Flexibility and Public Accountability in Public Land Development Projects in Progress

Abstract

Local authorities have moved many entrepreneurial activities outside the direct control of the municipal council. This includes land development activities relating to planning policies which involve both private development and public infrastructure. Many studies have shown that positioning activities outside the control of elected bodies undermines public accountability. Less is known, however, about public accountability in contexts where entrepreneurial activities are still run by the local authority. This issue may be particularly relevant when it comes to projects that are already underway because entrepreneurial activities imply flexibility and the choices made as part of this flexibility also need to be justified. This paper is based on a study of five key projects in a single municipality, Midden-Delfland in the Rotterdam/The Hague metropolitan region in the Netherlands, and analyses how land development projects are organized within a local authority. It shows that while they are structured to allow for flexibility in the process, the level of public accountability is not ideal. The quality of arguments used and the way in which decisions are justified leave room for improvement, which might be promising because they are organized within the local authority.     

Cost Efficiency,Urban Patterns and Population Density When Providing Public Infrastructure: A Stochastic Frontier Approach

Relying on stochastic frontier analysis we propose a methodology to study the technological characteristics and cost efficiency levels related to the provision of public infrastructure for basic utilities. The methodology assumes a cost minimizing behaviour on the part of public officials when planning the construction of local infrastructure, which is represented by way of a flexible translog cost function. Introducing relevant definitions of scale economies, associated with larger numbers of inhabitants and dwellings, as well as economies of density, brought about by reductions in urban dispersion, we analytically determine the optimal population densities for which average cost is minimized. We illustrate our model with the water cycle sector, including water distribution, sewage collection and cleansing of wastewater, and considering data at the municipality level for the Spanish region of Castilla y León. The obtained results indicate potential cost savings in the form of decreasing average costs, as relevant scale and density economies are present, along with large inefficiency levels. Relevant policy guidelines favouring larger and denser urban sizes are drawn, as the observed cost excess is the result of a general suboptimal urban size in terms of population density, and the negative effects of dispersed settlement patterns.     

Infrastructure Financing and Operation in the Contemporary City

The provision of large economic infrastructure in Australian cities is widely seen to be in crisis. This paper examines the reasons why crisis has arisen in the urban infrastructure sector and what might be done to redress this. The analysis and the argument are based on a resuscitation of the ideas and ideals of infrastructure provision and how these have been eroded. The paper shows how these ideas/ideals once underpinned the formulation of state role, governance and regulation systems, financial arrangements, and even community need and expectation. Critical to this was an acceptance of the ideals of universality, access, bundling and free positive externalities, and the belief that these should be assembled necessarily as part of any urban infrastructure roll-out. This package became instinctive in post-war economic and urban management. Yet this instinct has been lost as governments shift from models of infrastructure provision to infrastructure procurement where a major role for the private sector is now common. While such an involvement has its benefits, there are concerns for the urban condition when privatisation of infrastructure construction, delivery and operation becomes dominant. Citing Graham and Marvin (2001 ), the paper argues that, where once infrastructure was the key device for integrating the elements of the city and its people, the way it is now being delivered produces a splintered urbanism. There is an urgent need, then, to re-think what infrastructure means in today's urban context and thereafter to re-assess the criteria for deciding what infrastructure is to be provided, in what form it should be provided, who should provide it, who should pay, and who should operate it.     

基础设施建设水平与城乡生态经济系统发展的耦合分析——安康地区的实例研究

基础设施是一个多因素多层次的动态系统,随服务对象的不同,基础设施具有不同的概念和内涵。城市和乡村,都是在特定的自然环境基础上经过持续的文化、经济建设,而形成的社会、经济、自然复合生态系统。本文通过构建耦合关系分析模型,研究了两者之间的相互作用机理。     

The role of negotiated developer obligations in financing large public infrastructure after the economic crisis in the Netherlands

The economic crisis that started in 2009 has negatively impacted in the Netherlands the available financial resources for urban development. Dutch municipalities struggle since then with falling local financial sources, especially since active public land policy, traditionally an important additional financial source, became not so profitable anymore. One supposed effect is the limited degree to which municipalities can nowadays finance public infrastructure that serves wider areas, thus more than one specific development site (i.e. ‘large’ public infrastructure). Until now, however, there are no data available that support this claim. In this paper, we explore this and the role that developer obligations can play as an alternative, compensating financial source. Developer obligations are in many countries a growing popular public value capturing instrument, but in the Netherlands, a relative new phenomenon. On the basis of surveys, interviews and policy analysis, we conclude that at least a quarter of Dutch municipalities use developer obligations to obtain financial sources for large infrastructure. This seems, however, so far not to compensate for the diminishing of other municipal financial sources. The paper ends with some speculation about the future evolvement of developer obligations in the Netherlands.     

Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration*

Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.     

Infrastructure shortfall in the United Kingdom: the private finance initiative and government policy

Investment infrastructure is essential for long term economic growth, sustainable regional economic development, and the quality of urban life. Yet the available evidence suggests a significant shortfall in current UK government investment on infrastructure, and a long term pattern of low investment compared to other European countries. Given the pre-occupation of the Labour government with managing expenditures within the parameters set by the previous government, and the vulnerability of any government to financial markets' valuation of current spending plans in relation to interest rates and currency exchange rates, there is little likelihood of major new public spending on infrastructure in the near future. In this context, the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is very important for the government's plans to make up the shortfall. Although inherited from the previous Conservative government, the PFI has powerful advocates within the Labour government. The PFI is the formal mechanism by which government departments, agencies and instrumentalities, like the National Heath Service, utilise private sector investment capital and, in particular, pension fund assets, to revitalise public services. This paper sets out the institutional history of the PFI, beginning with the Thatcher government's Ryrie Rules, the efforts of the Major Conservative government to make it a viable operational practice, and the reasons why the new government supports PFI and has made significant moves to improve its effectiveness. Still we are sceptical about the future of the PFI. We show that the PFI has foundered upon fundamentally flawed design and the politicians' obsession with control of public sector spending. Notwithstanding recent `reforms', PFI may only succeed if the PFI process is decentralised and linked explicitly with regional development programmes. In any event, given the difficulties posed by the PFI process for private investors, perhaps different institutional responses to infrastructure shortfall should be contemplated, including the introduction of traded infrastructure bonds.     

Physical Planning in Entrepreneurial Urban Governance—Experiences from the Bo01 and Brunnshög Projects,Sweden

Recent research has argued that urban policy has turned towards entrepreneurial forms of urban governance, resulting in a more fragmented and decentralized setting within which public policy is formulated and implemented. This implies that the context for public sector urban planning is also influenced by this “turn”. This article questions this “turn” by arguing that, in Sweden and in practice, forms of fragmentation and decentralization coexist with remnants of coherence and centralization. It focuses on two planning projects, one in Malmö and one in Lund. A case study approach is followed, using official documentation and expert interviews. The article indicates that public authorities and planners remain crucial in urban development projects as initiators of projects, when they bring in financial incentives or lease out the plots for development, or when they add to the project's political legitimacy and bring to the table different actors that would otherwise be less likely to join forces. It concludes by discussing how public sector urban planning is adjusting to the changes brought forward by entrepreneurial urban governance. The article contributes to the literature on how urban planning is adapting to changes in the context for urban governance.     

江苏省城乡公共服务发展差距及其障碍因素分析

以江苏省13个省辖市为研究样本,通过构建评价教育、卫生、环境和基础设施等公共服务指标体系,运用熵值法、协调度模型和障碍度模型等方法,对江苏各省辖市的城乡公共服务发展水平进行综合评价。结果表明:①城乡公共服务发展水平区域分异明显;②不同类型公共服务发展水平城乡差距各不相同,基础教育服务城乡差距明显,医疗卫生服务乡村远落后于城市,生态环境服务城乡差距相对较小,基础设施服务城乡差距位居中等;③城乡公共服务协调发展水平可以划分为四种类型,城乡基础教育和医疗卫生等服务领域发展水平差距是影响多数省辖市城乡公共服务协调发展的最大障碍因素。     

Putting the crisis to work: The real estate sector and London's housing crisis

The idea of ‘crisis’ plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ‘the (economic) crisis’, many have also experienced intense ‘housing crises’ and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of ‘crisis’ have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development.     

