Evaluating Land-Use Restrictions concerning the Floor Area Ratio of Lots

Abstract

Introduction In Japanese city planning, urban areas are classified into`land-use zones' so that buildings used for very different purposes do not coexist in the same area. At the same time, there are restrictions on the form of buildings so that a balance between development and urban infrastructure is maintained, buildings are appropriately arranged, and buildings and roads receive enough light and ventilation. Because the planning administration lacks an effective procedure for monitoring the change of use of existing buildings, in practice different uses compete for the same land. Therefore, restrictions on the forms of buildings which determine the development capacity of land are emphasized in the current land-use control system (Asami 1994). Under restrictions known as the`zoning floor area ratio', (1) in each land-use zone the maximum floor area ratio of lots must not exceed the floor area ratio (FAR) designated for that land-use zone. In addition, buildings are restricted by a variety of rules which apply to individual lots: these rules are called`shape controls'. Specifically, the maximum FAR of each lot is proportional to the width of the road in front of the lot (hereinafter, thè front road'). The heights and shapes of buildings are also controlled by absolute height limits, shadow restrictions, and slant-plane restrictions. According to the shadow restrictions, the shadow of a building cannot fall outside of its plots for more than a certain period during the winter solstice. Under slant-plane restrictions, the height of buildings is restricted according to the distance from the front-road boundary or

Measuring the Stringency of Land Use Regulation: The Case of China's Building Height Limits

“…Some site characteristics contained in Z will be unobserved and thus present in the error term in (13). But, from (19), these unobserved elements of Z will also influence h. Thus, the FAR limit in (13) (which is h) will be correlated with the error term.…”

“…Note that the standard errors for the regression are clustered at the city-district level. 13 Panel B of Table 2 shows the results from estimation of (15) In panels (i) and (ii) of Figure 2, we plot the distributions of city-specific coefficients.…”

“…City-district by year fixed effects are denoted by α cdt . Note that these fixed effects subsume the Z variable from (13).…”

“…In other countries 2 A few related studies examine FAR regulation in other countries. Using data on 273 land lots in the Tokyo area, Gao et al (2006) estimate hedonic regressions to explore the effect of FAR restrictions on land prices. Brueckner and Sridhar (2012) measure welfare gains from relaxation of FAR restrictions in India.…”

Temporal analysisof urban changes and development in Warsaw’s ventilation corridors

“…the floor area ratio is the sum of the total floor area in a building divided by the area of the land on which it is built (Kono, Kaneko & Morisugi 2010). Floor area ratio (FaR) is widely used in urban planning (Joshi & Kono 2009;Gao et al 2006;Feng 2009) and is most commonly the ratio for a single allotment or a piece of land determined by a binding site/development plan. thus a reference area had to be chosen that was neither too detailed, nor emitting important information.…”