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ACCESSIBILITY AND ATTRACTIVENESS FOR PUBLIC PARK UTILIZATION : A CASE STUDY OF SAGA , JAPAN

The growth of the urban populations and associated industrialization has resulted in a range of detrimental and often dehumanizing outcomes (Woolley 2003). As a result from such a development, many impacts have been arising, especially on quality of the urban environment has been affected on a wide range of elements of daily life including housing, education, health, crime, employment and leisure, both for individuals and communities. One aspect of the urban environment that plays important role in daily life for people who live in urban area are public parks since they provide many different benefits and opportunities to people’s everyday urban lives. Therefore, public parks have been recently given much attention as one of the indicator of urban quality of life since public parks provide opportunities to people for certain activities, while the individual can gain direct benefit from park utilization that are related to physical health as well as improved mental. In the same time, public parks also contribute indirect benefits to the community in term of social, economic and environmental. However, in different country, the essential of public parks are considered in different level as well as the importance role of parks lie in different affected factors that are vary among individual country. Saga city is selected to be investigated as a case study for developed country on the interconnection between environmental and people’s behavior on park utilization since public parks play more vital role in this country than developing country. To reflect the community point of view, this study employed a multinomial logit model based on maximum likelihood estimation to interrelate public preferences on public park utilization in this city. The selected three parks are performed on site interview survey for gathering the data collection that consists of, Saga castle park, Kono park and Shinrin park. Different parks provide different opportunities on activities along with the different groups of people formed different behavior and preference on park utilization. Based on this approach, it can be seen that the availability of this kind of public space affect resident’s patterns of activities, the modes and frequencies of utilization. Not only the location of public park within and outside residential district are perceived in different way but the respondents’ personal characteristics, such as age, income, education and past experience of using public park service also result to the different patterns of public park utilization. This is very useful information to guide local planning agency to locate suitable plan for current and future policy for public park service improvement and to enhance the quality of life of the community. The structure of this paper is organized as follows. First, the employed method for assess the public park utilization is presented and the relevant literature is reviewed in the next section. Subsequently, a number of basic principles and assumptions to guide the development of model to capture the behavior and preference of park users are given details. Following that, the main concepts are applied in the methodology and illustrated in this section. Then, the analysis section is shown the result of investigation by using the data that collected in the study area. Finally, the conclusion of this study is summarized and discussed for future research.