Abstract:

In the process of rapid urbanization, the outdoor recreational resources are becoming scarcely. Although the construction of parks can promote recreational welfare and happiness for urban dwellers, few studies have focused on the recreational happiness of park users and its inherent differences, which carried great significance for urban governments to allocate the recreational facilities and services. Thus, this study, taking Hangzhou as a case, carried out a questionnaire survey on the dwellers in urban parks so as to explore the components, spatial disparities and social differences of recreational happiness for urban residents by using the methods of Principal Component Regression and Multivariate Analysis of Variance. The results show that: firstly, the park-based recreational happiness of urban residents exists three dimensions with emotional happiness as the first principal component which can be interpreted by the variables of enjoyment, relaxation and fullness, perceptional happiness as the second component which can be explained by the variables of ‘increasing efficiency at work’, ‘promoting family harmony’ and ‘enhancing personal health’, and social happiness as the third component which can be illustrated by the variables of ‘making new or old friends’, ‘developing interpersonal relationship’ and ‘improving life quality’; secondly, there exist spatial disparities for the recreational happiness of park users,with the large urban parks mainly undertaking the functions of improving the emotional and perceptional happiness and the community parks raising the social happiness for urban residents; thirdly, the four demographic variables, including income, age, education and occupation have significance influences on park-based recreational happiness, which can be further illustrated by the impact of income on the emotional happiness variable, education on social happiness, age on emotional and social happiness, and occupation on the whole components of recreational happiness. Hence the urban governances should allocate the recreational facilities in parks according to the components of recreational happiness and the characteristics of its social and spatial differences.

Key words: recreational happiness, urban park, community park, recreation