Green Urban Areas

This paper studies the size and location of urban green areas across city spaces. Urban green areas offer amenities that affect residential choices, land consumption and land rent. This paper discusses the socially optimal sizes and locations of urban green areas within a city and their decentralized allocation through land markets. The main result is that the share of land dedicated to urban green areas is a concave 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. The importance of urban green areas is finally assessed by a counterfactual analysis, where 50% of urban green areas are removed in each city