Small urban green areas

This paper studies the size and location of small urban green areas across city spaces. Small urban green areas offer amenities that affect residential choices, land consumption and land rent. This paper discusses the land use and locations of those areas and the resulting residential space allocation. It is shown that the land share dedicated to small urban green areas results from the trade-off between land value and population density and is a single peaked function of the distance to the city center. This result is confirmed by the empirical study of urban structures in the 305 largest EU cities using GIS data. This spatial pattern is shown to be robust to many measures of urban land uses.