Planning for compact urban forms: local growth-management approaches and their evolution over time

Abstract

Urban growth is a key issue for spatial planning as it influences urban patterns and disrupts open landscapes. To effectively steer urban growth towards compact urban forms, many growth-management policies have been developed over recent decades. However, few studies have assessed how municipal policy mixes have evolved over time. In our representative Swiss-wide survey, we evaluated the prevalence and the time of introduction of 18 policies. Our results indicate that large municipalities use a broad range of reinforcing policies over decades. In contrast, small municipalities mostly rely on conventional land-use regulations. The lack of innovative, incentive-based policies casts doubt on small municipalities' ability to effectively manage urban growth. However, our analyses reveal recent efforts by small municipalities to diversify approaches to growth management and adopt innovative policies. These efforts should be supported by guiding small municipalities in their policy choices, and providing support to those lacking planning capacity.

Keywords:

• urban growth
• local land-use planning, growth-management policies
• planning capacity
• Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jan Berli and Tobias Schulz for their collaboration in conducting the survey, as well as Silvia Dingwall and Curtis Gautschi for improving their English. The authors also thank Simona Grădinaru and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments considerably improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL; Swiss National Science Foundation, as part of the project ‘Controlling urban sprawl to limit soil consumption’ [SPROIL, grant number 406840_142996] conducted within the National Research Programme ‘Sustainable Use of Soil as a Resource’ [NRP68]. The project ‘Determinants of Local Growth Management Regulation and Its Relation to Urban Sprawl. A Spatial Econometric Analysis at the Municipal Level’ [grant number 143440], funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, contributed funds to the survey.