The effect of resident-perceived neighborhood boundary on the equity of public parks distribution: Using GIS

Abstract

Because of the ready availability of various data at residence level, census tracts have been the spatial units most commonly selected. In some cases, municipally defined service districts have also been selected, and they are, in fact, only the aggregates of several neighboring census tracts. The problem encountered in the current study is that Census-based Neighborhoods such as census tracts and the aggregations of census tracts frequently do not correspond with commonly recognized neighborhoods experienced informally in daily life. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Resident-perceived Neighborhood Boundaries (as the alternative unit of analysis to conventionally-used Census-based Neighborhood Units) on the accessibility to public parks based on equity consideration. The result indicates that when Resident-perceived Neighborhood Boundaries are adopted, there is no significant change the equity of accessibility to public park distribution among neighborhoods of different social strata. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.