The German law for & bdquo;Accelerating Housing Construction and Securing Housing" - the so-called Bauturbo - fundamentally changes key mechanisms of democratic control in the German planning system. The new provisions, especially the new possibility of extensive deviations from the Federal Building Code (& sect;246e BauGB) combined with the regulation on & bdquo;presumption of municipal consent" (& sect;36a BauGB) shift decision-making processes from democratically legitimized planning procedures toward simplified administrative acts. This change creates broader discretionary powers, information and power asymmetries between public authorities and private actors and increasing intransparency in land policy. These structural changes may foster corruption by enabling hidden influences on land value increases. The risk arises less from individual misconduct than from the systemic incentives generated by the Bauturbo itself. This paper highlights these risks and serves as a basis for discussion on how to mitigate them. Strengthening transparency of land ownership is proposed as a key approach to reinforce the legitimacy of planning law and restore trust in fair and accountable development processes.

Urban densification is widely promoted as a strategy to limit land-take and provide housing, yet its sustainability and effectiveness remain debated. The impacts of densification depend heavily on the form of densification, but systematic knowledge about these forms and the policies and actors shaping them is still limited. To better understand this relationship, we present an approach to measure densification on the level of urban form through multi-temporal building data, which overcomes limitations for comparative research. We derive information on building change, housing form and project size which allows us to identify densification patterns. Through aggregation and visualisation, the observed patterns are discussed against the backdrop of actor constellations and institutions of land policy. To test the approach, we apply it to three city-regions in Germany, France and England. The interpretation of the spatial results reveals distinct patterns, which are found to be in line with knowledge on actors and policy across the regions, which we retrieve from existing literature on land policies in the context of densification. Predominantly large-sized development of detached housing in the Liverpool region are found, compared to large- to medium-sized apartment projects in Strasbourg and incremental densification in Dortmund. The analysis and interpretation of the study indicates for a viable inter-disciplinary approach to urban densification, as we uncover national characteristics in urban form and actors and policy, while relying on widely accessible data. Based on this, future endeavours for urban densification could develop policies targeted at specific actors and spatial patterns.

Aufgrund des Klimawandels nehmen Naturgefahren wie Hochwasser, Dürre und Hitze verstärkt zu. Dabei können naturbasierte Lösungen weltweit zunehmend zum Hochwasserrisikomanagement beitragen. In den vergangenen Jahren wurden weltweit vermehrt naturbasierte Lösungen umgesetzt, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf öffentlichem Eigentum lag. Die größte Herausforderung für naturbasierte Lösungen ist aber, Maßnahmen auf Privateigentum, wie z. B. Land- und Forstwirtschaft oder Privatgebäuden, umzusetzen. Ein wichtiger Grund dafür ist, dass naturbasierte Lösungen für eine effiziente und effektive Wirkung Flächen erfordern. Flächen, die in der Regel nicht im öffentlichen Eigentum liegen. Um diese erfolgreich umzusetzen, bedarf es einer weitreichenden partizipativen Planung und Umsetzung der Maßnahmen. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass neben dem Hochwasserrisikomanagement insbesondere die Verbesserung der Biodiversität, der Klimaregulation sowie des Nährstoff- und Sedimentrückhalts die wichtigsten Gründe für die Umsetzung naturbasierter Lösungen sind. Wobei die Flächenkonkurrenz in der Land- und Forstwirtschaft sowie die höheren Pflegekosten zu den größten Herausforderungen zählten. Für eine erfolgreiche Umsetzung benötigt man daher (a) die frühzeitige Einbindung von Landwirt:innen, (b) die Schaffung ökonomischer Anreize, (c) langfristiges Monitoring und (d) die Anpassung der rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen.

