Organizational governance and bridging activity places: What makes a park a travel destination across neighborhoods?

Abstract

Research on urban inequality and mobility has focused on individual-level activity spaces (i.e., the set of places where a person carries out her routine activities), showing that such spaces can alleviate neighborhood-level segregation. We know less about why specific places in an activity space become travel destinations across distant neighborhoods, thus mixing different people and counter-acting neighborhood-level segregation. In this article, we address this gap by developing the concept of activity place —a bounded location in an activity space—and by investigating the factors influencing a place’s ability to become a travel destination across distances, thus bridging neighborhoods. We conceive activity places as constructed by organizations and focus on a hitherto under-studied factor—that is, the governance of the organizations managing an activity place. Findings from the analysis of smartphone visitor data on a sample of 3080 parks in the largest 120 USA cities suggest that organizational governance does influence a place’s attractiveness across distances, over and above the place’s physical characteristics. Notably, public-private governance positively affects a place’s attractiveness to distant visitors, and such effect is amplified by the diversity of programmed events. We discuss the implications and limitations of our findings for the organization of bridging activity places and urban parks.