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Urban public parks provide space to carry out physical activity, such as walking, jogging, open-door gymnastics, and yoga. While the importance of public parks is well recognized for public health, many a times parks might be designed only as green spaces and may not be conducive for physical activity (Bedmi-Rung et al., 2005).
Several park assessment tools have been developed. One good example is the System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities (SOPARC). It was developed by McKenzie and colleagues (McKenzie et al., 2006), and they also studied eight public parks in low-income neighbourhoods using that tool (Cohen et al., 2007). They observed that parks were the major space of physical activity for these communities. The level of physical activity by residents was dependent upon the proximity of the parks in addition to accessibility, availability of equipment, and management.
The city of Portland, Maine, USA has also prepared a public park assessment tool which categorizes the criteria into equipment accessibility, trails inside parks, presence of washrooms, and maintenance systems inside the parks (The Trust for Public Land, 2016). Similarly, the Community Park Audit Tool (Kaczynski et al., 2012) is an easy-to-use tool which segregates the park attributes into five domains: Park surroundings, Access, Activity areas, Quality and Safety.
If the parks exist in urban areas but are not easily accessible, then they may remain unused. The parks must be accessible by walking, otherwise they cannot be utilized for health benefits (Stark et al., 2014). Walkability in urban areas is critical, in general, but is especially in the context of public parks.
On the other hand, when walkability studies are carried out, they often include consideration of walkways and additional, optional facilities – for example, benches, green cover, and crossings. Depending on the purpose and the target population, different groups of walkability parameters are selected. Thus, assessment and interpretation of walkability may to some extent be subjective. For example, a study carried out by Liddle and colleagues (Liddle et al., 2014) for Belfast city focused only on the aging population of the region. Therefore, the study paid more attention to impediments on walkways (cars parked, tree trunks hindering walking, uneven surfaces) and to the safety of aging people. In contrast, the University of Delaware, Institute of Public Administration published an auditing tool for walkability which was more general and focused on the community at large (O’Hanlon et al., 2016). This latter tool assessed walking facilities and their maintenance (based on walking, stroller and wheelchair movement) and pedestrian amenities (such as curbs, quality of sidewalk, presence of sidewalk on both sides, presence of greenery along sidewalks, presence of buffer between sidewalk and road).