Cash flows generated by urban green spaces - Methods for identifying indirect values of UGI
Summary
Forming the theoretical basis of this report, urban green infrastructure (UGI) is understood as an interconnected system of urban green spaces that serves important environmental, social and even economic purposes. UGI is culturally mediated (shaped and used by people) and perceived values and usefulness depend on the specific cultural setting. Hence, studying UGI necessitates a social-ecological perspective, acknowledging the relevant complexity of both the social and the ecological. In particular, our approach to understanding the importance of UGI for urban inhabitants explicitly takes the view that UGI provides bundles of ecosystem services, not merely individual services, and that many of these services are intangible.
The aim of this report is to show that, from an economic point of view, UGI governance (and maintenance) could be aided by a system of rights and obligations that could help finance UGI conservation. To support or create such a system on e needs to disentangle the current system of property and use rights, as well as user obligations and UGI investment schemes. This marks a departure from the kinds of techniques currently used to value nature. Instead of stated preference valuation studies based on hypothetical scenarios, we argue for a move toward identifying real cash flows and beneficiaries that exist in and around UGI. This report presents a framework for assessing value based on green space quality, context and structural properties of the urban form and then explores how some of these values are translated into cash flows.
Although the identification of cash flows is not always possible, there are several possible routes to understanding how value (of UGI) becomes money, and ways to use this information to support UGI financing. This report demonstrates some practical approaches to measuring cash flows and other connections between urban green space and business activity. One method is to map the number of businesses located around urban green spaces. Also included here is a study of the perceived benefits of close proximity of green space by representatives of one particular business sector that could benefit from nearness to green spaces: cafés. We also use a more traditional hedonic pricing method, albeit with innovative extensions, such as an automatic web based tool for collecting data on apartment sales and heat maps to visualize the findings of this study. As posited, these studies indicated positive cash flows (or at least potential cash flows) related to UGI. Some expected connections were absent, such as in the case of medium-sized R&D companies in European cities, which could not be shown to be benefiting from locations in greener surroundings.
