Exposure-Sensitive Contextual Fragility of Urban Park Quality in Tenerife

Abstract

The evaluation of park conditions provides a mean condition score in urban park-quality assessment, while the city authorities need to address a more practical question: which parks demonstrate contextual vulnerability along with low domain floors, poor balance between domains, and sufficient park-user exposure? This study elaborates a method called Exposure-Sensitive Contextual Fragility Profiling (ECFP), a straightforward approach to interpret compact park-audit results that prevents the dominance of spatial aspects in concealing safety support, cleanliness, physical order, sensory richness, proper illumination, and acoustic conditions problems. Data for analysis comprise twelve urban parks in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain), observed based on eleven subcategories of the Public Space Characteristics Observation Questionnaire along with user-count statistics obtained from 155 frequent park users. The calculation procedure uses four components: contextual vulnerability, the deficit in the weakest domain floor, spatial, functional, and contextual balance, and the percentage of contextual subcategories scoring below the half-point on the 0–10 audit scale. Logarithmic exposure adjustment uses user counts without permitting the domination of high-sample parks in assessing environmental conditions. Order produced by ECFP assigned Polideportivo El Casco and Parque El Quijote to the top two places followed by Parque Primero de Mayo, Parque Punta Larga, and Parque de Guadamojete. In terms of park fragility, Parque Primero de Mayo outranks all other parks since it ranks well above average due to low levels of lighting, safety support, acoustics, sensory stimuli alongside excellent physical order. The sensitivity tests revealed high Spearman rank correlations in the range of 0.923 to 1.000 depending on the omission of each component and critical value adjustments. The research findings suggest that urban park repairs should start with ensuring the contextual aspects underlying accessibility, visual appeal, legibility, and usability of a park.