Boston is often cited as a city where every resident lives within a 10-minute walk of a park, but this statistic does not reflect the realities of accessibility and equity. Many parks are technically close to residents but remain underutilized due to barriers like poor infrastructure, lack of public transit access, safety concerns, and limited amenities. While some communities benefit from well-maintained, vibrant green spaces, others struggle with underfunded, hard-to-reach, or uninviting parks that fail to meet community needs.
This project narrowed in on these issues and ultimately came to the question of "How can a comprehensive research protocol be developed to facilitate meaningful conversations and provide actionable recommendations for improving the accessibility, equity, and quality of parks and green spaces in Boston?"
To address these disparities, we set out to develop a research protocol that could help assess and compare urban parks through a structured, participatory approach. Our goal was to create a scalable framework for evaluating park accessibility, quality, and user experience, allowing both city officials and community advocates to identify areas for improvement and inform future urban planning decisions.
To understand the challenges and disparities in Boston’s parks, we designed a participatory workshop that would allow community members to assess, compare, and discuss green spaces from multiple perspectives. Our approach was built on stakeholder engagement, data collection, and user-centered evaluation methods.
Our research began with stakeholder mapping, identifying key groups affected by park accessibility, including residents, parents, tourists, and leisure athletes. We then conducted preliminary research on park distribution, funding, and amenities, forming the foundation for our workshop design.
The workshop was structured to simulate different user experiences, guiding participants through activities designed to reveal how various communities perceive and interact with public parks.
Our workshop revealed several key insights about the real barriers to park access in Boston. Proximity alone is not enough; accessibility is shaped by safety, transit options, infrastructure, and amenity quality. Participants analyzing affluent neighborhoods like Back Bay noted that while parks were physically close, some felt less safe due to high foot traffic and urban density. In contrast, participants evaluating parks in Dorchester highlighted significant access gaps, often requiring car ownership to visit quality green spaces.
Beyond access, amenities played a critical role in shaping user experience. Essential features such as restrooms, seating, and signage were consistently ranked as priorities across all groups, while preferences for recreational features like dog parks and sports fields varied based on individual needs.
One challenge we faced was data synthesis—participant feedback was often qualitative and subjective. Moving forward, we saw a need for more structured documentation methods, including recorded sessions and standardized data collection forms to improve consistency and accuracy.
One of the assigned personas during the workshop.
Four-Quadrant Analysis: Groups assessed parks using common matrices focused on safety and accessibility, alongside custom criteria based on persona priorities.
A finished, digitized version of what the four-quadrant activity looked like during out workshop.
Tier List Activity: Participants ranked park amenities based on their personas’ needs, fostering discussions on what truly matters in green space design.
One of the results from the tier list activities.
Our proposal for this project is simple: we should scale this workshop model into a citywide initiative. This would allow Boston to systematically assess and improve its public parks through community-driven evaluation and data visualization. By expanding the workshop process across multiple neighborhoods, the city can generate detailed, park-specific recommendations that highlight key accessibility challenges, amenity gaps, and infrastructure improvements.
This expanded approach would involve hosting a series of workshops in different districts, engaging local residents in structured evaluations of their neighborhood parks. Each workshop would produce standardized data visualizations and diagrams that illustrate specific barriers and potential enhancements for each location. These insights could serve as a resource for policymakers, urban planners, and community organizations, ensuring that park improvements are informed by direct user experience rather than top down assumptions.
An example of what a final deliverable to the City of Boston, as resulted from the workshop, would look like.
This project was my first experience designing and facilitating a workshop, and it fundamentally shaped my understanding of how structured engagement can generate meaningful insights. I quickly realized that workshops are not just about gathering opinions—they require careful planning, clear objectives, and adaptable facilitation to ensure participants can engage productively. Balancing structure with open-ended discussion was one of the biggest challenges; too much rigidity could limit valuable insights, while too much flexibility risked losing focus. I learned how to guide conversations without over-directing them, ensuring that participant feedback remained genuine but actionable. Additionally, managing diverse perspectives and priorities reinforced the importance of designing activities that allow for multiple viewpoints while still producing tangible takeaways. This experience gave me a new appreciation for workshops as a powerful research tool, not just for gathering data but for collaboratively shaping solutions in a way that traditional research methods often can’t.
