Ebook: New instruments in spatial planning

Market-oriented planning instruments have recently received considerable attention in many countries. Is it possible to develop innovative, more market-oriented instruments? In the Netherlands – but also in several other countries – the American instrument of Transferable Development Rights has received a lot of attention and has been used as an inspiration for the tailor-made translation of instruments in other planning systems.

We were inspired to address the topic of transferring development opportunities between areas in planning practice by a debate between academics, lawyers, and planning practitioners at an international planning symposium in Annapolis, Maryland (organized by the University of Maryland in the U.S. and Habiforum knowledge center in the Netherlands) and the Van Doorne-Habiforum conference on Transferable Development Rights a year later. We quickly decided that the idea of transferring development opportunities between areas is more than only the transfer of development rights. It relates more to compensation: not in money, but in a non-financial perspective.

The participants' interest in these types of non-financial compensation issues inspired us to probe our own thinking on this compensation issue. A comparative study on non-financial compensation was started, funded by Habiforum and linked to a number of research projects, such as Menno van der Veen's and Marjolein Spaans' research funded by the Delft Centre for Sustainable Urban Areas, and Leonie Janssen-Jansen's research funded by the Dutch Scientific Organization NWO-STIP. Marjolein Spaans' and Leonie Janssen-Jansen's research also fall under the umbrella of the Habiforum Program Innovative Land Use.

The chapters in this publication are representative of a close cooperation between planners, economists and lawyers from both science and planning practice. The exchange of knowledge within the framework of this book has arisen from divergent paths. Draft chapters were discussed with all the authors during a special track on non-financial compensation within the Inaugural Conference of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law and Property Rights in Amsterdam, in February 2007. The more theoretical chapters were discussed during the international research conference by the ENHR (European Network for Housing Research) in Rotterdam, in June, 2007, and the Second Conference of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law and Property Rights in Warsaw, in February 2008.

We would like to thank Habiforum and NWO-STIP for making this publication possible. We are also grateful to the Amsterdam Institute of Metropolitan and International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, which covered the expenses for our first seminar in 2007. We also thank the OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies at the Delft University of Technology for covering the costs of the editing and lay-out of this book.

Finally, the contributors to this volume derserve immense thanks for their involvement. We hope this book inspires the reader to be curious about the instruments of non-financial compensation and to wonder what contribution they can make to planning.

Leonie Janssen-Jansen, Marjolein Spaans & Menno van der Veen

Amsterdam & Delft, May 2008