Quantifying the benefits of urban amenities in Singapore with consideration of the effects of spatial heterogeneity

Abstract

Studying urban amenities is crucial for understanding their impact on quality of life, social equity, and sustainable city development. However, the valuation of urban amenities on a holistic level is understudied. This paper builds upon the framework of isobenefit lines, where residents supposedly receive the same level of combined benefits from all urban amenities. Specifically, our proposed approach takes into account the spatial heterogeneity of amenities and the proxy data of property transaction prices in Singapore to estimate their underlying monetary values. These monetary values were quantified using geographically weighted regression (GWR) that can adequately address spatial autocorrelation issues. Our results show that GWR outperforms the global linear regression model by approximately 150% increase in the R-square value, demonstrating a much better goodness of fit when dealing with spatial data sets. Additionally, the signs of the average coefficients of GWR are largely consistent with those of the global model, while the signs and magnitude of the GWR coefficients vary spatially. The spatial variations of modeling performance tend to intensify from older to younger towns. The results reveal that the central regions of Singapore are among the top spots that receive the highest levels of composite benefits. It is also observed that a spatial structure with multiple centers with high benefit scores emerges in the younger towns located in the peripheral rings of the city. This observation demonstrates the efforts of local authorities to promote a city with several regional centers of diverse functions. As the first study that applies the concept of isobenefit lines in a real urban setting, we demonstrate that the developed framework can be a useful addition to the existing toolbox of urban and infrastructure planners.