Effects of urban park spatial characteristics on visitor density and diversity: A geolocated social media approach

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature investigating whether social media posts can improve understanding spatial density in relation to urban park use and how park facilities play a role in attracting visitors. What it is less understood, however, is the spatial diversity of visitors, a concept we define in this article in terms of how urban parks help connect people from different neighborhoods. In the research presented here, we aimed to begin to address that knowledge gap by inspecting spatial patterns of visits to 643 parks in Singapore using grid cells of 150 m × 150 m. Utilizing more than 20 million geolocated tweets dating from July 2012 to October 2016, and multiple park attributes, we applied statistical methods to observe the influence of Singapore’s park facilities on both spatial density and spatial diversity. Our findings indicate that visitors’ spatial density and spatial diversity were driven by a different sets of park characteristics. On the one hand, high surrounding population density and family-oriented facilities (e.g., playgrounds) resulted in higher spatial density of visitors. On the other hand, commercial areas, recreation facilities, and amenities offering a wider variety of activities for pleasure (e.g., barbeque pits, cycle tracks, or lawn areas) were critical factors in drawing more spatially diverse groups of visitors. From the analysis of our findings, we propose a novel classification of urban park attributes based on control, localized, cluster, or composite cluster effects.