Living Near to Attractive Nature? A Well-Being Indicator for Ranking Dutch, Danish, and German Functional Urban Areas

While nature is widely acknowledged to contribute to people’s well-being,nature based well-being indicators at city-level appear to be underprovided. This studyaims at filling this gap by introducing a novel indicator based on the proximity of cityresidentsto nature that is of high-amenity. High-amenity nature is operationalized bycombining unique systematic data on people’s perceptions of what are the locations ofattractive natural areas with data on natural land cover. The proposed indicator departsfrom the usual assumption of equal well-being from any nature, as it approximates the‘actual’ subjective quality of nature near people’s homes in a spatially explicit way. Suchindicator is used to rank 148 ‘cities’ in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. Internationalcomparability of the indicator is enhanced by the use of a definition of cities asfunctional urban areas (FUAs), which are consistently identified across countries. Resultsdemonstrate that the average ‘nearness’ of FUA populations to high amenity nature varieswidely across the observed FUAs. A key finding, that complements insights from existingcity-level indicators, is that while populations of FUAs with higher population densitiesmay live relatively far from nature in general, they also live, on average, closer to highamenitynature than inhabitants of lower density FUAs. Our results may stimulate policydebateson how to combine urban agglomeration with access to natural amenities in orderto account for people’s wellbeing.