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Description

Urban parklands are well-documented as critical resources that provide users with extensive benefits and protect open spaces and natural habitat. The Baldwin Hills (BH) urban park system serves residents of Culver City, Los Angeles, Inglewood, local unincorporated counties, and the Larger Los Angeles County, as well as tourists and visitors from other parts of the region. This poster represents the pilot phase of an impending 2-year comprehensive survey of BH park user experiences that aims to inform improvements to quality of urban recreational spaces. The pilot study focused on 6 heavily used parks/ riverways within the BH system. Ten undergraduate research assistants (URAs) were trained according to LMU’s Institutional Review Board policies for human subjects research. URAs visited each park and conducted user surveys that included the following: frequency of park use, demographics, park activity engagement, park accessibility, and health/ disposition. URAs also conducted strategic counts of the number of park visitors. A total of 8 visitor counts and 236 surveys were conducted. This study yielded numerous recommendations on how to improve local urban parks, such as: extending the park grounds to surrounding neighborhoods, adding public transit stops nearer to the parks, installing educational exhibits around the sites to increase environmental awareness, etc. Future efforts will be focused on expanding the scope and scale of the survey assessments and narrowing down the questions to more user- specific topics.

Publication Date

2015

The Value of Urban Parklands: A User Study of the Baldwin Hills Park System

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