The evaluation of desirability of urban public spaces among the youth Case study: Ghaemshahr city

The first criterion of judgment about city is quality of their public spaces. Therefore, understanding and conception of their users is important. The public spaces are important part of cities because of more interactions between people occurs in there and it consistent of parts that people have physical and visual access to them. There are great indices to measure the quality of urban public spaces. Project of public spaces (PPS) is a non-profit organization that its purpose is planning and programming to create and maintain the public spaces and to construct cities with appropriate structure. According to this, it can evaluate a place to four criteria: sociability, availability and integration, use and activities and finally, comfort and perspective. The present paper seeks to measure the desirability of the urban public spaces from perspective of young people toward it. In this research, the methodology was survey and questionnaire as instrument for data collection was used. Multistage cluster sampling was sampling method. A sample of 376 young people between the ages of 29- 15 years was determined according to the last census in Ghaemshahr. The analysis of information did by SPSS. The results showed that sociability, the availability and integration, user, activities and finally perspective evaluated in moderate level by young people. There were significant differences between respondents to assessment of desirability of space by gender. In fact, female have more negative perspective toward desirability of urban public space.