Assessing the Liveability in the European Metropolitan Cities by Interpreting the Property Markets

This study examines the functional relationship between urban live-ability and residential property values in a sample of 53 European metropolitan cities. The underlying assumption is that housing prices incorporate not only the physical attributes of dwellings, but also the environmental, social, and economic factors of the urban context. To test this hypothesis, two hedonic models are estimated,using as dependent variables the average price per square metre of apartments located in the city centre and in the periphery. The explanatory variables include the Cost of Living, the Quality of Life, the Tree Cover, and the Population. The empirical results show high explanatory power for both models and confirm the statistical significance of all the variables considered. Among them, tree cover emerges as the most influential determinant of housing prices in both urban con-texts,indicating the growing relevance of environmental quality in metropolitan housing markets. By contrast, the broader Quality of Life index appears less influential than variables associated with purchasing conditions and demographic pressure. These findings suggest that urban green infrastructure is more directly capitalised into the property values, whereas the social and service-related components of liveability exert a less immediate effect.