Public space managers are facing multiple transitions and increasingly complex challenges, prompting the emergence of new approaches that address diverse aims and involve a broader range of actors. As a result, the rationale behind management of public space is gradually changing. Gaining insight into the values that drive management of public space is essential. This research shows that, from the managers' perspective, the rationale behind management of public space is largely implicit, with a non-hierarchical relationship between means and ends. Where common approaches emphasised technical and economic values, a clear shift towards the integration of soft values, such as social inclusion and sustainability, is becoming apparent. This transition parallels historical paradigm shifts in spatial planning and underlines the dynamic nature of management of public space. This study examined the values pursued in the Netherlands based on a qualitative study consisting of narrative interviews and focus groups. The results offer insights into the values pursued and highlight the importance of an explicit and systematic approach, as well as research into the values that actually shape management of public space in current practice.

Nature-based solutions (NBS) in Flood Risk Management require more—and mostly privately owned—land, and more diverse stakeholder involvement than traditional (grey) engineering approaches. This also implies that there are challenges related to different disciplines. Flood risk management with NBS is an issue not only of technical expertise, but it asks for land-use planning, economics, property rights, sociology, landscape planning, ecology, hydrology, agriculture and other disciplines to cope with the challenges of implementing them. Nature-based FRM is thus an inter- and transdisciplinary endeavor.

Floods cause damage to lands and thereby often prevent property owners from using their property in the way they intend. Because of flood damage, property owners face challenges such as destruction and decreased value of their property, not finding tenants, etc. While land policy predominantly treats damage as solely economic, it also has emotional and social implications. Memories linked to a home, a spatial attachment to a specific piece of land, or a family legacy are only a few examples. Just like the values that property owners assign to their properties differ, so do their perceptions of damage. Perception of property forms the basis that shapes how damage is perceived. Despite the vast literature on risk perception and awareness, discussions in flood management mainly focus on assessing the likelihood of disasters. Noticeably, there is a lack of emphasis on flood damage itself, especially concerning damage to private property. Considering that the definition of damage influences the land policy measures taken on private property, there is a need to explore property owners' perceptions of damage to provide more effective land policy responses. Therefore, this research analyzes how property owners perceive and interpret flood damage on their private property. Social aspects such as personal experience, cultural background, and demographic profile all influence these perceptions. Furthermore, this research outlines how the mismatch between land policies and property owners' perceptions of damage is an obstacle to effectively combating the consequences of flooding on private property. A qualitative case study is conducted in a small-scale district in T & uuml;rkiye's Western Black Sea Basin. This study includes narrative interviews with local property owners. These interviews reveal the property owners' multiple perceptions of flood damage and show the mismatch between land policy responses and the needs of the property owners. The findings from this research show that the existing land policy instruments are often too generic and are not tailored to the needs of the property owners.

Land Policy in Germany is not an independent policy domain but rather takes on different meanings across various spatial scales. At the national level, it is understood as a non-unified policy field that emerges at the intersection of building, planning, environmental, and other policies. On the local scale, it is commonly understood as the strategy of municipalities to implement land-use planning objectives by means of private law and property rights. On the national level, land policy objectives, such as the production of 400,000 housing units per year, reducing land take to 30 ha per day, and urban densification, have been established. However, these objectives are partially in conflict with each other. Moreover, on the local level, the strong property rights associated with land ownership can make it challenging to implement these policy goals. The case of Burgwall 21 in the city of Dortmund to illustrate how land policy in Germany shapes and influences the relationship between public planning and property rights in practice. The case study explores why a plot of land with high development potential and economic value in a well-integrated urban location can remain underdeveloped for decades.

Urban densification has become a central policy goal to deliver much-needed housing while reducing net land take. At the same time there has been a significant shift between the role of the state and the market in how to deliver planning outcomes and the type of regulation to achieve densification. This article investigates recent policy changes to promote densification in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, looking at the role of the state in delivering those outcomes and the type of regulation used. We conclude that in order to achieve densification the state has become more proactive, but this was not necessarily the direct result of the proliferation of new legislation but caused by the use of existing instruments of land policy by municipalities. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .

