Speaker
Description
By offering various benefits, natural amenities play a significant role in enhancing the well-being of urban citizens whose city life is often associated with hecticness and stress. Urban green spaces serve citizens with recreational opportunities, aesthetic enjoyment, contribute to public health, climate regulations, cooling effect, and have an impact on the attractiveness of neighborhoods and housing prices. Thus, in view of global urbanization and biodiversity loss, the valuation of urban green spaces becomes increasingly essential.
We analyzed the impact of biodiverse urban green spaces on rental prices across 14 German cities by applying a hedonic pricing analysis. This analysis complements the existing literature by including the diverse measurements of urban green spaces and their biodiversity that we innovatively cluster as 'perceived' -variables retrieved from an online survey and 'objective' -variables, i.e. spatial data computed from satellite images. Furthermore, we analyzed rental prices in contrast to most studies that consider selling property prices. Finally, we incorporated an online survey as a source of perception data with a monetary valuation method. The key preliminary results at the aggregated level suggest that: (i) rental prices are positively correlated with the distance to the next urban green space. This raises the question of whether standard hedonic pricing analysis suffers from omitted variables bias – at least in this case – due to unobserved amenities in cities that are negatively correlated with UGS. (ii) Biodiversity of the UGS as well as around the flat have a positive, albeit not significant, effect on rental prices.
| Status Group | Postdoctoral Researcher |
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