Edwin Buitelaar

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Utrecht University

The Netherlands was traditionally lauded for its planning system, including its land policies. In this chapter, we argue that the picture has always been more nuanced and local planning practice has always been more pragmatic; it was an ambiguous utopia at best. Moreover, the Netherlands has experienced a transition over the last thirty years from...

In the reality of planning practice, where there is usually no a priori ‘right’ substantive conception of justice to guide and evaluate decision making, conceptions are negotiated between stakeholders. Moreover, these conceptions vary in space and time. The existing academic discussion on justice in planning provides limited insight in and guidance...

Met de stijging van de energieprijzen zijn mensen meer op hun energiekosten gaan letten. Dit zien we ook terug op de woningmarkt. Huizen met hogere energielabels en dus betere energieprestaties worden steeds beter gewaardeerd. Dit artikel laat zien dat de stijging in de energieprijzen sinds het begin van de oorlog in Oekraïne op de Utrechtse woning...

Waar komt de grondexploitatie, een typisch Nederlandse institutie, eigenlijk vandaan? In Rooilijn schreef ik een kleine geschiedenis van een belangrijk begrip.

Real estate developers play a crucial role in the production of our cities. Yet, the knowledge about how they operate is limited. They are often portrayed as a homogeneous group, while in practice we see a large variety of different types of developers and of their strategies. Particularly striking are the differences in the extent to which real es...

The report provides evidence on the current state of housing in Ukraine and how these challenges can be addressed through technical assistance, policy reform and capacity building, drawing on international best practices and experience. In doing so, it offers advice for the Ukrainian Government and other key stakeholders, such as the European Commi...

Nederland staat voor een grote ruimtelijke metamorfose. Woning-bouw, klimaatadaptatie, energietransitie, natuurontwikkeling: het moet allemaal een plek krijgen in een beperkte ruimte. Dit vraagt niet alleen om een goed ruimtelijk ontwerp, ook moet het ontwerp van het bestaande institutionele systeem tegen het licht worden gehouden. Dit essay verken...

Most planning theories are based on the assumption that there is a homogenous public interest. However, planning agencies are driven by multiple and conflicting interests in practice. This article conceptualises and empirically investigates these interests in an “extreme case” of active public land policy: the Dutch state selling Amsterdam’s Bijlme...

The current ecological crisis will transform the face and fate of cities. Neighbourhoods for the Future is based on the conviction that we should rethink cities from the ambit of the neighbourhood. It revisits the neighbourhood as the designated scale and arena to build our urban futures. The neighbourhood is small enough to be tangible, yet big en...

This conceptual article analyses how both policymakers and academics often discuss the state of buildings. Property vacancy and abandonment are generally approached statically, in an undifferentiated way and responded to with ad hoc public policies. However, there is great variety in the causes and effects of a building's state of affairs. This art...

Van wie is de stad? Van iedereen, zou het antwoord idealiter luiden. Maar wát is het waar iedereen aanspraak op zou kunnen of mogen maken? En vooral ook, wáár dan? Wat is rechtvaardig bij de bepaling van wie wat krijgt in de stad en waar? ‘De rechtvaardige stad’ wordt ten onrechte vaak gezien als een concept dat voor slechts één uitleg vatbaar is....

Urban sprawl is often portrayed as a (quasi-)natural process, as inevitable and taking place behind our backs. However, we claim that it is co-produced by government: Governments not only allow sprawl to happen, but often also incentivise and stimulate it, either knowingly or unintentionally. We substantiate this claim by comparing urban developmen...

In cities around the world, housing demand is increasing rapidly. Since housing supply is inelastic, house prices are rising as well, which causes affordability problems. Although there is consensus about the need to raise production, there is debate about its location: within the existing city, on underused or derelict buildings and sites, or on g...

De crisis van 2008 heeft niet alleen voor een daling van de woningbouwproductie op korte termijn gezorgd, de schade lijkt permanent of op z'n minst van lange duur. Daar waar door de crisis de eco-nomische productie in Nederland en de Eurozone ongeveer 15 procent lager ligt dan op grond van de pre-crisistrend verwacht mocht worden, ligt de productie...

We hebben het succes van de verkoop van de Bijlmerbajes beoordeeld aan de hand van een vijftal criteria (doelbereik, doeltreffendheid, doelmatigheid, transparantie en rechtmatigheid). De resultaten van die toetsing variëren. Van doelbereik lijkt over het algemeen sprake. Ook zijn die doelen tegen relatief lage kosten voor het RVB bereikt. Bovendien...

