Proposal Model for A Community-friendly Wetland Park in Egypt: A Social approach.

As community engagement is considered the key to a successful project outcome, it was necessary to change the general attitude dealing with main ecosystem projects such as Wetlands from just being producers supporting primary industries to community-friendly projects providing urban spaces with recreational, educational and ecological facilities and assuring high quality of life. Wetland parks play a vital role for the benefit of its communities. This paper focuses on social aspects and values in designing Wetland parks; it emphasizes the importance of involving community groups to overcome various difficulties and challenges of these projects’ existence. The paper aims to create a design model that achieves a community-friendly Wetland Park; a social guiding model that raises community awareness, participation and ensures sustainability of such projects. A theoretical design guideline review on parks and Wetlands is being presented to provide the basis for the design model and for a community-oriented questionnaire. The paper addresses decision-makers and urban designers in Egypt providing social guidelines to engage local groups in early stages of design. The paper then directs the questionnaire survey to com-munity groups to attain the proposed design model for a community-friendly Wetland Park in Egypt that paves the way for long-term development.


Introduction
Wetlands are parts of landscape defined by the presence of water.They present an integrated productive ecosystem being the main suppliers of fresh water, providing land and shelter to many kinds of animals and plants, in addition to supporting primary industries [1].Moreover, they could be places for community socialization and attraction [2].Unfortunately, wetlands are facing many difficulties and challenges for existence due to various human activity and climate change.Through the last two centuries, the rate of wetland loss has been accelerating to 71% of wetlands, especially for inland wetlands than coastal ones [3].Recently, Wetlands receive a world-wide acceptance aiming to overcome the natural loss and support many environmental, economic and social values beside wastewater management and other conservation strategies.Today, they are known as parks providing many other opportunities such as hunting, fishing, observing nature and photographing.They are soon being a productive and a valuable important resource for the public [4].
However, Wetland parks are yet neither recognized in the broader national community, nor considered in city development plans and strategies.Building community's awareness and interest is the most important mean to restore and achieve sustainable wetland planning and management.As for Egypt, wetlands are limited to wastewater treatment [5], neglecting potentials that could be offered by those lands to create spaces for people, and to provide urban recreational, educational and ecological art facilities .This study seeks to grab the attention of Wetlands' stakeholders in Egypt to the local community and the multiple benefits gained by their involvement, participation and occupying such projects.A design model based on the local community's preferences guarantees social-attraction, raises social-awareness and achieves high levels of efficiency and urban quality of life.Therefore, the study mainly focuses on the social aspect in design, exploring the role towards the community, what do people expect to find and do, what do they need in a Wetland Park, along with testing their awareness of the functionalities of these projects and raising their sense of public responsibility, behavior and belonging.
The study aims to set a guiding model that helps design a community-friendly sustainable Wetland able to integrate within the local urban social life.Following a theoretical approach, the research first explores the social challenges and benefits from Wetland parks, then sums up the main social design guidelines for parks and Wetlands separately.Based on this review, the study sets an initial social design model for Wetland parks and adopts a community-oriented questionnaire to gather specific customized data as a tool for achieving successful social sustainable design.Three main existing Wetland parks in the Middle East region will be studied as cases presenting nearly similar communities or users with same environmental, social and cultural features to the local.At the end, the paper concludes a social design model that achieves a community-friendly Wetland Park.

Materials and Methods
Several methods were utilized to obtain survey results and statistically evaluate par-ticipants' responses.Correspondence analysis was used to examine the responses to mul-tiple-choice questions.All analyses were performed using SPSS and AMOS 25 software.AMOS is specially used for Structural Equation Modeling, path analysis, and confirmato-ry factor analysis to draw models graphically, finally displays the results.

Wetland Parks: Social Benefits and Challenges
Wetland Projects provide several social benefits along with its main ecological functions.However, these projects face many challenges for its existence and continuity.The follow-ing presents the main benefits and challenges considering social aspects in designing wetland projects.

. Social Benefits in Wetland parks:
• Primary reason for climate resiliency and atmospheric maintenance through im-proving air quality and ecosystem services [ 6 .]

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Protecting public health and mankind safety by improving water quality and de-creasing damage caused by floods .

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Providing access to natural products (fresh food) for community use for free or with large privileges.Various plants like mints, berries, and certain kinds of rice, can grow in wetlands.Also, medicines are derived from plants and soils in wetlands.Most of the communities fishing industries harvest many species such as striped bass and brown shrimp only depending on wetlands.Furthermore, wetlands are considered as "biological supermarkets" where many food chain organisms develop [

.] •
Providing open spaces with recreational activities and aesthetic value, for ex.hunt-ing, fishing, and bird watching or photographing wildlife, etc.

