Are Urban Parks a Racialized Amenity? An Investigation of Park Use Patterns and Park Catchment Areas in Urban America

Keywords: parks, inequality, accessibility, visitation, SafeGraph data
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

In urban America, parks are a prototypical public good for leisure and recreational activity. However, the dominant spatial logic of park development has trended toward locating parks in affluent, white neighborhoods, which raises concerns that parks function as an amenity of wealthy whites instead of as a public good. Extant studies on park access have not sufficiently addressed this concern because they only measure potential access for different populations. This study focuses on the realized use of parks by leveraging SafeGraph’s cellphone data of residential locations of park users and their park destinations in the ten most populous American cities. I use hierarchical clustering and regression modelling to analyze the demographic predictors of visitor flows to parks and park catchment areas. Preliminary findings show that park consumption is patterned on neighborhood racial composition. On average, park users in Black and Latinx neighborhoods visit a greater number of parks in the city than park users in white neighborhoods, but they use parks closest to them most frequently. Park users in white neighborhoods do not demonstrate a strong preference for using their nearest park, but their visits are constrained to a smaller set of parks located in mostly white neighborhoods. Analyses of park catchment areas reveal that parks located in white neighborhoods serve neighborhoods from across the city, whereas parks in minority and racially diverse neighborhoods have smaller catchment areas that serve majority-minority neighborhoods. These findings have implications for how researchers and planners conceptualize and measure inequalities in park access.