Benefits and costs of urban parks: a review

Abstract

Urban parks (UPs) play a fundamental role in improving the quality of living in urban areas since they can produce many types of benefits for the inhabitants. In the last years scholars have devoted a lot of effort to estimating the economic value of these benefits. The literature review has shown that previous studies are not free of bias and limitations, but they contributed towards improving our knowledge on the benefits that UPs produce and the methodologies that can be used to estimate them. As a general results it is possible to state that in many cases the flow of benefits largely overcomes the management costs so the UPs seem to produce a net gain for the citizens.