How do planners manage risk in alternative land development models? An institutional analysis of land development in the Netherlands. (February 2020) - O'Brien, Philip
Highlights: How planners intervene in development is especially evident in land development. Scale of public risk and associated reward varies by land development model. Level of public risk in a land development may in practice be higher than expected. Public risk must be taken into account with new land development models. Reduced exposure to public risk can reduce quantity and quality of new development. Abstract: While risk is a key concern in property development, it tends to be discussed by planners only relative to the effects of regulatory planning on private sector risk. Yet planning encompasses a broad range of activities that go beyond its function of regulating private sector development. Despite active approaches to land development being commonly used across different planning contexts, frameworks for analysing public sector strategies to address risk are rarely discussed. We attempt to redress this deficit by investigating the actions of public sector development actors with regard to risk across three different land development models: public land development, land development by public-private partnership, and land readjustment. Using recent Dutch experience, we conduct an institutional analysis of each land development model in order to highlight the effects of alternative governance structures on risk as a particular transaction attribute, from the perspective of public sector planning. Our findings indicate the importance of highlighting the role of public risk in alternative models of land development where there may be a tendency to adopt institutional arrangements without due regard to this, and point to possible future applications of institutional analysis at the particular, rather than the general, level.