Urban Parks as Beneficial and POPs Contaminated Landscapes

Urban parks are essential to sustainable cities, providing climate regulation, support-ing biodiversity, and offering vital spaces for recreation and overall well-being. How-ever, their soils also act as long-term reservoirs for persistent organic pollutants (POPs), resulting from decades of atmospheric deposition, diffuse urban emissions, and the inherent heterogeneity of urban soils. This review brings together current knowledge on the occurrence, sources, and environmental behaviour of priority POPs, such as OCPs, PCBs, PCDD/Fs, PBDEs, PFAS, and PAHs, in the soils of parks and gar-dens. We examine how the physicochemical properties of these compounds interact with urban soil features to influence sorption, mobility, degradation, and air–soil ex-change. Evidence from cities worldwide reveals consistent patterns: urban parks ac-cumulate mixtures of legacy and emerging pollutants, reflecting both historical inputs and ongoing urban activities. These contaminants contribute to chronic low-level ex-posure through soil ingestion, dust inhalation, and dermal contact, as well as through dietary intake when food is grown in parks. Such pathways have been linked to endo-crine, immune, neurodevelopmental, metabolic, and carcinogenic effects. Despite growing research, significant gaps remain. Mixture toxicity, temporal trends, harmo-nised monitoring, and exposure scenarios specific to recreational soils are still insuffi-ciently understood. Recognising urban parks as both essential green infrastructures and active repositories of persistent pollution is crucial for improving urban environ-mental management. By integrating ecological, toxicological, and urban-planning perspectives, this review highlights the need for proactive monitoring and policy de-velopment to ensure that parks remain healthy and equitable spaces within increas-ingly complex urban landscapes.