COLUMBUS, Ohio — Our physical surroundings affect everything from personal well-being to a neighborhood’s safety. A new study from The Ohio State University finds that when it comes to preventing gun violence in a community, green space can help, but its location makes a big difference.
A growing body of research shows that urban green spaces — parks and other areas lined with plants, grass and trees — improve community and individual health outcomes by encouraging physical activity, reducing stress and improving air quality. They’ve also been associated with reduced gun violence and other violent crimes, but the relationship is complex, and not fully understood.
While attending a recent conference, the study’s lead author, Gia Barboza-Salerno, made a point that resonated with fellow researchers who study urban greenery and violence prevention: When it comes to the effects of green space on communities, local context matters.
“It’s not as simple as planting a tree and thinking that alone will solve it,” said Barboza-Salerno, an associate professor in Ohio State’s colleges of social work and public health . “Even though we know urban greenery is a great prevention measure for a lot of reasons, we don’t understand how or whether there’s an interaction between where this greenery is — the local context in which the greenery sits — and a subsequent reduction in violence.”
That question became the basis for a study published this month in Urban Forestry & Urban Greening . Barboza-Salerno’s team looked at how green space, neighborhood disadvantage and gun violence intersect in Cook County, Illinois, which reported the most homicides in the U.S. in 2022.
“Firearm-related violence is a public health crisis in this country, and it disproportionately affects young Black males,” Barboza-Salerno said. According to research cited in the study, racial and ethnic disparities in violence are often linked to factors such as poverty, limited educational and employment opportunities, economic inequality and residential segregation. Urban green spaces may offer protective benefits, but no previous study had specifically investigated greenery near the locations of firearm-related deaths as it would be seen from the street level, from a pedestrian’s point of view, according to the study.
“We really wanted to show in this paper that urban planning is a critical part of public health prevention by evaluating the quality of streets that people traverse daily in their activity spaces,” Barboza-Salerno said.
As director of Ohio State’s Investigating Spatial Structures in Urban Environments ( ISSUES ) Lab, Barboza-Salerno leads a research group that uses advanced spatial statistics, geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) and machine learning to understand how neighborhood environments shape health, safety and social well-being.
For this study, the team examined 899 firearm homicides and 2,256 natural deaths in the county in 2023 and compared them with natural deaths of people similar in age, sex and race who died nearby. By using Google Street View images and machine learning tools, they measured the amount and types of greenery a person would actually see from the street where each death occurred.
The study found that more visible greenery, tree canopy and green space along walkable streets were linked to lower odds that a death in that location was a firearm-related homicide. But the benefits of green space aren’t universal. Tree cover and greenery offered the most protection in less disadvantaged neighborhoods, while in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, being closer to a park was actually linked to a higher risk of firearm homicide.
The researchers attribute this finding to multidimensional measures of social deprivation, including poverty, structural housing disadvantage, economic inequality, family structure and income, having a stronger impact than a neighborhood’s green spaces.
“Green space is very important and critical for violence prevention, but not all green space matters equally,” Barboza-Salerno said. “Basically, if you lived in a socially advantaged environment, having green space mattered more for reducing violence than in a socially disadvantaged area. Green space should be thought of as a violence-prevention intervention, yet the green space that does the most protective work tends to be concentrated in more advantaged neighborhoods. That’s a double inequity: disadvantaged areas get less quality green space, and the green space they get is less protective without other supports.”
When parks in disadvantaged neighborhoods aren’t well-maintained or used regularly, they can become more of an eyesore than a protective factor, Barboza-Salerno said. Whereas in neighborhoods with more resources, well-kept parks have a beautification effect that can improve how people feel, and strengthen neighbors’ willingness to look out for one another.
“In these very [disadvantaged] areas, there’s a lot of economic disinvestment, and that is the association with violence, not the park per se,” Barboza-Salerno said.
The researchers caution that the study looked only at environments, not individuals. “We only looked at the location of death for the person in the context of the environment at that moment,” said Taylor Harrington , a doctoral candidate in public health and a co-author of the study. “It doesn’t encapsulate their whole lived experience or exposure throughout life up until that point.”
Barboza-Salerno has seen green space work as part of a broader effort. As the lead researcher at the Violence Prevention Collaborative in Boston and Director of Research for the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), Barboza-Salerno partnered with youth development organizations that employed young people to fix up local parks. The work gave them new skills and changed how neighbors perceived them.
Among other things, parks can provide safe places for children to play, socialize and have positive reciprocal interactions. Alongside housing and food security, “it’s one part of a comprehensive community-building approach that needs to be scaled to see effective violence prevention in this country,” Barboza-Salerno said. “If we think carefully about where green spaces are placed and why they make a difference, this could be huge.”
Other Ohio State co-authors of the study are Balaji Ramesh and Jeffrey Wing of the College of Public Health.
#
Contact: Gia Barboza-Salerno, barboza-salerno.1@osu.edu
Written by Elizabeth Weinstein, weinstein.137@osu.edu
Urban Forestry & Urban Greening
Imaging analysis
Not applicable
Street-view measures of urban greenness, area-level deprivation, and the risk of firearm-related homicide: A matched case-control study
1-Oct-2026