Organizational Governance and Bridging Activity Places: What Makes a Park a Travel Destination across Neighborhoods?

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: Governance

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 paper, we address this gap by developing the concept of activity place —a bounded location in an activity space- and investigating the factors influencing a place’s capacity to become a travel destination across distances. We conceive activity places as constructed by organizations and focus on a hitherto under-studied factor—i.e., the governance of the organizations managing activity places. Findings from the analysis of smartphone visitors’ data on a sample of 3,080 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 and the diversity of programmed events positively affect place’s attractiveness to distant visitors.

Authors

• Santi Furnari

• Christof Brandtner, EM Lyon

• Khodr Badih, City St. George's, University of London