Stel je voor: alle doelstellingen voor het ‘aardgasvrij’ maken van onze wijken zijn gehaald. Zijn we dan tevreden? In zekere zin natuurlijk wel: een majeure opgave is volbracht. Maar wat als al die wijken verder niet zijn verbeterd? Als Overvecht in Utrecht aardgasvrij is, maar nog steeds een 12 jaar lagere gezonde levensverwachting kent dan Tuindo...

Inaugural lecture professorship Land and Real Estate Development at Utrecht University

Door de energietransitie en de woningnood staat de wijkaanpak weer hoog op de planologische agenda. Op wijkniveau kan je immers meters maken én blijft de schaal overzichtelijk en tastbaar. Maar het wordt steeds duidelijker dat een succesvolle wijkaanpak om meer vraagt dan ‘aardgasvrij’ of ‘autoluw’. De sociale component is cruciaal. Want hoe win je...

Planning, Law and Economics sets out a new framework for applying a legal approach to spatial planning, showing how to improve the practice and help achieve its aims. The book covers planning laws, citizens' rights and property rights, asking ‘What rules do we want to make and, where necessary, enforce? And how do we want to apply them in planning...

The durability of real estate is closely related to physical deterioration and functional obsolescence. Aging effects appear to be particularly relevant for industrial real estate, where structures are often designed for specific production processes, and office buildings where outward appearance, which is often related to characteristics that are...

In the course of the nineteenth century, many countries attempted to simplify their regulatory systems; since then, however, the entire legal apparatus has become ever more complex, being based on the (debatable) notion that law must mirror the growing complexity of society. Owing to this presumption, complex land-use and building issues have rapid...

Cities are economically segregated to various degrees. Segregation translates into greater homogeneity of neighborhoods: the rich and the poor usually occupy separate parts of the city. In response, urban-renewal policies often focus on creating an economically more heterogeneous neighborhood composition by replacing lower-income with middle-income...

Increasing economic inequality in cities, and the spatial translation of that into more segregated neighbourhoods, is top of the political agenda in developed countries. While the overall living standards have increased in the last century, the focus has now shifted from poverty to economic differences, with a particular focus on the gap between th...

The intent of this article is to explore the scope and working of " framework-rules " in relation to self-organization in urban development, both theoretically and empirically. It explores the strategies promoted in Oosterwold (Almere, The Netherland), and the framework-rules that discipline its emergent development, without wanting to suggest that...

Attention to self-organisation and spontaneous order in urban development is growing both in academia and in planning practice. One of the current academic discussions centres around the desirability of self-organisation. This paper evaluates the case of self-organisation in Oosterwold Almere in the Netherlands — an atypical case as it is a large-s...

The international planning community has long regarded Dutch planning culture as atypical and even exemplary. This article claims that this common view might need revision, because of large changes that are taking place in planning and development practice. The three pillars of Dutch planning and development culture – integration (of land uses, act...

Urban-economic inequality is commonly considered to be increasing and a phenomenon that needs to be combatted. However, discussions about it are sometimes rather unsystematic, unsubstantiated and alarmist. This compromises policy effectiveness. In this paper we put forward a decision-making framework that can be used to provide structure to the dis...

Vintage effects have received considerable attention from economists in the context of house prices. Although strongly related, the impact of architectural building styles on prices has not been studied yet. Using a cross-sectional hedonic price analysis including building styles of recently developed homes in the Netherlands we find a significant...

Veel ruimtelijk onderzoek is impliciet normatief. Empirische observaties worden veelal gevolgd door normatieve reflexen in plaats van reflecties. Dit soort reflexen kunnen zorgen voor oversimplificatie en tunnelvisie binnen beleid. Als normatieve reflectie wél plaatsvindt, ontstaat ruimte voor alternatieve en wellicht betere beleidssuggesties. In d...

This article aims to highlight the mechanisms through which institutional arrangements influence the morphology of residential development. By comparing the Netherlands, Flanders and North Rhine-Westphalia, which have quite similar socio-economic and landscape characteristics, it investigates how differences in national institutional environments h...

This special issue is about a particular way in which a country, through its public policy, can stimulate the provision of social or affordable housing.Since the use of the adjective ‘social’ or ‘affordable’ is context-specific, we will use both words interchangeably. This way has the following components:land is made available for building social...

The supply side of real estate markets has remained relatively neglected compared to the body of work that studies the demand side. Consequently, little is known about the way that suppliers actually make decisions about the quantity of land and property to be made available for sale at any one time. This paper investigates how one particular type...

Transferable offsets are a means of mitigating the adverse environmental impacts of resource developments. Based on insights from institutional economics, there are three elements that need to be in place for offsets to be effective: (1) property rights over the mitigating good can be defined and assigned; (2) a difference exists between the margin...

