A Critical Review of Quality Assessment Tools for Public Spaces

Abstract

During the last decades, public spaces gained much attention from experts and researchers who sought to study factors affecting the quality of such spaces, and evaluate the extent of user satisfaction inside these spaces. Many assessment indexes and toolkits were developed to evaluate the quality of public space and specify the weak points that need development. This study aims to clarify similarities and differences between these tools and to highlight different methodologies of assessments, and presents the extent to which these tools meet human needs by comparing between seven of assessment tools; The project of public space (PPS), Gehl Assessment toolkit, CABE Space shaper, UN-Habitat Public space site-specific assessment, Place Standard Tool, The Good Public Space (GPSI) index, and Great Public Space toolkit, in terms of the assessment tool's aim, structure, methodology, scoring system, and by discussing strength and weakness of each tool, to define the most comprehensive index from human needs point of view. The comparison showed differences between the assessment tools in assessing methods and in their assessment criteria according to the theory or principles that they follow. The study deduced a set of common criteria categorized according to human needs, and noticed a wide range of coverage of social and aesthetic aspects more than the other aspects, the study found that UN-Habitat, GPSI are the assessment tools that covers most aspects of human needs and are thus considered to be the most comprehensive.