Interviews were conducted in twelve cases of gaiku-koen or city block parks in Nagoya. The purpose of this study was to measure children’s satisfaction as their assessment of parks and to explain its factors through multiple regression analysis. Prediction through a ten-variable equation was possible at a high rate of precision (the degrees of freedom adjusted R-square 100.0%). Focused intervention to adjust variables in accordance with their importance as assessed by standard partial regression coefficients should be proposed to effectively enhance satisfaction. The primary factors of satisfaction were 1) spatial planning in terms of spatial organization or the number of zones, the composition of play structures and their number, and three area variables (i.e., effective area, slope greenery inaccessible and ground), 2) surrounding environment as described by land-use patterns and school adjacency, and 3) date factors in terms of outside events and the day of week in conjunction with season.
It was thus proposed to enhance the level of children’s satisfaction through guidelines for spatial planning: securing enough zones, increasing satisfaction-increasing areas (i.e., slope greenery accessible, effective area, etc.), restraining satisfaction-decreasing areas (i.e., ground), increasing the number of play structures while restraining satisfaction-decreasing ones and restraining play structure component index as the number of play structures weighted according to play structure component coefficients. However, the planning manipulation of play-structure variables would not realize a major change in satisfaction.
Play structure component coefficients used to define the play structure component index maximizing the interpretability of satisfaction regression might allow to assess the value of each category of play structure from the satisfaction-maximizing point of view (e.g. climbing mountain 4.1 and Tarzan rope 2.7). Installation of popular but satisfaction-decreasing play structures might be acceptable if preferential selection of satisfaction-increasing ones or planning manipulation of other variables to enhance satisfaction is made.
Spatial planning, in sum, was closely related to children’s satisfaction in parks, supporting the hypothesis that children’s satisfaction would be enhanced through guidelines for spatial planning. It was also confirmed that guidelines for enhance children’s satisfaction would largely be compatible with guidelines for increasing children users and those for increasing the capacity of parks to generate play.
For analyses in this study, it took one year after another year of preparation to gather the data from on-site observation and interview surveys. The number of cases, twelve, derived from ten parks in Nagoya was sufficient for the systematic analysis of factors, provided that further study to increase parks as well as cases will be made for identifying more contributory variables. Our list of future issues also includes the development of more comprehensive guidelines incorporating criteria for social exchange in parks.
