Planning and the Value of Land

Over the past 60 years or more, planning practice and scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on cities and urbanisation. As we live in the so-called “urban age” (Brenner & Schmid, 2014), this urban emphasis is understandable as more of us live in urban rather than rural places, and cities are viewed as critical motors in the global economy – places of innovation, a critical mass of hard and soft infrastructure, and home to diverse talent. In this context, the spatial imaginaries of planning are focused on urban space and place, while planning practice has moved beyond a narrow land-use regulatory role to embrace place-making, spatial coordination, or development delivery. However, despite planning practice’s “urban accent,” the basic question of how we use land, including land beyond the city, should be of core concern. How we use, own and manage our land is fundamental to how we live. As noted in the OECD’s (2017) comparative study of land-use governance:

Land use affects the environment, public health, economic growth, the distribution of wealth, social outcomes and the attractiveness of cities and towns. Land-use practices have major consequences for climate change mitigation. Land use has been linked to approximately one-third of all man-made CO₂ emissions. (OECD, 2017, p. 14)

How we use land is critical when confronted with systemic challenges such as the climate crisis, the collapse of nature and biodiversity, food insecurity, declining water quality and resources, and the energy crisis. How central is planning practice to managing how we use and manage land resources to confront these challenges beyond the built environment? In England, latest landcover data suggest that only 8.7% of land is developed (Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, 2022). In Ireland, the urban fabric comprises 2% of land use and in the Netherlands, roughly one seventh of land surface is built up (Scott & Faulkner, 2023). However, as noted in a recent UK House of Lords Land Use Committee report, land use is changing radically:

Moving away from a landscape dominated by food production, we are now facing the challenges and opportunities of a new environment where nature and biodiversity restoration, carbon sequestration, new development and infrastructure needs and the role of the land for energy, access and wellbeing are all taking on a greater priority. (House of Lords Land Use Committee, 2022, p. 3)

Given that critical global challenges have a clear land-based dimension, how, as planners, can we maximise the use of land as a socially, economically and ecologically productive asset that ensures socially just outcomes?

Land is a fundamental and finite resource with human and non-human dimensions. Land and its various uses provide the foundation of economic prosperity, quality of life and wellbeing, and cultural identity. Its management is also of critical importance in addressing global environmental priorities. These include climate change mitigation and adaptation, addressing biodiversity loss, food and energy security, and sustainable water management. For example, a transition to a low or zero carbon society will have profound implications for how we use land, with a post-carbon land use mix comprising wind turbines, solar energy farms, and farmland converted to planting bio-energy crops. A post carbon land-use system also entails using land to create natural stores of carbon through afforestation and peatland or wetland restoration, while also requiring shifts in farming practices to reduce emissions from better livestock and soil management and to release farmland from productive uses (Committee on Climate Change, 2018).

While land is a finite resource and “fixed,” the supply of land for different purposes is not fixed nor static. That is to say, land is often allocated for specific purposes (or constrained from specific uses) by land-use regulations or other environmental designations. Therefore, if land is scarce for housing, it is rarely due to a lack of actual land in a country, but due to the zoning or allocation of land through planning policies and the balance between individual property rights and the “public good” in generating benefits from land (Davy, 2016). This regulatory aspect also generates wealth through surplus value that has very little to do with the actions of landowners (such as investment or improvement) but relates to permitted uses. For example, land on the edge of a city zoned for housing will have a higher value than land with agricultural zoning, while urban land close to publicly funded infrastructure (e.g. a light rail line) will increase in value over other parts of the city.

As reported by the OECD (2017), land and buildings on it, constitute by far the most important share of wealth across OECD countries, comprising 86 per cent of total capital stock, broadly split evenly between land and property. Land and buildings are approximately seven times as valuable as all other assets taken together. Thus, land-use policies are critical to the wealth distribution of a society, while the rise in wealth inequalities across advanced economies can be attributed to a rise in the value of land, which tends to be predominately owned by wealthier and often older individuals. The concentration of land ownership and wider questions of land reform are of critical importance in determining more socially just land policies. These may include community-based ownership of land resources, the increased use of land trusts or pursuing land justice for Indigenous peoples in settler colonial nations.

Classical economics traditionally identifies land as a key capital stock, as a productive resource with value, for example, for agriculture, mineral extraction or for absorbing waste. From this perspective, land is generally viewed as a private asset and that the driving force behind land-use is generally profit and individual wealth accumulation, which has been institutionalised through land-use regulation, land and property ownership rights, land and inheritance taxes, and public subsidies relating to agricultural production or direct farm payments based on landownership (particularly within European Union member states). However, land is increasingly valued as a financial asset rather than for its productive value. Monbiot et al. (2019), for example, highlight entrenched practices in the UK, whereby the price of land bears little relation to its productive value. This includes the hoarding of land for financial speculation (often by volume housebuilders) with unearned profits untaxed; investment in land as a tax shelter, with farmland subject to 100% inheritance tax relief, and now marketed as a safe haven for wealth; land managed for short term gains at the expense of local communities and nature; and land owned as a status symbol amongst financial elites. While land is often an individually-owned asset, land-use can generate significant externalities (positive and negative) for wider society, such as providing local amenities or maintaining cultural landscapes, or environmental degradation.

How can we use land to maximise its value for wider society and for its ecological benefits? Today, in many countries, land-use governance is siloed across sectoral interests and (often competing) policy agendas, leading to fragmented policy responses (Heatherington, 2019; Gkartzios et al., 2022). Farming activities are often exempt from the land-use planning system, despite the more intensive nature of modern agriculture. Whereas in the past, farmers may have been seen as the custodians of the landscape, today’s more intensive practices result in greenhouse gas emissions, ammonia emissions, biodiversity loss, nutrient pollution, phosphate/nitrate pollution, and declining water quality (Sturzaker et al., 2022). Physical development beyond farming, such as new housing and renewable energy infrastructure are, on the other hand, circumscribed by planning regulation. Landscapes are managed through a mix of planning policy and countryside management tools arrayed across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Nature is protected through wildlife management policies with top-down designation from European (e.g. European Union Birds and Habitats Directives) or international designation (e.g. UNESCO Man & Biosphere Programme), and national legislation for the protection of nature rich sites, often transposed to planning policy, resulting in an “islands of protection” approach (Cowell & Owens, 2011). Land use sectors related to agriculture, forestry, energy and amenity use are governed or licensed by sectoral specific policies. Ecosystem services, by contrast, are often managed through market-based tools, for example, as direct payments to farmers for less intensive farming practices as an aspect of agricultural policy. Land taxation is generally a component of a state’s wider fiscal policies.

Land is too precious to continue with its fragmented governance, to extract financial value from it, and for planners to marginalize how to get the best from this fundamental resource. This suggests the need to move beyond extracting profit from land towards multifunctional, coordinated land-use strategies that focus on wider wellbeing, national and community wealth-building, and which are aligned with ecological limits.

In This Issue

This issue includes five papers in our main article section. In the first paper, John Forester addresses how planners can become more context-responsive and improvise when faced with uncertainty and ambiguity, inequality and conflict. Forester argues that much of planning theory focuses on what planners must do – from seeking justice to ensuring sustainability. However, these theories are less helpful in setting out how change can be achieved in specific contexts. To address this challenge, Forester contends that planning practitioners should perform options analysis with stakeholders by deliberatively: (1) asking and listening to stakeholders about “what’s important,” providing recognition, acknowledging trust, and building working relationships; (2) asking “what’s known” and needs to be learned; and (3) asking “what they might do together.” For Forester, “asking and answering these questions together, not solo, can build working relationships.” This framework is further explored through four diverse case studies that demonstrate how practitioners influence change through leveraging expertise, diagnosis, and crafting options for implementation and negotiation. The article concludes that context responsiveness in planning practice can be enhanced through integrating expertise, diagnosis and negotiation into a deliberative framework of improvised “options analysis.”

In the second paper, Christina Hanna, Raven Cretney and Iain White explore managed retreats in Aotearoa-New Zealand in the context of climate vulnerability. Aotearoa-New Zealand has a history of managed retreat and this paper examines the challenges associated with mainstreaming “retreat” from risky locations and how these challenges relate to notions of permanence (land use, property rights) and dynamic and uncertain changes. While “managed retreats” is an emerging literature, Hanna et al. place retreat policies in a wider historical context to demonstrate how spatial imaginaries produce new political spaces that constrain or enable potential action. Their work illustrates how policy experimentation has led to the evolution of a “material change concerning relationships to space, place, and property,” which in turn has implications for spatial justice concerns.

The following paper also examines how planning should respond to growing uncertainties from climate change risks, drawing on case studies of responses to flooding events. In this paper, Mrudhula Koshy, Rolee Aranya and Hilde Refstie bring together literature from planning along with humanitarian action to examine flooding in Kerala, India, caused by unexpected monsoon floods. The article examines the interaction between planning, with a long-term time horizon, and short-term humanitarian responses in coping with unexpected crises. The authors call for a greater integration of spatial planning into disaster risk reduction through advancing a “contingency approach” that embraces “uncertainty rather than reducing, fudging, or deflecting it.” Stemming from embracing uncertainty, the authors argue that planning should prioritize flexible and adaptable decision-making to underpin institutional capacity and organisational learning.

In our fourth paper, Jill Grant explores how the term “balance” is used in describing aspects of planning practice and within planning policies and decision-making. As Grant argues, language is not neutral, and how terms such as “balance” or “public interest” are socially constructed can often “obscure the hidden moral calculus of decision making.” Drawing on over 200 interviews with planning actors (planners, politicians, developers, residents) across five Canadian provinces, Grant examines how participants construe and deploy power through discourse, examining how “balance” is used with conceptual, physical, procedural, economic and socio-demographic meanings. Grant suggests that for planners, “balance” is viewed as an essential feature of planning practice, implying comprehensiveness, even-handedness and objectiveness. This rhetoric can be useful for building support for decisions. However, Grant highlights how “balance” can be mobilised as a “moral discourse with a progressive veneer [that] can hide regressive premises and empty promises.” In this way, understanding how language is deployed is central to understanding meaning-making amongst planning actors, and also critical to revealing how language is used to mask power, choice and privilege.

In the final paper in the main article section, Michael Hibbard and Kathryn Frank examine the cultural dimensions of rural regional planning. The authors take an historical perspective by re-examining the work of Howard Odum and cultural regionalism in the USA in the 1920s and 1930s. Exploring historical planning ideas reminds us of the persistence of core planning challenges – new terms are often coined, yet problems around the social fabric of places and socio-spatial inequities can be depressingly familiar. Hibbard and Frank examine efforts to modernise rural places during the interwar years and the role of cultural regionalism and social planning, inspired by Odum’s ideas, to provide a context responsive set of guiding principles to promote social and environmental wellbeing. The article charts Odum’s career and the evolution of his thinking that led to the publication of American Regionalism in 1938. Hibbard and Frank explore how Odum’s work sought to combine the idea of regions as an interaction of human and natural factors (folkways) with an administrative region (technicways) that aimed to stimulate socio-economic development while at the same time supporting local cultures. Hibbard and Frank conclude by reflecting on how contemporary planning theory and practice might learn from Odum’s ideas, particularly in understanding culture-nature relationships.

The Interface for this issue (edited by Mee Kam Ng and Cecilia Wong) explores spatial planning for smart and sustainable development. The Interface draws on the experiences of two specific contexts – Shenzhen, China’s “Silicon Valley,” and Greater Manchester – to trace the evolution of smart city initiatives and to examine the integration of spatial planning and sustainability with smart city debates. In the first contribution, Cecilia Wong, Caglar Koksal, Ransford A. Acheampong, Wei Zheng and Mark Baker set the scene by asking how an integrative and spatial approach can deliver smart and sustainable development. The authors first note the origins of sustainable development and how technology is often positioned as a means to solve environmental problems, while also opening up new market opportunities. Thus, technological solutions appear attractive to cities and urban policy-makers tasked with achieving a more efficient use of resources or to reduce carbon emissions. However, Wong et al. also note “smart technology is of instrumental, rather than normative, value and its application may or may not coincide with the goals of sustainable development.” Within this context, Wong et al. explore the implications for planning practice emerging from smart city agendas and how planners negotiate or navigate sustainability claims. A critical challenge discussed in this contribution is how recent advancements in smart technologies (e.g. big data and computation technology, real time data) have outpaced planning tools and methodologies, which can marginalize planners or corral planners into passive positions. For Wong et al., the challenge for spatial planning is “to understand the interrelationship between the short-term, project-based approach of smart cities and the holistic, long-term vision of sustainable development by re-configuring spatial development to adapt and manage the ongoing and never-ending conflicts arising in the process.” This challenge is further explored in the second contribution by Dave Carter, who discusses the experience of Manchester and how the city council has “worked through” how new technologies can be applied to urban policy to avoid the pitfalls of a “technology-push agenda,” often dominated by tech corporation interests. Carter explores Manchester’s longstanding engagement with technology, first with its civic based “digital agenda” in the early 2000s based on open innovation, open data and open networks, and later developed into a broader policy approach outlined in its 2022 strategy, Manchester Digital Strategy. Local experimentation, a living labs approach and social responsibility, has led to an emphasis on “people driven smart cities.” The third paper in the Interface also focuses on Manchester (from a regional perspective) with Caglar Koksal, Wei Zheng and Ransford A. Acheampong examining the complexity of actors and relationships involved in smart and sustainable place-making, while locating the role of the planner within this network. The authors develop insights based on the case study of a flagship Greater Manchester smart city initiative to identify the extent to which planners play a critical role in smart city agendas. They identify several factors that define the role of planners, including the extent to which initiatives are led by municipalities. However, their case study reveals that planners are often relegated to more peripheral roles, focusing on reactionary and regulatory functions, rather than broader strategic place-making. In the following paper, Mee Kam Ng, Jonah Tang, Mingmin Pan, and Sylvia Y. He critically review smart and sustainable development in relation to Shenzhen, referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. The authors chart how, in four decades, Shenzhen was transformed from a border town into a smart sustainable city, highlighting the importance of multi-scalar decision-making and action and the fostering of inter-sectoral collaboration. There are parallels with Carter’s assessment of Manchester – an emphasis on local experimentation and a long track record of engaging with digitization to support wider governance objectives. Initiatives range from utilizing smart city approaches to pursuing low-carbon development, fostering the circular economy, to “ecological civilization” projects. The following three contributions focus specifically on the use of smart technologies as planning decision-support tools. Firstly, Jifeng Dai, Weizhi Cheng, Tao Wang and Yu Fang provide an assessment of the application of smart technology in Shenzhen’s spatial planning system. The authors outline how territorial development is supported by information technology including geospatial information and data, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence to assist with smart city governance. The article includes an example of an online platform for plan formulation and coordination, including tools that seek to coordinate planning data, the organisation of a data catalogue, monitoring tools including indicators, and longer-term evaluative tools on plan implementation. Dai et al. describe how planning platforms have enabled planning to achieve intelligent management, which can integrate with planning objectives. Secondly, Yang Yue, Zhong-Wen Hu, Qi-Li Gao and Chi-Sheng Wang assess how geospatial big data analytics are used to monitor progress in achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Great Bay Area (GBA). The authors provide illustrative examples related to coastal environmental monitoring and identifying potential affordable housing locations through analysis of mobility data. And thirdly, Yu Fang, Wenyong Sun, Shuyao Cai, and Jifeng Dai examine the role of spatial data platforms in the Greater Bay Area. These initiatives indicate the current trajectory of planning in China, which is increasingly embracing an urban science ethos to manage resources and efficiency in urban systems. The final paper in the Interface, by Ian Wray, reflects on these themes and draws comparisons with western planning theory in the 1950s and 1960s that emphasised technical solutions to deal with the increasing complexity of cities and regions. Wray distinguishes between “problem-solving” (which are suited to platforms, AI etc) and “more profound policy goals which rest in human values, ethics and judgement.” How do planners position themselves in these debates?

For this issue, the Debates and Reflections section comprises two Comment articles and a Book Review. In the first Comment article, Beatrijs Haverkamp and Lisa Eckenwiler explore health equity in the context of ethical placemaking. Despite efforts over the last decade or more to mainstream health concerns through a whole-of-government perspective – often referred to as a Health in All Policies (HiAP) approach – Haverkamp and Eckenwiler highlight critical barriers to achieving effective intersectoral collaborations to achieve societal health goals. To overcome these barriers, the authors propose an ethical placemaking approach to emphasize health justice and to enable all people to have the capability to be healthy. Ethical principles include relations of care, bodily integrity, mobility, autonomy and equity. For the authors, relating these principles to placemaking creates greater ownership of health inequity, which is rooted in real places rather than abstract policy aspirations. The second Comment article also focuses on socio-spatial inequities, with Danielle Zoe Rivera and Marcus D. Hendricks addressing the uneven implementation of green infrastructure strategies that further entrenches socio-spatial inequities experienced within marginalized communities. Rivera and Hendricks refer to this process as “municipal undergreening” to unpack “the systematic reluctance of municipalities to incorporate and provide green infrastructure in communities of color.” While green infrastructure is advanced as an approach to provide multifunctional benefits, including mitigating and adapting to climate change risks (e.g. flood risk management, addressing heat stress) and providing physical and mental health benefits, Rivera and Hendricks provide a welcome contribution to this literature which promotes a just transition to a more resilient built environment. This section concludes with a Book Review by Patsy Healey of The Pandemic Within: Policy Making for a Better World (Policy Press, 2021) by Hendrik Wagenaar and Barbara Prainsack. The book seeks to challenge the hegemony of globalised, corporate capitalism alongside dominant neoliberal governance to examine how a new political economy can emerge in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic. In her review, Healey describes the book as a “manifesto for an alternative political economy” that provides hope for reshaping political and policy discourses that critically addresses the “how” questions of both the reform of public institutions and the creation of new ones.

Mark Scott
University College Dublin
[email protected]

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).