Perceived priorities, experiences and provision gaps in urban green spaces: evidence from university students in Pécs, Hungary

Urban green spaces play a vital role in enhancing the liveability and sustainability of cities, particularly for university students. This study applies a socially differentiated importance–experience framework to the evaluation of urban green spaces by university students in Pécs, Hungary. The sample was not representative of the target population, primarily because foreign students were overrepresented. Post-stratification weights were therefore applied to align the sample with the composition of the student population at the University of Pécs. Using these weights, Multiple Factor Analysis identified three dimensions for both the importance and experience measures, as well as six dimensions representing the gap between the corresponding importance and experience ratings. Each dimension was subsequently modelled using post-stratification-weighted linear regression. The explanatory variables describing patterns of green-space use were preselected using the Boruta feature-selection algorithm. The findings reveal substantial importance–experience gaps for several basic attributes, including public toilets, accessibility for people with reduced mobility, benches, cleanliness, waste bins and vegetation. Associations with citizenship and patterns of green space use were dimension-specific rather than indicating consistently less experiences among respondents with foreign citizenship. The results suggest that the students’ evaluations of urban green spaces reflect a multidimensional interplay of practical, environmental, and social attributes. Future research should examine comparative settings and incorporate qualitative methods to explore variation among more precisely defined user groups and across urban contexts. Given the non-representative sample and the aggregation of respondents with foreign citizenship into a single group, the results should be interpreted cautiously, particularly regarding gender-specific patterns and heterogeneity within the foreign-citizenship group.