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Offering opportunities for environmental education, perfect sites to learn and re-search about vegetation, biodiversity, ecological systems such as nutrition, reproduc-tion, growth…etc [ .7 ]

. Social Challenges in Wetland parks:
• Raising awareness about the importance of Wetlands… Many local communities have poor knowledge on sustainable utilization [2].Since environmental recognition depends on how different groups of people know, interpret and interact with their environment [8].One of the main crucial challenges for successfully operating Wet-land parks is increasing awareness and community knowledge not just about bene-fits, but also about functioning, maintenance and conducting positive cooperative group behavior in such sites.

•
Community involvement and participation… High levels of local groups' involve-ment are the main basis for wetland sustainability guarantee and conservation of re-sources.Therefore, wetland programs must be based on gathering various commu-nity groups for conserving [ 2 .]• Project Site Area… With the continuous increase in urbanization, a main disad-vantage for Wetland parks is the large area of land needed for applying diverse verti-cal and horizontal techniques of subsurface flow or other new systems [9].In addi-tion to the need for other spaces for people to meet, interact and socialize.

Social Guidelines for Parks Design
A well-socially designed open public space, or a public park, connects and builds strong communities; by creating several chances or opportunities for people to meet, gather for a variety of recreational, cultural and ceremonial activities, it enhances community social bonds and relations, increases quality of life in urban environments through a wide variety of activities [10].This depends on providing appropriate spaces with specific design elements meeting various criteria and guidelines.Several Studies have been tackling and presenting social models and design recommendations for open public spaces or public parks, the following Table 1 presents a brief aggregation for the most crucial criteria that must exist in a public park, focusing on social elements that promote and achieve community-place attachment.Source: Authors

Social Guidelines for Wetlands' Design
Urban planners and landscape architects could easily merge wetlands into the urban built environment.They are designed to help reduce current severe environmental challenges [19].Moreover, they are currently being designed to attract people by providing communities social and recreational opportunities… Therefore, as the study focuses on social design guidelines to achieve its main objective, this part shows what a Wetland needs to take part in social life.The following Table 2 sums up the most important social guidelines for designing a Wetland.

Initial Design Model for a Community-friendly Wetland Park
Based on the previous general study review determining the main social design criteria and guidelines for parks and wetlands separately, an initial model has been set as a base for designing a successful social wetland park.The following figure shows the main social goals being organized sequentially, with the specific guidelines customized for each goal.

Wetland Parks in Egypt
As an arid country with hardly rain water, the Egyptian government has been struggling to manage and develop its water resources.A National Water Resources Plan is followed respecting both quality and quantity, taking in account that fresh water is a vulnerable and finite resource and should be dealt with in a holistic way, it also depends on an integrated management approach and on participatory strategies that involves planners, policy-makers with users and community groups at all levels of development [21].Moreover, great awareness has been raised recently in Egypt by specialized sectors on Natural and Constructed wetlands to act as climate resilient elements besides being places for waste water treatments.Water regulation and restoration (such as in Nasser Lake), fish production (at Northern lakes), protection against salt accumulation are all main functions and values of Wetlands in Egypt Although Egypt is one of the members of RAMSAR convention since 1988, which is an international convention created for wetlands' conservation and sustainable use [23], yet still not beneficially applied or developed in several sites with many wetland potentials.Wetlands in Egypt are restricted to water treatment systems, they don't reach to undertake social aspects or engage people to involve and participate in such projects.Egypt is in great need to consider multi-functional and human activities within wetlands to engage the community, raise their awareness and direct their vision to the importance of wetlands to the urban life.Some wetlands in Egypt have the potential to be converted into wetland parks open to people, whereas several public parks in Egypt are considered to be wetland parks with great potentials such as El-Maadi Island, Al Fustat Park in Cairo and El Nabatat Island in Aswan, etc., all are sites surrounded and engaged with water including lawns, rare various plantings along with multiple human recreational activities and playing areas for all community groups.
As the research aims to set a social design model for Wetland parks in Egypt, it was necessary to study a local case for a public wetland park.El Maadi Island was chosen as a common, well-known site within Cairo's urban fabric.A case centering the city can be an ideal example to face difficulties and challenges of wetland projects.

Aim of the Survey
As architects, we are looking for sustainable solutions and alternatives to achieve harmony with nature, (e.g., rehabilitate wetlands and conservation processes), and design for the community (e.g., encourage community participation, provide educational and recreational opportunities, healthy lifestyle, etc. and improve aesthetics).Therefore, users were asked about various social aspects related to wetland park's functions and design through a questionnaire design based on the inferred initial model.Thus, the study aims to : • Evaluate the community's assessment of selected case studies and the extent to which they meet societal needs and positive social interaction.
• Explore the community's expectations and their prior knowledge of this type of Wet-land Park.

