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Description
The concept of “environmental education”, which is considered to be an educational activity aimed at “fostering responsible environmental behavior”, originated from a conference held by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Paris in 1948. Currently, most of the environmental education is conducted in national parks, nature reserves, and other countryside environments where there is a greater proportion of untouched nature. However, environmental education programs that place young people outside of the city implicitly send the wrong message that “cities are unnatural, detached from the function of the earth's overall system, and have no environmental value or educational significance,” and that young people or adults who participate in wilderness development education activities away from their daily environments do not necessarily adopt a pro-environmental attitude when they return to their daily lives. Therefore, it is imperative to develop environmental education in cities, where artificial nature is rooted in the daily lives of the majority of the population.
Under the trend of highly centralized cities, the construction of small urban parks with recreational functions, known as urban pocket park, is gradually emerging. It is characterized by flexible location, slight size, and discrete distribution, which not only plays the basic function of the urban green space system, but also carries various activities such as recreation, leisure, exercise, and cultural exchanges for urban residents, and is a good carrier for urban environmental education. In Nanjing, China, the rules for the construction of pocket parks are divided into five categories according to their location and function: business, commercial, residential, public service and transportation.
The symbiotic integration of urban pocket parks and environmental education helps to improve the functional diversity of small green public spaces in high-density urban areas, as well as the structure of the education system and the self-consciousness of the participants themselves. With the cooperation of good landscape facility substrate and high-quality spatial structure, the unstructured informal education received by the citizens unconsciously, accidentally and randomly is prompted to change into the structured informal occasion education received consciously and with subjective initiative, which is conducive to the realization of the goal of sustainable development of the city, and the maintenance of the quality of the urban environment and the physical and mental health of the residents.
In order to avoid the tendency of homogenization and fragmentation of the environmental education system in different types of pocket parks, this study will first analyze the spatial attributes of various types of pocket parks, such as external location, scale and size, morphology and structure, and their landscape characteristics. Then design a systematic, modularized and menuized theoretical system of environmental education in urban pocket parks, and categorize and screen the knowledge categories, educational principles and methodological modes of environmental education that may be carried by various types of pocket parks and spatial spaces, so that they can be classified and filtered into the right categories. Finally, a series of strategic guidelines for environmental education in urban pocket parks are formed.
After that, a hierarchical analysis is used to construct a multi-dimensional index-based evaluation system for the suitability of environmental education venues. Finally, the generative rule representation method, which is one of the expert systems, is adopted to reveal the matching mechanism between the environmental education venues and functions in urban pocket parks, and a complete set of comprehensive configuration model of environmental education based on the coupling of venues and functions is formed for urban pocket parks. This model will be practically applied to a residential pocket park design proposal in Nanjing, China.
| Keywords | Environmental Education；Pocket Parks；Educational Strategy；Adaptability Analysis |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
