Residential satisfaction about urban greenness: Heterogeneous effects across social and spatial gradients

Abstract

Rapid urbanisation in developing countries is putting pressure on urban greenness supplies and living environment. Access to parks plays an important role for people's lived experiences about urban greenness. While existing studies have mostly focused on the capitalized value of access to parks on property values, few studies have been conducted on the relationship between access to parks and residential satisfaction towards the greenness domain in developing countries. This study fills this gap through the detailed investigation about individuals’ perceptions about residential satisfaction towards the greenness domain using a large-scale resident survey in metropolitan Beijing. We focus on the ways in which this relationship is moderated by complementary effects between access to parks and contextual amenities in order to explore how residents’ satisfaction perceptions are shaped by socio-spatial gradients. The results show that limited access to parks is associated with lower residential satisfaction towards the greenness domain. Importantly, the psychological implications of access to parks vary with household demographics, and contextual amenities such as schools, recreational amenities and crime rates. These findings reveal the importance of the socio-spatial contextualized dependent nature of perceived benefits of access to parks as is subjectively experienced by residents.