RAPID: Park Usage During Mandated Social Distancing

Engineering - Comprising a complex network of interconnected subsystems, cities are particularly vulnerable to pandemics like COVID-19 due to high population densities and the fact that a single event can trigger cascading effects across functionally interdependent physical, social, and economic domains. By observing the behavior of park users, this study focuses attention on the complex and potentially opposing roles that parks and other natural and engineered forms of green infrastructure (GI) play in residential neighborhoods of Philadelphia and New York City during the pandemic. The role of parks is complex because while on one hand, visits to these sites can build social resilience by promoting social contact, recreation, leisure, and other psychosocial processes that build trust, generate place attachment, social support, and feelings of belonging and empowerment, on the other hand visits to parks could potentially accelerate spread of this highly contagious disease by creating more person to person contact and/or transmission of the virus to playground surfaces, benches, handrails, bike racks or other surfaces. The overarching hypothesis is that as the pandemic progresses, fewer and fewer people will engage in risky park behavior, but parks will eventually become havens for homeless who seek social distance as infection rates rise in shelters and the weather improves through the spring and summer.

Because of the national shortage of COVID-19 testing, swabbing, sampling, and laboratory testing of parks surfaces is deemed impossible. The focus of this study is instead on the observed behavior of park users, and documentation of usage patterns that potentially pose an elevated risk of infection. This goal is approached through implementation of a novel approach through paid citizen scientists, enabled by digital technology, and designed to promote economic resilience in the very neighborhoods to be studied. The work will be conducted over the course of one full year and contains 12 discreet but interconnected tasks performed in 20-40 strategically selected parks in residential neighborhoods of Philadelphia and New York City. An Advisory Panel will be formed to help guide the work and interpret results. The research will advance knowledge in the fields of urban green infrastructure, citizen science, urban resilience, and social-ecological systems in the context of an unprecedented international pandemic. The PI has extensive interdisciplinary research experience in these fields and has worked collaboratively with governmental and nongovernmental stakeholders in the two cities before. The research will generate novel data sets regarding public use of parks as COVID-19 spreads and will search for correlations between these observations and park and neighborhood characteristics. It will also evaluate the feasibility with which unemployed urban residents can rapidly become crucial human "sensors" who collect important fine spatial resolution observations within these two large cities. The study will generate results of relevance to urban parks and natural resource managers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.