Shades of Green

Overview scores for London
Scores for nature appreciation (left) and physical activities (right) in London parks. Some parks score low on nature appreciation but high on physical activity (A), while imperial-era parks such as Green Park and St. James's Park, close to the royal palace score high on nature appreciation but low on physical activity (B). Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, purpose-built for the 2012 Games, scores high across all dimensions (C). Map data from OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright.

Description

Prior research on the connection between parks and health largely overlooked the range of potential health-promoting activities these green spaces can offer. Additionally, studies focusing on park usage patterns have only examined a limited selection of facilities without adequately connecting these facilities to the usage and health-promoting activities.

To address this gap and provide a detailed understanding of park quality with respect to various activities that people can do in them, we collected data on park elements and spaces in parks across 35 cities worldwide. The raw counts reveal design priorities for park activities on different continents, while the park health scores indicate a trend where parks closer to city centers offer a wider range of facilities. Additionally, we identified the successes and failures of various cities in providing high-quality parks, highlighting those that offer more uniformly distributed park facilities compared to others that show significant disparities in facility provision.

A visualization of the park health scores is available here: VIS

This project is a collaboration of Linus W. Dietz, Sanja Šćepanović, Ke Zhou, André Felipe Zanella, and Daniele Quercia.

Dietz, L. W., Šćepanović, S., Zhou, K., Zanella, A. F., & Quercia, D. (2025). Understanding the potential of urban parks to promote well-being. Nature Cities. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00345-4

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