Existing research conceptualizes urban parks primarily as urban amenities. One body of research treats parks as unevenly distributed environmental resources, documenting persistent inequalities in park access and quality across neighborhoods shaped by segregation and socioeconomic stratification. A second line of work examines parks as urban amenities that contribute to neighborhood change, showing that new green spaces can attract higher-income residents and accelerate gentrification. While these perspectives highlight parks as desirable resources that are differentially accessible and valued, they pay less attention to parks as public spaces where people gather and interact. Consequently, we know little about how neighborhood change shapes the social composition of park users. Drawing on over 3000 parks in large American cities, this paper addresses that gap by examiningwhether gentrification alters the diversity of park users, asking whether neighborhood change leads parks to become sites of greater social mixing or, alternatively, spaces increasingly dominated by new residents. We discuss various results of diversity measures, and implications to promotingdiversity in public space. 

About the speaker: 

Hesu Yoon is an assistant professor of Sociology at ENSAE-CREST École Polytechnique. Her research asks longstanding questions about spatial inequality in urban sociology: Why do some neighborhoods (or cities) grow and are considered desirable places to live, invest, or travel while others do not? How does this place stratification intersect with racial and class-based inequalities? Drawing on experimental, computational, and qualitative approaches, she investigates how social stratification by race and class becomes spatialized through culture and markets. 

About HOSS:   

The House of Sustainable Society (HOSS) is a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, social science research center at the Stockholm School of Economics focused on creating knowledge and impact to promote more sustainable markets. Our aim is to develop rigorous knowledge around how markets can be effectively advanced to support the transition to sustainable development.  

You can register for the seminar here.