Spatial Inequality in Perceived Cultural Ecosystem Service Accessibility of Urban Parks: A Case Study of Turin, Italy

Urban parks are important providers of cultural ecosystem services (CESs). However, the perceived content, accessibility and spatial distribution of these services remain difficult to assess in planning practice. Existing studies often rely on proxy indicators or park-level hotspots, which may overlook how visitors describe park experiences and how these review-derived CES signals are reachable by residents. Using Turin, Italy as a case study, this paper integrates Google Reviews, dictionary-based natural language processing, a Gaussian two-step floating catchment area model, spatial inequality diagnostics and importance-performance analysis to assess perceived CES accessibility across eight CES categories. The NLP classification identified 86,506 CES mentions from 36,932 valid reviews. The results show: 1) Aesthetic value and recreation were the most frequently mentioned categories, while cultural heritage and educational value were less frequently expressed and appeared mainly as secondary or more specialised perceived services. Perceived CES accessibility was concentrated along the Po-Dora river system, the southeastern hillside-river interface and several high-contribution parks. 2) Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients indicated substantial spatial inequality across all CES categories, with cultural heritage showing the strongest concentration. Global Moran’s I further showed that perceived CES accessibility was spatially organised across population grid cells. 3) The IPA revealed differentiated reach-performance patterns across CES categories and parks, with cultural heritage showing high potential reach and performance close to the cross-category mean, while park-level diagnosis distinguished parks with different review-derived reach-performance profiles. The study shows how social media review data and established spatial analysis methods can be combined to move beyond hotspot mapping toward a distributional diagnosis of perceived CES accessibility. The findings provide review-derived evidence to inform differentiated planning attention across service categories and parks and to identify candidates for further assessment.