Geographic Field Model based hedonic valuation of urban open spaces in Wuhan, China

Economic valuation of the amenities of urban open spaces will lend support to urban planning and development. In the absence of an explicit market for these amenities, the hedonic approach is often employed. Hitherto there have been a relatively limited number of studies on hedonic valuation of urban open spaces in China. This paper employs Geographic Field Model (GFM) to specify the externalities of urban open spaces with regard to their specific scale of influence, and builds a GFM-based spatial hedonic model to value the environmental amenities. The GFM quantification of open space variables overcomes the potential bias caused by traditional distance measures without influence scale limitations and the discontinuousness of the dichotomous index indicating the proximity to open space. A GFM-based spatial hedonic analysis was conducted in Wuhan, a metropolis in central China with various open spaces. Proximity to the Changjiang River recreation space and the East Lake were found to exert remarkable and positive impacts on apartment price. But proximity to other lakes and rivers were not significant in the result. The study showed that city level parks have significant amenity values, but district level parks do not. The amenity values of these urban open spaces were demonstrated by measuring the value they added to apartment prices. Some unexpected findings, such as the positive effect of noise and the powerful impact of floor height on housing price, may be common rules in densely populated cities in China. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.