Study of Factors Influencing Quality of Life through Matches between Demand and Satisfaction of Cultural Services in Urban Parks

Abstract

Quality of life is increasingly a concern for city dwellers, and it is widely accepted that it can bring benefits to urban developments. As the only natural element in modern cities, urban parks can provide cultural services that are directly connected with aspects related to quality of life. As a result, studying the cultural services provided by parks could be meaningful for research into quality of life for better urban developments, and China should be a particular area of concern as it largely lacks related academic research. In this study, multiple influential factors are treated as the research objects, and the mechanisms through which these factors act are studied by looking at the matches between demand and satisfaction for cultural services. It is hypothesized that both factors relating to the physical environment and individual human factors need to be considered. Cultural services are classified into psychological, leisure, exercise, and general visit services, and are quantitatively assessed for six typical parks in central Shanghai. From the case study results and the ways in which demand and satisfaction are matched, it turns out that all features of a park, the objectives of visiting a park, and personal characteristics play important role in the evaluation of quality of life, but how visitors understand parks and the financial condition of the park are, in summary, the crucial factors. Besides this, methodologies for the evaluation and theories of the quality of life are discussed, and it is discovered that a subjective questionnaire could be implemented but that it needs to be combined with place-based situations.