Evaluation of Quality of Public Open Spaces for the Elderly (Case Study: Sheet-e- Bazaar in Zanjan)

In urban planning, access to public spaces provides social relations for citizens. The goal of thispaper is to evaluate the elderly's requirements in public spaces (case study of Sheet Bazaar, Zanjan, Iran) in order torecognize and classify their strengths and weaknesses and present more appropriate and effective strategies for theirimprovement. In this research, the related literature on old age and requirements of the elderly in public open spaceswas reviewed and the factors affecting their use of physical places were determined at the first stage of the study. Afterreviewing the literature, some observations on the elderly were made and questionnaires were given to 80 users withthe age of over 65 years old to serve the purpose of this study. The results of the questionnaires indicate that the frequentproblems of the elderly in public open spaces were identified as follows: pollution (24.8%), pavements and roads(24.6%), traffic (14.4%), safety (12.2%), insufficiency of maintenance and management (9.6%), and socio-culturalproblems (5.3%). In addition, the result of the observations in the main research area shows that the design propertieshad the highest and maintenance-management services had the lowest success percentages. In the end, some solutionswere presented for designing new public open spaces and developing the existing spaces.