LAUSR

Nowadays, the feeling of fear and the lack of security in urban environment, in particular parks, are considered as the main concerns in public health. Thus, users’ characteristics should be considered for meeting the requirements for planning and designing urban parks. The aim of the study is to explain influential factors and to develop users' preferences model related to components affecting security in urban parks. Our research method is based on descriptive-survey and attitude measurement. Therefore, we extracted the variables from the distributed open-ended questionnaire among the 250 park users based on content analysis technique. Then, we determined the effective factors and criteria for the sense of security, using approaches suggested by theorists, literature reviews on urban security and interviews with experts in urban planning. We therefore developed a closed questionnaire to measure users’ preferences and distributed the questionnaire to the 250 park users one more time. By analysing the extracted data using Exploratory Factor Analysis in SPSS, we obtained eight explanatory factors based on the users' preferences, including artificial elements design, control and surveillance, planting design, readability, physical accessibility, aesthetics, activity patterns, and space size and extent. The approximate share of each eight factors in explaining variance was 9.304, 7.673, 7.485, 7.310, 7.260, 6.146, 6.024, and 5.592, respectively. Finally, we extracted an empirical model from eight exploratory factors in Amos.