Assessing park qualities of public parks in Cairo, Egypt

Purpose: This article presents an evaluation tool that is designed to assess 12 spatial and managerial qualities of public parks. The tool is applied in evaluating public parks in Cairo to reveal common management practice issues. Design/methodology/approach: Features and factors of the qualities were defined and evaluated. The tool was then tested by conducting an evaluation of 48 public parks in Cairo and consulting local experts regarding the assessment criteria. These contributed to enhancing the tool, making it more comprehensive and contextualised to Cairo. Findings: Application of the tool confirms that the tool has the capacity to provide a comprehensive evaluation of a variety of features and can detect key differences between evaluated parks. Analysis highlights that parks in Cairo are not maintained at optimum level and many exhibit serious deterioration that can have negative influences beyond the boundaries of the parks themselves. The majority of these parks also share problems of heavy commercialisation, wasted potentials, fragmentation and separation of uses. Originality/value: The evaluation tool provides a new and alternative perspective for the evaluation of the built environment. The tool considers the relationships between the different factors of evaluation, rather than reducing the factors to simple checklists. Managers and other practitioners can use the tool to evaluate existing parks or when designing proposals to achieve better standards in the qualities.