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

eality, each activity is done to satisfy human’s physical and mental demands. Therefore,
classifying activities often bases on result of the activity without care about the way or form
of the activity.
The principle features of activities are shown by the relationship: Demand-> benefit->
activity. People often reveal themselves in their activities and these in turn may develop
into habits. The synthesis of habits and stable actions define an individual’s lifestyle.
Activities can be indoor (watching television, reading at home or in private garden), or
outdoor (using leisure time in living area: in public areas as playground, park and garden,
etc.; leisure travel/ travel for pleasure). Both categories can happen in local recreation areas
as well as far away from home (e.g. a holiday trip).
Popular are also the classification by gender and the grouping by age, because each group
shows its own particularities. Gender delivers in most subjects clear and strong varying
results and the age too identifies specific activity preferences or patterns. For example,
children, teenagers, young people, middle age and old people have quite different behavior
in leisure time, but show strong similarities within each group. These particularities were
demonstrated clearly in a survey in Romania (see ISTRATE 2000).
Furthermore, some activities do not need any equipment (such as: jogging, aerobic, martial
art/ Kung fu), some others require equipment (such as: tennis, skate, etc).
Leisure activities
According to socialism definition, spare time “is one of the most significant conditions
affecting the welfare of population. The more free time a person has in a day, the greater
opportunity for her/him to relax and to restore the ability to work.” (ISTRATE 2004: 14).
However, leisure researches using psychological approach are abstractive and complicated,
because the concept of leisure belongs to mental concepts. It depends on personality, age,
sex, income, social group, etc. This chapter reviews researches of leisure concepts.
People do leisure activities when they have free time. But how an activity is defined as a
leisure activity or an obligated activity, is not only depending on the activity itself, but also
on its own subject. For instance, for some people spending time with family is leisure.
Others think it is not leisure, it is domestic work. In another case, a person can have a walk
with his dog and thinking about work. It is difficult to label this activity as purely working
or leisure activity.
Influencing factors on leisure activities:
“In the area of leisure, early sociologists or ‘social researchers’ produced survey evidence
which showed that leisure behavior had a number of uniform features but that it also varied
considerably between different groups in the community, depending on such social
characteristics as family status, age, sex, education level and race” (VEAL 1996: 12).
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