The VALUE project will deliver and apply economic valuation tools to green infrastructure at the city region scale, capable of handling landscape level value 
impacts. It will build on earlier innovations addressing the site scale.    
   
The project will be innovative by achieving the following three key objectives;    
   
•demonstrating how cities/regions can target greenspace investments to locations where they will maximise economic benefits;    
•taking a transnational approach in promoting the competitive benefits of green infrastructure;    
•establishing a link between the value of city-centre commercial property and its proximity to greenspace.    
   
VALUE builds on a previous Interreg IIIB project, Creating a Setting for Investment (CSI), which showed that at the regional scale, high quality landscapes 
are key economic drivers. This contrasts markedly with the fine (site) scale at which private developers and land valuers operate.   
   
VALUE aims to solve the problem of how should regional and local authorities target their resources to the locations where they will achieve the maximum added 
value and return?    
   
Previous rigorous economic valuations have so far only demonstrated impacts on residential property around parks. Projects on commercial development 
have only shown 'correlations'. Providing open space in cities involves a trade-off with other uses, and can often be seen simplistically as ‘land-take'. 
Although it is often argued that high quality designs incorporating greenspaces lead to more valuable office or retail developments, this cannot yet be substantiated. 
VALUE therefore aims to establish whether city centre commercial properties near greenspaces are more valuable, further developing robust tests used in 
CSI for peri-urban brownfield redevelopments. This project would thus be the first of its kind to demonstrate cause and effect.