试论城市规划的政策化趋势

城市规划的改革与发展是一个倍受我国城市规划界关注的问题。除了传统的城市空间组织功能外,近年来城市规划的利益调控功能受到了研究者的广泛关注。通过对传统城市规划理论与实践的反思,城市规划的公共政策属性得到了更多的认可,城市规划的政策化趋势更为明显。本文在比较"以空间组织为中心"和"以利益协调为中心"两种规划视角的基础上,分析了城市规划的政策化发展趋势,阐述了城市规划中的政策输入与输出过程,并针对我国规划研究中的不足,提出了相应的对策。     

Engendering urban planning in different contexts – successes,constraints and consequences

Cities are rapidly transforming into complex places which traditional approaches to urban planning have difficulties to deal with. The new EU- and UN-urban agendas still lack gender-awareness concerning the supportive infrastructure of everyday life that enhances the opportunities for both women and men with different backgrounds and orientations to muddle through in the complex daily contexts. I argue that, in addition to mainstreaming gender equality as a top-down endeavour, there is a need for an expansion of engendering urban planning, which requires different ways of dealing with varying types of planning from the gender perspective. The aim of the article is to present and discuss the results of an explorative study with qualitative methods which has tested with examples a framework for engendering urban planning in different contexts. These are (1) Gender mainstreaming comprehensive urban planning (Vienna); (2) Gender-sensitive advocacy planning (Barcelona); (3) Gender+ self-organizing around urban planning & development (Helsinki); (4) Gender-aware co-governance with public, private, people-partnerships (Athens). The results corroborate the argument but lead to a new one concerning the engendering of new approaches, such as Expanded urban planning that might alleviate dealing with complexities.     

Planning in the 1990s: An international agenda

This paper, originally presented to the AESOP‐ACSP joint conference in Oxford in 1991, stresses that both in Europe and in the US, there is a major difference for planning in the switch from boom to recession. During the 1990s a major challenge will be to find new ways of public‐private partnership in financing new urban infrastructure at a time when developer contributions — a major innovation of the 1980s — have dried up. This particularly applies to the European high‐speed train system — one critical element of which will run through the East Thames Corridor, one of Britain's major urban developments in the coming years. In the US, planners are likely to remain more locally focused, less internationally concerned, than in a Europe in which national barriers are rapidly eroding.     

城市创新基础设施空间格局与创新产出——基于中国290个地级及以上城市的实证分析

知识经济背景下,创新成为区域与城市发展的关键,而创新基础设施作为国家和区域创新体系的重要组成部分,在提供创新支撑、聚集创新资源、提升创新能力等方面具有重要作用。本文首先界定了创新基础设施的概念,构建了测度城市创新基础设施的指标体系,之后基于中国290个地级及以上城市的数据,使用主成分分析和GIS技术分析中国城市创新基础设施的空间格局,并通过构建知识生产函数模型,实证研究城市创新基础设施对城市创新产出的影响。研究表明：①创新基础设施是指保证创新相关活动顺利进行的各种物质工程设施和公共服务系统的总和,包括支撑创新活动的国家重大科技基础设施、科教基础设施、产业技术创新基础设施及创新创业服务基础设施。②中国城市创新基础设施水平整体偏低,且存在显著的空间差异,整体上表现为东部发展水平高于西部。③中国城市创新基础设施水平对城市创新产出具有显著的正向影响。研究从政策层面进一步明确了创新基础设施建设的重要性,为国家推进创新基础设施建设提供科学依据。     

Voluntary Environmental Programs in the Public Sector: Evaluating an Urban Water Conservation Program in California

Solving conflictual environmental policy problems is increasingly falling under the purview of local governments and public agencies. Nonregulatory approaches, such as the development of voluntary environmental programs (VEPs), could offer a useful policy alternative as they often have greater political traction and flexibility. However, there has been little work examining the use of VEPs in the public sector. This article uses a new dataset from California to examine how political institutions affect decisions by local governments and public agencies to participate in a voluntary urban water conservation program and whether this program has improved the water conservation performance of its members. The results show that special district governments, private utilities, and water suppliers dependent on purchased water are more likely to participate in the program and to join early. However, urban water agencies that have joined the program have not reduced their per capita water use more than those that have not. These results underscore the influence of political institutions in public‐sector decision making and demonstrate that, as in the private sector, commitment to a VEP by local government and public agencies does not guarantee implementation or environmental improvements. While voluntary programs offer political and administrative advantages, in order for VEPs in the public sector to be effective they must be accompanied and supported by credible enforcement mechanisms, performance standards, and rigorous monitoring programs.     

