What We Can Learn About a City by Mapping Its Parks

Ninety-four percent of people in Minneapolis live within a 10-minute walk of a park, a quick way of saying that the Minnesota city is woven with arguably the best green space of any large metro in the country. The parks there are plentiful, they're large (spanning more than 36,000 acres of the entire city), they have real amenities (2.9 playgrounds per every 10,000 residents), and the city actually spends money on them ($210 per resident per year).

All of this data comes from the Trust for Public Land, which released an updated annual ParkScore ranking today of the park systems in America's 50 largest cities. Minneapolis comes in at No. 1, based on a metric that accounts for park access, park size, and city investment and services. Viewed through the lens of its park space, Minneapolis has few pockets in serious need of new investment: