A study on importance of blue space in urban parks to human well-being, with reference to Colombo City, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Urbanization reach to human with lot of positive and negative impacts on their lifestyle. Urban parks are introduced to create healthy living environments in urbanized areas. Blue spaces and Green spaces are two relative terms, but with different meanings, used in urban parks. The two spaces collectively play an important role in achieving health and well-being through urban parks.The study is focused on the blue spaces in urban parks. Health and well-being is a widely discussed field in research. Main three pillars of human well-being identified as, mental well-being, physical well-being and social well-being. The main objective of the study is highlighting the importance of blue spaces in urban parks to human well-being under three categories, mental, physical and social well-being. The study designed as a non-systematic qualitative research, by analyzing three urban parks in Colombo city as case studies. The data collected through maps, photographs and observations. The data analyzed as a parallel analysis with three case studies. Among three selected urban parks, ‘DiyathaUyana’ park has ‘very positive’ support from blue spaces to mental and social well-being, while having ‘moderate support’ to physical well-being. In ‘Weras Ganga’ park has ‘very positive’ support from blue spaces to mental and physical well-being and ‘moderate’ support for social well-being. In ‘Urban Wetland Park’, has ‘negative’ support from blue spaces to mental and social well-being and ‘moderate’ support for the physical well-being. Further studies need to be carried out with quantitative measures to identify the influence of blue spaces to human well-being, produce parameters for blue spaces and can implement the results in planning and designing stages of urban parks in cities.