Urban Green Space Satisfaction in an Extreme Industrial City: Evidence from Coastal Park, Asaluyeh, Iran

Urban parks in rapidly industrializing cities of West Asia face a triple challenge: extreme climate, limited green space, and populations fragmented by labor migration. Planning decisions in such contexts are rarely guided by empirical evidence on what drives user satisfaction. This paper reports preliminary findings from a case study in Asaluyeh, a petrochemical city on Iran's Persian Gulf coast, where summer temperatures exceed 45°C and per capita green space is just 0.44 m², less than one-tenth of international recommendations. Analysis identifies park characteristics that most strongly influence visitor satisfaction and highlights underserved population segments. Vegetation quality emerges as the strongest predictor of overall satisfaction (r = 0.45, p < 0.001), surpassing demographic and socioeconomic variables. Gender disparity is evident, with female visitors reporting lower satisfaction than males (3.5 compared with 3.9 on a 5-point scale; t = 2.15, p = 0.045), despite equal or greater preference for public green space. Visits are temporally concentrated, with 76% occurring on weekend evenings and only 2% during weekday daytime hours. Access is constrained by transport dependency, as 84% of visitors arrive by private car. Although 43% of respondents have private gardens, 79% prefer public parks, emphasizing their social and collective value. These findings are translated into a prioritized intervention framework for urban managers, offering guidance for investment based on empirically demonstrated effects on user satisfaction. This abstract presents preliminary findings from an ongoing study, and the full manuscript is currently under review for journal publication.