On the Use of Hedonic Price Indices to Understand Ecosystem Service Provision from Urban Green Space in Five Latin American Megacities

Abstract

Latin American (LA) megacities are facing enormous challenges to provide welfare to millions of people who live in them. High rates of urbanization and limited administrative capacity of LA cities to plan and control urban growth have led to a critical deficit of urban green space, and therefore, to sub-optimal outcomes in terms of urban sustainability. This study seeks to assess the possibility of using real estate prices to provide an estimate of the monetary value of the ecosystem services provided by urban green space across five Latin American megacities: Bogota, Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City and Santiago de Chile. Using Google Earth images to quantify urban green space and multiple regression analysis, we evaluated the impact of urban green space, crime rates, business density and population density on real estate prices across the five mentioned megacities. In addition, for a subset of the data (Lima and Buenos Aires) we analyzed the effects of landscape ecology variables (green space patch size, connectivity, etc.) on real estate prices to provide a first insight into how the ecological attributes of urban green space can determine the level of ecosystem service provision in different urban contexts in Latin America. The results show a strong positive relationship between the presence of urban green space and real estate prices. Green space explains 52% of the variability in real estate prices across the five studied megacities. Population density, business density and crime had only minor impacts on real estate prices. Our analysis of the landscape ecology variables in Lima and Buenos Aires also show that the relationship between green space and price is context-specific, which indicates that further research is needed to better understand when and where ecological attributes of green space affect real estate prices so that managers of urban green space in LA cities can optimize ecological configuration to maximize ecosystem service provision from often limited green spaces.

Access to Urban Green Space in Cities of the Global South: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Studies in other Asian cities such as Sheikhupura, Pakistan [69], Tehran, Iran [71,84], and Hamadan, Iran [46] also found inequitable results for green space quantity. All sampled articles that measured quantity in Latin America [18,20,72,73] and Africa [21,77,85,89,96] discovered inequities. Effect sizes for inequities were particularly large in some studies that measured green space area per capita [21,73,85].…”

“…Findings in cities in other Asian countries are mixed: One study in Tehran, Iran found inequities for maintenance and best green spaces [71], but three other studies in Dehli, India and Karachi, Pakistan uncovered mixed findings for satisfaction and safety [23,79,87]. In Latin America, more studies found inequities for green space quality-amenities in Curitiba, Brazil [20]; best green spaces in Santa Cruz Bolivia and Buenos Aires, Argentina [47,72]-than mixed findings-green space satisfaction in Bogotá, Colombia [38]. Finally, all sampled studies in Africa uncovered inequities for quality, including best green spaces, satisfaction, amenities, and maintenance and safety [77,89,96].…”

“…Finally, articles had to report descriptive or inferential statistics. We decided to include articles that only reported descriptive statistics because, due to the limited availability of data on urban green space or SES in some Global South countries [47,[71][72][73][74], many articles had relatively small n sizes, which made it not feasible to conduct and report inferential statistics.…”

“…We did not find any relevant studies for most African countries and several countries in South Asia, and very few articles emerged for most Latin American countries. While the high number of studies conducted in China might be explained by its very large population size and its tremendous growth in the higher education sector, the lack of articles in other geographical contexts might be partly attributed to data availability issues [47,[71][72][73][74].…”

“…The only study focusing on racial-ethnic differences found that, in Karachi, Pakistan, Pathan women felt safer in women-only-parks than Mohajir women [79]; however, the author did not discuss whether one of these ethnic groups is more advantaged in Pakistani society than the other one. [20,25,47,71,72,77,81,89,96,101,105] 100%, n = 5 [47,71,72,77,101] 80%, n = 4 [25,71,89,96] 50%, n = 4 [25,89,96,105] 100%, n = 2 [20,96] 50%, n = 1 [81] Equity 5.8%, n = 1 [104] 0%, n = 0 0%, n = 0 0%, n = 0 0%, n = 0 50%, n = 1 [104] Mixed or not sig. 29.4%, n = 5 [23,38,79,87,90] 0%, n = 0 20%, n = 1 [79] 50%, n = 4 [23,38,87,90] 0%, n = 0 0%, n = 0…”