This website is the culmination of my undergraduate thesis research for
the Center for Environmental Studies at Brown University. The salience
of urban environmental issues in our world today is unprecedented - more
people than ever before are making cities their homes. With a desire to
understand how the features of the urban environment shape people's
quality of life, I began an investigation of the role that parks play in
enhancing our cities.

Understanding that parks are significant and necessary components of urban communities, I wanted to know more about how the challenges of city environments affect the role that parks are expected to play. How do parks withstand the pressures of neglect, misuse, and crime, and remain positive assets to neighborhoods? More specifically, when does a park become degraded by these pressures to a point where it has become a detriment to an area instead of an advantage? I realized that people's perceptions are the key to understanding park dynamics, for perceptions of crime or lack of safety could potentially deter park users, and ultimately undermine the success of a park. I wanted to learn more about specific perceptions, and how these perceptions might be affected by park features, crime, and neighborhood conditions.

I decided to focus my efforts on the urban parks right here in Providence, Rhode Island, and developed the following questions to drive my thesis research:

1. What are Providence residents' perceptions of the quality and safety of their parks?
2. What is the quantifiable context of crime for these parks?
3. How do these inform our understanding of what constitutes a successful park?

View the Executive Summary for a summarized description of my project, including my results, conclusions, and some recommendations.

My website is arranged into six main components:

Urban Parks: This section presents a discussion of the benefits of parks in the urban environment, and a description of the challenges that parks confront.

Parks in Providence: This section is an introduction to the parks system in the city of Providence, Rhode Island.

Park Perceptions: These pages give an account of how I sought to gauge park user's perceptions of park quality and safety at six case study parks, the results of this inquiry, and an analysis of the results.

Park Crime: This section describes how I mapped a crime database using GIS, in order to understand the trends and patterns of crime in the whole city, as well as around my case study parks.

Linking Crime and Perceptions This section delineates how I compared the results from the perception interviews with those from the crime mapping. My goal was to determine how the actual context of crime relates to the ways in which users perceive the crime and safety of a park.

Case Study Parks: Here I present detailed information on all my findings for each of my case study sites.

last updated: June 5, 2002