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ABSTRACT
In the light of global urbanization and biodiversity loss, ecosystem services provided by urban green spaces (UGS) are becoming increasingly important, not least as a recovery and recreation opportunity for citizens. The valuation of UGS is significant for urban planners, who make decisions on the creation or removal of UGS. We analysed the influence of UGS on residential property prices in Leipzig, Germany, by applying a hedonic pricing analysis. This analysis complements the existing literature by considering both sale and rental prices for flats and houses; moreover, the shape of UGS is taken into account explicitly; finally, it is the first study in Germany to analyse UGS in hedonic studies to such an extent. The results demonstrate that the size of the nearest UGS has a stronger impact on prices compared to the distance from it. With respect to shape, we found that the simpler the UGS shape, the higher the prices. Although we find an impact of UGS on prices, the impact is smaller than that of other characteristics. The proposed valuation approach and obtained results inform urban planners regarding the design of new UGS and raise awareness about potential intended and unintended economic and social effects.
Acknowledgements
The authors highly appreciate the support and assistance of those who made this research possible. First and foremost, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to Robert Holländer at Leipzig University, as our scientific discussions and his constructive comments and suggestions have improved the analysis. We are grateful for the advice given by Ameur Manceur, which was a great help at the stage of data preparation and particular areas of data analysis. We also thank Carsten Buchmann for his valuable input into the statistical portion and Cheng Guo for help with ArcGIS applications. We are grateful to Immobilien Scout GmbH for providing real estate data within its transparency campaign and the City of Leipzig and especially Jens Weinert for providing some of the spatial data. In addition, we would like to thank Madhumitha Jaganmohan for final language polishing. We appreciate the suggestions of anonymous reviewers which improved the manuscript substantially. We thank Uwe Ferber for reviewing the manuscript from the urban-planning perspective. We would like to thank ESCALATE for financial support throughout the PhD project of the first author. None of the sponsors had any influence on the study design or any involvement in the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data other than as identified above.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.