Criteria for Selected Case studies & Community groups
As the study follows a social approach, certain criteria must be determined to best serve the selected scope.Selected cases are located within the Middle-east region, where community samples belong with a common cultural thread that runs through many communities presenting respect, honor, loyalty and sanctity of religions.And to a great extent, similar traditions, habits and group behavior patterns [24] that consequently reflect similar needs and requirements.For example, the family is an important part of culture in all Middle East countries including Egypt which must be mainly recognized in design.Projects selected outside Egypt, awarded the Aga Khan for Architecture, are approved as successful projects that gained exceptional appreciation in architecture, planning, historic conservation and landscape design and successfully fulfill their community's needs and desires [25].Furthermore, cases are selected to invite and interact with the community as parks offering several recreational, educational and cultural facilities .

Questionnaire Sample Selection
Designing the questionnaire, the assumption that most people cannot recognize a different type of park such as a wetland park was taken into account.Therefore, the questionnaire survey covers groups of people who have visited a wetland park as main users aiming to evaluate, from their own point of view and experience, the social role of wetland parks towards the community … The sample for study was intentionally selected using specific questions to verify their belonging to groups in the mentioned above criteria.A lack of a population list makes it difficult to take a random sample.However, a combination of different representative populations present in the spatial range of the selected case studies has been applied…Moreover, city dwellers have been also included aiming to ensure public participation by taking users social experiences and expectations through the survey .

Questionnaire Design and Participants
A visual questionnaire was created and released through Google form, including a demonstrative video about wetland parks; the video describes the definition, function, and importance of wetland parks with examples of existing wetland parks.Following the video, is participants' profile including gender, age, and educational background.After this part, questions were created to find out users' perceptions about social challenges and benefits of wetland parks.This consists of 13 questions which are mostly singlechoice questions.The questionnaire form was designed as short and straightforward as possible.It was conducted online with a random sampling method on the 20th of May 2023 to review questions regarding understanding and accuracy for public users.It was released as an anonymous online questionnaire starting from the 27th of May 2023 through social media networks, and finally ended in 27th of June 2023 .

Survey Case Studies
The research presents three case studies for wetland parks.The first case study is "Wadi Hanifa Wetland Park" in Riyadh-Saudi Arabia, aimed to achieve a long-term environment by establishing an ecological infrastructure using innovative landscape along with developing recreational places for Riyadh residents.The second named as "Wasit Wetland Center" located in Sharjah-United Arab Emirates, designed as a center to spread knowledge about this unique habitat, as well as to achieve its preservation.Finally, the Egyptian case study "El-Maadi Island" in Cairo; a large park including small natural and artificial lakes and acting as a great place to enjoy the landscape walking and strolling within vast green spaces.

Socio-Demographic Characteristics.
A total number of 407 respondents were acknowledged, with a higher female response of 65.6% over males presenting 34.4%.Age groups ranging from 35 to 44 years old presented 43%, while 17.4% ranged from 18 to 24.The majority of respondents presenting 85% were highly educated.

