Analyzing the accessibility to urban parks by an environmental justice approach

The purpose of ‎this study is to analyze the status of urban parks enjoyment and accessibility in Eslamshahr, a city ‎with a population of more than 540000 located in 12 Km southwest from Tehran. The research ‎method is Comprative evaluation and we use descriptive statistics indexes such as per capita and ‎covered land ratio, and accessibility measures based on minimum distance to the nearest park, and ‎the park access areas. Finding showed that both per capita park lands (2.2 m2) and ratio of park ‎lands are low (2.2 m2 and 1.3% respectively). There are also large disparities in spatial distribution ‎of parks as more than 42% of the city's area, in which more than 29.5% of the population reside in, ‎is not within parks access areas. This is while in the southern part of the city, access area of 10 ‎parks are overlapped. In term of accessibility, district 4th of Eslamshahr municipality in south, has a ‎more appropriate condition, so that half of its inhabitants reside in a maximum distance of 60 m ‎from nearest park. In contrast, district 5th has only one park and the distance between most ‎residents and the park is high. In order to move towards environmental justice, it is necessary to ‎allocate more land to parks and construct and develop parks, especially in the central part and in ‎the parts with no access to existing parks.