| 1. |
- Berghauser Pont, Meta, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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A systematic review of the scientifically demonstrated effects of densification
- 2020
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Ingår i: IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science. - : IOP Publishing. - 1755-1307 .- 1755-1315. ; 588:5
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the current dominant strategies proposed for sustainable urban development is densification. UN Habitat prescribes a density of over 150 inhabitants per hectare to realize the UN Sustainable Development Goals. While some authors advocate the very reasonable benefits of density, others emphasize the potential drawbacks. The main goal of this paper is to provide a systematic review of international research on urban density and its potential benefits and drawbacks for sustainable urban development. 1208 articles were selected from Web of Science and after the screening of abstracts, 330 papers were found eligible to be included in the quantitative synthesis. Results show that the effects of densification that dominate literature are transport related studies (41%), followed by studies focusing on economics (14%), social effects (12%) and human health (11%). Least studied effects are resource efficiency (1%), service (3%) and urban environment (4%). Positive correlations with higher density are reported for transport and economics, while ecology, social impact and health show mainly negative correlations with higher density. The findings reported are generic as similar trends are found in North America, Asia and Europe and only minor differences in outcome are found in studies using different measures of density, unit or scale of analysis.
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| 2. |
- Berghauser Pont, Meta, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Systematic review and comparison of densification effects and planning motivations
- 2021
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Ingår i: Buildings and Cities. - : Ubiquity Press, Ltd.. - 2632-6655. ; 2:1, s. 378-401
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Do higher urban densities contribute to more sustainable cities and communities? This paper examines the effectiveness of higher density (as a means) for achieving sustainable urban development (the goal) following three lines of enquiry. First, a systematic review of the scientific literature (n = 229 peer-reviewed empirical studies) is presented on the effects of urban density. Second, the motivations for increasing urban density are studied in a systematic review of Swedish planning practices based on the comprehensive urban plans in 59 municipalities. Third, these two studies are compared to find matches and mismatches between evidence and practice. Although positive effects exist for public infrastructure, transport and economics, there are also considerable negative environmental, social and health impacts. This creates a challenging task for urban planners to assess the trade-offs involving densification and accommodate current urbanisation rates. Some topics are found to be over-represented in research (transport effects), seldom discussed in practice (environmental impact), and misaligned when comparing motives and evidence (social impact). Furthermore, for some topics, urban density thresholds are found that are important because they may explain some of the divergences in the results between studies. PRACTICE RELEVANCE The transfer of knowledge from research to planning practice is a serious concern as planning strategies are not aligned with scientific evidence. Planning practice in Sweden is more positive about the contribution of higher density to sustainable urban development than the results of empirical studies warrant. The largest deviation is found in relation to the social impacts of higher density where the planning arguments are not aligned with the evidence. Several reported negative effects of densification (e.g. water management, recreational infrastructure, biodiversity) are not sufficiently accounted for in Sweden’s planning policy and strategy. The narrow planning focus on decarbonising cities and densification needs to be broadened to ensure cities are resilient against the effects of climate change and include mitigation strategies to reduce negative social, environmental and health impacts. The findings can be used to develop evidence-based planning strategies. Other countries can apply this process to assess their planning strategies.
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| 3. |
- Heyman, Axel, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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Distances, accessibilities and attractiveness; looking at new approaches to include measures of urban form in hedonic pricing modelling
- 2016
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Ingår i: Journal of Space Syntax. - 2044-7507. ; 6:2, s. 213-224
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The population of Oslo increases rapidly and the corresponding demand of housing is an issue of great public, political and professional interest. Today, we can see several interesting discrepancies in the housing market, such as very high prices for dwellings with low technical standards and dwellings located in neighbourhoods very different from those planned and built today. There is a great diversity in the housing households’ willingness to pay. What are the patterns of such attractiveness in more detail and what might be the lessons to learn concerning what to build in the future? How can we plan and build housing that responds to the wide range of contemporary demands and that will also be attractive in decennials to come? Economists and real estate businesses provide statistics on prices of dwellings, but the variables examined are usually too general for the results to be useful for actual planning and design. However, space syntax based research has shown that locations in cities can be measured more specifically and that analyses of these measurements correlate with numerous phenomenon related to activities and attractiveness of cities. By applying space syntax based measurements in GIS, comparing housing prices with presumed relevant variables of buildings and neighbourhoods by means of hedonic regression analysis, it is possible to seize new knowledge about how specific urban form variables of buildings and neighbourhoods correlate with housing prices. By this approach, willingness to pay for dwellings has been examined in two studies in Stockholm and Copenhagen. This paper presents methods and some result of these studies. In brief, we see that continuous urban form measurements in GIS are significant for willingness to pay for dwellings. The specificity of these measurements achieved by GIS analyses, applying the Place Syntax Tool, provides new and more detailed knowledge in this field.
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| 4. |
- Heyman, Axel, 1985, et al.
(författare)
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House prices and relative location
- 2019
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Ingår i: Cities. - : Elsevier BV. - 0264-2751. ; 95
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Location is known to be a main determinant in people's efforts to estimate the value of a house. However, the type of location, and subsequently how the value of that location is estimated, has not been investigated to the same degree. In hedonic price modelling, a well-used method of estimating housing as a composite good, locational proxies such as postcodes or census tracts are often used to control for location. This notion of location is what geographers refer to as absolute location, a fixed position in space, as opposed to relative location, a position in space relative to other positions. In this paper, we look at the difference in explanatory power of absolute versus relative location in a hedonic model for apartment sales, using the city of Oslo as our case. The main finding is that the added explanatory power of postcode dummies significantly diminishes when introducing relative location explanatory variables such as walking distance to key places like the metro and parks. As house prices correlate with consumer preferences, these findings will have implications for urban planning insofar as different neighborhood designs vary with respect to their ability to harvest relative location potentials.
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| 5. |
- Heyman, Axel, 1985
(författare)
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The monetary value of urban form: Examining the relationship between accessibilities and attractiveness in Oslo
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today and for the foreseeable future we experience a global urbanisation, which requires development of buildings, roads, and plots, also called urban form. Most often it is urban planning and design that determine changes in urban form, and it should be valuable with knowledge of its monetary value. Considering both the rapid urban development and that buildings and roads are slow variables in cities, it should be an important factor for urban planning and design to be aware of the value created or lost with proposed development. This research aims to examine the nature of the monetary value of urban form by reviewing prior research and through hedonic modelling empirically estimate the marginal willingness to pay for location in Oslo, Norway. The review is conducted through an overview of previous projects from practice on the topic and a systematic review of peer reviewed papers. The empirical examination is principally built on the connection of a geographic model to quantify urban form, and an economic model to estimate monetary values. Two empirical studies are carried out to first estimate the intrinsic monetary value in urban form, and second to investigate how the monetary value changes with distance to amenities, such as parks. The findings suggest that there are indeed monetary values connected to urban form and that urban form variables in comparison with more commonly used variables to describe location have a higher explanatory degree in the economic model. The empirical findings also suggest that there are clear non-linear relationships between distance to amenities and price, indicating that not only urban form influence housing prices but also the composition of urban form. The results provide knowledge to the planning and design practice to appreciate attractiveness of aspects of plans and designs. The results also bring new knowledge to the research field of urban morphology of the monetary value of urban form and shed light on methodological deficiencies in the research field of urban economics.
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| 6. |
- Łaszkiewicz, Edyta, et al.
(författare)
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Valuing access to urban greenspace using non-linear distance decay in hedonic property pricing
- 2022
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Ingår i: Ecosystem Services. - : Elsevier BV. - 2212-0416. ; 53
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Modelling walking distance enables the observation of non-linearities in hedonic property pricing of accessibility to greenspace. We test a penalized spline spatial error model (PS-SEM), which has two distinctive features. First, the PS-SEM controls for the presence of a spatially autocorrelated error term. Second, the PS-SEM allows for continuous non-linear distance decay of the property price premium as a function of walking distance to greenspaces. As a result, compared with traditional spatial econometric methods, the PS-SEM has the advantage that data determines the functional form of the distance decay of the implicit price for greenspace accessibility. Our PS-SEM results from Oslo, Norway, suggest that the implicit price for greenspace access is highly non-linear in walking distance, with the functional form varying for different types of greenspaces. Our results caution against using simple linear distances and assumptions of log or stepwise buffer-based distance decay in property prices relative to pedestrian network distance to urban amenities. The observed heterogeneity in the implicit property prices for walking distance to greenspace also provides a general caution against using non-spatial hedonic pricing models when aggregating values of greenspace amenities for policy analysis or urban ecosystem accounting purposes.
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| 7. |
- Marcus, Lars, 1962, et al.
(författare)
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Empirical support for a theory of spatial capital: Housing prices in Oslo and land values in Gothenburg
- 2019
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Ingår i: 12th International Space Syntax Symposium, SSS 2019.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Land is, besides labour and capital, one of the classic production factors in economic theory. However, neoclassical economics dominating the 20thcentury, simplified production theory to only labour and capital, treating land either as just another form of capital or as the natural resources it harbours. This hides the central role of land – in the meaning of spatial extension and location – for contemporary economies, where land rent is an essential cost and location a productive factor for most economic activities, not least since these increasingly are located in cities. Critical here is the confusion often found concerning property values and the distinction between land and improvements, the latter most often constituted by buildings, where buildings quite naturally can be treated as capital, while land cannot. Importantly, while property value can be increased by its owner through improvements, such as new buildings, she is very limited in influencing the land value, since this is a collective variable dependent on the economic development of the city as a whole. It is here proposed that improvements on land in contemporary urbanised economies to a dominant degree concern systems of centrality and accessibility generating relative locations, that are further enhanced by buildings and land division, and that this constitutes what is proposed to be called a spatial capital, which to a large degree is created through the practices of urban planning and design. In this paper we investigate the dependency of spatial form on land value. First, we review how spatial form and the configurations of accessibility it generates on land, influences housing prices to find support for the intimate relationship between relative location and monetary market values. Second, we investigate the dominance of land values compared to improvement values in four Swedish cities of different size Third, we investigate how known parameters of spatial form correlates with land values in Gothenburg, Sweden. We see close associations between spatial form and land values, both in shape of market housing prices and as property taxation values. Land value holds a larger share of total property taxation value in larger cities, suggesting that relative location is valued higher where economic activity is greater. Furthermore, we find clear correlations between spatial form and land taxation values. Altogether, these findings indicate that spatial capital encompasses monetary value. In extension, these findings also indicate how knowledge based and skilful urban planning and design can create measurable value.
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