How are our landscapes valued by their users? Identifying the value of public open spaces using real estate market turnovers

Abstract

Landscapes provide significant intangible services such as mental and physical enjoyment. However, the intangibility of these services means they are difficult to quantify and tend to be overlooked when making design and development decisions. Such ill-informed decision-making processes are often linked to the fact that the ‘economics’ underpinning decision-making are not usually well-researched and understood in landscape architecture. This research explores a potential approach for revealing the overall perceived value of a landscape. Because intangible services cannot be quantified directly, we needed to find a way of measuring them indirectly. One way of doing this is to reveal what value people put on elements like parks and other public open spaces, as reflected in real estate turnovers. Our study focuses on Lincoln, New Zealand, and looks at how the publicly accessible landscape features are valued by their users. A hedonic price model was built to examine the relationship between the land prices from the last two decades of property turnovers in Lincoln and a series of land price-related factors (e.g. distance to the closest open space, travel times to schools and the university, land size). The results show that landscape features were highly valued by local residents, in comparison to other factors. Also, the ‘landscape premium’ remains significant throughout the two-decade observation period, even when major disruptions, such as the 2011 major earthquake in Christchurch and the recent Covid-19 pandemic, occurred and significantly affected the real estate market. The study also examined the possibility of monetising intangible landscape benefits and taking them into account when making landscape-related decisions. A possible method for this is demonstrated in the study.