Contemporary Approaches to Environmental Studies of Urban Open Spaces

Open space is an ill-defined concept in that it is understood differently by different people. However a variety of different authors have used a range of definitions relating to open space. This study assesses the current urban open space in English language papers published in related journals by searching electronic database of ScienceDirect. The period of analysis is limited to the articles appearing between 2000 to 2010. In order to review contemporary approaches in scientific journals, research papers published in English language journals on UOS were obtained by searching electronic database of Science Direct. Keywords used for the search were ‘open space’, ‘public open space’, ‘urban open space’, and ‘outdoor space’ and these were looked for in titles, abstracts and keywords of articles. Initially 250 articles were identified. Of these 121 papers (58.4%) were not directly related to the purpose of this survey and 129 one (51.6%) were relevant. In this sense, four categories of approaches were noticeable. These categories, included: climatic-environmental approach; hygienic-health approach; conservative-ecological approach and planning-management approach. According to our survey, Conservative & Ecological is a variable approach (37.21%). Others are Management & planning approach (28.68%), Climatic & Environmental approach (22.48%) and hygienic-health approach (11.63%) respectively. This emphasis on contemporary articles can be justified by ecological concerns within the last decay. Articles, mostly interested in conserver & supplier function of open space throw public demand and give emphasize to natural spaces in order to manage the use of open space and to shape the build environment growth direction. The results of this article indicate the increase attention to the planning- management and conservation-ecological approaches in open spaces especially from years 2007-2008, these pieces of research often consider open spaces beyond inner city spaces such as those in suburbia and rural areas. Recent priorities in research issues are the methods, models and the influences of each urban-regional planning and management decision on supplying key roles of open spaces and the most important ones, the protective role.