Landscape and Urban Planning 120 (2013) 119–128 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Landscape and Urban Planning jou rn al hom ep age: www.elsevier.com/locate/landurbplan Classification and valuation of urban green spaces—A hedonic house price valuation Toke Emil Panduro ∗ , Kathrine Lausted Veie University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Science, Department of Food and Resource Economics, Rolighedsvej 23, 1958 Frederiksbeg Copenhagen, Denmark h i g h l i g h t s • We categorize green space into eight different types based on aerial photos and GIS data. • We find that it is important to distinguish between different types of green space. • We find that green buffer areas are unattractive in their own right. • We find a quadratic relationship between implicit prices and green space proximity. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 15 November 2012 Received in revised form 13 August 2013 Accepted 14 August 2013 Available online 9 September 2013 Keywords: Hedonic valuation Green space appreciation index Classification Environmental amenity and disamenity a b s t r a c t In this paper we propose a categorization of green space into eight different types and quantify their impact on housing prices in the city of Aalborg using the hedonic house price method. The categorization was made manually according to an idealized description of the eight types of green space and a rating system in which each green space was rated according to accessibility, maintenance levels and neighbor- ing negative land-use. The hedonic house price schedule for each of the green spaces was estimated using a generalized additive model, which allows for a data driven adjustment of underlying omitted spatial processes. To our knowledge the use of a spatial generalized additive model is novel to the hedonic val- uation literature. We find that types of green space, which are rated highly in terms of accessibility and maintenance level, have high implicit prices whereas types with low ratings are not identified or provide ambiguous results. Green space buffering unattractive land-use such as infrastructure and industry is found to provide negative implicit prices despite controlling for the negative neighboring land-use. Our results clearly indicate that green space is not a uniform environmental amenity but rather a set of distinct goods with very different impacts on the housing price. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Provision of green space in a dense urban environment is costly. The rent from alternative land-use for areas allocated to green space is high. At the same time, green space provides a number of valuable direct and indirect services to surrounding parcels. These services span from provision of recreational opportunities to floodways and improved air quality as well as benefits associated with reduced housing density (e.g. more light and reduced noise levels). Green space in cities exists in a broad variety of types spanning from the high maintenance urban park to natural areas and buffer space between noisy infrastructure and other land uses. From such a degree of heterogeneity in the type of green space it follows that the ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +45 23962908. E-mail addresses: tepp@life.ku.dk (T.E. Panduro), kave@life.ku.dk (K.L. Veie). benefits (and costs) generated by different green space provision vary greatly. The value of green space has been the subject of a good deal of research using the hedonic method and stated preference meth- ods as surveyed in, e.g. McConnells & Walls (2005) and Waltert & Schläpfer (2010). The results are generally mixed with both pos- itive, negative and insignificant effects found for the same types of green space. With the notable exceptions of Anderson & West (2006) and Irwin (2002) much of the existing literature primar- ily deals with either a few specific types of green space such as nature preserves or agricultural fields (Morancho, 2003; Towe, 2009; Tyrväinen & Miettinen, 2000) or with categorization of green space by size and/or proximity (Abbott & Klaiber, 2010; Jim & Chen, 2006a; Kong, Yin, & Nakagoshi, 2007; Morancho, 2003). Green space is often treated as a homogeneous good with distinctions in some cases being made with regard to owner- ship (Cheshire & Sheppard, 1995) or conservation status (Irwin & Bockstael, 2001). As stressed in the survey by Waltert and Schläpfer 0169-2046/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.08.009