A Study on the Cooling Capacities of Urban Parks and Their Interactions with the Surrounding Urban Patterns

In this study, the climatic interactions between parks and the urban pattern surrounding them were investigated by sampling from two urban parks which are located in the Kadıköy district of Istanbul. Parks are very close to each other but their surrounding areas are different from each other in terms of the building density and the urban pattern. The analyses were carried out by examining the relationships between surface temperatures, distances to the park, and zones. Surface temperature/park distance correlations were examined in different zones by the bivariate method at a 0.01 significance level, and it was observed that the parks displayed different correlations in different pattern types and again each pattern type exhibited different graphics in temperature/distance scatter plots. When the results were evaluated from a climatic perspective, it was seen that a street with trees was more effective than a park area that has a weak plantation. On the other hand, the results also showed that the building geometries can cause the formation of cool islands. So, the study revealed that street planting and urban design are as important as the landscape design of park areas in terms of the cooling of the city.