title: Capturing land policy effects with spatial analysis : a comparison of densification patterns in Utrecht and Bern
Creators: name: Götze, Vera
Publisher: name: Universität Bern
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: 910 Geography &amp; travel

description: This thesis is about understanding the effects of land policy on urban development through spatial analysis. While numerous tools exist to describe urban development, they are hardly applied to policy-related questions from the municipal to the national scale. Spatial analysis has the potential to identify and compare development patterns, thereby gauging policy impacts on the built environment. By bridging the gap between spatial and policy analysis, this thesis aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how land policies shape urban development.
I particularly concentrate on the application of spatial analysis in the context of urban densification. Densification presents an interesting context due to its inherent complexity. Within limited space, numerous, often conflicting interests and rights compete for priority. This intensifies as pressure mounts to address critical issues like housing, energy, transportation, and climate change. Municipalities have to navigate this field through land policy. How does the comparison of densification patterns contribute to tracing these land policy effects? What densification patterns emerge across countries and municipalities, and how does land policy possibly explain the observed differences? I approach these questions by zooming in on three different aspects of land policy, namely (1) the effect of institutional regimes on densification patterns across countries, (2) the effect of applied policy instruments on the outcome of individual development projects, and (3) the effect of municipal strategies on the application of policy instruments.
I conducted my analysis in the city regions of Bern, Switzerland, and Utrecht, the Netherlands, which are countries with contrasting institutional regimes. I found that two approaches were especially well-suited to tease out policy effects when comparing densification patterns because they reflect the ability and willingness of municipalities to enable densification and to control the outcome of individual developments. First, measuring not only densification outcomes but focusing on the process. The degree to which municipalities have the power to enable densification at strategic places can show in the kind of neighborhoods densification occurred in and the change it introduced in these neighborhoods. It can also show in the complexity of the planning process as expressed in the size of projects, zoning change, the number of involved landowners and the complexity of parcel changes. Second, by measuring densification outcomes in terms of how they deviate from expectations. This can be achieved by comparing the characteristics of densification projects to the neighborhood average or values predicted by a model simulating market forces. The strength of this latter approach is that, by pointing out projects that deviate from expectations, spatial analysis can be combined with qualitative case study approaches to trace planning processes and establish causal relationships between policy and spatial outcome.
In addition to spatially tracing policy effects on urban densification, this thesis provides evidence of the variation in possible densification outcomes, ranging from the affordability of new-built housing to the prevalence of disruptive, large-scale redevelopments of social housing estates. By monitoring densification outcomes themselves, the methods and findings presented in this thesis contribute to triggering an important discussion on the winners and losers of densification, acknowledging that negative social effects are not inherent to densification itself but depend on the form it takes on, and land policy affects the prevalence and distribution of these forms.