Towards Sustainable Public Open Spaces for Promoting Human Comfort, Health and Well-Being: The Case of Oxygen Park in Doha, Qatar

Abstract

Public Open Spaces (POS) are an important and necessary component of the urban city design. Well-designed and well-functioning public open spaces provide a variety of social, economic, environmental, physical and psychological advantages for populations, and thus play a substantial role in improving the quality of city life and contributing to livability. Doha city, the capital State of Qatar, has encountered a rapid urbanization which brought with it an increasing number of inhabitants and the implementation of many urban projects (Salama & Wiedman, 2013); these changes demand well-designed and well-functioning public open spaces. Responding to this need, this paper aims to develop design guidelines for a sustainable public open space by exploring the physical and non-physical characteristics of a few key public open spaces as well as the ways in which environmental conditions impact user comfort, health and well-being-with an eye for accessibility, sociability, activities and user's comfort-in these POS. To achieve this aim, a combined methodology based on quantitative and qualitative techniques was developed and used to encompass the multi-dimensionality of the POS. Expected outcomes state that POS can become catalyst for healthy urban spaces if a series of multi-dimensional parameters are considered at all design stages