Assessing the inequality of park's contributions to human wellbeing in Shanghai, China

Abstract

Parks play an essential role in sustainable urban development and human health, but their benefits are distributed unevenly across space. Assessing spatial inequalities in the contribution parks make to human wellbeing is crucial. Previous studies have primarily focused on disparities in public access to parks, overlooking the effective availability of parks and the positive spillover effects that parks have on their surroundings. Thus, a multidimensional framework for assessing the allocation of parks' intrinsic and spillover benefits, which considers park opening hours and foot traffic, is proposed to capture the equality of parks' contribution to human wellbeing. Our results show that ignoring park availability can overestimate the service supply to visitors from parks in suburban and outer suburban areas and underestimate that of central urban areas; parks' contribution to human wellbeing decreases as people move further away from the city center and toward the periphery. To address these inequalities, we suggest improving park services in outer Shanghai by developing community parks; increasing the number of pocket parks in central Shanghai; and extending parks' opening hours in the periphery. Additionally, we identify areas in the urban periphery that require priority attention for park planning. Our framework offers an effective means to assess and reduce inequities in park allocation in megacities.