Despite the widespread use of physical improvements as a strategy to regenerate deprived and run-down urban areas, there is only limited evidence on the precise impact of these kinds of regeneration activities. A number of conceptual and methodological problems that impinge on all evaluations of regeneration policies have constrained the required evidence base. This paper evaluates the impact of publicly funded physical improvements of run-down industrial sites in the Netherlands and seeks to address several of these challenges; namely, selecting appropriate comparison areas, attributing change to specific interventions, access to small-scale, longitudinal data and selecting outcomes congruent with policy goals and rationales. Pooled data from various sources provide us with information on regeneration initiatives and other site characteristics for more than half of all sites in the country. Propensity score matching enables us to systematically compare economic outcomes related to regeneration policy goals between sites that have been subjected to regeneration and those that have not. The results of this study suggest that physical regeneration of industrial sites has a negligible effect on economic outcomes that are related to the most commonly articulated policy goals: the increase of employment, of firm numbers, of property values and of the intensity of land use on these sites. These findings add to a small but growing body of work that investigates the economic impact of regeneration programmes that fund physical investments on commercial and industrial areas.

Comparative research on gentrification is on the rise, especially since gentrification is no longer confined to historical, central neighbourhoods in First World countries, but also appeared in rural, new‐built areas and Second World countries. In this paper we present our comparative approach to investigate gentrification processes in four European cities (Arnhem, Istanbul, Vienna, Zurich), which differs from previous studies in its use of assemblage theory as research framework. The multi‐layered framework discerns three levels: ‘metrics’, ‘interpretations’, and ‘practices’. We argue that many comparative studies mainly focus on metrics, while researching interpretations and practices instead – and how these three levels influence each other through processes of actualisation and counteractualisation – would enhance our knowledge on gentrification. In doing so, we aim to provide a precise account of the nested relations of different layers of empirical reality and thus respond to various calls in the debate to intensively examine ‘geographies of gentrification’.

In the 1990s, Dutch nature policy adopted a new policy concept, 'nature development', whereas, until then, 'nature preservation' had largely dominated both the discourses and practices of nature policy-making. Nature development can be regarded as the Dutch counterpart of concepts such as ecological restoration, emerging simultaneously in other national nature policies. This paper argues that the rise of the nature development concept in the Netherlands is mainly due to the entrepreneurial strategies of a relatively small group of individuals. To study the impact of the latter's entrepreneurial strategies on the adoption and implementation of the new concept, we first made a content analysis of nature-policy documents issued between 1977, when the concept of nature development was coined for the first time, and 2012. Next, we analysed newspaper articles covering the debate on Dutch nature policy. Third, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the key individuals involved. This article deliberately takes an agency perspective, emphasising the complementary roles that policy entrepreneurs played in the different phases of the policy change process, with concept developers, early adopters and translators, and early implementers. Their success is to be attributed to a smart combination of discursive and network strategies. KEYWORDS Nature development, policy entrepreneurs, policy change, discursive framing SIMON VERDUIJN et al. 56 Environmental Values 24.1

The supply side of real estate markets has remained relatively neglected compared to the body of work that studies the demand side. Consequently, little is known about the way that suppliers actually make decisions about the quantity of land and property to be made available for sale at any one time. This paper investigates how one particular type of suppliers, public developers of serviced industrial building land in the Netherlands, assess market conditions, and the way these analyses influence decisions to make more serviced building land available. This paper presents evidence from interviews amongst municipal developers and finds that profit considerations are not the main motive behind their decisions to develop industrial land. Municipalities are involved in land development primarily because they want to be able to steer local economic development. Furthermore, they also pay attention to 'nonprice' signals of market conditions -sales levels in particular -when deciding to make more land available for sale. However, we should be cautious with interpreting these results since this study only addresses public agencies, which might operate with 'soft budget constraints' and might have alternative preference functions than commercial developers.

Local economic development is a much used tool for the regeneration of urban areas. Although the designation and effectiveness of local economic development policies has been studied extensively in existing literature, the question as to whether these policies are aimed at the areas that are most in need of these policies remains relatively understudied. This question has been answered using the case of industrial sites in the Netherlands. This particular type of urban area in the Netherlands has experienced problems with rapid urban area decline and has therefore been targeted by various area-based regeneration initiatives for many years. The economic performance is the main justification for the designation of industrial sites that are in greater need of regeneration. However, another pertinent and unanswered question is: are the industrial sites targeted for regeneration really the ones that underperform economically? (Multinomial) logistic regression analysis is used to answer this question. Differences in economic performance, measured by the growth in employment figures, the number of companies and property values, between industrial sites that are targeted for regeneration in two different rounds of regeneration initiatives and non-targeted sites are studied. The analysis shows that the differences in economic performance are negligible between these groups. It indicates that other criteria, such as political and strategic decision making influence policymakers' decisions to target industrial sites for regeneration, thus making it at least doubtful that public money for the regeneration of industrial sites is being spent on what it is meant for.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the specification of hedonic pricing models can be improved by using insights generated from qualitative research. In doing so, it seeks to address one of the main problems in the specification of hedonic models, namely that theory yields little guidance in the selection of the characteristics that should be included on the right-hand side. Design/methodology/approach – Building on the behavioural tradition in real estate research, this paper introduces a research approach that integrates insights from qualitative analysis in an econometric model of land values. The empirical segment explores the way in which asking prices of building plots for industrial purposes are determined in The Netherlands. It draws from interviews with municipal land developers, who dominate supply in this market. The information secured during these interviews relates to the characteristics considered important and the kind of information used in the valuation process. Based on these qualitative data, an econometric model is developed and estimated. Findings – The estimation results confirm qualitative evidence that the typical developer considers only a limited number of features of the land in the valuation process and that the primary source of information in setting asking prices relates to the prices charged in neighbouring municipalities. Originality/value – This paper represents a novel attempt to examine the determination of land and property values by merging qualitative and quantitative, econometric analyses.

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There has been a growing research interest in measuring the impact of planning and land-use regulations on housing market outcomes, but parallel development of the evidence base for the business sector has yet to occur. This article examines the impact of planning intervention on the amount of building investment taking place at sites allocated for industrial and business development. Measures that capture different dimensions of planning intervention are incorporated into models of industrial building investment. The models are estimated using a novel micro dataset on permit activity that covers a sample of industrial and business sites in the Netherlands. The results provide evidence of some of the expected negative effects of the regulatory role of planning intervention, but also show that proactive, targeted planning policies exert a significant and positive influence on investment activity. Specifically, policy-induced improvements to the physical environment will stimulate both new construction and refurbishment activity.