Planning for environmental justice in an urban national park

Abstract

Urban national parks were designed in the 1970s to bring nature and recreational opportunities to socio-economically disadvantaged communities in the USA. Using the theoretical frame of environmental justice, this paper discusses findings of a recent survey of visitors to Los Angeles' Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area – the United States' largest urban national park. Findings show park visitors were predominantly white, affluent, and lived nearby. People of colour travelled further, were significantly less likely to be return visitors, and were less inclined to use the park for active recreation. Seemingly, this park fails to meet the needs of the disadvantaged urban communities for whom it was created, a problem that may also affect other parks in the United States and potentially parks in other countries. Park planners and managers can take practical steps to increase accessibility to this park for people of colour and low-income earners, and should monitor other parks for patterns of ethno-racially differentiated access and utilisation.

Keywords:

• urban national parks
• race
• ethnicity
• environmental justice
• Los Angeles

Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by a grant from the Western National Parks Association (WNPA). The authors gratefully acknowledge WNPA's Scott Aldrich for facilitating this support. They would also especially like to thank Melanie Beck, Woody Smeck, Brian Forist and Gary Machlis from the National Park Service who co-ordinated administration of the project, and the 40 National Park Service volunteers who worked over the course of the survey. Thanks are also due to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (SMMC) and to John Wilson from the University of Southern California's GIS Research Laboratory. The authors would also particularly like to thank Steven Yoon from the Centers for Disease Control, Epidemiology Program Office. Thanks are due to Phillip Byrne for his insights into urban nature and park use. Finally, a debt of gratitude is owed to Iris Ahronowitz (summer fellow, Harvard University), Max Joel (summer fellow, Columbia University), David Woollard (summer fellow, University of Southern California) who assisted with data collection and preliminary analysis and to Christina Qi Li from the University of Southern California who assisted with cartography. Finally, the authors thank REI™ for generously donating the gift bags that were given to participants.

Notes

1. Alienation and dispossession were also features of urban park development, and many poor African-American and Irish working class communities were destroyed or disenfranchised through park creation (Baldwin 1999, Marne 2001, Gandy 2002, Olwig 2005).

2. The area of the park held in public ownership is less than half this size – 63,500 acres, of which 21,500 acres are held by the National Park Service and 42,000 acres are held by California State Parks. The entire unit is managed by the National Park Service.

3. Copies of the instrument are available from: http://www.usc.edu/dept/geography/ESPE/publications/trailuse.html

4. Staff administering the survey used a standardised greeting sheet approved by the National Park Service and the University's Institutional Review Board.

5. The survey and estimated time for completion was approved by the Federal Office of Management and Budget in accordance with National Park Service Requirements.

6. The choices provided for race were American Indian or Alaska native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, White, and Do not wish to answer. A supplementary question asked participants if they were Hispanic or Latino/a.

7. The limited budget precluded a Spanish version of the survey and the translation resources that this would have necessitated.

8. It should be noted that 10.4% of those surveyed did not wish to report household income.

9. A high proportion of respondents (17.3%) did not wish to answer the question about race, perhaps indicative of some level of personal disaffection on the part of respondents regarding practices of differentiating between individuals based upon social constructs such as ‘race’.

10. The numbers of visitors from other ethno-racial groups such as African-Americans or Native-Americans was too small to make statistical inferences, so they were combined under a group called ‘other’.

11. These numbers add up to more than 100% because respondents could check more than one season.