Urban parks: green spaces or green walls?

Abstract

Parks as an urban landscape feature serve many functions as providers of passive and active recreation, environmental benefits, and wildlife habitat. The research presented herein explores the concept that urban parks may also function as a boundary landscape separating neighborhoods of distinct socioeconomic characteristics. When an urban park functions as a boundary, it impoverishes neighborhoods because it often leads to less use of the open space resource, which then can become a derelict landscape. Therefore, park condition, in the paper, was used as an indication that a park is functioning as a boundary park. Four parks in Boston's neighborhoods of Roxbury and North Dorchester served as study sites to evaluate the hypothesis that parks located between socioeconomically distinct neighborhoods function as boundary landscapes. Analysis of spatial patterns surrounding the parks of race by census block area, and income by census block group in 1980 and 1990, provide the basis for evaluating socioeconomic characteristics that are related to boundary parks. Park tree characteristics provided for comparison of park condition between the general population of park trees in the study area with the four study-site parks. The characteristics examined include species diversity, size class diversity, and percent in good condition. The results show that while white and non-white populations were distinct, the spatial clustering of the populations were random. All four of the study-site parks manifest some characteristics of boundary parks, but two parks were below average for all three measures of urban forest structure condition.