Transformative Power of Play in Uvalde, Texas

New playgrounds lead to increased engagement and positive community impact.

In the heart of the Texas Hill Country, Uvalde — famously known as the "Honey Capital of the World" for its exquisite huajillo honey and stunning natural landscapes — holds a special place. Beyond its allure for outdoor enthusiasts enjoying tubing and camping, and its distinction as the birthplace of figures like Matthew McConaughey, Uvalde is a community that has shown immense strength in the face of profound tragedy. Following the horrific mass school shooting on May 24, 2022, which claimed the lives of 19 students and 2 teachers, and injured 17 others, the spirit of Uvalde has been bolstered by a global outpouring of support, including memorials, tributes, and dedicated efforts towards healing.

Amidst this journey of recovery, the national non-profit KABOOM! stepped forward with a noble mission: to ensure every child has an amazing place to play. Recognizing that play is not just fun but a critical developmental necessity supporting social, emotional, and physical growth, KABOOM! partnered with the City of Uvalde and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District to reimagine and launch vibrant new parks and playgrounds. A cornerstone of this ambitious undertaking was a commitment to quantifying the transformative impact of these spaces through a truly data-driven approach. This is precisely where CityData.ai became an indispensable ally.

Traditionally, understanding playground usage has relied on resource-intensive, often limited, in-person observations. Parks and recreation staff would spend hours manually counting visitors, a method prone to overlooking users outside peak times and failing to capture crucial year-over-year or seasonal trends. KABOOM! sought a more comprehensive, scalable, and non-intrusive solution to assess how their investments were genuinely making a difference.

CityParks.ai : Precision in Play Measurement

CityData.ai provides unparalleled insights into visitation and movement patterns for parks, trails, and open spaces across the United States through the CityParks.ai initiative. For the Uvalde project, we licensed our cutting-edge CityParks.ai data product, offering KABOOM! a robust methodology to understand park engagement levels and quantify the success of their vital work.

Our process begins with Geofences — virtual boundaries meticulously drawn around areas of interest. In Uvalde, CityData.ai and KABOOM! precisely delineated the digital footprint of each park and playground. These polygon shapes are the foundational step, enabling highly granular analysis of each location's usage.

The magic happens with GPS Data. Every mobile device and vehicle equipped with GPS and location services constantly pings satellites, allowing its location to be estimated with remarkable accuracy, typically within 10 feet. This ubiquitous technology forms the bedrock of our methodology. The advantages of this passive data collection for computing visitation are manifold:

• Effortless & Non-Intrusive: No manual counts, no hardware sensors, no additional infrastructure required.
• Comprehensive Coverage: Data is captured for every hour of every day, year-round, overcoming the limitations of short observation windows.
• Historical Depth: Access to historical data extending back to January 2020 allows for robust pre- and post-intervention analysis.
• Scalable Precision: Analysis can be fine-tuned from expansive park areas to intimate picnic spots (as small as a 10-foot radius).
• Privacy-Compliant: No personal data is collected, and all location data is anonymized and aggregated, ensuring user privacy.

From Raw Data to Actionable Insights

CityData.ai harnesses these geofenced GPS signals to estimate public space utilization. For Uvalde, we diligently obtained, cleaned, and aggregated cell phone GPS data for each geofenced location, translating raw signals into estimated user counts. Crucially, we curated and analyzed data for 12-month periods both before and after KABOOM! redesigned each park and constructed each playground. This extensive 24-month comparative analysis neutralized variables like seasonality, temperature fluctuations, precipitation, and major community events, providing a clear, unbiased view of the impact.

The resulting insights are presented in the intuitive online CityParks.ai dashboard for Uvalde, Texas. This dynamic portal displays total visit counts, breaks down visits by individual location, and illustrates multi-month and multi-year trends. Users can dive deeper into visitation patterns by hour, time of day (morning, afternoon, evening, night), and day of the week. Crucially, the dashboard also reveals "dwell time" or "stay time," indicating how long visitors engage with these vital spaces.

Moreover, the CityParks.ai dashboard visualizes detailed heatmaps or usage maps for each park and playground. These visual representations, with bright red opaque areas signifying high usage and yellow, more transparent areas indicating lower engagement, are invaluable for optimizing the design and maximizing the impact of community spaces.

Uncovering Movement and Demographics

Beyond mere counts, CityParks.ai illuminates visitor origins. As anticipated, a significant majority — 81% — of visitors to Uvalde's parks and playgrounds originated from within Uvalde County, underscoring the profound local impact. However, a fascinating revelation was the unexpected breadth of visitors from across Texas and even beyond, including states like California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina. This demonstrates the broader appeal and potentially therapeutic draw of these revitalized spaces.

Furthermore, CityParks.ai enriches understanding by inferring the demographics of visitors, correlating data with census information for their respective home neighborhoods. Beyond standard attributes like age, race, and ethnicity, the dashboard provides insights into household types, occupation types, education levels, and average household income. Most importantly for KABOOM!'s mission, the dashboard quantifies the number of families with children frequenting Uvalde's parks and playgrounds, directly validating the success of their child-focused initiatives.

Tangible Results: A Community Reinvigorated

The data speaks volumes. KABOOM! redesigned and relaunched two pivotal parks with new playgrounds in Uvalde: DeLeon Park and Esperanze Park. In the very first month since these newly designed spaces were reopened to the public, the community witnessed a significant surge in engagement.

• DeLeon Park experienced a remarkable 17.5% increase in visitation.
• Esperanze Park saw a substantial 11.5% increase in engagement.

These concrete numbers are more than just statistics; they represent a vibrant return to outdoor activity, a renewed sense of community connection, and a testament to the power of thoughtful investment in play.

A Brighter Future for Play

Quantifying engagement is the definitive approach to understanding the true value and impact of play spaces. KABOOM!'s inspired design and execution of play environments, synergized with CityData.ai's unparalleled data insights into play engagement, have demonstrably revitalized Uvalde. More children and teens are now enjoying high-quality outdoor playtime, learning, and thriving in spaces designed for their joy and development. This partnership serves as a powerful model for how data-driven insights can underpin and amplify the profound, positive changes brought about by community-focused initiatives.