Urban green and blue: Who values what and where?

Heather A Sander; Chang Zhao

doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2014.07.021

Urban water bodies (bluespace) and vegetated open spaces (greenspace) are key sites for building urban sustainability, promoting social, economic, and environmental objectives and influencing human well-being. Building sustainable cities requires an understanding of how urbanities value these amenities, how values vary within cities, and of the factors influencing these values. Hedonic pricing, an economic-valuation technique, is commonly used to estimate values for green and bluespaces based upon home sale prices, but typical applications fail to identify how these values vary within cities, leaving a gap in decision-makers’ knowledge and limiting their ability to plan green and bluespaces that promote urban sustainability. The present study examines this issue by identifying spatial variation in the values of urban green and bluespace across the Twin Cities metropolitan area of Minnesota, USA using both global and local regression techniques. We find that the values of all blue and greenspace amenities examined vary significantly spatially and that values for these amenities can differ greatly from those estimated using global models. Importantly we find that that the influence of treecover on home sale price is always positive when this relationship is significant and that the landscape context in which an amenity occurs impacts its value with features such as trails, water bodies, and wetlands being more valuable in locations with protected natural areas than elsewhere. We also find evidence that wealth influences access to blue and greenspace, in many, but not all cases, leading to reduced access to these features among poorer groups. These finding suggest that, when used in planning and policy-making, global values may lead to the provision of urban green and bluespaces that fail to meet the needs and desires of local residents. Identifying variation in these values, as in this study, will facilitate more targeted planning of green and bluespace and thus more liveable, sustainable cities.

Urban green and blue: Who values what and where?

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