Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
JOURNAL OF FOOD AGRICULTURE & ENVIRONMENT, cilt.10, sa.2, ss.1262-1268, 2012 (SCI-Expanded)
The pedestrian walkway located in the city centre of Kocaeli is one of the important and busy urban outdoors of the city. In order for the qualified urban outdoor spaces to provide contributions to urban life physically, socially, recreationally and economically, urban outdoor spaces have to be arranged in a way to meet the needs of urban outdoor users. The purpose of this study, which was conducted between 2009 and 2010, was to determine the problems about the landscape elements, area landscape and its use and develop suggestions in the direction of the demands of users. In the study, the structural and vegetative elements of area landscape carried out in the walkway by means of investigations, observations and countings were determined. A survey was conducted based on face-to-face interview with 120 people to get user views. The survey results were analysed by using SPSS 16.0 statistics program and frequencies, cross-tabulation and chi-square tests were used to evaluate the data statistically. According to the results obtained from the studies, a great majority of the users (79.2%) were aware of the area landscape. The most important characteristic that adds value to area landscape is that it reminds of the former railway, with a rate of 51.17%. The negative landscape characteristics of the area is that equipment elements are not sufficient, with a rate of 88.74%. The existence of birds in the area was determined to be attractive for some users but negative for the others, their proportional distributions being very close to each other. The most important expectation related to the user demands, with a rate of 75%, is that this area should completely be closed to vehicle traffic and become an area for pedestrians.