Is the grass greener or the water bluer? Drivers of local park visitation patterns in Phoenix, Arizona

Urban green and blue spaces provide mental and physical health benefits for their surrounding communities, but the key to many of these benefits is the utilization of the urban greenspace for recreation or relaxation. For some communities, use is limited by physical access to the greenspace while for other communities, the characteristics of the greenspace play an important role in encouraging or discouraging use. What drives communities to use their local greenspace with respect to all other available greenspace in an urban area remains an underexplored question. To fill this gap, we leverage a large human mobility dataset to track a year of park visitation by residents across the Phoenix, AZ, metropolitan area combined with a spatial autoregressive model using spatially lagged dependent variables. Our results suggest that it is not vegetation but the presence of water features within a park that encourages higher visitation to local parks. Water features also influence visitation to parks outside a communities local area; its presence within a local park decreased how often individuals visited non-local parks as a proportion of their total park visitation. We discuss the implications of these finding in the context of a desert city that lacks both greenspace and water.