Assessing perceived cultural benefits and spatial equity in urban parks: A case study of Turin, Italy

Urban parks and riverside green spaces are a major part of everyday urban life. They provide places for recreation, social interaction, aesthetic appreciation, and contact with local history and identity. In research and planning practice, however, their value is still often assessed through physical provision, land cover, or proximity. These approaches are useful, but they do not fully capture how cultural benefits are perceived by users or how such benefits are distributed across the urban park system. As a result, spatial equality may be judged on the basis of access to green space itself, rather than access to the benefits people actually experience. Using Turin, Italy, as a case study, this paper develops a multi-method framework to assess the spatial equality of perceived cultural ecosystem services (CES) in urban parks. The study draws on publicly available Google Reviews and applies natural language processing to identify and quantify perceived intensity across eight CES categories. These include recreation, aesthetics, social interaction, cultural heritage, and other experience-based dimensions of park use. In order to move beyond park-level description, the study combines these perception-based indicators with a road-network-based Gaussian two-step floating catchment area model, which estimates accessibility in relation to surrounding population distribution and service reach. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients are then used to evaluate the degree of spatial equality across CES categories, while Moran’s I is employed to identify clustering patterns. Importance-performance analysis is further applied to compare accessibility-weighted importance with user satisfaction and to diagnose priority areas for park management.