More Neighborhood Green Space, Fewer Park visits? Evidence from Mobile Phone-Based Population Movement Data in a Major Chinese City

Abstract: The compensation hypothesis suggests that residents in neighborhoods deprived of green space will visit parks more frequently to compensate for this deprivation. Most empirical tests on this hypothesis have been conducted in European cities, limiting the applicability to cities in other socioeconomic contexts. Moreover, prior studies have largely relied on survey data, which are constrained by small samples and recall biases. Addressing these gaps, we evaluated the compensation hypothesis by examining how neighborhood green space was associated with park visits, using a mobile phone-based population movement dataset containing 1.4 million park visits from 735,960 individuals in Nanjing, China. After controlling for neighborhood- and park-level built environment characteristics, we found that a 1% increase in neighborhood green space coverage was associated with a 0.7% reduction in park visit rates. In addition, we found that for neighborhoods at the bottom 20th percentile of green space coverage (16.01%), a 1-km increase in Euclidean distance to a park was associated with a 12.1% reduction in its visit rate, compared to a sharper, 14.4% reduction for neighborhoods at the top 20th percentile (45.06%). Our estimates were robust when considering different day types (weekday, weekend, and holiday), park sizes, and age and gender groups. Together, these findings suggest that residents deprived of green space not only visit parks more frequently but are also more willing to overcome distance barriers in park visits, therefore supporting the compensation hypothesis. These findings also underscore the need to increase neighborhood green space provision and its distributional equity in cities.

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