The role of urban green space for human well-being

Christine Bertram and Katrin Rehdanz

No 1911, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Most people in Europe live in urban environments. For these people, urban green space is an important element of well-being, but it is often in short supply. We use self-reported information on life satisfaction and different individual green space measures to explore how urban green space affects the well-being of the residents of Berlin, the capital city of Germany. We combine spatially explicit survey data with spatially highly disaggregated GIS data on urban green spaces. We observe a significant, inverted U-shaped effect of the amount of and distance to urban green space on life satisfaction. According to our results, the optimal amount of green space in a 1 km buffer is 36 ha, or 11.5% of the buffer area, and 75% of the respondents have less green space available. Our results are robust to a number of robustness checks.

Keywords: life satisfaction; urban ecosystem services; urban green space; well-being (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I31 Q51 Q57 R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The role of urban green space for human well-being (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ifwkwp:1911

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