URBAN PARKS - GREEN SPACES OR GREEN WALLS

Parks as an urban landscape feature serve many functions as providers of passive and active recreation, environmental benefits, and wildlife habitat. The research presented herein explores the concept that urba n parks may also function as a boundary landscape separating neighborh oods of distinct socioeconomic characteristics. When an urban park fun ctions as a boundary, it impoverishes neighborhoods because it often l eads to less use of the open space resource, which then can become a d erelict landscape. Therefore, park condition, in the paper, was used a s an indication that a park is functioning as a boundary park. Four pa rks in Boston's neighborhoods of Roxbury and North Dorchester served a s study sites to evaluate the hypothesis that parks located between so cioeconomically distinct neighborhoods function as boundary landscapes . Analysis of spatial patterns surrounding the parks of race by census block area, and income by census block group in 1980 and 1990, provid e the basis for evaluating socioeconomic characteristics that are rela ted to boundary parks. Park tree characteristics provided for comparis on of park condition between the general population of park trees in t he study area with the four study-site parks. The characteristics exam ined include species diversity, size class diversity, and percent in g ood condition. The results show that while white and non-white populat ions were distinct, the spatial clustering of the populations were ran dom. All four of the study-site parks manifest some characteristics of boundary parks, but two parks were below average for all three measur es of urban forest structure condition.