Analysing environmental satisfaction in gated housing settlements: A case study in İstanbul

In Istanbul, gated communities have been increasing in number all around the city, particularly since the 1980s, and there has been an ongoing demand since then. This paper mainly tries to examine the users' relationships with the housing environment and focuses on the issues of "satisfaction" and "residents' evaluation of their physical and social environments" in gated settlements. Housing environments have a mechanism that includes "spatial", "functional", and "social" relations. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to understand how residents define their social and physical environments within this mechanism, and to find out some environmental characteristics that affect their satisfaction in order to provide some clues to the environmental quality of the housing environments without walls around and gates with security control. A case study was carried out in four gated settlements in Istanbul, and a questionnaire was given to 200 residents which essentially contained open-ended and multiple-choice questions. Data gathered from the open-ended questions provided a wide range of concepts that define the settings in different scales, while the data gathered from the multiple-choice questions presented the statistical findings with respect to satisfaction. The results show that the residents' "satisfaction" with their social and physical environment is at a considerably high level. This situation demonstrates the importance and significance of the studies in this field while there are many discussions related to the negative effects of these settlements.