https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1378-4487
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ABSTRACT
This paper shows that, in principle, better public control in planning tends to contain land consumption in the medium-long term, thus confirming the reliability of the typology of spatial governance and planning systems in Europe recently proposed in this journal. That typology, covering 39 countries classified into five types of system by decreasing capacity for public control, is here related to the variation of land consumption in the respective countries over approximately 20 years. The result of the quantitative comparison is interpreted and refined through a qualitative analysis aimed at explaining the apparent anomalies. The results of the analysis generally verify the investigated correlation. Ultimately, to give substance to the declared commitment to curb or reduce land consumption, political attention should also be paid to the quality of the institutional technologies that can work to this end.
Acknowledgements
The databases upon which the arguments proposed in this paper are based were funded within the framework of the ESPON COMPASS (https://www.espon.eu/planning-systems) and ESPON SUPER (https://www.espon.eu/super) research projects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For an overview of the variables that contribute to drive land consumption, intended as a balance between the demand for and the supply of land, see Colsaet, Laurans, and Levrel Citation2018.
2 On closer inspection, two of the seven so-called ‘interrelated factors’ used to define each system in the ‘EU Compendium of Spatial Planning Systems and Policies’ expressed the need, mostly implicit, for an evaluation of efficiency (i.e. ‘the maturity or completeness of the system’) and of effectiveness (i.e. ‘the distance between expressed objectives and outcomes’) (CEC Citation1997, 34).
3 The ESPON COMPASS research project (2016–2018) was developed by a research group led by TU Delft, The Netherlands. The materials are available at the link: https://www.espon.eu/planning-systems.
4 The ESPON SUPER research project (2019–2020) was developed by a research group led by PBL (Dutch Environmental Agency), The Netherlands. The materials are available at the link: https://www.espon.eu/super.
5 The second objective of the COMPASS project was to understand which EU policies may have contributed to changing the functioning of the SGPSs themselves in the first two decades of the new millennium.
6 For the sake of brevity, European states are indicated in the tables and figures included in the article with the acronyms used by Eurostat (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Glossary:Country_codes).
7 In fact, this last type of SGPSs is labelled as ‘misled performative systems’ in the article referred to here (Berisha et al. Citation2021). To avoid the risk that this term could be offensive, even if this was certainly not the intention, the authors decided to partially modify the label.
8 The Corine Land Cover (CLC) initiative monitors the coverage and use of the land, starting from a photointerpretation of satellite images, following a standard methodology and nomenclature. The CLC data guarantee a complete and comparable European and national picture, with a time series that ensures almost thirty years of information (1990, 2000, 2006, 2012, 2018) (https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/corine-land-cover).
9 The ESPON SUPER research project (ESPON, Citation2020a) considers land consumption as intended in the elaboration of the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service, i.e. as the loss of natural, semi-natural or agricultural land following an increase in artificial land cover. More in detail, net land consumption is defined as the balance between consumed land and the increase of agricultural, semi-natural and natural surfaces due to interventions of demolition, de-sealing, re-naturalisation etc.
10 This seems further confirmed by the Corine Land Cover classification when, in reference to the ‘Discontinuous urban fabric’ (1.1.2), it states that ‘the impermeable features like buildings, roads and artificially surfaced areas range from 30 to 80% land coverage’ (copernicus.eu). This means that in some cases there may be an overestimation while in others land consumption may be underestimated.
11 According to Muñoz Gielen and Tasan-Kok (Citation2010, 1098), ‘public-value capturing may be considered one of the most important driving forces of public planning’, and concerns ‘the level at which public bodies manage to make developers pay for public infrastructure – infrastructure provision, public roads and space, public facilities and buildings, affordable and social housing – and eventually capture part of the economic value increase [generated by a spatial transformation]’.
12 As mentioned, France constitutes an exception here as, despite featuring a more traditional ‘conformative’ model of spatial governance, it is characterized by an uncommon role of the central government so as to guarantee a high level of public control of spatial development.
13 In this case, the misunderstood performative systems constitute an exception as the public authority, while committed to assigning spatial development rights on a case-by-case basis, is often overwhelmed by the prevailing socio-economic dynamics, and ends up accepting most of the requests of private stakeholders, thus renouncing effective public control.