Specifying the recreational local parks' features that are expected to have according to the expert opinions : Eskişehir province example

Leisure time management habits are important for community development. Parks are prominent recreational places since they are free of charge and they enable people to do recreational outdoor activities near the places they reside, and also parks give people the opportunity to be a part of an activity related to sports, art and culture. Especially the parks that are located in a neighbourhood make it convenient for transportation to the event venue and also increases participation. The time that is spent voluntarily in the parks contributes to the individual's development and accordingly to community development. In this research, it is observed that the parks are alike, they do not offer enough variety of recreational acitivities and they do not have standards. It is thought that standardization is essential for quality parks and therefore the research was designed to specify to the recreational local parks' features that are expected to have accorging to the expect options. For this purpose, twenty local/neighbourhood parks in Eskişehir Metropolitan Municipality were investigated via observation technique and focus group interviews were conducted with the field experts in Eskişehir. Thirty five different items about the features of parks were determined with help of literature review, focus group interviews and observation. These items were delivered to the field experts via delphi technique and their opinions were collected in two turns. The field experts specified fifteen of these items as the essential features of parks and six of these items as the features that may depend on the theme, the size and the user profile of the parks. In the last stage of the research, the items specified with the help of field experts were considered by investigating the twenty local parks in the beginning. It was observed that these parks were not able to meet the standards. It is strongly believed that these features specified within this research will contribute to the standardization process and also quality parks. Keywords: Leisure, Recreation, Park, Local Parks, Municipality