Examination of the Situation Access to Urban Parks and its Influencing Factors from the Viewpoint Users (Case Study: Shiraz)

Public spaces are the most important parts of cities and urban environments. Such spaces contain the whole urban context, people have visual and physical access to; and it is in such spaces which the most part of contact, communication, and interaction among humans occur. Parks and urban green spaces are of most important elements of these collections which always play an active role in the city and citizen's health and must be accessible to all people in the community. Therefore, this article mainly aims at studying factors affecting the rate of Shiraz city citizen's access to these important urban spaces. This research tries to study the rate of access to urban parks from citizen's point of view. For this purpose, factors affecting such access have been specified and studied with respect to researches performed in this field and via questionnaire distribution respectively. According to the importance of the spatial distribution and access to parks, what matters is that the analysis of access to the parks give two important recommendations for the policy makers and the urban planners; First, the planners and policy makers should not only increase the number of district parks, but also the spatial distribution pattern should be improved, thereby increasing the availability of parks among residents must be provided. Second, they need more time to analyze the characteristics of individuals (inhabitants) particularly socio- economic status, age, gender, employment status and etc. and then in order to create economic equity and social justice, they should promote the availability of different socio- economic classes.