Planning the Neighbourhood Economy: Land-Use Plans and the Economic Potential of Urban Residential Neighbourhoods in the Netherlands

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between zoning by-laws, as put forward in governmental land-use plans and the viability of urban residential neighbourhood economies. The Dutch planning tradition has long been characterized by strict separation of functions and top-down planning. We argue that profound changes in social and economic structures make land-use planning practices less suitable for the current policy formula of “mixed urban milieus”. Although the residential neighbourhood might not be the location of large firms, it definitely attracts small ones, and facilitates starting businesses whose presence (and potential growth) can be beneficial to the city as a whole. We present a typology of spatial patterns of neighbourhood economies based on land-use plans and describe whether these are related to the distinctive economic development of the neighbourhood over the period 1999–2007.

Notes

1. “High modernism” refers to the belief that bureaucratic planners can order and control physical space from behind their desks (Scott, 1998).

2. Neighbourhoods were ranked by socio-economic status. A factor analysis was performed to group seven variables that indicate socio-economic status of the neighbourhood (including income, unemployment levels and data on housing stock) into two variables. Consequently, k-means cluster analysis was used to rank all the neighbourhoods into the categories.

3. The categorization into four types of neighbourhoods is made on the basis of postal code areas. First, only areas with more than 500 residential addresses are selected. This group is divided into three categories: neighbourhoods with a city centre function, neighbourhoods that have an industrial site within them and the residue is categorized as “purely” residential neighbourhoods (Raspe et al., 2010).

4. The LISA database is based on Chamber of Commerce data supplemented with employment figures at firm level.

5. Wittenstein, Mildenburg, Zuilenburg and Vredenburg in Dordrecht have a global land-use plan.

6. In Utrecht and Amsterdam, if one wants to change the residential function of a building to a non-residential function, the number of M² taken away from the housing stock have to be compensated by adding M² for residential use or for compensation, a substantial sum of money has to be paid.

7. Or groups of buildings in the case of the “global” land-use plan.

8. The neighbourhoods Mildenburg and Vredenburg in Dordrecht form an exception to this. The neighbourhood shopping centre is located exactly on the “border” of these two neighbourhoods. Both zoning plans only pay marginal attention to economic activity, simply stating the number of square metres designated for business and retail and the preference for not expanding the economic activity throughout the neighbourhood. (This might also have to do with the fact that the zoning plans for these neighbourhoods are of a “global” nature.)

9. Van Kinsbergenstraat, Ewijckstraat, Zeehavenlaan, D. Rijkersstraat get special attention in the city structure plan published in 2008.

10. The Mann–Whitney test is considered to be the non-parametric alternative to the student's T test or ANOVA test. The Kruskall–Wallis test is the non-parametric counterpart of one-way ANOVA (Gibbons, 1993).

11. For this test holds that N = 42, because growth rates could not be established for the two young Utrecht neighbourhoods Langerak and Veldhuizen since their population numbers are not available for 1999.