The public space that is vital for the quality of life and the functioning of the urban area faces significant pressure. The fragmented arrangement of actors leads to inefficiency and problems in coordination between actors. Public space managers strive for integration to tackle these challenges, prompting a fundamental shift of the policy arrangement. This study explores, through a qualitative multiple case study conducted on Dutch municipalities, how the current policy arrangement of managing public space is constructed, and how it hampers an integrated approach. This research shows that the strategic management of the municipalities stimulates an integrated approach but often fails to implement this approach due to various challenges in all dimensions of the policy arrangement. The challenges identified in the research are mainly expressed in the discourse and require more interaction between the actors, the development of necessary knowledge and competences and a change in the informal rules.

Cities worldwide have developed policies to promote and control urban densification. However, a high proportion of densification takes place without the purview of strategic planning. It is driven by individual landowners, who hold a strong position in deciding if land is developed or not. Despite their pivotal role, knowledge on landowner involvement is highly restricted by limited access to landowner data. We address this gap and make use of a unique dataset, available for the city of Dortmund, including landowner data for each parcel in 2011 and 2021. Using a geospatial approach, we identify six forms of densification, ranging from large-scale multi-family housing development to small-scale densification with low-density housing, and provide for the first time a systematic analysis of the involvement of private individuals, private companies and the municipality in these processes. The results show that private individuals play an important role in small-scale densification, which accounts for a third of all densification in Dortmund and takes place mainly in suburban areas. Further, we show that each densification type is associated with a distinct pattern of landownership and change of landownership over time. Our findings highlight the need for customised land policy approaches that can address private landowners’ interests, in order to facilitate and direct densification processes.

This concluding chapter presents four main conclusions based on the 12 cases and the reflections on land policy in European countries (AT, BE, CH, CZ, DE, ENG, FI, FR, NL, NO, PL, SE): Although land policy closely relates to spatial planning, it differs in two dimensions: (1) in its allocative and distributive perspective and (2) at strategic and operational levels of public policy. Based on this distinction four elements of land policy emerge: land use policy, land use planning, land tenure policy, and land management. Land policies comprise intentional decisions or activities led by public actors, sometimes with private sector cooperation. Land policy strategies stem from different interpretations of landowners’ roles, which are often more decisive than specific instruments. Public actors conceptualise the relationship between property rights and land policy: To one end, landowners are key stakeholders; at the other end, they are partners in spatial projects. The chapter concludes that the international comparative analysis can deepen the understanding of land-use planning, property rights, and spatial development.

This paper examines how land use conflicts in renewable energy expansion can be addressed through regional planning. These conflicts often arise from competing spatial claims and limited local support. Drawing on a case study of the Regional Energy Strategy (RES) in Flevoland, the Netherlands, the study applies conformance-performance planning framework to assess how different regional policy approaches influence spatial outcomes and governance processes. Empirical evidence is derived from document analysis and 18 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across multiple governance levels. The analysis explores how regionalisation reshapes stakeholder dynamics, procedural legitimacy, and institutional coordination. Theoretically, the paper contributes to debates on multi-level governance by identifying the conditions under which regional strategies can mitigate land use tensions in energy transitions. Findings show that regional planning can contribute to redistributing benefits and risks, potentially lowering conflict intensity, and enable procedural legitimacy. However, the outcomes are shaped by the design of governance structures, institutional flexibility, and coordination across multiple governance levels.

The business of densification refers to more or less aggressive urban development practices that use the broad political consensus on the need for urban densification to promote profit-driven development, often dressed up in the rhetoric of eco-efficiency, and to the detriment of social policy objectives (e.g. affordable housing, cultural heritage, community cohesion). The implementation of urban densification requires deep changes in the practice of land-use planning because, as opposed to greenfield developments, it occurs in a complex web of established rights and interests. These more active forms of planning interventions are referred to as “land policy” in a growing body of literature (including in this special issue). In the context of densification, land policy tends to be appraised in planning debates as purely instrumental, that is, as a more effective and proactive administrative strategy for improved project implementation. In this commentary, relying on empirical data from the Netherlands and Switzerland, we argue that land policy is in fact a hybrid construct that merges both progressive and neoliberal elements. We discuss how the hybrid nature of land policy generates tensions in project implementation as different discourses and representations collide. Therefore, there is a real need to accurately assess the true ideological scope of urban changes implemented in the name of densification, as land policy is fundamentally value-loaded. If planners remain blind to the political dimension of land policy, the business of densification will flourish, and social sustainability objectives will be systematically relegated to the background.

