Abstract:
Urban parks are a significant feature of the urban environment
and constitute a significant budget commitment on the part of local councils
and some state governments, but they are relatively neglected, and often
ignored, in mainstream leisure studies. This paper examines two themes in
existing urban parks research, namely the 'non-use and decline' theme and the
theme of equity. The review concludes that the 'accepted wisdom' on non-use
and decline of urban parks is questionable and contrary to available empirical
evidence and that leisure studies discourses which ignore urban parks as a
leisure sector give a distorted view of the equity outcomes of public leisure services
as measured by patterns of usage. The paper presents data from recent
surveys of park use in Sydney, Australia, which indicate that visiting urban
parks is the most popular of all out-of-home leisure activities and, unlike a
number of other public leisure services, urban parks attract high levels of use
from virtually all sections of the community.
