Review and Challenges in the Economic Valuation of Green Spaces

Faced with increasing urbanisation and climate crisis, the development of green spaces in cities has become a major issue for urban planners. While the need for proximity between housing and green spaces has been widely established in the literature, the question of the size to allocate to the latter is important in a context of strong pressure on land use. We explore this question by taking advantage of databases of the local rent observatories for rental prices and OpenStreetMap for parks. Using a generalised propensity score weighting method, we analyse the preferences between different typologies of park sizes in the private rental market of the largest French urban areas in 2017 and 2018. We show that on average, individuals value large parks more, followed by small and lastly by medium-sized parks. We also detect variations in this hierarchy of preference depending on flat size and its location. These results are of interest not only to property investors looking to increase their rental income, but also to political decision-makers looking to improve existing parks and propose new urban park development projects.

Under minor revision at Economics and Business Letters