The Perception of Safety in Urban Parks

In our discussions surrounding directed attention restoration, one thing that came up repeatedly was the benefits of access to nature. We discussed how natural spaces of almost any size can provide restoration, and access to parks especially for urban populations has long-proven positive effects on both mental and physical health. However, while those of us who grew up in rural areas may only have positive associations with parks and nature, people living in urban areas often perceive parks to be unsafe places and hotbeds of crime. As perceived safety can have little to do with actual crime rates, designing parks to be perceived as safe and thus more used can have positive effects on the health of urban communities. Further, many of these design strategies can improve the actual safety of the park, at the very least by attracting more people to the area and thus dis-incentivizing crime.

As outlined in the Kaplan textbook, perception goes much farther than simply seeing your environment. Our perception of surroundings is heavily influenced by our prior experiences; a place with characteristics similar to places we’ve experienced as safe will be perceived as safe, and vice versa. As we perceive our surroundings, we are also using this prior experience to make assumptions based on incomplete information. For example, when many people see graffiti in an urban park, they extrapolate all sorts of things about crime rates, demographics, possible gang activity, etc. that will all influence their perception of safety.

Many studies have been done—usually by having participants rate the perceived safety of photographs—to try and pinpoint design characteristics of urban parks that people perceive as the most safe. In reviewing a couple of these studies, some common themes emerge. First, and predictably, the strongest factor determining how safe someone rates a park is how familiar looking that park is; in short, whether the person has had positive experiences in parks that look similar to the park in question. Beyond familiarity, the strongest factors in determining perceived safety are visibility and signs of maintenance/neglect. Spaces highly rated for visibility include large open areas of mowed grass between denser vegetation, clear sight lines across the space, and adequate lighting. Spaces rated as poor for visibility include dense forested areas, large fences that obstruct views, and poor lighting. This makes sense with what we know about human evolution—we feel safe in spaces where we can easily spot both potential threats and potential exit routes.

Parks perceived as safe include high visibility and signs of maintenance.

Signs of maintenance/neglect are signifiers of safety that have more to do with our previous experiences and associations than with our fight or flight responses. This goes back to how we form perceptions of our environment—we recognize signs of maintenance such as neatly mowed grass, tended flowerbeds, and well-maintained trails as things we have previously encountered in safe environments.  Conversely, things such as patchy grass, dense untended foliage, and graffiti are things we generally associate with unsafe environments. Of course, perception is based on previous experience, and while most people in urban areas might see unkempt forest as unsafe, people who grew up surrounded by rural forest might perceive it as particularly calming.

Parks perceived as unsafe include barriers to visibility and signs of neglect.

As Professor De Young mentioned in an early lecture, even the slightest signs of maintenance such as trails and signage can lead to increased use and acceptance of urban green space. In this way, we can take advantage of the highly subjective nature of human perception. By recognizing and including even small elements of perceived safety into the design of parks, we have the potential to greatly increase urban populations’ engagement with nature.

Sources:

Kaplan, Stephen, and Rachel Kaplan. Humanscape: Environments for People. North Scituate, MA:          Duxbury, 1978. Print.

Schroeder, Herbert W., and L. M. Anderson. "Perception of Personal Safety in Urban Recreation              Sites." Journal of Leisure Research (n.d.): 178-94.

"What Role Can Design Play in Creating Safer Parks? - Project for Public Spaces." Project for Public      Spaces. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Oct. 2016.

Photo sources: The Chicago Tribune; CitySeed blog.