THE RELATIONS BETWEEN URBAN PARKS AND PERSONAL WELL-BEING IN BRISBANE, SOUTH-EAST QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA

Abstract

The positive impacts of urban parks on human health have been analysed in many studies,
but nearly none of them provide a suitable method to explain quantitatively the satisfaction
and dissatisfaction of park uses on personal health. Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) was
employed to examine individually well-being spirit in relation to the changes of quality of
parks and the joyfulness on access to parks. This study aims to find answers for questions
‘why and where are people happy or unhappy with their health in connections to urban
parks?’ The data for Brisbane area were extracted from the quality of life survey in South-
East Queensland, Australia. 70% data was used for learning model parameters; the rest was
for model testing. The generated model had 73.17% accuracy, and it was imported to ArcGIS
for constructing probabilistic maps. Due to the high density of sample points, Inverse
Distance Weighted (IDW) interpolation was chosen to illustrate the probable happiness and
unhappiness on personal health. The result shows that quality of urban parks controlled
strongly the fulfilment of personal health. Local governors can successfully enrich the quality
of urban lives by improving the quality of parks in some specific regions.