Assessing the Value of Environmental Attributes of Urban Public Spaces by Using Choice Experiment and Contingent Valuation Methods, Case study: Sofeh Mountainous Park of Isfahan

Rapid growth of cities and their physical development cause different crises in urban life like the drop in the quality of environment. Following this the necessity of paying attention to the concept of quality and its promotion in urban environments along with the attention towards quantitative problems is more felt. Considering to the social, livelihood and identity values of citizens and urban aesthetic measures such as the main criteria for enhancing the quality of urban environment, especially the urban public space as a heart of the city and in addition to positive psychological results, and also considering the common interests of citizens can be improved satisfaction of citizens in urban public space and encouraged the presence of more space. Therefore, considering to the environmental quality values from the viewpoint of the citizens is one of the most important issues in urban planning. Planning to improve the quality of urban public space is important and necessary. Urban public spaces plans and projects include the variety of types of economic, social and environmental interests. This is despite the fact that a significant proportion of annual income were spent on urban projects that real benefits were not included, such as urban public spaces programs and planning. In fact, a careful study of the costs and benefits would not be in urban plans and projects. The benefits of environment values that play the important role in improving the environmental quality of urban public spaces are examples of such these benefits and in fact, the accurate quantifying of the environmental values is one of the current issues in analysis of obtained impacts of urban projects. Soffeh park of Isfahan, is one of the urban spaces of this city which is regarded as an effective public space for the citizens in the recent years. Yet to be considering this space because of physical characteristics, historical, social, cultural, and recreational services it is a public space with high quality urban upgrading to find. The purpose of this paper is to assess the quality of the environment and to rank the willingness of users to pay and to improve the quality of each environmental value from the perspective of people who go to this park. Methodology of this study is based on Choice Experiment Method (CEM) and Contingent Valuation Method (CVM). These methods used for evaluating environmental values and information which are received from answers to the hypothetical questions. In this research by using these methods, environmental quality values were chosen based on the review of the theoretical literature. Willingness levels of the urban space users to pay and its prioritization were studied by questionnaire. By using contingent valuation method, it can be estimated the willingness to pay for environmental values and can be stated the amount of monetary of those willingness in Rials. Moreover, the willing to pay for environmental goods and services that have not been used (but there is a chance to use them in the future) can be measured. The willingness to pay is quantitatively expressed by Choice Experiment Method. Despite of contingent valuation method, it does not examine the scale of money directly. It could value each features of affecting the willingness to pay, also determine the ranking of each of the features compared with others and measure the relationship between different factors affecting the choice of users (perceived correlation) eventually. In these methods, environmental quality values were chosen based on the review of the theoretical literature. The analysis results showed that the quality of environment in the Soffeh park is at low threshold (3> 1 / 83> 1) and fairly satisfaction. The results of CEM showed that all value variants had a high relation to choose their urban space. (0 / 05> P) Access variant had the highest priority from the user viewpoints (with number 1 / 25), and also the results of CVM showed that people tend to pay 1500 Rials for entering to the Soffeh park and none of the Social - Economic user features is affected on this tendency.