The value of urban parks in the city of Turin: an application of the Geographically Weighted Regression

Urban green areas provide a wealth of benefits that range from maintenance of natural ecological processes to air and water management, to ameliorating the wellbeing of local population. Starting from the concept of Total Economic Value, the paper investigates the method of the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to estimate the value of two urban parks in the city of Turin: Dora Park and Valentino Park. The GWR grounds on to the Hedonic Pricing approach and permits to investigate the spatial patterns of the key variables under investigation. The results of the model show that proximity to parks influence positively real estate prices, and that it emerges a positive Willingness To Pay for environmental goods and services such as those provided by urban green areas.