Urban Green Areas – their functions under a changing lifestyle of ...

Secondly, those transitions were clearly shown through changes in parks’ utilization over
time. Emperors’ gardens were private, used for relaxing and making poetry in the feudal
time. In French colonization and shortly after independent periods, parks were often used
by clerks and only a few people from the lower class for resting. In the contemporary time,
park-users in Hanoi are dominated by students and retirees. However, the structure of park
user covers well society structure.
Nowadays Hanoi parks’ utilization is in abundance in terms of user numbers as well as
activities. There are up to 11,507 visitors per day in big parks, for instance in Thong Nhat
park.
The course of the day shows high visitor frequencies early in the morning and late
afternoon. These two peaks are dominated by adults and retired people doing exercises,
while during the day mostly students and retirees use the parks & gardens. Besides,
minority groups share the lower percentages of park users (e.g., sellers, high professionals,
clerks and so on).
In the course of the week, Sunday is the peak, because then more families and in particular
more children use the UGAs.
Most park users come to parks on foot. Due to its centrality, Hoan Kiem park has a high
share of visitors arriving by bus.
Apart from dominating students and retirees, there are some differences in structures of
park user among the four parks. For instance, in Thong Nhat 50 % of users are workers;
while in Lenin 37.5 % of them are retirees.
The young park users often go with friends or colleagues, but they are in a low frequency
group. In contrast, the retirees often go to parks alone, but daily.
The length of stay depends on the width and interesting level of the park. Due to stress on
space, there are several kinds of non-leisure activities in parks. Nevertheless, relaxation and
sport & exercises are the two dominating kinds of activities.
Hanoi parks are very poor in facilities. Face-to-face interviews with park visitors resulted in
a long list of missing facilities in the parks.
As the number of visitors will increase mid- and long-term, the parks will be under a higher
pressure and the number of conflicts among user groups will rise, too. Therefore, based on
th stocktaking of current situation of inner Hanoi’s parks, eight recommendations for future
development and management of the parks have been derived.
UGAs are gaining attention from the world researches, for example:
In England and Germany, parks are for different purposes with more or less users’
rights (football, BBQ, area for dog and so on) (SOUTHWARK);
In Singapore and Australia – Singapore is garden cities, while Australia has
equipped parks. Are they the good pattern for Hanoi parks? There are similarities
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