Alireza Karimi; hossein daneshmehr
Abstract
Parks are regarded as constituting one of the most important spaces in Tehran, Iran. One of the oldest, largest parks in the city, Sorkhe-Hesar Forest Park, located at busy urban nodes, has unique functions. Optimal use of the space is possible when users feel secure therein. Although known as an extra-regional ...
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Parks are regarded as constituting one of the most important spaces in Tehran, Iran. One of the oldest, largest parks in the city, Sorkhe-Hesar Forest Park, located at busy urban nodes, has unique functions. Optimal use of the space is possible when users feel secure therein. Although known as an extra-regional park,it is visited mainly by residents of Municipal District 13 of Tehran. This can be accounted for by several factors, a major one being perception of security in the park among citizens. Due to the large area of the park and its partitioning, there cannot be a discussion of a single perception of security in the park. Furthermore, security is a multi-dimensional notion, where each of the dimensions may be perceived differently in different partitions of the park. Accordingly, the main purpose of the research is to investigate the perceptions of different aspects of security by visitors to different partitions of Sorkhe-Hesar Forest Park and to examine if there are significant differences between them. The park has been divided by the municipality into six partitions, including Khorgasht (‘picnic’), Eghamat-Entezar-Tafrih (‘stay-wait-fun’), Piyaderavi-Honarhaye Mohiti (‘walk-environmental arts’), Aramesh (‘peace’), Tafrihate Fa'al (‘amusement), and Tabiatgardi-Hefazat (‘ecotourism-conservation’). Due to the presence of wildlife and passage of animal species, the ecotourism-conservation partition has turned into a protected area in which tourists are not allowed. Therefore, the partition is excluded from the spatial domain of the study. This is a quantitative survey with a researcher-made questionnaire used as tool. The research population includes all the women and men aged 18 years or more visiting the five included partitions of Sorkhe-Hesar Park during the survey. Given the spatial domain under investigation, there was space and time sampling in addition to visitor sampling. The findings obtained from the 504 visitors in the sample were analyzed using SPSS and GIS. The six aspects of security perception in the above five partitions of Sorkhe-Hesar Park were found reliable, and there were significant differences between perceptions of financial, dignity, public property, and public order security in the partitions. The overall perception of security of the visitors was obtained through addition of their scores in the six aspects. The findings from the overall perceptions of security in the different partitions of the park demonstrated that the highest and lowest means concerned the stay-wait-fun and walk-environmental arts partitions, respectively. The differences between the overall perceptions of security in the different partitions were statistically significant. That is, citizens’ perception of security in the different partitions of Sorkhe-Hesar Park can explain their decisions to visit or not visit them to a great extent. The perception of security in the different partitions of the park can be enhanced through use of citizens as a contributing factor, establishment of more security posts and police and municipality patrols, use of CCTV, establishment of weekend markets, construction and development of educational and cultural centers such as mosques and libraries and presentation of courses in various fields, enhancement of cellular coverage, equipment of less crowded passages with proper lighting, installation of cluster lights in clusters, etc.
