City of Boston open spaces and parks, playgrounds, athletic fields, conservation land, and cemeteries, 1,012 polygons from the City of Boston GIS open data platform. Official primary source, republished as cloud-native GeoParquet with a PMTiles visualization and MapLibre styles.
Every open space of conservation and recreation interest in Boston,
1,012 polygons and 7,356 acres, from Franklin Park's 392 acres down to
pocket gardens, maintained by the
Boston Parks and Recreation Department
and published on Analyze Boston.
The layer's defining trait is in its official description, regardless
of ownership. City parks sit beside 214 privately owned sites, state
reservations, cemeteries, and 124 community gardens.
This inventory is the basis of the city's
Open Space and Recreation Plan 2023-2029,
which reports 7.1 acres of protected open space per 1,000 residents,
and every site in it triggers design review within 100 feet under
Boston's Municipal Ordinance 7-4.11.
Agents, AGENTS.md documents the free-text traps in this
very real municipal data, read it before aggregating.
What Is in It
Six site types by acreage. Parkways, reservations, and beaches, 82
sites and 2,622 acres. Parks, playgrounds, and athletic fields, 361
sites and 2,559 acres. Cemeteries and burying grounds, 38 and 1,013.
Urban wilds and natural areas, 144 and 929. Malls, squares, and
plazas, 261 and 199. Community gardens, 124 sites and 32 acres.
Quick Start
The data asset is GeoParquet 2.0 with a native geometry type and a covering bbox column, so it needs a GeoPandas built on pyarrow 24 or newer. DuckDB spatial queries the same file in place, see AGENTS.md for those patterns. Paths are relative to this directory, and the same code works against the published URL.
Schema
Column
Type
Description
SITE_NAME
varchar
Best-known or official site name. Multi-parcel sites carry Roman numeral suffixes, Stony Brook Reservation I and II.
OWNERSHIP
varchar
Fee owner where known. City of Boston, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, private owners, and agency abbreviations like BRA and BNAN.
PROTECTION
varchar
Slash-separated legal protection instruments. A97 is Article 97 of the Massachusetts Constitution, the strongest. Free text, match with LIKE.
TYPECODE
integer
Numeric open space type 1 through 7. Disagrees with TypeLong on about 13 rows, treat TypeLong as closer to intent.
DISTRICT
varchar
Planning district per the city's open space plan, not the official neighborhood boundaries. Includes the non-spatial value Multi-District.
ACRES
double
Official area in acres of the open-space portion, the figure to use instead of computing geometry area.
ADDRESS
varchar
Street address if known, null for 589 rows.
The table has 21 columns in all. The full list with types lives in table:columns on the collection.
Protection and Access Are Columns, Not Assumptions
Being in this file does not mean a site is a public park. Cross the
two flag columns before any access or equity claim. POS says whether
a site is permanently protected, 450 sites and 5,015 acres are, mostly
under Article 97 of the Massachusetts Constitution, which requires a
two-thirds vote of the legislature to convert conservation land.
PA says whether the public can actually get in, 724 sites yes, 4 by
appointment only, and the rest unknown or no.
Limitations
A planning inventory, not a legal record. The city's own disclaimer
limits it to general planning, only deeds research and surveys settle
boundaries. It also is not a complete greenspace layer, street trees,
most schoolyards, and private yards are absent. This is a fixed
snapshot from July 2026 of a continuously edited layer, and it carries
no stable public identifier, so joins to later versions go through
SITE_NAME or space.
