Abstract
In recent years, after the rapid and chaotic suburbanization in the 1990s, public spaces were gradually appearing in the new suburbs of postsocialist Poland. It is worth verifying to what extent these spaces are used on a daily basis. This paper aims to present a method of measuring the utility value of recreational public spaces and to determine the relationship between the utility value of space and its publicness. It suggests models of publicness of the most community-friendly recreational public spaces in Warsaw suburbs. As the research shows, intended diversity has the greatest influence on the prosocial character of space. Proximity, on the other hand, does not influence utility value so much. Location at some distance from the main nodes of activity and the highest concentration of houses, but with safe pedestrian access, is of more importance and should be promoted as a condition of successful suburban recreational space. The main conclusion from the research is that the most community-friendly recreational spaces do not have to be fully public. The measurement tools used in analyzing socio-spatial relations contributes to the development of the academic methods of studying the quality of public space.
Highlights
The scores of the twelve spaces that were in 75th percentile of the total utility value amounted to 18 or more
The utility value model of the most community-friendly suburban recreational space (two matrices because of two dominants for the type of behavior A(TB) indicator) shows that too few people pass through such spaces, and establishing new contacts between users is insufficient (Figure 4)
This paper presented a method of measuring the utility value of recreational public spaces which is partly determined by their publicness
Summary
Suburbia that arose in the previous political system were generally not planned and were not provided with recreational areas, except school sports fields and school playgrounds, but these were of rather low quality This trend was continued in the 1990s, when suburbanites were driven exclusively by the desire to live in their own house with a garden, regardless of the availability of social services or leisure facilities [4,7]. At the beginning of the transformation, municipalities, as a local level of self-government restored in Poland in 1990, rejected spatial planning as a relic of the previous political system They avoided reserving land for recreational spaces due to the necessity to pay high compensations for land purchased from private owners. There are many new, well-equipped playgrounds, sports fields, and recreation areas
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