Evaluating geographic and social inequity of urban parks in Shanghai through mobile phone-derived human activities

The equity of urban park access has received great attention from studies on public service provision. However, individuals’ growing demands for recreational activities have brought diversity and complexity to park usages, drawing doubts on traditional measurements of park accessibility. To fill the gap, this study explores park equity issues with a dataset containing 12.03 million mobile phone users who accessed one of the 332 parks in Shanghai. We measured community-level park accessibility with two traditional place-based indicators – park area proportion and Gaussian-based 2SFCA accessibility, and three innovative activity-based indicators – park activity frequency, park activity trip length, and park activity duration. We then explored the geographic and social inequity by calculating Gini index and conducting correlation analysis. The results show that place-based and activity-based indicators presented citywide differences, indicating a significant impact of human activities on urban park accessibility. The geographic inequality of park distribution was undermined by people’s actual park usages. However, residents in communities with higher quality of built-environment had higher park activity frequency while shorter trip length, and social inequity of park access among the total population was more obvious than the low-recreation-demand population. Therefore, policy-makers should rethink how to provide park resources to address the inequity issues brought by human activities. Our study contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: (1) compared place-based park accessibility and activity-based park accessibility in the same context, and (2) identified low-recreation-demand population as a comparison group to explore impacts of recreation demand on park equity.