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Historically, environmental justice initiatives focused on urban parks have evaluated where those green spaces are located and who has access to them. But, according to SESYNC researcher Jeffrey Clark, “Just because there is a park, doesn’t mean it necessarily has the features that that community values or needs.”
In fact, making park access truly equitable means ensuring residents get the best use and value from the green spaces available to them.
Generally, parks departments know a lot about who they serve, explained fellow SESYNC researcher Charles Nilon. "So, they know a lot about who lives within say a 10-minute walk to the park or a half-hour walk to the park," he said. "That's information that's really important, and it's a really important part of park planning. But the sort of broader picture of how people use those parks, what resources are there, those really need to be explored because those are probably an equally important part."
Nilon—Professor Emeritus of Fisheries and Wildlife, in the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources—added, "The question of how cities provide parks to people is really complex. It's something that really needs to be considered when we think about what access means."
Part of ensuring equal access is recognizing that parks provide more than just physical benefits to city residents.
“When you see the uses of parks during times like the COVID pandemic, we know that they can be really valuable for more than just recreation—they can have cultural importance, they can be good for mental health,” explained Clark, Senior Manager of Applied Climate Research at Natural Areas Conservancy. “If we are going by [parks’] presence/absence only, we’re leaving a lot of people out from some of the benefits as planners that we really try to push,” he said.
Despite parks’ unique features impacting residents’ physical, mental, and social well-being, urban planners and municipalities seldom consider these attributes when trying to develop plans for addressing environmental inequities.
For example, Clark explained that while brush, shrubs, or undergrowth in a park might provide ecological value to the park by way of biodiversity, some park users might perceive the overgrowth as contributing to safety concerns or as impeding their ability to use the space recreationally. Integrating residents’ use of and beliefs about the space is critical.
To bridge this knowledge gap, Nilon (co-leader of the project), Clark, and a team of researchers, supported by SESYNC, formed the project, A Socioecological View or Urban Green Spaces. The group aimed to expand traditional assessments of green spaces to include many important—but often overlooked—factors. These features—including a park’s tree cover, length of trails, size of play areas, water features, and capacity to mitigate both heat and noise—all paint a more complete picture of the benefits that parks provide, and which residents benefit most from them.
The research aimed to show that by striking a balance between the ecological needs of the park—for the plants and wildlife for example—with the social and health needs for humans, park planners could create a more equitable and just approach.
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In one of the group’s studies, published in Nature Cities, the researchers analyzed data available from Trust for Public Land’s (TPL’s) ParkServe database to examine 122,988 urban parks across the United States. They measured the racial/ethnic population distribution within a 10-minute walk to each park and then compared those numbers to the overall demographics of the city. They then examined other aspects of the parks to measure their quality. The researchers said that though previous studies looked at things like the park’s infrastructure (e.g., facilities and acreage) and services (e.g., programming), they didn’t adequately capture the parks other social, environmental, and health amenities.
For example, in this study, the researchers included the length of trails and the size of playgrounds as they not only lead to greater physical exercise but also contribute to social interactions and even child development. Another important feature was a park’s tree canopy; not only do trees provide shade and contribute to biodiversity but they also help to mitigate heat in urban settings—an increasingly important characteristic in the face of climate change.
Looking at these key features, the study found clear disparities in the quality of parks among racial groups. For example, they found that parks in neighborhoods with greater Hispanic, Black, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) and Multiracial populations mitigated less heat and noise and had less tree cover than parks in neighborhoods with greater white populations.
They also found that even though one race might have high access to more parks, the parks usually weren’t providing the environmental, social, and health benefits that the residents needed. In fact, the study found overall that Whites were overrepresented near parks with above-average amenities (higher quality), whereas Blacks and Hispanics were over-represented near parks with below-average amenities (lower quality).
The team hopes that park managers can use these findings to tailor their future park plans to create a more equitable experience for park goers.
Following the study, the research team provided feedback on the ParkServe database to TPL with the aim of making it more useful for park managers going forward. Over a couple of sessions, the team provided insights into how they used the data and what additional information and criteria they’d like to see included going forward. For example, including information about the age of park equipment and/or their renovations would improve future assessments of parks’ quality.
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Nilon explained that having even more data available means ensuing studies could expand to include more specific park features and more demographic identifiers, such as income level of residents, age, and home ownership.
Ultimately, having such metrics available means more park planners could create urban green spaces that provide all urban residents with the environmental, social, and mental benefits that nature provides.
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