Geographical Stratification of Green Urban Areas

This paper studies the provision of urban green areas in cities when residents havepreferences for the size of and access to those areas. At the optimum, the number ofurban green spaces is a non-monotone function of distance to the city centre, whilethe sizes and distances to other urban green areas increase as one moves to the urbanfringe. This paper empirically investigates those properties for the 300 largest Europeancities by using the GMES Urban Atlas database (European Environmental Agency).The empirical analysis confirms the non-monotone relationship between the numberof urban green spaces and the distance to the city centre. The distance between twoparks also increases as one moves toward the urban fringe. Finally, richer cities areassociated with a denser network of urban green areas.