Securing public objectives in large-scale urban development: Comparison of public and private land development

Abstract

Public authorities have a wide range of objectives related to urban development. Usually, they strive to achieve the objectives via land use planning but their involvement in land development can be significant as well. In this paper, we compare how, and to what extent, local authorities can safeguard public objectives through the use of public and private land development by analysing four illustrative cases of land development in two Nordic countries, Finland and Sweden. Our results suggest that public land development appears to bring significant added value for public authorities in respect of achieving both qualitative and economic objectives. On the other hand, to guarantee fair treatment of landowners, it appears important that public authorities have consistent long-term land policies concerning the use of public land development. However, within democratic societies such long-term policies may be infeasible due to short electoral terms.

Housing developers’ perceived barriers to implementing municipal sustainability requirements in Swedish sustainability-profiled districts

“…While municipalities in Sweden have a monopoly on urban planning and land use, as is the case in several countries (Tambach & Visscher, 2012), they also use their position as landowners to govern sustainability in local urban development (Francart et al, 2019). Similar utilisation of public land has been observed in the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany (Bulkeley & Kern, 2006;Greber, 2016;Smedby & Quitzau, 2016;Tambach & Visscher, 2012;Valtonen et al, 2018). In Sweden, municipalities use land allocation agreements to place project-specific sustainability requirements on building development projects that exceed the current building regulations (Brokking et al, 2020;Caesar, 2016;Candel et al, 2021;Francart et al, 2019;Smedby, 2016;Smedby & Quitzau, 2016;Storbjörk et al, 2018), referred to here as municipal sustainability requirements.…”

“…These are detailed development plans (detaljplaner) and building permits (bygglov), produced in that order (ibid). In the detailed development plans, municipalities can specify permitted uses of buildings, the size of buildings and the size of individual dwellings (Valtonen et al, 2018). It has become a common practice in Sweden to have housing developers carry out the early phases of their projects in parallel with the detailed planning process and participate in preparing detailed development plans (Kalbro, 2013).…”

Accelerated planning for urban housing infills: coordination strategies

“…In principle, it is possible to incentivize developers to accelerate their activities, especially when it is a question of municipal land ownership. Valtonen, Falkenbach, and Viitanen (2018) find when comparing Helsinki and Stockholm projects that there was more emphasis on deadlines and financial penalties in the Finnish cases, although the absence of binding development schedules and penalties in the Swedish cases had not caused any notable differences in the realization of development.…”

Planning initiative: Promoting development by the use of options in Amsterdam

“…Regulations often play a role in these governance arrangements, and could, for example, prohibit the withdrawal of housing from residential use, or prescribe provision of a certain percentage of affordable housing in any new development (De Kam et al, 2014). Because regulations do not force development (Valtonen et al, 2018), however, it is necessary to address needs to implement solutions to initiate development at preferred locations.…”