February 26, 2019

There are well-documented health benefits of physical activity for children and adults including a reduced risk of obesity and chronic diseases. There are also shorter-term benefits including improved psychological well-being. Urban areas can play a significant role by focusing on providing and enriching green spaces in communities.

Urban parks offer a broad range of opportunities for children’s recreation and physical activity. How people use urban parks, however, are not equal in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. In order to design policies to improve park design and to provide healthy park experiences among children of communities of color, insight on how children of color use urban parks in their communities is needed.

A new study, co-authored by Dr. Gina Lovasi, co-director of the Urban Health Collaborative and Dornsife associate professor of urban health at the Drexel University School of Public Health, and Dustin Fry, UHC doctoral research fellow in the Dornsife School of Public Health’s epidemiology and biostatistics PhD program, found that a broad range of factors not only impact park usage, but also the physical activity levels of the people who visit the parks.

“We know that parks are important for a variety of health outcomes, but continued research like this can provide us with more information about how parks can best be implemented to maximize benefits,” said Fry of the study.

A research team based at North Carolina State University, along with Lovasi and Fry, examined whether weekday park usage and physical activity differed by race and ethnicity across numerous categories of park features. They captured the number of users and physical activity levels within 167 park features in 20 parks in low-income neighborhoods in New York City in 2017.  Audits of park environments assessed the type, condition, and cleanliness of all features and amenities.

Usage and physical activity levels differed across types of park features, with playgrounds, basketball courts, and swing sets having the greatest proportion of active users. High usage of playgrounds was consistent among children of all racial groups, while basketball courts were especially popular among Asian and African-American children.

For more details on this study, published in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening click here.

For more information on park use and childhood physical activity, please visit the UHC project page here.

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Contact Lovasi at gsl45@drexel.edu