Identifying Stakeholders' Views on Sustainable Urban Transition: Desirability,Utility and Probability Assessments of Scenarios

The assessment of different urban planning scenarios by stakeholders can yield important insights which, in turn, inform sustainable urban transition. Yet to gain in-depth insight, this assessment needs to be multi-faceted and should go beyond a unidimensional “most/least desired” approach. Accordingly, we use indicators that distinguish between desirability, utility and probability assessments. We compare these assessments within and between various stakeholder groups based on a set of literature-based hypotheses. We constructed six planning scenarios, systematically varied with respect to sustainability for the case study, “Erlenmatt”, a major urban redevelopment area in Switzerland. Three stakeholder groups (housing suppliers, the non-profit & public sector and housing target groups, n?=?80) were investigated. The results of the statistical analyses suggest that more sustainable scenarios are preferred with respect to both their desirability and utility and that their probability is not lower than that of the other scenarios. The non-profit & public sector is the most pessimistic about the probability of a sustainable district while housing suppliers desire it less. We conclude that such detailed subjective scenario assessments can provide informative and detailed guidance for sustainable urban transition.     

The Future of Collective Farms' Built Social Infrastructure: Choosing Between Central Place and Network Theories

The aim of this paper is to discuss local and regional planning and development practices in a post‐socialist country such as Estonia. Two approaches — central places and network theories — are used as a conceptual basis. According to the first hypothesis, planning and development of social infrastructure (e.g. schools, sports halls) has remained based on the central place theory — as an outdated planning approach — in Estonia. The second hypothesis argues that while, on the one hand, the application of the network paradigm and increased cooperation between local communities would considerably save public resources, on the other hand, because of the path dependency of Soviet centralized planning and development practices, the networking and lobbying takes place vertically rather than horizontally. This restricts both administrative cooperation and networking on the local and regional levels. The paper consists of three parts. The first part describes the turn in Western planning theory: the shift from normative top‐down planning to a bottom‐up approach and networking. The second part analyses critically the Soviet and post‐Soviet planning theory and practices: the planning and development culture created during the Soviet era. Finally we present a case study of a community planning procedure in the Suure‐Jaani locality — a good example of the influence of historical changes in the settlement system and planning culture of the past on current development.     

Quo vadis,Delhi? Urban heritage and gender: towards a sustainable urban future

Historic architectural heritage is important to sustainable urban planning policy, particularly in cities that have heritage sites and/or themselves have ancient archaeological value. Delhi is one of the oldest living cities in the world. However, the vision of its planning policy is limited to valuing heritage for itself and for its economic value instead of also exploring the ways in the city’s heritage might contribute to the social organisation and utilisation of the urban public space. Particularly, like most national policy documents on heritage, it ignores the heritage/gender nexus, which has implications for the identity and status of women in Delhi, community development and ecological preservation. But twenty women practioners and scholars of development in Delhi referred to heritage as a challenge as well as opportunity for gender and urban sustainability when asked for their perspectives on the most important sustainability issues in the city. I argue that Delhi’s urban planning strategies must acknowledge the gender/heritage nexus to enable holistic and gender-inclusive urban development for the present and future generations of its citizens, which is an important thrust of the sustainability agenda.     

Induced Cooperation in Housing Development: Comparing Housing Schemes in Four European Countries

In the development process of housing at a local level, several actors are involved. As a result, there is a need for coordination between the actors. The market can take care of this coordination. However, housing is generally considered to be, at least partly, the responsibility of the public sector. Leaving the development entirely to market forces is not an option for several reasons. But the other extreme, in which the public sector is entirely responsible for housing development is not considered a feasible option either. This paper investigates, using four case studies of housing development processes in different countries, what the role of the public sector, represented by the local planning authority, in such processes is, and how this can be put into effect. To that aim, the notion of 'induced cooperation' is introduced, as an approach for the local planning authority to pursue its housing and land use policy aims in an environment of mutual dependency.     

元管治:规范化的自组织协调机制——元管治与我国城市规划公众参与组织形式的构建

自1980年代初以来,管治(Governance)思潮已经在西方社会汹涌澎湃,社会、经济、政治、文化等领域受到其巨大冲击。在城市规划的具体实践中,如何在众多利益共同发挥作用的领域中取得一致的认同,这有赖于对管治的认识与理解。作为管治重要理论之一的元管治(meta-governance)理论在西方社会有着深刻而广泛的影响。本文通过对规范化的自组织协调机制--元管治的探究,试图以元管治为理论基础建立我国城市规划的公众参与组织形式和保障机制,从而在规划决策中发挥持久作用。