A review of the history of Chinese gardens beginning in the Shang Dynasty reveals that parks have become increasingly important to urban residents' lives; and hence, this paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the suitability of parks. The analysis shows that suitability evaluations of urban parks should not be restricted to a park's basic functions, but should include a comprehensive evaluation of ecological value, cultural inheritance and feature construction. After describing the current literature of research on indices, categories, use conditions and landscape accessibility of domestic and foreign urban parks, the paper concludes with a framework for evaluating a park's suitability, i.e. the establishment of an integrated evaluation system, the selection of reasonable evaluation methods, and public participation as an indicator in the evaluation system, so as to ensure the validity of research results.
