Abstract
Urban parks are essential components of urban ecosystems, providing recreation and relaxation places to residents. Measuring the spatial accessibility to urban parks serves as an initial step in urban planning and developing urban development strategies to improve social and environmental justice. This study aims to evaluate measures of spatial accessibility to urban parks by comparing three geographic information systems (GIS)-based approaches, accounting for network complexity, transport modes, distance thresholds, and destination choices. Taking Ipswich City (Australia) and Enschede (the Netherlands) as two testbeds, we examine the spatial patterns of a total of 21 accessibility measures in the two cities and conduct a correlation and principal component analysis to unravel the interrelationship between these measures. The results suggest that among all measures under the three approaches, the selection of distance thresholds and transport modes matter more to accessibility measures than the destination choices. Furthermore, when distance threshold and transport mode are held constant, the network-based and entrance-based methods provide more realistic accessibility measures than other methods. We also discuss the generality of the entrance-based method we propose and suggest ways to choose the most appropriate accessibility measure for use in different contexts.
Highlights
Access to public green space or green infrastructure such as urban parks has been recognized to associate with people’s physical activities (Cohen et al, 2007)
We may suggest that among accessibility measures within one particular distance threshold, the entrance-based method provides more realistic accessi bility measures, and it is mainly applicable to areas close to large urban parks connected by road networks
Our study proposes a combined network- and entrance-based method for more realistic park accessibility measures and suggests the suitability of accessibility measures in different contexts by comparing 21 park accessibility measures using three geographic information systems (GIS)-based approaches and validating our proposed method across two study areas in Australia and the Netherlands
Summary
Access to public green space or green infrastructure such as urban parks has been recognized to associate with people’s physical activities (Cohen et al, 2007). By nature, is a multiple dimension concept (Zhang, Lu, & Holt, 2011) It can be conceptualised by the park’s proximity to neigh bourhoods where people reside, park size, or park attractiveness in terms of the type, quantity, and quality of amenities (Dony, Delmelle, & Delmelle, 2015). A growing body of literature has emerged to measure urban park access by various spatial approaches, including measuring the closest distance to a nearby park, the density of parks, or the number of parks that can be accessed within a certain distance (Zhang et al, 2011) Most of these methods require a distance measure of sorts, which is a key element that affects the results (Talen & Anselin, 1998). While extensive literature on measuring park accessibility exist, most of them fall short on one (or more than one) of the three aspects: measuring proximity using Euclidean distance between residents’ home and urban parks which can deviate substantially from their ground distance; using the centroid (the geographic centre) or the edge of a park to represent the destination choice; and overlooking the impact of transport modes and distance thresholds on accessibility measures (Halden, Mcguigan, Nis bet, & Mckinnon, 2000)
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