Do Greener Environments Support Better Business? An Empirical Study in Seoul’s Commercial Alleys

This study investigates the association between urban greenness and sales in commercial alleys. We focus on 1090 commercial alleys in Seoul, South Korea, defined as neighborhood-scale open commercial streets or districts composed of small retail, service, cafe, and restaurant businesses, and combine spatially explicit measures of greenness with data on weekend sales to assess how variation in vegetation is associated with local economic performance. Greenness is measured by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from remote sensing imagery. We employ a set of global and spatially explicit models, including Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR), and a Python Geographical Random Forest (PyGRF, v0.0.12), to capture both overall and location-specific relationships. The results show that higher levels of greenness are significantly associated with higher weekend sales, with spatial heterogeneity observed across different areas of the city. The green investment efficiency index (GIEI) results further identify clusters of high investment efficiency in areas characterized by strong greenness–sales associations and relatively limited existing greenness. High GIEI values were concentrated in areas near natural amenities and dense residential neighborhoods, indicating potential priority locations for targeted greening interventions. By linking objective measures of greenness to observed sales at the scale of everyday commercial environments, this study contributes to a better understanding of how urban greenness is associated with consumer behavior and local economic activity. The findings provide practical implications for identifying areas where greening strategies may be considered as part of broader efforts to support more resilient and sustainable neighborhood commercial areas, while recognizing that the observed relationships are associative rather than causal.