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Despite the well-known benefits associated with physical activity, the lack of physical exercise has risen to become one of the most severe health-related problems of the 21st century. Previous studies have found a good health profile and frequent engagement in physical activities to be positively correlated with productivity and mental well-being. Thus, it is of interest for the municipalities to better the health of their inhabitants. The accessibility of health-encouraging facilities, goods, and services have been discovered to be positively related to health and physical exercise. Hence, it is of interest to the municipalities to understand what drives the growth of these amenities. Especially considering that it is easier for municipalities to affect the accessibility of health amenities on a municipal level than changing lifestyle habits on an individual level.The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the growth of “health amenities”, defined as amenities encouraging a healthy lifestyle, is related to the share of high human capital individuals in the Swedish municipalities. To examine this relationship, this paper inspects the percentage change of employees within these establishments across the Swedish municipalities between 2010-2019 through a series of OLS regressions. The results indicate that the growth of health amenities is positively correlated to the share of high human capital individuals in the Swedish municipalities which confirms the hypothesis of this paper.

After compiling an appropriate list of beach criteria from established award programs and experts, the research landscape architect observed the Virginia Beach Resort Zone for areas of intense beach user activity.  The resulting analysis of these "hot-spots" indicated that urban resort beach users visiting the recreational beach during high-use times tended to gravitate toward locations on the resort beach which were close to three needs:  public parking, public restrooms, and inexpensive refreshments.  This pattern shows the apparent preferences of many beach users for certain amenities. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Standard models in urban economics assume that the boundary of an urban area will expand as long as the present value of land for urban uses is greater than the present value of land for rural uses. Under this assumption, the boundary of the urban area is endogenously determined by the rent paid to rural landowners. But this assumption is not realistic. The physical expansion of many major urban areas in the United States is impeded by an exogenous boundary. For example, geographic growth of the three most populated metropolitan areas in the country is limited by an ocean or a Great Lake. In this thesis, we argue that such exogenous boundaries affect land prices throughout the urban area because inter-city migration is costly and these boundaries effectively constrain the supply of land. Specifically, we develop a theoretical model in support of this conclusion and show that prices are highest in cities with the most restrictive exogenous boundaries, ceteris paribus. This argument implies that researchers who do not control for exogenous boundaries could be introducing a systematic bias in their findings if they use land prices or rents to measure the value of public amenities in urban areas or the relative desirability of different cities.

The intensification of downtown Vancouver is the result of a structured fiscal, design and planning project. Cardinal to this effort is the realization of public amenities through the development process. However, those involved in the struggle to control the provision of amenities deny that no less than the determination of legitimate public goods is at stake in the contest. Employing Bourdieu's understanding of capital and related description of social space, the objective of the thesis is to examine how amenity production is oriented by the public benefit's utility to the dominant interest of capital accumulation. Reviewing the adoption of discretionary zoning and its corollaries to planning permission explicates the relation of a legalized aesthetic to the process of amenitization. The understanding of physical heritage asa public value is among the derivatives of this association with the introduction of planning mechanisms to encourage the retention of historic structures. The subsequent naturalization of heritage as public value and concurrent endowment of its capacity to facilitate development serves as an appropriate vehicle in the consideration of amenity valuation. By specifying the physical form and the legitimated community value of approved development, City reports and bylaws are the primary means of study. Analysis of these documents finds heritage to be the principal amenity realized through development mechanisms and illustrates its substantial influence on the physical and social space of the city. Case studies further support the thesis objective by addressing the constitution of public amenities aligned with the accommodation of the dominant interest; the unbounded consideration of heritage supports the retention of the physical features most conducive to intensification and results in greater development ability in terms of both private capital and in the realization of more bounded social amenities. The misrecognition of this key utility lends considerable authority over the physical transformation of the city and, more importantly, facilitates control of the related social environment. The thesis concludes that heritage serves the ideological continuation of the field of power, and cautions that recent efforts to consider less tangible qualities are symptomatic of this process.