Identification of Factors Impacting the Usage of Urban Green Spaces: Literature Review and Delphi

Abstract

Urban Green Spaces are essential components of the urban system due to their numerous benefits. There are many factors that affect the usage of the Urban Green Spaces. These factors act as barriers or enablers to the usage and significantly contribute to formulating the perception of the benefits. Many scholars, planning organisations, and city administrations have attempted to list this factor. However, the efforts are in bits and pieces, lacking a comprehensive approach. The present study presents a comprehensive list of factors using the established PRISMA technique and two-stage Delphi. The first stage of Delphi helped in the identification, classification, and identification of the direction of causality; and the second stage helped in developing the ranking by using the relative importance indexing method in and among groups. The authors identified 29 factors classified into six categories, along with the direction of causality to usage. The physical factors contribute a maximum of 20.23 %, and demographical factors (10.31 %) have the lowest contribution in factors impacting the usage of UGSs. Transportation cost contributes the highest weight (6.54 %), followed by maintenance charges (5.89 %). The shape of Urban Green Space (1.76 %) influences the users least for their usage, followed by the educational qualification of users (1.77 %). The identified factors, their scoring, direction of causality, and ranking are of high importance for policymakers, planners and urban managers dealing with Urban Green Spaces.