Thomas Hartmann

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at TU Dortmund University

Extreme floods cause enormous damage in floodplains, which levees cannot prevent. Therefore, it is vital when spatial planning to provide space for water retention in these areas. Land use planners, water management agencies, landowners, and policymakers all agree on this challenge, but attempts to make the space for when rivers burst their banks a...

What is the role of spatial planners in urban development? Planners can be very involved in the realization of the land-use plans or they can take a more passive role in development processes. Which role they take depends on the particular institutional arrangements for land management in each country. In this contribution, a typical active and a t...

This open access book addresses the various disciplinary aspects of nature-based solutions in flood risk management on private land. In recent decades, water management has been moving towards nature-based solutions. These are assumed to be much more multi-purpose than traditional “grey infrastructures” and seem to be regarded as a panacea for many...

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...

Land is a scarce resource. How can conflicting claims to land be reconciled? How can more housing be provided and, at the same time, the ecological goal of reducing land take be met? In many European countries, land-use planning is facing increasing and oftentimes contradictory challenges. This forms a land question, which requires land policies th...

As urban areas face increasing pressure on limited land, this article examines how various stakeholders, including municipal planners, distribution system operator (DSO), and developers, navigate the growing land-use conflicts inherent in urban energy transitions. While energy transitions significantly shape urban planning, energy infrastructure is...

In many European countries, land policies face increasing and often contradictory challenges, such as land take, housing shortages, and densification. This contribution argues for a comparative approach to land policy and provides an analytical framework for cross-country comparison. The framework seeks to allow for understanding, comparison and re...

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 strateg...

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 o...

Cities worldwide have developed policies to promote and control urban densification. However, a high proportion of densi-fication 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 piv-otal role, knowledge on landowner involv...

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...

Zusammenfassung Nachverdichtung wird als eine zentrale Lösung für eine nachhaltige Siedlungs-entwicklung gesehen. Diese erfordert Wissen zu den stattfindenden baulichen Prozessen, aber auch zu den Akteuren, die diese durchführen. Im Gegensatz zur Erweiterung der Städte in den Außenbereich, stellt die Verdichtung die Heraus-forderung, planerische In...

Flood risk is increasing and residents are expected to undertake adaptation measures to minimise flood damage. This requires them to be aware of the risk they face and how they can adapt, but this is often not the case. Through risk communication, residents’ relation to their flood prone environment could be strengthened, but the effect remains lim...

Während die Bundesregierung in Deutschland den Bau# Turbo ausruft und eine Siedlungsentwicklung wie in den !9%&er Jahren fordert, strebt Belgien eine Bau#Wende (Bouwshift) mit dem rechtlichen Ziel einer Netto#Null# Flächeninanspruchnahme an (Lacoere/Leinfelder 2&23). Zugleich experimentiert Tschechien mit ökonomischen Maßnahmen zur Reduzierung der...

The emerging objective to combat urban sprawl has put densification on the political agenda. Simultaneously, the complexity of planning within the existing built environment means that planning increasingly occurs on the project level. Project-based negotiations between planning authorities and landowners, in which agreements between parties are fo...

Progress of the ARL International Working Group on Land Policies in Europe

Dieser Themenband stellt den aktuellen Stand der Fachdiskussion zu bereits entwickelten bzw. in der Entwicklung befindlicher methodischer Ansätze sowie konkreter Beispiele zum Themenfeld „Resilienz im Hochwasser- und Starkregenrisikomanagement“ dar. Dieses Vorhaben ist eingebunden in die Bearbeitung des Themenfeldes „Anpassung an den Klimawandel“,...

Who owns the land? This question is important in many areas of public policy. Effective urban planning, efficient land markets, democratic legitimacy, and the allocation of land as a scarce resource are some examples of why certain stakeholders need information about who owns land. Transparency of land ownership can also contribute to more effectiv...

Responsible land distribution in Asia, with ever-increasing limitations in space, requires the use of smart technologies, sophisticated models, intelligent algorithms, and big data repositories. This book presents new land management perspectives and fit-for-purpose, flexible, dynamic, and effective solutions for land management and land administra...

During the last decades, the topic of land policy has been mainly relegated to the realm of academia. The current simultaneity of multiple societal and ecological crises, however, is challenging established practices of planning and spatial policy and threatening sustainable development. In many European countries, land policies have (again) recent...

