Speaker
Description
The rapid growth and increasing complexity of European cities underscore the critical need for spatial planning to ensure sustainable urban environments. Within spatial planning, local land-use planning is translating strategic goals into legally binding regulations. Making up a big part of land ownership and development law, local-level regulations directly shape cities by controlling their physical components, such as buildings and open/green spaces, and allocating land for different activities and uses, e.g. residential, commercial, industrial, etc. However, land-use regulations used across European cities are highly diverse as municipalities have a lot of freedom in designing regulations to address their local needs. Moreover, the development of regulations is often a practice-led process and not theory-driven. Thus, our understanding of how and why urban environments are regulated on the local level remains poor as we lack systematic analysis and comparative research.
So far, comparisons of spatial planning across Europe (Berisha et al., 2021; Knieling and Othengrafen, 2009; Newman and Thornley, 1996) have predominantly focused on legal-administrative frameworks but largely neglected local land-use regulations. An exception is the COMPASS project (Nadin et al., 2024) which looked at the diversity of local planning instruments, such as local plans, in 32 European countries. The project identified 251 types of instruments and categorised them according to the envisioned functions into four categories. 76% of all “local spatial planning” instruments fell into one category, which indicates the need for a more detailed approach. Moreover, the project did not analyse the individual regulations that comprise these instruments, such as regulations limiting building height or protecting urban trees. A focus on regulations is promising since regulations are the law-based building blocks of any planning system and, thus, essential for understanding the differences and commonalities in how and why municipalities and countries plan and regulate urban environments. Thus, we seek to develop a European overview of spatial planning based on regulation-level detail and the regulatory profiles of countries.
We analyse how local land-use regulations are prioritised in the planning and permission-granting process and the extent to which they pursue efficiency and equity objectives. Efficiency and equity are two primary objectives of planning (Vejchodská et al., 2022) where efficiency stands for the most effective use of resources aimed at supporting economic growth and social well-being, and equity refers to a fair distribution of resources aimed at addressing disparities and inequities. The data is collected with an online survey of planning professionals and academics across 31 European countries. In order to develop country profiles, we classify regulations into three main categories – those regulating buildings, open/green spaces, and those determining the use of land. Within these, we examine subcategories, e.g. subcategories of building regulations include those controlling height, volume, density, etc., to understand planning priorities and objectives. Together, results on subcategories create unique regulatory profiles of countries which are then analysed and compared.
We found that certain regulations are common throughout Europe and that others are more context-specific. Some are efficiency or equity-driven, while many are pursuing both goals. Preliminary results show that it is possible to develop regulatory profiles for individual countries, though there is considerable overlap. The discovered groups of common country regulatory profiles add to the aforementioned comparative research on European planning by providing new insights into the relationship between legal-administrative frameworks of planning systems and the nature of their local regulatory practices. Thus, the findings of this study will contribute to comparative research on European land-use regulations.
References
Berisha, E., Cotella, G., Janin Rivolin, U., Solly, A., 2021. Spatial governance and planning systems in the public control of spatial development: a European typology. European Planning Studies 29, 181–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2020.1726295
Knieling, J., Othengrafen, F., 2009. Planning Cultures in Europe: Decoding Cultural Phenomena in Urban and Regional Planning. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315246727
Nadin, Vincent., Cotella, Giancarlo., Schmitt, Peter., 2024. Spatial Planning Systems in Europe. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781839106255
Newman, P., Thornley, A., 1996. Urban Planning in Europe. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203427941
Vejchodská, E., Shahab, S., Hartmann, T., 2022. Revisiting the Purpose of Land Policy: Efficiency and Equity. J Plan Lit 088541222211126. https://doi.org/10.1177/08854122221112667
| Keywords | regulations; land-use planning; planning systems; efficiency; equity |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
