  Urban parks provide significant health benefits by offering spaces and
facilities for various recreational and leisure activities. However, the
capacity of specific park spaces and elements to foster health remains
underexamined. Traditional studies have focused on parks' size, greenery, and
accessibility, often overlooking their ability to facilitate specific
health-promoting activities. To address this gap, we propose a taxonomy
consisting of six categories of health-promoting activities in parks: physical,
mind-body, nature appreciation, environmental, social, and cultural. We
estimate the capacity of parks in 35 global cities to promote health by
establishing a lexicon linking park spaces and elements with specific
health-promoting activities from our taxonomy. Using this lexicon, we collected
data on elements and spaces in all parks in 35 cities from OpenStreetMap. Our
analysis covers 23,477 parks with a total of 827,038 elements and spaces. By
first comparing similarly sized parks across cities, we found that North
American parks offer more spaces for physical activities, while European parks
focus more on nature appreciation. Second, by scoring parks based on both
elements and spaces, we investigated the variability in their health-promoting
potential. We found the most uniform provision across parks for physical
activities and the highest disparities regarding social activities.
Additionally, parks offering a variety of activities are usually located in
city centers, while offerings diminish in parks towards the suburbs. Lastly, we
identified significant inequalities in park standards across cities, regardless
of their continental location: Tokyo and Paris offer the most uniform park
standards, while Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro exhibit the most pronounced
disparities. Our study provides insights for making urban parks more equitable,
engaging, and health-promoting.
