The infrastructure lottery and the land development process

Summary

Proposals for land development may generate a need for supporting services in the form of roads, sewers, water supply, open space and so on. This article examines the distribution of the cost of supporting services between the private sector, the public sector and the community at large and the consequences of that distribution for land development and for the developer. It is based on research funded by the Scottish Development Agency and conducted by the authors in Scotland during 1984 and 1986. Although there are some differences between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom both in the institutional structure and in the legislative framework for distributing such costs, the arrangements are broadly similar and the observations in the article seem likely to be of general application. The article draws attention to considerable variation in the manner in which costs are distributed from service to service, from area to area and even from case to case. It goes on to suggest that greater standardization is both possible and desirable but that some variation would seem inevitable. The article concludes that the ability of developers to accommodate their share of the cost of supporting services is greater if the cost can be anticipated at an early stage in the land development process.

Keywords:

• Land development
• infrastructure