The Trust for Public Land has just released its annual scores and rankings on city parks across the U.S., as Laura Blissreports. These scores claim to evaluate what the trustconsiders the “three important characteristics of an effective park system: acreage, facilities and investment, and access.”
While this assessment is supposed to be the gold standard for determining park quality, its criteria is severely undermined by its failure to consider the legacy of racism in the U.S. park system. This holds especially true when looking at access, which the TPL defines as “the percentage of the population living within a 10-minute (half-mile) walk of a public park.”
This is a limited definition, to say the least. We know from the many failed instances of desegregation in the U.S. that mere proximity or an open-door/floor plan doesn’t necessarily mean equal access for all. It certainly hasn’t meant that for African Americans and parks, as University of Missouri scholar KangJae Lee recently discovered. In Lee’s study, published June 1 in the journal Leisure Sciences, he attempts to answer a long-unresolved question: How come black people don’t go to the park? Or, put better: What keeps black people away from parks?
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/design/...st-proximity/485321/]
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