AMP BEAVERTON • 2026
4,471 Beaverton youth shared nearly 50,000 stories of everyday life. We mapped those stories to understand where young people play, move, feel at ease, encounter barriers, and where action could have the greatest impact.
What emerged is a geography of young people's everyday lives and a field guide for making those lives more active, mobile, safe, and connected.
THE BIG IDEA
Youth are playing in many of the places we would hope to see them play. But when AMP adds safety and ease to the picture, the geography changes. Belonging is more concentrated than play.
That difference matters. AMP defines opportunity as places where youth are already present, but where some aspect of everyday life is making play, movement, or belonging more difficult.
FIVE STORIES FROM THE DATA
The full report contains dozens of maps, rankings, comparisons, and recommendations. These five findings capture the arc from youth experience to action.
01 • PLAY → BELONGING
The Play map reaches across Beaverton and well beyond it. The Belonging map is more constrained. Belonging requires more than presence: youth need to be playing while also feeling safe and at ease.
This gap is one of the clearest ways AMP distinguishes use from quality of experience.
Back to top02 • PLAY OPPORTUNITY
Play Opportunity identifies places where youth are already playing but also reporting uncomfortable or unsafe conditions. Beaverton HS scores .197, which is 30% above the BSD six-catchment mean of .152.
03 • MOBILITY OPPORTUNITY
Springville North ranks first among BSD preferred walking segments, with a Mobility Opportunity score of .691, which is 224% above the BSD preferred walking route average.
AMP then expands beyond the route score to the actual stories of friction (traffic, crossings, road safety, pedestrian access) and where intervention could matter most.
Back to top04 • PLAY OPPORTUNITY
Center Street Park ranks first among parks in the Beaverton HS catchment, with a Play Opportunity score of .605, which is 925% above the catchment park average.
After Center Street Park emerged as the top Play Opportunity, AMP identified 118 youth whose mapped neighborhoods fall within roughly 1 km of the park. We then compared their recreation stories with the broader Beaverton youth sample to surface programming ideas that are specific to this park and its surrounding neighborhood.
05 • GIRLS + BELONGING
Girls average .160 on belonging across Beaverton-area parks, compared with .249 for all respondents and .268 for boys. Westview has the largest girls' belonging deficit among the six high-school catchments.
The Westview maps are especially striking: girls and boys occupy many of the same places, but the area in which boys report belonging is dramatically larger.
Back to topTHE MAP BOOK
Scroll through a sample of the indicator maps. Click any image to enlarge it.
9,072 stories of play shared by 3,220 youth.
Walking, biking, scootering, and other active movement.
Places where youth most frequently report feeling safe.
The overlap between active movement and feelings of safety.
Leisure and recreational spaces significant to young people's everyday lives.
Places where youth spend leisure time while feeling safe and at ease.
Places where youth report obstacles to walking, biking, scootering, and rolling.
Places where youth are more likely to feel uncomfortable or unsafe at leisure.
Prioritizes places where improvements could have immediate impact.
Identifies places where access improvements may unlock mobility.
FROM MAP TO ACTION
The Beaverton Field Guide shows how the same youth insight can be used at progressively finer scales.
Score catchments, routes, parks, or other places using AMP indicators.
Open the youth stories underneath the score to understand what is creating friction, discomfort, or opportunity.
Use hyper-local activity preferences, place context, and mapped experience to shape infrastructure and programming.
DEEP DIVE • GIRLS IN BEAVERTON
Across Beaverton-area parks, girls report substantially less belonging than boys. The report then follows that gap into the Westview HS catchment, where girls have the largest belonging deficit of the six high-school areas.
The implication is not simply “girls play less.” In Westview, girls and boys are playing at similar rates. The difference is in the conditions surrounding that play: the pathways, in-between spaces, and environments that determine whether activity feels comfortable and sustainable.
PROGRAMMING INSIGHT
Recreation planning works better when it reflects both what youth already enjoy and what they are asking for next. Beaverton youth shared the activities they currently play, the activities they want to try, and the activities generating the strongest enthusiasm.
41-PAGE MAP BOOK & FIELD GUIDE
The full Beaverton field guide includes demographic profiles, all ten core maps, high-school catchment comparisons, activity and aspiration analysis, safe-route prioritization, park rankings, hyper-local planning examples, a girls-and-belonging deep dive, and an appendix of priority routes and parks.
FROM BEAVERTON TO YOUR COMMUNITY
AMP can adapt this approach to parks, mobility, schools, neighborhoods, and regional planning.