Exploring the effect of park design and management on park user preferences: Insights from Moda Coastal Park and IMM Kurbağalıdere Park in İstanbul

Date

2025-11-28

Author

Şahin, Simay

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Urban parks play a vital role in providing spaces for people to rest, engage in leisure activities, and socialize. They are accessible to individuals from diverse social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. As public spaces, urban parks should be public and inclusive to all groups regardless of their income group, age, gender, ethnicity, etc. However, some urban parks do not operate in such an inclusive way due to their exclusionary design and management policies. This leads to the exclusion of some groups in urban parks. This study aims to investigate the effect of the urban parks’ design and management on user preferences, which strongly impact their publicness and inclusiveness. Many factors influence the user preferences to visit urban parks. The most prominent factors include management, safety, accessibility, interaction, diversity and design & quality of parks. İstanbul is one of the most striking examples of rapidly urbanizing cities where there is a fierce conflict between economic development and environmental protection. For these reasons, the city of İstanbul was chosen as a case study to examine the factors affecting visit preferences and park use. As the case studies, this research conducts in-depth examination on the design and management of the two parks in Kadıköy coast, i.e., Moda Coastal Park and IMM Kurbağalıdere Park, based on user questionnaires, direct observations and spatial mappings. The research findings primarily reveal that user preferences vary according to park-specific strengths: Moda Park is favored for its sports/play facilities and social diversity, while Kurbağalıdere Park performs better in circulation and environmental comfort. However, both parks show weaknesses in basic services, which negatively affect their overall publicness and inclusiveness.

Subject Keywords

Inclusivity, Urban Green Spaces, Urban Parks, User Preference, Urban Design

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118241

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis