Preferences for cultural urban ecosystem services: Comparing attitudes, perception, and use
Introduction
Approximately 75% of today’s European population lives in urban areas (World Bank, 2013). One important element for their well-being and quality of life is the availability of urban green spaces. Urban green spaces, including parks as one important component, provide numerous ecosystem services (ES) for city inhabitants (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999, TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), 2011). These services are “the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being” (TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), 2010) and consist of provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services. Cultural ES, which are probably the most relevant ES in urban environments besides regulating services (see, e.g., Jim and Chen, 2006), encompass tourism, recreation and physical and mental health as well as aesthetic appreciation, inspiration, education, and spiritual experiences (MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2005). Opportunities to recreate are of particular importance for the well-being of city inhabitants who live in a stressful and hectic urban environment (Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999). This view is supported by evidence from the psychological and medical literature which shows that urban green spaces significantly enhance human health and well-being (see Tzoulas et al. (2007) for an overview).
This paper focuses on urban parks, a main component of urban green spaces, and the ES they provide. We compare attitudes towards ES provision, perception, and use of urban parks among the inhabitants of four European cities, namely Berlin (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Salzburg (Austria). Focusing on one component of urban green spaces allows carrying out a consistent analysis of preferences and uses as other types of urban green spaces (e.g., forests or cemeteries) may be used differently.
Given the focus of our study on attitudes towards ES provision, perceptions, and use of urban parks, studies that have dealt with one or more of these aspects before are most relevant for putting our analyses in context1. One example for such a study is Chiesura (2004), who analyzes people’s reasons for and perceived benefits of visiting urban parks. Examples for studies that focus on the use and perception of urban parks include Zhang et al. (2013), Özgüner, 2011 and Lo and Jim (2010). Some studies also analyze attitudes towards and/or the perception of urban parks and ES provided by them but leave out actual use (e.g., Bonaiuto et al., 2003; Balram and Dragićević, 2005, Jim and Chen, 2006, Kabisch and Haase, 2014). Other studies analyze preferences for varying types of vegetation, differentiating between different groups of people, for example between residents and landscape planners (Hofmann et al., 2012). Some studies also relate socio-economic characteristics to attitudes towards urban parks, to perception of urban parks or to preferences for park characteristics using statistical tests (Chiesura, 2004, Jim and Chen, 2006, Jim and Shan, 2012) or econometric analysis (Bjerke et al., 2006).
These studies mostly focus on a particular park in one city (e.g., Kabisch and Haase, 2014, Chiesura, 2004) which limits general statements and, furthermore, comparability with other studies due to, for example, differences in survey design and varying degrees of detail. One rare exception is Van Dyck et al. (2013), who analyze neighborhood perception and physical activity in Baltimore (USA), Seattle (USA), Adelaide (Australia) and Ghent (Belgium). The focus of the van Dyck study, however, is different from ours because Van Dyck et al. (2013) focus on physical activity and not on a broader set of recreational activities. Moreover, they do not consider people’s attitudes towards ES provision or their perceptions of urban parks. We thus add to the literature by providing a comparative study on people’s attitudes towards ES provision, perception, and use of urban parks in four European cities. This allows investigating whether general patterns are observable and to what extent findings are transferable between different locations and across countries. The four cities are interesting examples for comparison because they are quite different with respect to size, location, physical geography, and economic structure. But they are all faced with projected increases of population numbers in the medium term, which might put pressure on existing urban parks2.
In addition, many studies that analyze people’s preferences for urban parks do not systematically include the ES framework in their analysis. First, this implies that most preference studies about urban parks directly consider recreation without paying attention to the question of how other cultural urban ES such as spiritual experiences and aesthetic appreciation are valued by citizens (e.g., Zhang et al., 2013; Özgüner, 2011). Second, most studies investigating regulating services consider the potential of urban ecosystems such as urban parks to provide these services but they do not ask to what extent this potential is recognized by the citizens (e.g., Bolund and Hunhammar, 1999; Kabisch et al., 2013). While it is important to know the potential of urban parks to provide regulating ES, it is also interesting to find out whether this multi-functionality of urban parks is recognized by the citizens. Jim and Chen (2006) is the only study that we are aware of that investigates to which extent people recognize the importance of different urban ES provided by urban parks and green spaces. We thus add to the literature by showing which services of urban parks citizens recognize and how they value them.
Finally, we relate people’s stated importance of park characteristics to how these characteristics are perceived by park visitors in the four cities. If there are differences between what people find important and how parks are designed and equipped, then this will be valuable information for city planners because it informs them which characteristics of urban parks need improvement to meet the needs of the visitors. Subjective information on how people perceive the quality of urban parks may, in addition, help city planners to evaluate whether the measures they have taken fulfil the intended purpose. Some of the characteristics might be more easily altered (e.g., equipment with facilities such as playgrounds) than others (e.g., distance).
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents main information about the case study cities as well as information about survey content, design, and implementation as well as the statistical methods used for the analyses. Section 3 presents the results, including a description of main demographic characteristics of the sample populations in the four cities and a comparative description of people’s attitudes, perception, and use of urban parks in the four cities. Section 4 discusses the results and concludes.
Section snippets
Case study cities
The case study cities considered in this paper are Berlin (Germany), Stockholm (Sweden), Rotterdam (The Netherlands), and Salzburg (Austria). Key demographic, geographic, environmental, and economic characteristics of the case study cities are summarized in Table 1. The Maps provided as Online Appendix show the distribution of urban green spaces3
Descriptive statistics of key demographic and household characteristics
Table 2 provides descriptive statistics for key demographic and household characteristics of the respondents in the four case study cities. The average age of the respondents is quite similar among the four cities, ranging from 40 years in the case of Salzburg to 47 years in the case of Stockholm. Before we start investigating the perceived importance of park attributes and park use patterns, it is important to learn if there are differences among the respondents in the different cities
Discussion and conclusions
Our study compares attitudes towards ES provision, perception and use of urban parks between residents of four European cities. Regarding the perceived importance of parks for the provision of ES, we find that parks are perceived most important for providing recreational ES, followed by regulating ES, other cultural ES such as tourism and aesthetic appreciation, supporting ES, and provisioning ES in descending order. This reveals a common understanding in all case study cities that
Acknowledgements
We thank Tim Hartmann and Swantje Sundt for excellent research assistance. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research provided welcome financial support through the project “Urban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” (URBES; 01LC1101A), funded within the European BiodivERsA framework.
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