First stage: Community's Awareness.
In this stage, questions investigate community's awareness and recognition for Wet-land Parks. Figure 2 indicates that a high percentage of the surveyed groups 74.8% had never heard about wetland park.This percentage decreased to 47.3% when a video ex-plaining the wetland park concept was viewed.Additionally, 58.6% of respondents ex-pressed that the video fitted their perception of the wetland park, especially since the video included examples in Egypt and the Arab world.Furthermore, all respondents expressed a desire to visit a Wetland Park in the future.Results indicate that most of community groups lacked the awareness of the existence and value of such projects, which were treated and experienced as any other public park.Among other reasons, this unawareness is due to the absence of community engagement in design and planning phases of wet-land parks.Thus, raising community awareness and interest is the key to ensuring sus-tainable wetland design and planning.Moreover, respondents provided their ideas regarding the great significance of Wetland parks in response to several questions, including both potential benefits and drawbacks.As shown in Table 3, one of the main purposes of wetland parks, according to 24.5% of respondents, is to provide information and education about wetlands.The two main purposes were to encourage the local community to preserve wetlands and manage and conserve wetland areas.The questionnaire indicates respondents' reasons behind visiting Wetland Parks.Based on the findings, only a number of 185 respondents have visited a Wetland Park presenting 45.5% of the sample considered as the rate of response, while 222 respondents did not answer the question.'Recreational /Entertainment interest' had the highest response rate with 60%, followed by 'Concerned about natural environment/wildlife', with a response rate of 23.2%.This may be due to respondents' interest in entertainment activities and na-ture tours.Moreover, the lowest response rate was the 'Cultural/ educational interest' with 7%, which in all ways depend on users' awareness, participation and taking role in early design phases.Besides providing attractive and interesting activities, wetland parks' design should rely on a long-term investment that ultimately benefits the community .
On the other hand, as shown in Table 4, the questionnaire asked the 185 respondents who had previously visited a wetland park to mention the disadvantages they experienced.A main complaint was the hardly existence of any benches to sit or relax with a percentage of 21.6%, followed by the 'Shortage of toilets' presenting 17.3%, and the lack of specific programs showing the components and activities available in the park with 15.1%.5 shows the results, where the most commonly endorsed activities were enjoying the unique natural environment with a percentage of 43.7%.Thus, it is obvious that Wetland parks with vast urban natural spaces and scenes play a crucial and valuable role in supporting communities' health and social life.However, there is currently a relative lack of studies assessing the impact of wetland parks on enhancing the quality of community life.Based on previous findings, this part of the survey explores the relation between levels of enjoyment and the nature of activities that observed to tend towards activities related to enjoying the natural environment.This stage sheds light on the socio-economic benefits of wetland parks.As mentioned, wetland parks have multiple socio-economic benefits along with its main ecological functions that restores the natural environment and enhances the community's health.Therefore, it was necessary to investigate participants' understanding of benefits and its extents, in order to promote activities that provide community engagement and economic support.Table 6 shows that the highest percentage was observed 28.2% presenting 'Enjoying nature'.Furthermore, all results were far from any economic investment which reflects the incomplete understanding of benefits to be acquired from such projects.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Initial Design Model for a Community-friendly Wetland Park

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. The participants' awareness of the Wetland Park

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The purposed a social design model based on the local community's preferences6.ConclusionMaintaining integrated productive ecosystem projects such as wetland parks is considered a great challenge unless adopting a participatory approach that engages, empowers and supports the community to exist, value, care and benefit from such projects.Local community engagement is the key for longterm development, thus it is crucial to design socially from the beginning.This study has set an initial social model for designing a community-friendly Wetland Park presenting a sequential series of social goals and guidelines.Through a community-oriented questionnaire that was designed based on the initial social model, the survey acknowledged social aspects and values to achieve local community attachment.Results were analyzed to redesign the initial model to achieve a customized Local Social Model for designing Wetland Parks in Egypt.The proposed model ensures the main and direct impact of Community Awareness, Enjoyment and Participation factors on maximizing its Socio-economic benefits which present high levels of social sustainability.Thus, the proposed model is regarded as an essential procedure for a successful Social Community-friendly Wetland Park design.

Table 1 .
Aggregation for the most crucial criteria that must exist in a public park

Table 2 :
Important social guidelines for designing a Wetland.

Table 3
The main importance of Wetland parks Frequency Percent 9 4.3.Second stage: Community Interest and Attraction .

Table 4
Assessment of the disadvantages of Wetland parks visiting This stage reflects the reason behind respondents' desire to visit a wetland park, at the same time it identifies what kind of activities that encourage community enjoyment.The question was presented to respondents with 9 variant activities.Table

Table 5
Assessment of the attractive activities to visit the wetland parks (N = 407).This part explores respondents' willingness to participate in Wetland Park Community activities, either by volunteering or as a member of the community, in order to be able to identify effective and appropriate actions to promote active community participation.A percentage of 59.5% answered negatively and were unwilling to participate.In comparison, 32.9% of the sample expressed a desire to volunteer in any programs or activities in the park.The lowest percentage was 4.2% participated as members of the Community Council.This requires urging the community to be socially active and to play an effective role in decision-making, which is considered one of the key strategies to acquire and raise a community quality of life, and accordingly achieving high qualified community-friendly Wetland Parks.

Table 6
The main community benefit from visiting the wetland parkThe final survey question asked about the affordability of visiting a Wetland Park, whether it was appropriate for different groups & ages.Results show that 55.5% of respondents find that the ticket was partially convenient, while 34.4% find it fitting and affordable.
'Community Enjoyment'.As well as there is a significant positive impact from 'Community Enjoyment' on 'Community Awareness' with standardized coefficient 0.250, which explains 6.2% of any change in the 'Community Awareness'.Both at confidence level 99%.

Table 7
The Path Analysis of the Main Social Design Criteria.Besides the previous, there is a positive significant impact from 'Community Involvement & Participation', 'Community Awareness' and 'Community Enjoyment' on 'Community Socio-Economic Benefits' at confidence level 95%, with standardized coefficient 0.200 -0.193 -0.161 respectively, these variables explain 18.8% of any change in the 'Community Socio-Economic Benefits'.