April 2014 - Parks & Recreation - 52

M A K I N G P L A C E S F O R P L AY

style choices doctors recommend.
Access to outdoor recreational opportunities, including playgrounds,
parks, community centers and public green spaces, encourages the
kind of physical activity that will
help people lose weight and establish healthy habits.
Too often, however, communities
are left wanting for open green spaces.
They exist in what's come to be known
as " play deserts, " where children simply don't have places to run, teens
can't find a space for a pickup basketball game and the local senior center
is without space for its outdoor tai chi
class. These communities are put at a
distinct disadvantage to those that do
have ready access to parks and recreational facilities. " More people report
being physically active when they live
closer to a park than people who live
farther from one, " says Carmen Harris,
an epidemiologist with the CDC's Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity
and Obesity. " We know when people
are more active, particularly youths,
it has an impact on their adiposity.
They have healthier bones, and there
is improved mental health and aerobic
capacity. [Active] adults have better
cardiovascular, diabetes and cancer
outcomes, " Harris says.

Parks & Recreation

Defining and Identifying
Play Deserts
In 2012, NRPA gathered together
some of the foremost thinkers on the
concepts of active lifestyles, community planning, and health and
wellness to discuss precisely how to
define play deserts. And while that's
a work in progress, the idea can be
understood to describe an area where
there is a lack of viable, safe places
for physical activity, or where existing facilities cannot be accessed or
are underutilized. Researchers and
health officials posit that if such areas can be identified, steps might be
taken to establish a community center, park or other green space; improve areas that have been rendered
unusable by dilapidation, crime or
other negative impacts; or encourage

One strategy [to
eliminate play deserts] is
to simply improve access
so people can get to the
parks that are already

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out there.

the surrounding community to visit
nearby play areas, thereby improving
health outcomes for all residents.
The first step in this process is identifying where play spaces are and are
not. KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit
ensuring all children get the play they
need to thrive, is developing a robust
Map of Play that shows where playgrounds do and do not exist throughout much of the country. Several other organizations, including the CDC
and NRPA with its PRORAGIS™
database, are also attempting to remedy that situation by collecting Geographical Information System information on existing park space, but
even that won't tell the whole story.
" It takes ground truthing - actually
going to look at an area to see where
those parks are, " says Bill Beckner,
NRPA's senior manager of research.
" You have to look at all the surrounding data to determine who lives there
and take into account the variety of
factors to understand the existence or
nonexistence of a facility. "
We already have access to data that
indicates fewer than four in 10 Americans live within walking distance of
a park, defined as no more than half
a mile. But, of those individuals, " 30
to 50 percent still don't use the park, "
says Deborah Cohen, senior natural
scientist at RAND Corporation, a
nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking
through research and analysis. " In
my view, if people have access to a
playground or park but they don't use
it, it's still a play desert. Just because
a park is there doesn't mean people
will use it. That's not enough. "
Handing community planners the
sort of nitty-gritty data that will show
where parks and green spaces already
exist; who lives in the surrounding
area, including age and household income details; crime statistics; and infrastructure details, including wheth-

April 2014 - Parks & Recreation

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