En quoi le cadre de vie rural contribue-t-il à expliquer les prix fonciers dans les espaces périurbains ?

Agricultural activities, natural spaces and forests generate amenities that characterise the local environments of periurban households. As a result, amenities evaluation is of importance in a wide range of public policy-making. We introduce an amenity variable to an urban economics model extended to periurban areas. The refined model suggests that amenities may weaken the traditional decreasing relationship between land prices and distance from the city centre if rural amenities grow with distance. The model is applied to a study of three French departments : Rhône, Ain and Isère. A hedonic framework evaluates the contribution of specific rural features which characterise periurban household?s living spaces on land prices. Results from the study suggest that the decrease of land prices over distance from city centre is much lower in periurban areas than results from other studies confined to urban areas exclusively. In addition, we find that households appear to attach more significance to remarkable protected sites than to agricultural environments in general. Classification JEL : R21, R14, R52.