Care of Residential Landscapes: Cadastral Measures of Proximity Effects in Detroit, MI, USA

Abstract

While many studies have investigated proximity effects of greening, we know of no previous study that has employed a cadastral measure to examine proximity effects for urban residential landscapes. Cadastral refers to property boundaries, which is a different way to measure proximity compared with Euclidean measures, which are typically used. We assumed that each residential property would be managed homogeneously for cues to care (Nassauer, 2011) in visible front and side yards, and that consequently, measurement units delineated by residential properties boundaries would be more valid than units defined by Euclidean distance for measuring heterogeneity in landscape care. We investigated whether cadastral locations for surrounding residential properties significantly affect care for occupied residential parcels in two neighborhoods of Detroit, MI, USA, that are characterized by high levels of vacancy and abandonment of residential property. We used data describing cues to care for 8967 residential parcels information in the Brightmoor and Eastside neighborhoods. These data were collected by inspection of Google Street images checked by field inspection in summer 2011. We tested the relationship between each occupied parcel’s front yard cues to care and its surrounding parcels’ occupancy and care characteristics at eight cadastral locations. We describe these cadastral locations in Fig. 1. We hypothesized that for all surrounding parcels’ characteristics, cadastral locations that were adjacent, face-face and rook-face locations relative to the case parcels would influence the care of case parcels, and that adjacent parcels would have the greatest influence on care of case parcels. We hypothesized that back-back parcels and rook-back parcels, in contrast, would have no significant relationship with care of the case parcels, despite having similar Euclidean distances from the case parcels. Considering different care characteristics of surrounding parcels, we hypothesized that positive care of surrounding parcels would more powerfully affect cues to care of case parcels than would abandoned houses or vacant land on surrounding parcels (Table 2). We further hypothesized that, compared with vacant land, abandoned houses on surrounding parcels would have a stronger negative effect on care of case parcels. Results show that cadastral measures are an important way to analyze and interpret the influence of people’s behavior to cities’ appearance, and the results may guide city planners and policy makers to find a more effective way to revitalize high-vacancy city areas.