Leveraging land-value capture in contexts of urban austerity: evidence from the Grand Paris Express (France)

ABSTRACT

Austerity urbanism has emerged as a powerful concept to explore the political and socio-spatial consequences of cuts in public spending, but interrogations remain regarding public actors’ shifting role in urban production in times of increased budgetary constraints. This article focuses on Land Value Capture (LVC), a financing mechanism that has been gaining traction amongst scholars and practitioners alike. While LVC can be framed as a valuable tool to finance infrastructure provision in times of austerity, we argue that the existing literature has neglected its use by other public actors, for the funding of other urban projects. Indeed, we analysed how different public actors (public landowners, land developers, and local governments) sought to take advantage of the anticipated rise in land value around future stations of the new urban railway system surrounding Paris, the Grand Paris Express. Through an exploration of four case studies, we show that LVC can be a flexible instrument that allows actors to either play into, or mitigate austerity-driven urban policies in French cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban austerity
• land value capture
• financing instruments
• infrastructures
• Grand Paris Express

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For a discussion of the uneven and conflicted diffusion of New Public Management in the French administration, see Bezes (2015) Réinventer l'État: les réformes de l'administration française (1962-2008). Presses universitaires de France, Cole A and Jones G (2005) Reshaping the state: Administrative reform and new public management in France. Governance 18(4): 567-588.

2 https://www.vie-publique.fr/en-bref/277104-grand-paris-express-augmentation-des-couts, last accessed on Dec. 7, 2020.

3 This hypothesis can be challenged when, for example, a real-estate developer accepts diminished returns in order to get access to new markets (i.e., when it hopes to improve its notoriety in a new territory, in the hope of winning future contracts later on). We have not encountered such a situation in our case studies.

4 https://www.ville-creteil.fr/un-nouvel-essor-pour-lhopital-mondor, last accessed Jan. 2021.

5 Newsletter from the Henri Mondor section of the ‘Sud Solidaire Santé’ union, April 2021.

6 Ibid.

7 Of note, there were also important costs associated with cleaning up the land, which had been polluted by an uncontrolled landfill. These costs threatened the project, but the State eventually released €12 million for the clean-up, through a wasteland recycling programme.

8 Of note, SGP announced in 2020 that it would seek to develop LVC practices more aggressively. Nevertheless, at the time of writing this article, its involvement in development projects around GPE stations primarily serves the densification and economic development of train station districts (and not the financing of the transportation project itself). Its attempts to generate funding through LVC are limited to small-scale projects, around ventilation shafts for instance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the French National Agency for Research [Agence Nationale de la Recherche].