QUANTIFYING THE QUALITY AND DETECTING SOCIAL INEQUALITY IN THE PROSPEROUS AND DEPRIVED ZONES URBAN PARKS OF TABRIZ, IRAN

Abstract

High-quality urban parks within the urban built environment will help create healthy and sustainable cities. This study aimed to analyze the quality of two urban parks located in deprived and prosperous zones of Tabriz city, Iran, which present high relevance for ecological equity topic. The study merely explored users’ perceived quality, considering sub-factors such as sense of place, satisfaction, security, comfort, and perception of attractiveness using a subjective method. The results show that the prosperous zone urban park (PZUP) has average quality, however, has significantly better status in terms of public satisfaction, security, comfort, perceived attractiveness, and sense of belonging to place, compared to the deprived zone urban park (DZUP). Since security influences people’s perception of other quality indicators in PZUP, approaches to increase citizens' sense of security can greatly improve the quality of PZUP. In PZUP, inducing a higher sense of security will contribute to higher comfort, a stronger sense of belonging to place, and a positive perception of attractiveness. On the contrary, there are deep quality problems in DZUP. Quality and security problems of the DZUP root in the informal settlements around the park. The results show the priority to solve the problems in the park neighborhood. These have high relevance for enhancing the equity in accessing urban parks, both in DZUP and PZUP.