Abstract
Yodo river park, the first government-managed river park in Japan, has annual visitors of about 5 million and has become one of the most important parks in Osaka and its neighboring prefectures. The park also plays a role to protect or preserve natural river environment and is composed of four types ofareas according to purposes. The actural condition of various functions and utilization of the park has never been investigated sufficiently since the park was open to the public. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the utilization of the park economically using a questionnaire survey result and visitors number data by the park administrator. A relation between characteristics of the areas and the benefit of the utilization is investigated. Annual benefit of the park is over 2.7 billion yen.
