Analysis of urban green space accessibility and distribution inequity in the City of Chicago

Abstract

Urban green space (UGS) has positive impacts on people’s physical and mental health. Equal access to UGS for all people, regardless of their individual characteristics, is key to the achievement of better public health outcomes. Existing studies have focused largely on inequity in spatial UGS accessibility distribution but failed to uncover the disparities of UGS accessibility among different racial/ethnic and income groups as well as inequity in income-based UGS accessibility distribution within the same racial/ethnic groups. By using the city of Chicago as the study area, we adopt the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to measure census tract-level UGS accessibility and compare distribution disparities among white-majority, black-majority and Hispanic-majority census tracts as well as low-income and non-low-income census tracts. In addition, we employ the Palma ratio to measure the income-based UGS accessibility distribution inequity within respective racial/ethnic groups. The results show that white-majority census tracts generally enjoy significantly better UGS accessibility than minority-dominated census tracts, while black-majority census tracts have higher UGS accessibility than Hispanic-majority census tracts. In terms of the intra-racial/ethnic income-based UGS accessibility inequity between the richest and the poorest, inequity is the lowest among white-majority census tracts and the highest among black-majority census tracts, with inequity in Hispanic-majority census tracts in the intermediate range.