Measuring the Accessibility of Parks: A Case Study in Shanghai, China

Parks are viewed as basal green infrastructure in urban areas, and perform important ecological as well as socio-economic functions. With socio-economic development, people and governments have begun to pay much more attention to urban amenities, especially parks. More and more citizens like to live close to parks and desire for contact with nature. This paper presents two measures (minimum distance and travel cost distance) to comprehensively analyze the accessibility of parks, based on GIS technologies, through a case study of Shanghai, China, during 1986–2002. The accessibility level is classified into four types, very good access, good access, poor access, and very poor access. Results demonstrate that the percentages of residents and block groups beyond ‘good access level’ have increased dramatically, which mean the accessibility of parks in Shanghai metropolitan region has been improved obviously during 1986-2002. However, the results also indicate that there were still many residents live far from parks, and many block groups are lack of parks, which mean the exiting parks are not enough to meet all citizens’ increasing demands. The measures of accessibility take social equity into account, which will provide time-series information to the policy-makers and planners to improve or optimize the urban park planning and assessment.