Transaction cost theory and application tells us that when buyers and sellers in a market incur transaction costs, intermediaries may become involved. Specifically, intermediaries influence the cause of the transaction costs to buyers and sellers such that transaction costs are reduced. In this paper we assess if and how this occurs for a number of...

http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/PBL_2013_gebiedsontwikkeling-en-commerci%C3%ABle-vastgoedmarkten.pdf

Environmental policy instruments generate transaction costs to public and private parties. There is a growing literature reporting on the size of transaction costs produced by environmental policy instruments. This paper extends that literature through an analysis of the factors that influence transaction costs in environmental policy and how this...

"On ne sait plus quoi penser du modèle hollandais. Les mythiques politiques foncières néerlandaises ne seraient-elles plus que l'ombre d'elles-mêmes ? Si des fissures sont bien visibles, et menacent le système vanté dans tous les bons manuels, le mythe est loin d'avoir été balayé."

As a means to sustainable urban development, redeveloping brownfield sites is advocated over greenfield development in most Western countries. There is much case study research into the factors that influence the (financial) costs, revenues and results of land development. What is virtually absent in the literature is large-scale quantitative resea...

http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/PBL_2012_Vormgeven-aan-de-Spontane-Stad_500232002.pdf

After being introduced in the US in the 1970s, inclusionary housing is now found around the world. Even the Netherlands, which is known for its tradition of public land and housing provision, has adopted it. The aim of this paper is to trace how this change occurred by applying a theory of institutional change. This theory regards institutional cha...

Outcomes of land and property markets may be understood by studying the effects of (interventions in) market processes and market institutions. Many studies have paid attention to the meaning of institutions for land and property development processes. The standpoint of this paper is that changes in the institutional order of the market may be cons...

Urban regeneration is an increasingly important but complex business. One factor that is widely recognised as adding to the complexity is the fragmentation of landownership. However, not only does this affect the process, it also reveals itself in the outcome of urban regeneration—the urban morphology. Property rights theory helps to conceptualise...

Planning laws are usually made with good intentions, but do not always lead to good results—at least not when measured against their own goals. Since July 2008 the Netherlands has had a new planning act which aims for a plan-led system and a stronger role of the land-use plan in providing a framework for building permits—instead of these being gran...

Theories of land markets should be intellectually sound and should be able to explain and predict market outcomes, such as price and volume of transactions, changes in these and locations of different land uses. Theories based on neo-classical economics, which largely ignore the role of institutions, are not intellectually sound because it is known...

In the international literature and discussions on land management, Dutch land policy is often presented as a special case, sometimes even as a role model for other countries. However, in recent years this policy has come under pressure as a consequence of institutional changes in the housing market, the social housing sector, spatial policy and Eu...

At the heart of every planning system lies the trade-off between flexibility and legal certainty. Every system has a bit of both. Systems such as the English put more emphasis on flexibility, whereas the American and the French seem to value legal certainty more highly. The Netherlands is part of the same Napoleonic legal family as France. However,...

http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/PBL-2010-Ex-durante-WRO.pdf

The intent of this article is to understand why Houstonians reject zoning while simultaneously adopting a collection of mechanisms that serve zoning-type functions. The answer is found in discursive-institutionalist approaches that emphasize the symbolic meaning (besides the instrumental value) that people give to regulatory tools. Zoning as a labe...

This paper presents an analytical framework that allows us to evaluate the performance of dynamic governance structures. In housing development processes, governance structures—markets, hierarchies and network or relational structures—change as the process proceeds, and so do the goals that are set by all stakeholders, including local authorities....

The Quest for Control Over DevelopmentRelationship Between Public and Private SectorAttitudes Towards Transaction CostsLegal Styles: Flexibility, Certainty and AccountabilityReferences

Dutch planning and property lawThe Marialaan case: small but complexTransaction-costs analysis of the MarialaanReferences

Economic approaches to institutionalismInstitutions and transaction costs in the (early) new institutional economicsGovernance structures and property rights: building upon and refining Coase's workHow do transaction costs emerge? Transaction dimensions and economic behaviourRelationship between transaction costs and institutionsReferences

Planning in the US: Social Conflict Over Property RightsHouston: no Zoning, but not UnregulatedHouston City Planning in Practice: MontebelloTransaction-Cost Analysis of MontebelloReferences

Applying Transaction Cost Theory to Planning and DevelopmentTransaction Costs as Dead Weight Losses or Means with a Purpose?References

The User Rights Regimes ComparedTransaction Costs Entangled in StructuresReferences

User rights regimes as particular governance structuresA transaction-cost analysis of the development process: a methodologyThe empirical researchReferences

IntroductionBeyond the ‘market versus the government’ debatesThe study of transaction costs in planning and property researchThe relevance for planning practiceThe structure of this bookReferences

English planning and property lawWapping WharfTransaction-cost analysis of Wapping WharfReferences