One of the difficulties in implementing densification objectives is that planners often do not have sufficient coercive power to restrict property rights, which means that landowners can resist the implementation of land use plans. As a result, planning increasingly takes place on the project level, allowing planning authorities and developers to renegotiate the terms and conditions of densification. While project-level negotiations have been researched, these studies do not focus on individual landowners but rather on developers. This article examines how developers and public authorities manage the property rights of individual landowners to prevent delays or blockages in project implementation. Drawing on a comparative case study of Thun (Switzerland) and Utrecht (Netherlands), we show how project-based planning takes different forms depending on legal frameworks and planning norms. In Thun, strategies focus on consensus building and input legitimacy; in Utrecht, more coercive instruments such as expropriation are used and legitimized based on their output. The findings suggest that project-based planning tends to exclude individual landowners from negotiation, framing their objections as obstructions to be managed. While individual owners' interests are often sidelined, the private economic interests of developers and large landowners often appeal to collective goals such as climate change mitigation or housing supply. This raises broader questions about which interests are recognized, or dismissed, in the construction of social sustainability in urban densification.

Abstract To reduce pluvial and fluvial flood risks throughout the catchment, land is needed for the implementation of flood risk measures. Especially nature-based solutions require plenty of land to store water and direct runoff water in the hinterland, riverine land, and urban areas. Most land, however, is privately owned. Mobilizing private land for flood risk management is considered a challenge of spatial flood risk management and requires specific strategies to involve landowners. Mobilizing private land for flood risk management is not a matter of obtaining land by land acquisition but, rather, a challenge of gaining access to land using land policy strategies. Gaining access to private land depends on the efficiency, effectiveness, and legitimacy of these strategies and differs across the catchment. It is also influenced by biophysical and sociopolitical conditions and also conditions created by stakeholders that differ in the hinterland, riverine land, and urban areas. Implementation challenges and land policy strategies differ in the three sections of the catchment. In the hinterland, many small-scale measures are needed to effectively reduce flood risk. The causal relationship between measures and their effects is more diffuse, complicating the selection of specific locations. However, a higher number of measures leads to greater effectiveness. Motivating landowners to voluntary provide access to their land seems to be the preferred way forward in the hinterland. In riverine land, the cause–effect relationships of measures are more obvious and understood by landowners. Thus, to get access to private land, “hard” strategies such as restricting land use or expropriation are more effective. Gaining access to this fertile land next to rivers often requires financial compensation. In urban areas, the challenges are centered around the fact that there are numerous landowners who own small pieces of land. These landowners build and rebuild in flood-prone urban areas, being unaware, unable, or unwilling to reduce their flood risk with measures. A wider variety of strategies are required to address these landowners. Sometimes these are more informative, sometimes more incentive-based, and sometimes more restricting. Thus, successful mobilization of private land for flood risk management requires a nuanced understanding of the specific challenges and tailored land policy strategies across the catchment. By adopting tailored land policy strategies, policymakers can enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and legitimacy of implementing flood risk measures across the catchment.

This chapter is an exploration of the reasons people settle in areas exposed to flood and therefore how land use planning and management can help alleviate flood risk in urban areas. Regarding the former, the chapter analyses the complex socio-economic and political dynamics within flood-prone areas. To this end, it focuses on the vicious cycle of the 'control paradox', a false sense of security resulting from overreliance on flood defence, and its role in maintaining flood risk in society. Land use planning and management can break this cycle through a number of strategies that support a shift in flood risk management discourse towards planning and making more room for water. Finally, the authors argue that there is scope for new research on the role that land value capture instruments can play in mainstreaming the implementation of blue and green infrastructure in urban areas in an efficient, legitimate and socially just way.