The greener, the happier? The effects of urban green and abandoned areas on health

This paper investigates the effects of urban green and abandoned areas on residential well-being and health in major German cities, using panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the time period between 2000 and 2012 and cross-section data from the European Urban Atlas (EUA) for the year 2006. Using a Geographical Information System (GIS), it calculates the distance to urban green and abandoned areas, measured as the Euclidean distance in 100 metres between households and the centroid of the nearest urban green and abandoned area, respectively, and the coverage of urban green and abandoned areas, measured as the hectares covered by urban green and abandoned areas in a pre-defined buffer area of 1,000 metres around households, respectively, as the most important determinants of their accessibility. It demonstrates that, for the 32 major German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, urban green areas, such as parks, have significantly positive effects, whereas abandoned areas, such as brownfields, have significantly negative effects on residential well-being, in particular on life satisfaction, as well as mental and physical health. The effects are sizeable and strongest for residents who are older, accounting for about a third of the size of the effect of being unemployed on life satisfaction in case of abandoned areas. Using data from the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II), this paper also shows that older residents who report living closer to greens have been diagnosed significantly less often with certain medical conditions, including diabetes, cardiac disease, sleep disorder, and joint disease.