88
H. Nuissl and S. Siedentop
US, where public concern about sprawl has grown significantly in the recent past
(Bengston et al. 2005), resulting in a strong anti-sprawl movement. This in turn has
prompted a number of states to adopt growth management programmes that attempt
to contain urban growth and preserve open space. However, urban land consumption
is also a major concern in Europe (EEA 2006; Nilsson et al. 2013), where quite a few
planning strategies and instruments have been placed under scrutiny regarding their
effectiveness (Hersperger et al. 2018). Such policies, however, have met with strong
opposition by more liberal academics and planners who emphasise the importance of
individual choice and the free market (e.g. Ewing 1994; Ewing 1997; Benfield et al.
1999; Gordon and Richardson 2001; Bruegmann 2005). Elsewhere, most notably in
Western and Central Europe and Australia, the debate about the drawbacks of urban
land use change has gained considerable momentum, too (e.g. Newman 1992; EEA
2006). In England, the former Labour government set a national target of delivering
60% of all new housing units on previously developed land and through conversions of the existing building stock. The government saw the reuse of urban land
as a key policy in reducing development pressures on the open countryside (Downs
1999; Ganser and Williams 2007). The Chinese government, concerned about the
alarming loss of prime farmland due to urbanisation, has introduced regulatory policies that have attempted to protect farmland more effectively (Lichtenberg and Ding
2006). The federal governments of Austria, Germany and Switzerland have all introduced national targets to reduce the rate of conversion of non-urban to urban land
uses (Bundesregierung 2002). They argued that urban land use change and landscape fragmentation were key drivers of species loss, landscape deterioration and
reductions in infrastructure efficiency.
A great variety of policy and planning instruments have been proposed to implement the goal of taming urban land use change. One common way to categorise
policy and planning instruments is their classification according to whether they are
concerned either with (I) regulation, or (II) spending, taxation and subsidies, or (III)
advocacy (e.g. Bengston et al. 2004). Adopting and slightly modifying this approach,
we propose differentiating policy and planning instruments according to where they
are located on the continuum that ranges between the poles of two basic planning
principles:
• Planning, reflecting the “traditional” regulatory approach of spatial planning to
set legally binding rules for the use of land via regulatory plans, and
• Market, reflecting the “economic” approach of land use policy which employs
“market-based instruments” that modify incentives in a way that lead actors to
use the land in an intended manner. For instance, taxation schemes that put an
additional cost on the development of land are clearly among the most efficient
ways to minimise the total amount of urbanised land (e.g. Song and Zenou 2006).
Somewhere in the middle between these two poles, there is a wide array of instruments that are primarily managerial by character because they basically focus on
influencing the decision-making processes of (either potentially land consuming or
land use policy making) actors. This group of instruments can be subsumed under a
third planning principle:
H. Nuissl and S. Siedentop
US, where public concern about sprawl has grown significantly in the recent past
(Bengston et al. 2005), resulting in a strong anti-sprawl movement. This in turn has
prompted a number of states to adopt growth management programmes that attempt
to contain urban growth and preserve open space. However, urban land consumption
is also a major concern in Europe (EEA 2006; Nilsson et al. 2013), where quite a few
planning strategies and instruments have been placed under scrutiny regarding their
effectiveness (Hersperger et al. 2018). Such policies, however, have met with strong
opposition by more liberal academics and planners who emphasise the importance of
individual choice and the free market (e.g. Ewing 1994; Ewing 1997; Benfield et al.
1999; Gordon and Richardson 2001; Bruegmann 2005). Elsewhere, most notably in
Western and Central Europe and Australia, the debate about the drawbacks of urban
land use change has gained considerable momentum, too (e.g. Newman 1992; EEA
2006). In England, the former Labour government set a national target of delivering
60% of all new housing units on previously developed land and through conversions of the existing building stock. The government saw the reuse of urban land
as a key policy in reducing development pressures on the open countryside (Downs
1999; Ganser and Williams 2007). The Chinese government, concerned about the
alarming loss of prime farmland due to urbanisation, has introduced regulatory policies that have attempted to protect farmland more effectively (Lichtenberg and Ding
2006). The federal governments of Austria, Germany and Switzerland have all introduced national targets to reduce the rate of conversion of non-urban to urban land
uses (Bundesregierung 2002). They argued that urban land use change and landscape fragmentation were key drivers of species loss, landscape deterioration and
reductions in infrastructure efficiency.
A great variety of policy and planning instruments have been proposed to implement the goal of taming urban land use change. One common way to categorise
policy and planning instruments is their classification according to whether they are
concerned either with (I) regulation, or (II) spending, taxation and subsidies, or (III)
advocacy (e.g. Bengston et al. 2004). Adopting and slightly modifying this approach,
we propose differentiating policy and planning instruments according to where they
are located on the continuum that ranges between the poles of two basic planning
principles:
• Planning, reflecting the “traditional” regulatory approach of spatial planning to
set legally binding rules for the use of land via regulatory plans, and
• Market, reflecting the “economic” approach of land use policy which employs
“market-based instruments” that modify incentives in a way that lead actors to
use the land in an intended manner. For instance, taxation schemes that put an
additional cost on the development of land are clearly among the most efficient
ways to minimise the total amount of urbanised land (e.g. Song and Zenou 2006).
Somewhere in the middle between these two poles, there is a wide array of instruments that are primarily managerial by character because they basically focus on
influencing the decision-making processes of (either potentially land consuming or
land use policy making) actors. This group of instruments can be subsumed under a
third planning principle: