What Makes a Just City?: Assessing Tempe’s Parks

Making Space: An Equity Study for Tempe Parks and Recreation (Arizona) launched from the Parks and Recreation Master Plan, which identified the need to build an action plan for ensuring equity is reached across spaces, programs, and staffing for the Parks and Recreation division.
The study provides innovative analysis tools and community engagement methods that go beyond traditional park system evaluation tools, using a discursive method of public engagement to facilitate storytelling from Tempe’s constituents. The DEI Park Assessment Tool provides an accessible format for evaluating how park spaces are experienced through the lens of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In Tempe, this meant working with Community Navigators – community members who represent a wide range of identities and lived experiences – to evaluate if park spaces support social mixing and activation, program diversity, feelings of safety, and access and amenities. The tool takes a humanistic approach and considers personal experiences, backgrounds, knowledge, bias, identity, and insights to ground truth challenges. The findings allowed for the discovery of why some spaces and programs serve our full range of community members better than others and played a key role in reforming Tempe’s public space design, policies, and provision of recreation programming.

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