Abstract
It is important to integrate user preferences and demands into the design, planning, and management of urban forests. This is particularly important in highly urbanized areas where land is extremely limited. Based on a survey with 600 participants selected by quota sampling in Seoul, Korea, we developed a conjoint choice model for determining the preferences of urban dwellers on urban forest attributes, the levels of attributes, and the preferences for particular attributes. Then, the preferences were transformed into monetary values. The results indicated that urban dwellers preferred broadleaved forests over coniferous forests, soil-type pavement materials over porous elastic pavement materials on trails, and relatively flat trails over trails with steep slopes. The model indicated that participants were willing to pay an additional 11.42 USD to change coniferous forest to broadleaved forest, 15.09 USD to alter porous elastic pavement materials on trails to soil-type pavement materials on trails, and 23.8 USD to modify steeply sloping trails to relatively flat trails. As previously reported, considerable distance decay effects have been observed in the user preferences for urban forests. We also found a significant difference in the amount of the mean marginal willingness to pay among sociodemographic subgroups. In particular, there were significant positive responses from the male group to changes in urban forest attributes and their levels in terms of their willingness to pay additional funds. By contrast, the elderly group had the opposite response. In this study, we were not able to integrate locality and spatial variation in user preferences for urban forests derived from locational characteristics. In future studies, the role of limiting factors in user preferences for urban forests and their attributes should be considered.
Highlights
Urban forests are valuable and integral components of the urban environment
Decision makers, and the designers of urban forests, it is an important but difficult task to respond to user’s preferences and demands. This is critical in highly urbanized areas where land values are extremely high and the land available for urban forests is extremely limited, because every planning, management, and design practice is required to be justified
The results indicated that urban dwellers in our study area preferred broadleaved forest (11.42 USD) over coniferous forest, soil-type pavement materials (15.09 USD) over porous elastic pavement materials on trails, relatively flat trails (23.8 USD) over trails with steep slopes and a short travel time (18.03 USD for less than 15 min) to the urban forest from home
Summary
Urban forests are valuable and integral components of the urban environment. In previous studies, urban forests have been shown to provide numerous ecological and environmental benefits such as enhancing water quality, improving air quality, conserving energy, carbon storage, reducing storm water runoff, and enhancing biodiversity (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]). Tyrväinen (2001) [14] investigated the influence of urban green environments on stress relief in a study with 95 participants in Helsinki, Finland, and reported that natural settings may differ in terms of their restorative quality. Their results suggested that remaining longer than 15 min in a natural environment was necessary to enhance the feelings of vitality. Many recent studies have reported significant positive relationships of urban forests with mortality, physical conditions, mental indicators, and the level of physical activity undertaken by urban residents [19,20,21,22,23,24]
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