International Journal of

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Current literatures on urban parks and green spaces showed that people’s preference for visiting urban parks in various group users is different. People visit parks for various motives and activities, leading to several patterns of park usability. However, the patterns in urban park use in majority of Iran cities are not yet known. This study presented the preference for activity in urban parks among people in Gorgan city. A survey research was conducted to gain understanding of respondents’ preferences for activity in urban parks. The Data was collected among 300 visitors of two well-known urban parks in Gorgan. Visitors rated preference for four activities: relaxation, socializing, nature involvement, and playing activities. The results revealed that the people of Gorgan chose relaxation and nature involvement as the most preferred activities whilst socializing and playing were the least preferred activities. Furthermore, a significant difference in two variables: relaxation and nature involvement activity was found among marital status and visitor age groups. The results also indicated the role of urban parks on psychological needs of the citizens, which creates urban nature as a valuable urban resource and key component for city sustainability. This result contributes notions towards significantly impacting design of urban parks and their facilities that designers and decision makers should manage those facilities to satisfy the visitors’ needs.

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The present paper focused on architecture students' learning styles based on Kolb's Experiential learning theory (ELT) and evaluated relationships between students' learning styles, degree of their academic achievement, gender, and duration of study in architecture. Based on the results of this research, divergent, accommodating, assimilating and convergent styles were the architecture students' dominant learning styles, respectively. Furthermore, there was an unbalanced distribution of dispersed different learning styles as more than a half of the students' preferred divergent learning styles while divergent and accommodating styles in the half north of scatter plot generally covered more than 85% of the participants. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed between the students' mean scores of learning style test at the end of the first to fourth years of study. It was found that there were significant relationships between male students' learning styles and their achievement in architecture education. Accordingly, male students with divergent learning styles had higher academic achievement in terms of their total grade point average, compared to that of assimilating and accommodating groups. Meanwhile, there was a significant relationship between the students' academic performance and gender. In general, female students had better performance in architecture in terms of their total grade point average.

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This study seeks to investigate the effect that environmental factors have on the use or non-use of bicycles according to gender in urban travels in Iran. To this aim, while conducting a questionnaire survey among 304 bicycle users (162 males and 141 females) within the dedicated bicycle network in Shiraz, "T" test and "Regression" statistical tests were conducted to investigate the preference differences between the two groups (male and female) and specifically, the effect of factors among women.
Based on the findings of the aforementioned statistical tests, both men and women faced barriers to using bicycles in urban travels, although a difference was observed between the two genders in the effective environment they preferred. This difference is especially significant regarding socio-cultural indicators considering the specific traditional-religious context in Iran. Therefore, in addition to indicators such as "sense of safety," "path security," "using dedicated bicycle lanes," "path greenness and attractiveness, " women's cycling is significantly affected by indicators such as "community custom and people's judgment" and also "religious norms."
Based on the analysis, education of women about the benefits of using bicycle and the creation of synergy between cultural and religious institutions of the society to remove social, cultural and normative barriers for women's cycling in Iran along with planning to increase urban bicycle transportation lanes with the necessary environmental qualities and standards can increase the per capita and eliminate the disparity in the number of men and women who cycle in developing countries such as Iran.