WP 2020-78 Specifying preference heterogeneity regarding natural attributes of urban green spaces to inform renaturation policies
Mai-Thi Ta, Harold Levrel, Léa Tardieu
Abstract
It is now acknowledged that greening cities influences positively the quality of life of dwellers through several ways, such as increasing outdoor recreational opportunities, improving in turn social connections, physical or mental health. However, in urban planning, it is usually implicitly assumed that any type of urban green space will have the same effect on citizen’s well-being. The location and design of urban greening investments are barely compared to the needs of the city dwellers. This paper addresses the demand side of urban greening by questioning which green spaces’ characteristics people value. To do so, we applied a distance-based choice experiment to capture the trade- off between the green spaces· attributes (e.g. tree cover, size, shape) and the travel time citizens’ are willing to spend to reach a hypothetical site. We found a strong heterogeneity among the interviewees’ expectations regarding a green space. We show that dwellers’ tastes are influenced by many parameters such as geographical and socioeconomic characteristics, or the activities they are used to practice. The results suggest that accounting for potential users’ preferences regarding urban nature characteristics is critical to inform urban planning in order to build efficient designs of urban greening programs.
Citation:
Ta M-T., Tardieu L., Levrel H., Specifying preference heterogeneity regarding natural attributes of urban green spaces to inform renaturation policies, CIRED Working Papers, WP 2020-78