Content area
Full Text
Landscape amenities and disamenities are important factors for households in making residence decision. This study presents a hedonic analysis of the amenity and disamenity effects arising from the heterogeneous urban landscape in a Chinese city. The sample is composed of 358 apartment characteristics and transaction data collected directly from home owners in the central built-up area of Shenzhen. Four types of urban landscapes were included, namely urban parks, residential gardens, Shenzhen Bay, and urban villages. We applied a three-dimensional model (availability, accessibility, and visibility) to estimate the amenity-disamenity effects of these urban landscape features. The results indicated that residential gardens were the most attractive landscape (an average increase of 17.2% of housing price) and urban villages had disamenity effects (a decrease of 3.72% for visibility and 2.5% for availability). The visibility of landscape was more valued than the accessibility. The lower weight accorded to the availability variable suggested: both benefits and possible negative impacts related to urban parks and Shenzhen Bay could be embodied in home buyers' behaviour; and the unavoidability of urban villages. The findings could provide insights to the location and design of residential areas vis-à-vis amenity-disamenity landscape features in Chinese cities that are rapidly expanding and redeveloping.
KEY WORDS: Shenzhen, landscape amenity, hedonic pricing method, urban park, residential garden, urban village
Introduction
Urban development is generally highly anthropocentric in form and function, bringing significant alteration of the original landscape character. Complex agglomerations of buildings and infrastructures constitute the principal fabric of cities to satisfy multiple human needs (Antrop 2004). Natural landscape, usually existing as fragmented remnant patches and corridors within and around cities, have been retained and managed for passive recreational and amenity uses. In some compact cities, the high-rise, poor-quality and overcrowded housing may degrade the environmental quality and influence people's physical and mental health (Evans 2003). Such undesirable landscape elements might generate disamenity effect on neighbouring properties (Farber 1998). On the contrary, exposure to natural landscape would reduce the stressful effects of congestion and improve psychological well-being (Ulrich et al. 1991; Kaplan 2001), contributing notably to the quality of urban life in cities (Bishop et al. 2004).
Amenity or disamenity attached to various urban landscape types presents intrinsic and noncommodity benefits or disadvantages, which could influence residents' home-buying decisions...