B0620
Title: Evaluating the impact of built environment interventions in philadelphia
Authors: Shane Jensen - The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: Urban analytics has recently been improved through publicly available high-resolution data, allowing us to empirically investigate urban design principles of the past half-century. We will evaluate a specifically built environment intervention, the greening of vacant lots in Philadelphia, in terms of potential effects on neighborhood safety and real estate value. We will use several matching strategies to address the issue that greened vacant lots are substantially different from ungreened vacant lots in terms of their surrounding demographic and economic context. We estimate larger and more significant crime reductions around vacant lots that are greened in our matching analysis compared to unmatched analyses. The effects of vacant lot greening on crime are larger in areas with high residential and low commercial land use and are moderated by the presence of different types of nearby businesses.
