Preference-Based Planning of Urban Green Spaces: A Latent-Class Clustering Approach

Green spaces within cities are important oases of restoration and space for physical activities. Due to the health benefits provided by visits to urban green space, encouraging people to increase frequentation may be a public policy objective. To do this, individual attitudes should be considered because individuals may not respond in the same way to the increasing availability of green spaces. In this paper, we propose a latent-class analysis to probabilistically allocate respondents into homogeneous groups, each with similar attitudes towards green-space visitation. The data originated from a questionnaire survey of adult Irish citizens who resided in major Irish cities. Results identified three groups of users with varying visitation and attitudes and suggested that the conditions of the neighbourhood where people reside can influence attitudes and willingness to visit green spaces, thus raising questions about access to green spaces.