home2park: An R package to assess the spatial provision of urban parks

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes to human mobility and working environments have prompted a re-think of land use distribution in the city, particularly for office, residential and public spaces such as parks. One prominent trend is a rising demand for the outdoors, as urban dwellers turn to local parks for recreation and leisure (Venter et al., 2020). However, current metrics of park provision tend to focus on summaries of park area within a given region (Tan & Samsudin, 2017). There is a need to characterise the wide variety of parks that serve different groups of people (Song, Richards, He, et al., 2020), and to deal with the limitations of artificial boundaries when planning at fine spatial scales. The package home2park provides a way to measure multiple aspects of park provision to homes, at the resolution of individual buildings.