ABSTRACT
Urban parks are regarded as major contributors to the physical and aesthetic quality of urban life and as venues to facilitate and promote human interaction. Under social dimensions, this chapter endeavors to explore the relationship between people (society) and public spaces, and considers the way people perceive, use and respond to their surroundings as part of their interaction with space. This also means that there exists a “social construction of nature versus the material nature of the environment because the term allows for both. The world is out there, and we interact with it in ways that reproduce it, often altering it in the process” (Smith 2010), yet the world only has meaning for us as language-using and symbol-making animals owing to how we intellectually apprehend it (West et al. 2006: 252). Spaces, hence, are not solely physical entities but vessels of human interactions and social activities. Spaces and people are two interrelated concepts and it is difficult to think of space without its social content and of society without its spatial component.
