| Our country has officially entered the aging society since 2003. With the exacerbating aging trend of China’s urban population, the social structure is now undergoing a series of changes. Thus, how the elderly spend a happy and comfortable old age has become a widespread problem faced by our country. The urban park is one of the social welfare facilities, and now more attention is given to the special needs of the elderly population when constructed. In this paper, Taoranting Park, Wanshou Park and temple of Heaven Park were investigated based on the environmental psychology and environmental behavior the-ory, and the method of the Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE) was adopted to obtain a comprehensive research and analysis of the activities of the elderly in the park. In addition, the construction background, the historical and cultural characteristics, the environmental conditions and the needs of the elderly pop-ulation of these three parks were compared to analyze the favored environmental characteristics of the urban park by the elderly and ultimately to make a conclusion of the optimized design and management strategies of the modern urban park based on the needs of the elderly population.To explore the problem between the present situation and the need of the elderly in the park, the methods of site investigation and the questionnaire surveys were applied. Here, the usage situation of the park and the environmental and spatial features of the park which was favored or not by the elderly were analyzed. At the same time, the main features of the using people of the elderly, the distribution and types of activities as well as the subjective evaluations by the elderly were surveyed and analyzed to gain a comprehensive knowledge, thus providing an objective basis for evaluating and optimizing the park.Based on the comprehensive analogy analyses of above investigations of the three parks, the favored environmental characteristics of urban park by the elderly were summed up and the improving and opti-mizing strategies to meet the needs of the elderly from the perspectives of the design and management.The strategies of design included three aspects of the venue design of the elderly theme, the spatial layout of the venue guide and the design of site elements. The strategies of management included four aspects of the improvement of policy system and the strengthen of management efforts,the increment of capital investment and the enhancement of service awareness, the definition of the functional theme and the proper guiding system, the promotion of "quantitative" standard and the effective guidance. |
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