Quantifying the well-being benefits of urban green space
Rapid urbanisation compounded by underlying population growth has placed increasing pressures upon green space areas within cities. Anecdotal evidence suggests that such areas are major sources of wellbeing yet the complex nature of the services provided by such areas and the non-market, unpriced characteristics of the benefits they yield raise concerns that they are inadequately incorporated within decision making and planning systems. This thesis seeks to address the problem of quantifying the well-being benefits of urban green space through the extension of two complementary strands of research. The first seeks to contribute to the incorporation of urban green space benefits within conventional decision making systems. Within this strand of the research the authors report two studies designed to address various challenges associated with the estimation of economic values for the non-market benefits generated by urban green space. The first of these studies contributes to the literature on the estimation and transferral of valuation functions across locations to allocate available resources at an inter-city, national level. The second valuation study operates at an intra-city level through an experimental study the dimensions of which are designed to reveal optimal locations in the presence of potential local dis-amenities (a potentiality which is confirmed through the application of advanced statistical analysis techniques). The second strand of research addresses the complexities of relationships between urban green space and individual well-being. Here recent methodological advances in the field of applied social-psychology are extended to yield a richer picture of the diverse impact of both direct experience and passive viewing of green space upon wellbeing. An experiment is designed to permit enhanced controls for the potential correlation between environment and activity in determining experiential perceptions of well-being effects. A common theme of all applications is the explicit incorporation of spatial complexity and variation in the environment within each study and across the various methodologies employed. From a practical perspective it is argued that these results provide inputs to both the decision making and planning fields. More fundamentally, the work presented within this thesis represents a useful methodological contribution to both the applied economic valuation and social-psychology research literatures.
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