A demand-oriented examination of local park services: Park types, sizes, features and actual use in the City of Los Angeles

Abstract

A local-park-dominated and service-oriented urban park system would attract proximate use and benefit residents' life quality. Park planning literature has established guidelines to measure the level of local park services. However, without empirical research evidence, it is difficult to understand how actual supply is meeting demand. In order to inspect the effectiveness of current services and examine the rationale of the existing planning standards, this paper investigated the types, sizes, service composition in 277 local parks and surveyed the actual use of park features in 24 recreation centers in the City of Los Angeles. To understand the levels of diverse services and how they are responded by actual park use, four demand-oriented categories were employed to measure the composition and commonness of park features, their popularity in actual use and compare the services with use. The paper concluded that (1) a local park system dominated by parks of high quality, consisting of diverse types of parks with limited services as enrichment and satisfying dimensions of recreational demand with flexible features would provide better services on small parcels of land; (2) the existing planning standards for local parks cannot provide sophisticated guides so that more complete and flexible guidelines need to be studied, especially in terms of park