Isabella C. Richmond, Michael A. Paulauskas, Erica Padvaiskas, Laura Carolina Gonzalez Sinisterra, Kayleigh Hutt-Taylor, Alec L. Robitaille, Carly D. Ziter

Cities are temporally dynamic ecosystems that experience continuous redevelopment and change over time. Development patterns over time often reflect the power structures and inequities that shape our societies. Urban parks are developed on different land-use types, and are susceptible to these inequitable development patterns, past and present. Importantly, urban parks also provide critical benefits to resident wellbeing, and contain natural elements that are susceptible to the effects of historical decision making. Thus, understanding the current day functioning of our city’s natural ecosystems is dependent on incorporating the continuing influence of historical conditions. To plan for the equitable distribution of park benefits in the future, we must quantify and understand the impact of historical decision-making. We measured neighbourhood socio-demographic composition, forest composition, and the cooling effect of 33 sites in parks across Montreal, each with a past land-use that fell into one of three categories: agricultural, forested, or industrial. We asked: 1) How do surrounding communities differ around parks of each historical land-use type and do these differences indicate inequity? 2) What are the effects of historical land-use types on current park capacity to provide cooling? We find a complex dynamic with inequity at previously industrial sites, where historic environmental racism has resulted in these parks being surrounded by communities with higher proportions of immigrants, and lower median incomes than Montreal’s average. We find little evidence of past land-use type affecting the relative cooling effect of our parks, and we see more similarities than differences in forest composition across past land-use types. We do find that forest composition affects the cooling effect, where tree density strengthens the cooling effect and tree size has a negative relationship with cooling effect. If we want to plan cities that provide critical benefits equitably, we must understand the implications of developing our greenspaces on different types of land. This study provides some evidence that an equitable future is possible on many different types of current land uses.

Paper is currently in review at Environmental Research: Ecology. All data/code available at: https://github.com/zule-lab/parklegacies