Optimizing urban park locations with addressing environmental justice in park access and utilization by using dynamic demographic features derived from mobile phone data

Urban parks play a critical role in improving the quality of life of local residents and creating sustainable and resilient urban environments. As urban parks are essential public services, it is important that they be accessible, sufficient, and of high quality so all city residents can access and benefit from them to advocate environmental justice. To make park services more equitable, it is crucial to evaluate the distribution and quality of existing urban parks and consider potential locations for new urban parks, in terms of both park access and utilization. By adopting a new type of dynamic population data based on mobile phone-based tracking, we assessed urban park access by vulnerable populations, particularly economically marginalized older adults, and employed dynamic demographic features and neighboring environmental features of existing urban parks and park candidate sites to estimate park utilization. Ultimately, we developed an advanced multi-objective location optimization model considering park access, utilization, and construction cost. The three objectives of maximizing utilization of the candidate sites when urban parks are established, maximizing the number of vulnerable people who can be covered by the urban parks, and minimizing the total establishment cost for the urban parks were optimized in locating urban parks among candidate sites. The proposed methodology was validated with an application to Ulsan Metropolitan City in the Republic of Korea. •Actual park use and vulnerable population’s access matter for locating urban parks.•Our advanced optimization model effectively locates new urban parks.•Three objectives: maximize coverage and utilization and minimize establishment cost.•Dynamic demographics and environments surrounding urban parks estimate park use.•Dynamic demographic features are extracted from mobile phone-based data.