THE HEALTH BENEFITS OF PARKS AND THEIR ECONOMIC IMPACTS 25 outcomes. The health benefits associated with activity is an area of the literature where the connection between park access and awareness and health benefits is clear. Parks provide space for physical activity, and that activity has been shown to provide health benefits. However, other areas, such as the impact of parks on social cohesion, may be heavily affected by park context. For instance, if a park is not viewed as safe and welcoming, if certain racial groups or economic classes lack access to park space, or if other factors exogenous to the park itself hinder social interaction, the park’s impact on social cohesion may be limited. The framework will need to focus on how to tease out, whether through park typologies, amenity checklists, or some other means, which impacts, and to what extent those impacts, can be reasonably attributable to any given park, given the wide range of size, type, and quality of park space and the range of community contexts. Additional Research Is Needed to Understand the Connection between Parks and Larger Health Systems The nature of the academic literature on health outcomes trends toward the individual-level impacts that parks have on health outcomes. Individual health measures and self-reported outcomes have data and are easier to study. However, parks are small parts of larger health systems, and focusing on individual outcomes could obscure some of the downstream effects of park space. Hospital systems, state departments of health, primary care providers, neighborhood and economic conditions all impact individual health outcomes. Isolating the magnitude of the impact of green space on health is an ongoing challenge. Further, examining the individual impacts of parks can miss some of the systems-level impacts on particular groups. For instance, although parks have clear positive impacts on mental health and selfreported happiness, parks are also less likely to be sited in predominately Black and brown neighborhoods and neighborhoods with lower income levels. In turn, these neighborhoods face higher rates of negative mental health outcomes. The framework must account not only for expected impacts on a general population but also for specific impacts given the population with access to the park. As localities use their community- or individual-level measurements to better understand the value of parks, there will be increased data available for summarizing large-scale impacts across park networks and geographical regions. Expanding the field through examining health-based impacts can strengthen the narrative of park benefits and their contribution to thriving communities.
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