In flood risk management awareness has been growing that the responsibility for coping with a flood cannot be assumed by the government alone. Homeowners need to be actively involved in flood risk management by taking responsibility; for this, they need empowerment and support to take adequate precautions. If homeowners implement precautionary meas...

Participative decision-making can offer a route toward more democratic and legitimate decisions in spatial planning processes. Although more legitimacy is sometimes presented as a result of participative decision-making, this relationship is more complex and not necessarily causal. This paper explores the relationship between the forms of legitimac...

Most spatial planning systems are growth-oriented and focus on upzoning. However, downzoning is becoming increasingly important, as European planning is taking a “resourcial turn” and needs to integrate net land neutrality. Yet downzoning may entail financial compensation for landowners losing their development rights. Understanding the legal and f...

In many urban areas, governments are struggling to curb urban sprawl while simultaneously trying to keep up with growing pressures on the housing market. As a result, housing developments increasingly take place within the existing housing stock through soft densification in the form of subdivisions. Municipalities aim to regulate this type of dens...

Land value capture refers to a range of methods utilised by public authorities to obtain a portion of the rise in land values from landowners. To enable both researchers and decision-makers to comprehensively assess the outcomes and effects of land value capture, evaluation frameworks are necessary. This special issue adopts four generic evaluation...

This paper investigates the role of flood risk experts in supporting homeowners to implement property‐level flood risk adaption (PLFRA). Homeowners can reduce their flood risks by implementing PLFRA. However, oftentimes they need advice on what sort of and how to implement PLFRA. This means that tailored experts advice is necessary to inform homeow...

Dealing with climate-driven natural hazards like river or pluvial floods, droughts, heat waves or forest fires play a central role across the globe in the twenty-first century. Urban resilience has become an important term in response to climate change. Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb shocks. Resilience depends on the vulnera...

Substantial public and private resources have been devoted to recover from floods (through building and infrastructure reconstructions) pursuing the solidarity principle. However, particular flood recovery schemes have not been used strategically to prevent future damages. The prevention and recovery phases seem to be in many ways disconnected. Tha...

How can we achieve resilience of urban areas? That is the central challenge set in this edited volume. While we don’t attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to this complex challenge, contributions in this volume focus on one of the major aspects of implementing resilience that has hitherto largely been overlooked in academic and professional de...

Governments all over the world experience institutional conflicts in transforming their fossil-based energy system into a more renewable one. Between national, regional, and local tiers of government tensions rise on meeting renewable energy objectives. Under the institutional arrangement of subsidiarity, decisions on renewable energy policy object...

The increasing number of environmental disasters such as floods, landslides, sea level rise, and storms have an impact on how land can be used and affect property rights. The effects are predominantly negative and often result in damage of property. The academic debate on land policy and its attempt to deal with such impacts are mainly responding t...

IAK Land Policies in Europe in Discussion with the German Association of Cities and Towns and the German Institute for Federal Real Estate (BIMA) on the challenges of land policy

The transition to a renewable energy future requires the extensive expansion of current high voltage grids. Due to the amount of land needed for expansion, issues related to land use have led to increased grid development opposition among landowners which in turn leads to significant project planning and budget overruns. Yet knowledge about why lan...

The OECD Water Governance Principles provide a guideline for good water governance. However, these principles can conflict with each other when applied in practice. This contribution aims to understand which dilemmas arise and how such conflicts play out. It is explored in an in-depth case study on Dutch flood risk management in which conflicts bet...

Land policy influences how and by whom land is used; therefore, it impacts the efficiency and equity of land use. This paper offers an economic perspective on efficiency and equity as fundamental purposes of planning and land policy. It brings a highly needed mutual understanding between planning and economics, whilst acknowledging the limitations...

The adoption of sustainable soil management practices such as the use of green waste from road side management and nature reserves is thwarted in practice by hesitance on the side of farmers. To foster the use of these practices, it is crucial to understand farmers’ decision‐perspectives and attitudes toward them. Using Q‐methodology, perspectives...

Centralising the role of land and landowners, Spatial Flood Risk Management brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing .

Plain Language Summary Flood risks are expected to increase in the future due to the combined effects of climate change, land use change and population growth. New approaches are needed to complement conventional flood risk management (FRM) based on engineering solutions and project‐based approaches. In this Commentary we present the findings of th...

Flood risk management nowadays affects landowners behind dikes, broadening the group of stakeholders. Interactive governance provides an approach to negotiate and balance the diverging interests of stakeholders involved. One of the benefits of interactive governance is creating satisfaction through involvement, making stakeholders less prone to tak...

The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other (qualitative) policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces. In public debate in the Nether...

The major event that hit Europe in summer 2021 reminds society that floods are recurrent and among the costliest and deadliest natural hazards. The long-term flood risk management (FRM) efforts preferring sole technical measures to prevent and mitigate floods have shown to be not sufficiently effective and sensitive to the environment. Nature-Based...

It is generally assumed that municipalities attract residents and businesses as a result of intermunicipal competition for tax revenues. This growth-oriented behaviour poses a serious problem considering internationally acknowledged goals to limit land take. Nonetheless, research on how fiscal incentives affect municipal land policies is scarce. Ad...

Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro‐meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate‐resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt...

Land policies influence the value of land use. In this context, land valuation is essential for land policy for two reasons: First, operationally, many of such instruments require reliable knowledge of land values; second, ethically: by influencing land values, land policy makes people poorer or richer. The valuation of land, therefore, is importan...

ie Hochwasserereignisse vom 13.-15. Juli führen uns die Relevanz von Hochwasser­prävention akut und erneut wieder vor Augen. Die Natur hält mit der Erhitzung der Erd­atmosphäre immer mehr und intensivere Ereignisse für uns bereit, die unsere Hochwasser-Schutzmaßnahmen an ihre Grenzen und darüber hinaus führen. In Deutschland und in der Europäischen...

Die jüngsten Ereignisse verdeutlichen es drastisch: Wetter-Ausschläge werden extremer. Im Juli 2021 waren es extreme Niederschläge in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Rheinland-Pfalz, Bayern und Sachsen, 2018 und 2019 litt Deutschland unter einer langanhaltenden Trockenheit und Hitze. Jüngere Klimastudien zeigen, dass die Wahrscheinlichkeit für beide Extreme z...

Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro-meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate-resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt...

Floods are one of the most common natural disasters affecting numerous people worldwide. Over the last years, Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have gained attention as an emerging approach for flood mitigation that can complement traditional grey infrastructures. NBS provide several ecosystem services, including flood mitigation and improved water qual...

Residents should take adaptive action to reduce flood risk—this claim increasingly resonates in the academic debate on flood risk management (FRM). Hence, it must be assumed that a change in the division of responsibilities between actors involved is an imperative, that is, beyond the public authorities, residents should become more responsible for...

The multi-layer safety approach was introduced in 2009 in the Netherlands as a result of the shift from flood prevention to flood risk management. It aims at reducing flood risks by integrating defensive measures against floods (layer 1), resilient spatial planning measures (layer 2), and effective disaster management measures (layer 3). But how ar...

How do municipalities strategically use land policy to develop land for housing? The development of housing is a challenge for many European countries, though the scale and time of it differs. Issues are not always about the absolute number of houses that need to be supplied in a country. The distribution and quality of houses affect the demand for...

We need to change how we think about flood risk management. Successfully implementing sustainable flood risk mitigation measures requires approaches that are different from the management of grey infrastructure measures, such as dams, dikes, or levees. For large grey infrastructure projects, the defining factor is engineer-ing. Measures are designe...

Like many other countries, Germany aims to create flood retention areas via polders and dike relocations. As these measures require access to diverse plots, land acquisition is clearly a challenging task for the responsible water authorities. A revision to the national water law in 2017 introduced several new instruments for land acquisition, i.e....

Governments all over the world experience institutional conflicts in transforming their fossil-based energy system into a more renewable one. Between national, regional, and local tiers of government tensions rise on meeting renewable energy objectives. Under the institutional arrangement of subsidiarity, decisions on renewable energy policy object...

Die Bereitstellung von Grund zum Wohnen – Bauland – ist ein erklärtes Politikziel des Baulandmobilisierungsgesetzes, das derzeit im Referentenentwurf vorliegt und in vielen Punkten den Empfehlungen der Baulandkommission folgt. Wohnungsnot wird demnach als eine Frage der Flächenbereitstellung und somit eine Bodenfrage erkannt. Nach jahrzehntelanger...

