Research On The Accessibility Of Urban Parks

Urban Park is not only a major natural landscape in urban ecosystem, but also an important place for the recreational activities of city residents, which provides ecological, economic, and social benefits. Early scholars mostly concentrated on a single park or several typical parks, the residents’ cognition and the structural characteristics of urban parks.With the arrival of the era of leisure, urban residents’ demand for urban parks dramatically increases. The residents concern about the number of city parks. Moreover, they concerned about the convenience of access to the city parks. So the accessibility of urban parks has become a research hotspot. However, most of the quantitative analysis of accessibility in China are about discussion of case studies, the research on the theoretical system still lacks.Based on the above understandings, this paper is written based on urban geography, human geography and other related disciplines. Firstly, based on the literature review, the concept, classification and core theory of urban park are identified. This paper makes a conclusion that the spatial interactions between the urban parks and residents, the spatial segregation, and the public social policy are the three core elements to the accessibility of urban parks. Then a structural model of urban park accessibility is built up to explore the internal mechanism and specifications.Secondly, based on the analysis of existing urban park accessibility research principles and their advantages/disadvantages, architecture, this paper selects Gulou district of Nanjing as the study area, integrates buffer analysis and network analysis, and implements Remote Sensing and Geographic information system techniques to build up an urban park accessibility model. Based on the urban parks accessibility model and quantitative analysis, this paper gets the empirical results:① at the road network level, the spatial layout of urban parks in Gulou district are relatively reasonable.② at residents level, higher accessibility residential area mainly locate in the central core area of Gulou District, while the lower accessibility neighborhoods concentrate in Hexi region.In the end, based the accessibility analysis of urban parks in Gulou district, this paper proposes suggestions from urban park, road network and public policy perspectives:① strengthen urban park construction or increase the number of free and open city parks to better meet the increasing demand of the residents’recreational activities.② solve congestion problems, optimize bus route system,③ build a better platform for the residents to participate in the public policy making...