and recreation facility, explain the large variation of people’s satisfaction in the comprehensive parks in Shenzhen
This study uses online comment data as a proxy for people’s perspective on urban parks, and Dianping data is useful in providing valuable information for exploring human-environment relationship in urban research
Summary
Urban areas confront issues of increasing population concentration in the last decades.Agglomerations that have over 300,000 people accounted for 57% of the entire population by 2014, and the reports estimate that, by the year 2030, 62% of the global population will live in urban areas [1]. Urban areas confront issues of increasing population concentration in the last decades. As cities expand and grow denser, urban green spaces, parks, are gaining an increasing amount of attention from both academic and policy arenas. A growing body of literature highlights many ecological, socio-cultural and economic benefits provided by urban parks [3,4,5]. Better understandings of the interactions between urban population and parks can provide managerial guidelines for planners and decision-makers to optimize people’s imperative life qualities. Such guidelines can be useful for local authorities to plan and manage urban parks more effectively, and promote a higher level of incorporation of functional and usable urban parks into urban life
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