Revisiting the Proximity Principle with Stakeholder Input: Investigating Property Values and Distance to Urban Green Space in Potchefstroom
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have read the manuscript carefully. There is certainly material in this manuscript that fits the aims of ‘land’ well, and would be of interest to an international audience. However, I have a number of concerns that should be addressed.
1) The paper is written very much like a graduate thesis chapter – lines 49-55 appear exactly like an outline to a thesis. The paper is over-long, because it is repetitive (the aims of the paper are repeated at least three times) and includes much review material that is so general as to be unnecessary.
For example, lines 57-62 can be cut. The literature review section (Section 2) should be reduced substantially. Readers don’t need a general background review to green spaces, ecosystem services, or environmental economic evaluation and revealed preferences by hedonic pricing. Just focus the literature review to how these topics are applied to South African cities such as Pochefstroom. That is the really interesting stuff, and what’s needed to place the authors’ current work in context.
2) The statistical hypothesis testing used for the hedonic pricing appears all garbled, The authors may wish to consult a statistician.
a) What measure of effect size is being used? There are multiple ways – is this Cohen’s D = (Mean1 – Mean2)/pooled SD ?
b) It makes no sense to say “The p-values were only included for the sake of completeness, thus, not interpreted.” What’s the point of a statistical hypothesis test, then?? I see no point in interpreting an effect size if the statistical hypothesis test conclusion is no significant difference.
- c) Kuskal-Wallis is a non-parametric ANOVA, to be used when the data violate the assumptions required for ANOVA. You use one or the other as is appropriate, but not both.
3) Table 1 indicates that in only 2 of five locations is there a significant effect of distance to greenway on pricing. If a Bonferroni correction was used to correct for multiple testing, only one (Grimbeck Park) would be significant. One problem is that replication is modest per Area-Zone (n = 9-15), so statistical power is not high.
Why not do a mixed ANOVA, with Area as a random factor and Zone as a fixed factor? This would be a much more powerful test
4) In table 2, why weren’t the ‘old’ 2013 values corrected for the 2019 value of the rand? As is, the data confirm that housing prices have increased, but that may all be attribute to falling value of the rand (inflation). What would really be interesting is a comparison of the relative increases – did the different zones on average increase at different rates. That’s the comparison to make for this paper, not just that housing prices are climbing overall.
5) Figure 7, 8:Remove the bar for ‘total respondents’ and state in the legend the sample size. The y-axis should be percent respondents.
The methodology is unclear – how do the interviewers know that respondents understand a question like “ urban green spaces have social value”. Moreover, what does a response of yes (or no) mean? This is usually in relation to something else. For example, does a green space have greater social value than a shopping center, or housing project.
6) There is a long section on Recommendations (Section 5). It is interesting, and many of the recommendations appear sound. However, where do they come from? These do not directly come out of the empirical results in Section 3, or out of the literature review. Clearly the authors are informed and these recommendations are thoughtful, but they don’t directly follow from the literature review or empirical results, as far as I can tell.
Minor comments:
- No need to include page numbers with citations (e.g. line 279 “Potchefstroom) [13] (pp. 63). “ . This is generally not done in a published paper.
- What is ZAR? South African rands?
- No reason to specify “Source: Own composition” on figures and tables that are clearly the authors’.
- Sections where the authors compare the prior Cilliers papers to this paper are confusing. Take great care to make clear what papers (and time periods) are being referred to.
- The abstract, oddly, doesn’t summarize the empirical results and what can be concluded. That’s a key component of an abstract.
Author Response
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All changes in the paper are indicated in red
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Though the paper has considerable added value to urban green space literature, the current title is too general, and makes the feeling that it covers some theoretical or systematic quantitative review. I ask to change the title which reflects more the empirical study. Connected to that, I would avoid driving consequences from the literature part in the Conclusions section.
The number of completed questionaires (and the fact that they were not representatively chosen) do not allow making general statements, it should rather be considered a case study. It should be clarified in the description, and the discussing sentences about those results have to be checked and changed according to that.
A map about the location of Potchefstroom in the country (before/together with the map in Figure 1) would be useful for the readers.
Author Response
Please refer to uploaded document
All revisions made in the paper are indicated in red
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an interesting study, and with substantial revision, may be worth publishing.
This is currently written like a thesis with too much literature review and not enough methodological detail. The authors must make substantial revisions. Additionally, I think the methods my be incorrect, or interpreted incorrectly.
The survey results should be analyzed, not just presented.
And the discussion should put this study in the context of what others have done. The current discussion seems to be more of a literature review.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please refer to attached document
All changes made to paper are indicated in red
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have done a fine job addressing the reviewer comments - and so quickly!
While I still believe that some will question details of the statistical analyses, I'll concede to the authors justification. Readers can evaluate for themselves.
The only minor edit I can recommend is that the international style is for the decimal to be a period, not a comma. This should be changed in the tables and elsewhere.
Author Response
Thank you for the feedback provided. We changed the punctuation as proposed.
Please refer to line 276-284, Table 3 in line 285, 287, 303-305, Table 4 in line 310, 332, Figure 3 in line 325 and Figure 4 in line 349.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
