ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Contribution of Urban Parks to Exercise Habits in Istanbul

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 17 | PUBLIC SPACE

Speaker

Merve Deniz Tak (İstanbul University)

Description

Daily physical activity is essential for a healthy society. In recent years, exercise habits have diversified, with people working out at home, in gyms, and in open public spaces. However, not everyone has the time or financial resources to go to the gym, and increasingly smaller homes often lack the space for indoor exercise. As a result, governments must implement public policies that promote active living to support healthy aging for all. As a guide, the World Health Organization has published a global action plan on physical activity, stating that increasing green and blue spaces boosts active living. In this context, urban parks, with their spatial and infrastructural features, offer great potential for promoting exercise. Despite their benefits, urban parks do not always serve as effective exercise spaces. Factors such as inadequate sports facilities, lack of security, poor accessibility, noise, and overcrowding can discourage people from using them. Therefore, understanding the motivations behind park usage is key to assessing whether parks encourage physical activity and identifying areas for improvement.
This paper investigates to what extent public spaces in İstanbul contribute to public health through exercising and how fair distribution is ensured within the framework of physical activity. To achieve this, an analytical framework was developed, incorporating four key components: (i) spatial attributes of urban parks, (ii) socio-economic characteristics of districts, (iii) exercise habits of residents, and (iv) park usage tendencies, derived from open-source and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) data. The study relies on multiple data sources, including survey results from the Data-Based Management Model (VDYM) of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM), Google Map reviews, socio-economic data of districts, and sports infrastructure information from the IMM Open Data Portal. The methodology was carried out in two stages, using GIS based mapping for visualization, text mining and correlation analysis. In the first stage, the largest urban parks in each district, along with their available sports facilities and the socio-economic status were identified. These results were then mapped in a GIS environment to visualize spatial relationships. The second stage focused on exploring residents’ exercise habits and park usage preferences. The VDYM survey provided data on how frequently residents exercise, presenting the average number of workout days per week for each district. Additionally, Google Map reviews from July 1, 2021—when COVID-19 restrictions were lifted in Türkiye—were collected for each park, using the Apify Data Scraping environment. A word frequency analysis was conducted with Orange Data Mining to identify exercise-related terms in park reviews. These results were then compared with district-level exercise rates using correlation analysis to determine whether urban green spaces contribute to physical activity. With this work, more than 70,000 comments were evaluated by utilizing a text-mining method for urban parks in Istanbul.
This paper provides valuable insights into park usage patterns in Istanbul. By utilizing this methodology, challenging areas in Istanbul can be detected more rapidly and implementing policies becomes more cost-effective for municipalities when compared with traditional methods. The effective use of VGI and open-source data helps to asses more precisely the deficiencies/potential of parks and create a roadmap for a healthy society.