Using Social Media to Understand Drivers of Urban Park Visitation in the Twin Cities, MN

Urban parks do a lot of heavy lifting. They clean the air, cool hot neighborhoods, manage stormwater, and give people a place to move their bodies, meet their neighbors, and simply unwind. But the people who plan and manage these parks often work with surprisingly little information. They may not know who actually visits a park, how often, or what draws people there because the traditional tools, like in-person surveys, are slow, expensive, and hard to run across a whole city.

Researchers found a faster, cheaper way to answer those questions: social media. By looking at geotagged posts, they tracked where people actually go across the park systems in the Twin Cities metro area in Minnesota. They found that parks near water drew more visitors, as did parks with more amenities, parks connected by trails, and parks in denser, more populated neighborhoods.

That kind of information matters more as cities grow and populations shift. Parks are only doing their job if they actually serve the people who live around them, and managing them well takes up-to-date, local knowledge about how they’re used. Social media data won’t replace traditional survey tools, but it offers a practical way to keep monitor park use at a fraction of the cost and time and it gives planners a direct look at what residents value, so green space can be managed for the people who rely on it.

Abstract

Green space and parks in urban environments provide a range of ecosystem services and public benefits. However, planners and park managers can lack tools and resources to gather local information on how parks are used and what makes them desirable places for recreation and a wide variety of uses. Traditional survey methods to monitor park use and user preferences can be costly, time consuming, and challenging to apply at scale. Here, we overcome this limitation by using geotagged social media data to assess patterns of visitation to urban and peri-urban green space across park systems in the metropolitan area of the Twin Cities, Minnesota, USA. We find that parks with nearby water features, more amenities, greater accessibility from the presence of trails, and that are located within neighborhoods with higher population density, are associated with higher rates of visitation. As cities grow and shifts in demographics occur, more responsive management of public green space will become increasingly important to ensure urban parks provide ecosystem services and meet users’ needs. Using social media data to rapidly assess park use at a lower cost than traditional surveys has the potential to inform public green space management with targeted information on user behavior and values of urban residents.