Campus Open-Space Satisfaction as a Design Evaluation Problem: Survey Evidence and Contextual Site Documentation from Four Istanbul Campuses

Campus open spaces support movement, social interaction, restoration, and informal learning, yet comparative evidence connecting student evaluations with contrasting campus contexts remains limited. This article examines architecture students’ satisfaction with campus open spaces across four university campuses in Turkiye. A survey-based comparative design was used, supported by open-ended response coding and structured site observation. The main objective was to organize the substantive questionnaire content into nine questionnaire-informed design-evaluation categories, compare the perceived adequacy of open spaces for extracurricular activities across four selected campus groups, and formulate context-sensitive design considerations from the survey findings and contextual site descriptions. All 890 eligible students were invited, and 284 questionnaire records were obtained (31.9%); 282 had valid university identification, 282 contained substantive responses to the Perceived Campus Environment Description, and 281 had valid campus and retained-item data. Analysis combined descriptive statistics, nine questionnaire-informed design-evaluation categories, descriptive categories of the Perceived Campus Environment Description, and Welch’s ANOVA with Games–Howell comparisons. Istanbul Aydin University scored lower than Işık, Yeditepe, and Yildiz Technical universities on the extracurricular-activity adequacy item (all adjusted p < 0.001), while the latter three did not differ significantly. The Perceived Campus Environment Description most frequently identified insufficient socialization space (25.2%), poor landscape organization (23.0%), insufficient open-space capacity (23.0%), and limited evening cafés (18.1%). The study contributes a transparent questionnaire-informed design-evaluation structure and treats the resulting contextual design considerations as directions for subsequent campus assessment.