Variety as a Key to Responsive Environments: Students’ Evaluations of Public Open Spaces on Eastern Mediterranean University Campus

The observations on many university campuses illustrate that some of the activities like meeting, eating, sitting, chatting, waiting, studying, and even protests take place outdoors. In this context, students from different environments and other users of different ages, cultures, and with different needs may use the public open spaces of a campus. Accordingly, the quality of variety emerges as a significant quality. In this thesis, first, variety as key factor of responsive environments and the public open spaces will be explored through a literature survey. In this regard, according to the main question of this study about how variety can effect on quality of public open spaces, and by considering three main factors of variety including variety of uses, variety of users and variety of forms, on the basis of students’ evaluations and site observation in the open spaces in Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) campus, the most and the least preferred public open spaces of the campus will be selected. In the next step, the selected public open spaces and the role of variety on these spaces will be investigated by three mentioned factors of variety through a questionnaire survey. The research methodology includes literature survey, data collection from both qualitative and quantitative analysis, user survey and observation. Keywords: Responsive environments, public open spaces, variety, EMU campus, Famagusta, North Cyprus