Book review Sclar, E., Baird-Zars, B., Fischer, L. A., Stahl, V. E. (eds.) (2020). Zoning: A guide for 21st-century planning. Rooilijn - tijdschrift voor wetenschap en beleid in de ruimtelijke ordening.

Flood resilience (resilient flood risk management), which has been repeatedly demanded, can be achieved through the phases of the risk management cycle. There is a vast body of literature on adaptation, disaster risk reduction measures, and effectiveness of prevention, seen through the lens of postdisaster recovery, but oftentimes the existing lite...

Studios were introduced at many planning schools about 50 years ago. They broke with the tradition of classical lecturing which had prevailed until then. Since then, this teaching format has been established a characteristic of planning education and is even listed in the core requirements of AESOP. This paper discusses the relevance of the idea fr...

Flood Resilience of Private Properties examines the division and balance of responsibilities between the public and the private when discussing flood resilience of private properties. Flooding is an expensive climate-related disaster and a threat to urban life. Continuing development in flood-prone zones compound the risks. Protecting all properti...

Land resources are emerging as a critical factor in flood risk management. While there is a general consensus to “accommodate water” on land for (temporary) flood storage or flood runoff, the provision of the necessary land for floods is hampered by the lack of availability and accessibility of the (often privately owned) land. Similarly, the need...

Informal real estate markets have developed as a result of deficiencies of formal real estate markets and play a crucial role in providing housing to the urban poor. This contribution combines an adaptation of Ostrom’s rules with property rights theory to study the rules that have developed in the informal real estate, their spatial impact and impl...

Managing public space is a big and important blind spot of urban and regional planning and design. Important, because major transition challenges, such as climate adaptation, energy transition, circular economy, mobility, and governance require substantial changes in public space – both physical and social changes. Big, because managing public spac...

The past two decades have witnessed increasing global concern about the need for sustainable water and land management in an era of rapid change, and persistent water insecurity. Good water governance is a prerequisite to improve water management all over the world. The OECD Water Governance Initiative developed Water Governance Principles to enhan...

For decades, many cities have introduced densification policy objectives to stop urban sprawl or to promote efficient use of natural resources. In the urban housing sector, however, densification projects often intensify social challenges. Due to rising rents after moderniza-tion of existing housing stocks as a consequence of densification, low-inc...

A common assertion in discussions of flooding is that risk perception is critical and is linked to risk‐mitigating behavior. Furthermore, many assert that the adverse effects of floods could be reduced by changes in risk communication, thereby influencing risk perception to foster mitigating behavior. We argue that these assertions are based on qui...

The European Flood Directive (FD) shifted water management policy from flood protection to flood risk management. To facilitate the shift, a new instrument was introduced called the flood risk management plan. According to the FD, a flood risk management plan shall first take into account relevant aspects from water management, nature conservation,...

In view of the anticipated climate change, many countries face increasing risks of flooding. Since the end of the 20 th century, the traditional hard flood protection measures have been increasingly complemented with spatial flood risk reduction measures. These measures, though in the public interest and as such, benefitting many people, almost ine...

The academic debate on flood risk governance is paying increased attention to the shifting position of homeowners. Homeowners are increasingly expected to adapt their homes to protect against possible floods. Although an overall agreement seems to exist on the involvement of homeowners in flood risk governance, the academic literature is dispersed...

Options for the increase of flood resilience during the recovery phase is, to a large extent, overlooked. The special issue Financial Schemes for Resilient Flood Recovery investigates how the implementation of financial schemes (government relief subsidies, insurance schemes, buy-outs, etc.) might increase flood resilience. Five papers address foll...

Special Issue

- Learning to ‘live with the flood’ instead of ‘fighting the flood’ starts at home – on private land. - The law has a strong influence on how homeowners respond to floods. - Risk communication is not just about informing citizens, but also clarifying public and private responsibilities. - Fair distribution of benefits and burdens requires coordinat...

In many countries, densification is a central goal of land policies to promote sustainable development. However, while these policies intervene in existing built-up structures and thus affect diverse and complex arrangements of property rights, it remains unclear how they are applied by actors. We argue that an explicit normative point of view is r...