How to achieve parsimonious urban land use: The Case of Greater Zurich

ABSTRACT

Land use regulations in Switzerland do not meet the requirements of the spatial planning act (SPA) in their guidance for parsimonious land use. If parsimonious land use is to be achieved, urban economic theories and price-based regulations must be leveraged to determine the intensity and balance of land use. Therefore, an urban information system to project and guide for parsimonious land use was developed. The GIS spatial analysis instrument presented in this paper is intended as a decision-making aid in the reform of the land use regulations, in particular metropolitan, cantonal and regional structure plans and municipal land use plans. By intensifying and better balancing land use at locations adequately accessed by public transport, land can be used parsimoniously. However, the projection results are not a self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore, to guide for parsimonious land use regulations need to change from normative, static and exclusionary to context-dependent, conditional, dynamic and inclusionary ones. The next step is to develop a system of fees and codes to internalize negative externalities of building and transport and to collect public revenue from economic and agglomeration rents.

KEYWORDS:

• Land use regulations
• parsimonious land use
• projections
• spatial analysis
• urban growth
• Zurich

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and colleagues for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscripts. These have contributed substantially to the outcome of this paper. A thank you to Simon Milligan for editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 162718].