Whether you’re in New York or Los Angeles, finding a leafy city park can lift your spirits, according to a new study on urban nature.
A team from the University of Vermont found that the bigger the city park, the happier it will make you, with Indianapolis residents being most empowered by parks.
They measured the happiness effects of urban parks in the 25 largest US cities and found that the benefits of urban nature to users roughly matched the mood boost people experience on holidays like Thanksgiving or New Year’s Day.
To reach their conclusions, the scientists used vast amounts of social media data to quantify the mood-boosting benefits of urban nature.
“These new findings underscore the importance of nature for our mental and physical health,” said lead author Taylor Ricketts, adding, “The findings are timely given our increasing reliance on urban natural areas during the COVID pandemic.”
Urban nature should be protected, enhanced and made as accessible as possible, the team said, as it is nature’s only source for millions of people.
Whether you’re in New York (pictured) or Los Angeles, finding a leafy city park can lift your spirits, according to a new study on urban nature. Image from a photo agency
Building on the work they had done in San Francisco, the team used Twitter posts and geolocation data to quantify the happiness benefits people derive from nature.
They expanded the work to focus on the 25 most populous US cities and included 1.5 million Twitter posts to measure online sentiment.
Tweets included those within neighborhoods, near city parks, and those posted outside of parks and more generally in the city.
Researchers found that city parks have strong happiness benefits at all times of the year, month, week, day, and time of day.
They had expected a flare-up over the weekends and summer holidays, so they were taken care of to see that it was consistent throughout the year.
“We understand the irony of using Twitter and technology to measure happiness against nature,” says lead author and graduate student Aaron Schwartz, noting Twitter’s reputation as “doom scrolling.”
A team from the University of Vermont found that the bigger the city park, the happier it will make you, with Indianapolis residents (pictured) being most empowered by parks. Image from a photo agency
“But our goal is to use technology for the greater good – to better understand nature’s impact on humans, which has until now been difficult to quantify in such large numbers.”
Researchers found that U.S. cities varied widely in the magnitude of the happiness benefit their parks provided to users, with Indianapolis providing the largest boost.
The researchers were surprised by several of the top-ranked cities in the study, including Indianapolis, Austin and Jacksonville, which have lower per capita funding levels for parks compared to some other cities on the list.
While people in parks wrote far happier tweets — words like “beautiful,” “funny,” “enjoying,” and “amazing” — the top-rated cities saw people in parks tweet dramatically fewer negative words — like “ hate”, ‘not’ and ‘not’.
Building on work they had done in San Francisco (pictured), the team used Twitter posts and geolocation data to quantify the happiness people get from nature. Image from a photo agency
A more powerful predictor of happiness than park funding per capita was park size, with the happiness advantage being highest in parks larger than 100 hectares.
“Being in nature offers recreational benefits that you can’t buy in a store or download onto a screen,” says UVM’s Chris Danforth.
“However, not all parks seem to be equally fortunate. Being able to immerse yourself in larger, greener natural areas had a greater impact than smaller cobbled city parks.”
One explanation the researchers proposed is that larger parks offer greater opportunities for mental recovery and disconnect from urban environments.
The results were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
HOW HAPPY DOES YOUR CITY PARK MAKE YOU? THE MOST POPULATED CITIES BY PARK HAPPINESS RATING
Researchers found that U.S. cities varied widely in the magnitude of the happiness benefit their parks offered users: