Open Access

Sabine Timpf, Marie-Rose Degg

• Public parks are important urban spaces to promote physical and mental health, in addition to inducing social interaction between visitors. Within the context of geo-design and sustainability issues, urban designers are interested in designing parks for visitor’s use as well as easy management – a bottom-up approach often resulting in public participation processes. As an alternative, people’s behaviour may be simulated during the design process thereby testing di!erent design alternatives. This course of action is also feasible when renovating or redecorating parks. However, validated models simulating people’s behaviour in public parks at a very local level are very scarce. In this project, we use geodata on people’s activities collected in three public parks in a European city to derive a model of behaviour for an agent-based simulation. We discuss this process as well as the problem of modelling human behaviour at the local scale.