TUCSON PARKS AND RECREATION: LAND ACQUISITION PRIORITIZATION

Abstract

Parks play an essential environmental and cultural function by improving the quality of life and creating valuable green space. Providing new parkland with adequate distribution and accessibility can assist in planning and development and enhance recreation projects. The Parks and Recreation Department in Tucson needs to identify and evaluate acquisitions to make informed decisions on building new parks. Doing that will provide value and benefits to the system and grow equitable access to the parks —it also aligns with other city goals to understand potential priorities of expanding the parks for underserved areas. A comprehensive acquisition strategy was formulated based on several factors to evaluate and prioritize parkland opportunities that ensure the parks are equally distributed. Using existing data from The Trust for Public Land, Pima Association of Governments, and other datasets from the City of Tucson's open data portal, ranked suitability analysis was used to find suitable areas for new parks. The analysis gave us a classification of all the possible places that can be considered appropriate and the rank of their importance. Moreover, Model Builder was utilized to update and automate the individual factors for future analysis. The outcomes of this study will provide the city with a roadmap for acquiring land for parks that meet the community's needs.