Urban planners and public health experts have long relied on a simple rule of thumb when it comes to accessing parks and greenspace: ideally, everyone should live within a 10-minute walk to a park. Proximity to green space, after all, is known to provide a wide range of physical, mental, social, and environmental benefits. By that measure, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul—where 99% of all residents live within a 10-minute walk to a park—should be a model of equitable access to parks and the many benefits they confer.
But a new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) suggests that proximity doesn’t tell the whole story. SPH researchers examined not just access to parks, but also looked at a park’s total acreage—adding an important new element to the conversation.
To conduct the study, researchers analyzed data from SPH’s Project EAT to focus on just over 2,200 Twin Cities adolescents who lived within a 10-minute walk of a park. Using geographic information system data, they calculated how much of the land near each of their homes was made up of parks, information they then used to develop the concept of Urban Park Oases—neighborhoods that are both nearby parks and whose land is at least 10% parkland. They then compared physical activity levels between adolescents living in these park-rich areas and those in neighborhoods with less parkland.
The study, published in Environmental Justice, found:
- Adolescents living in Urban Park Oases had greater levels of physical activity. Adolescents in Urban Park Oases reported about 15 more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week than peers in areas with less park acreage.
- Park acreage was inequitably distributed. Though parks are generally evenly distributed across the Twin Cities, racially and ethnically minority and low-income adolescents were significantly less likely to live in acreage-rich neighborhoods.
- Citywide park rankings can mask unequal distribution of parkland. Minneapolis and Saint Paul regularly score in the top tier of “green cities” where parks are close to nearly all residents, but the Urban Park Oases metric underscores that neighborhood-level disparities persist even in these cities.
“Living near a park supports physical activity, but the size of a neighborhood park is a key element that planners and public health officials have overlooked for a long time,” said Eydie N. Kramer-Kostecka, SPH researcher and lead author. “By looking beyond distance and asking how much parkland actually surrounds young people’s homes, this study shows deep differences in the size of greenspace available to adolescents in different areas. Because the activity habits formed in adolescence shape health across a lifetime, equitable access to substantial park acreage isn’t just an urban planning question—it’s a public health priority.”
The study recommends that municipalities test the 10% acreage threshold in their communities and adopt land-use and park investment policies that intentionally expand green space in underserved neighborhoods.
Study co-authors include: UMN Medical School Assistant Professor Sarah M. Kaja, UMN Medical School Assistant Professor Junia N. de Brito, University of North Carolina Charlotte Professor Daheia J. Barr-Anderson, University of North Carolina Associate Professor Jaime C. Slaughter-Acey, and SPH Regents Professor Dianne Neumark-Sztainer.
