Does Urban Quality pay? How to assess the impact of accessibility, services and public spaces through a hybrid evaluation approach

Real Estate prices are influenced by the presence of multidimensional factors and many studies have been carried on to prove the correlation between property prices and extrinsic (location, neighborhood’s quality, etc.) as well as intrinsic (structural features, systems, etc.) characteristics. As it emerges by many consumers’ preferences investigations, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a shift to healthier cities. In major cities, green and open spaces are typically the only chance citizens have of coming into contact with nature and they fulfils environmental and social functions which improve quality of life and wellbeing. The aim of the current contribution is to assess the value of the urban quality by considering both spatial multicriteria variables and its marginal price, in order to explore its impact on real estate market. In fact, the quality of the built environment is a multidimensional notion, as it deals with the land use patterns and mixes, the spatial and temporal distribution of activities, the accessibility to services, the open spaces and green areas, the air quality, the arrangement and appearance of the physical elements of urban design. Given the spatial nature of urban quality and the multiple aspects to be considered, a hybrid evaluation approach has been defined by combining Spatial Multicriteria Analysis with the Hedonic Price Method. In line with urban design domain of research, the features contributing to the overall urban quality and analyzed within this study are the presence of public open spaces, influenced by i) the physical setting, ii) connectivity, iii) vitality, iv) meaning, v) protection, the accessibility and the provision of services. Since the linear regression models cannot take into account the interaction effects between different variables, non linear exponential multiplicative model computed via Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) has been applied.The proposed evaluation approach has been tested on three urban districts in the city of Milan (Italy), with different location features and located on the north-eastern side of the Municipality, from the center to the administrative border. By putting a light on urban quality marginal prices, the results of the this study could be considered as a contribution to address the real estate market actors choices about the trade-offs between economics and environmental quality.