T.J.M. Spit

Utrecht University | UU · Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning

Some urban megaprojects are framed as a strategic move to achieve broader economic benefits. Project proponents often claim that adverse socio-environmental effects are mitigated accordingly and that all aspects of sustainability are integrated successfully. Using a case study of the Bali Mandara highway, this study drew upon the politics of scale...

Background: How can flexible applications of the space and infrastructure of urban distribution centers (UDCs) be organized to help lower demands on space and infrastructure in cities? The application of flexible use of space and infrastructure can improve the efficiency of a UDC, but the challenge lies in the organization of the application of fle...

The practice of land value capture (LVC) from collectively owned rural land is undergoing changes in rural land marketisation as local governments are constrained in their power to expropriate rural land. Previous studies have either overestimated short-term rural LVC losses or exaggerated long-term urban LVC increases, while generally neglecting l...

Is it possible for flexible applications of infrastructure to help cope with the demand for space? In this paper we tried to answer how different forms of flexibility can impact the societal costs of infrastructure development on passenger transport hubs. For this explorative research option, the value is used to determine these impacts. It is appl...

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...

Rural Land Value Capture (LVC), particularly that obtained from rural collective-owned land, is an important policy instrument for local government public financing. In China, rural LVC faces a significant change, as rural land marketization reform has been launched and local governments have been increasingly restricted in expropriating rural coll...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Background This study aims to examine to what extent sustainability has been incorporated into assessments of road infrastructure projects. It identifies promising approaches that include indicators reflecting core sustainability criteria, determines criteria that were insufficiently covered as indicators, and develops an integrated indicator set c...

The incorporation of sustainability into road infrastructure development by public agencies in developing countries is limited by what they understand by the notion and how it can be adopted into their tasks. A limited sectoral perspective often dominates this understanding, leading a limited focus on specific sectoral elements included into a poli...

With growing urban populations, higher mobility needs, limited available space for transport infrastructure, and the increasing need for more attractive urban areas, these urban areas are faced with a complex dilemma, which gets more challenging by the day. This paper examines the role of flexibility in the relationship between structural spatial d...

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,...

- 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...

For the last few decades, the development of mega-infrastructure projects has been high on the agendas of policymakers in Southeast Asia. Despite the potential benefits of such projects, there are also inevitable societal impacts that often lead to protests by local people. In general, most literature on megaprojects focuses solely on managing proj...

The trade-off between flexibility and legal certainty is inherent in every planning system. This trade-off is especially apparent within a land-use plan. Flexibility and legal certainty are often seen as communicating vessels: the demise of one leads to an increase in the other. Within land-use plans, however, the connection between the two is more...

Cities in EU-member states increasingly involve governmental and non-governmental stakeholders in developing strategic urban mobility plans to increase the legitimacy of policies. The question is, to what extent urban transport experts and other stakeholders acknowledge the added value of the involvement of stakeholders in a sectoral policy field a...

There has been a growing interest in developing tools to assist decision-making in moving towards sustainable development, such as Sustainability Assessment (SA). It is argued here that more advanced and sophisticated tools are less useful than strengthening institutions when it comes to better engagement of stakeholders and more integrated decisio...

The conventional argument that the introduction of transfer of development rights (TDR) shifts the power of land use regulation from the state to the market is increasingly under challenge. In China, the state's grip on land is reinforced through TDR, in which the state is both regulator and player. This state‐dominated form of TDR affects China in...

In planning regional road development, planners often face a challenge to reconcile various interests and interpretations on the ultimate goals which complicate the discussion decision-making processes. This situation is defined as strategic ambiguity. Standard procedures for impact assessment are mostly ineffective at offering solutions that satis...

Understanding stakeholder power relations—such as between land sellers, land buyers, and local governments—is crucial to understanding Land Value Capture (LVC). While scholars have focused on stakeholder relationships through approaches such as stakeholder salience, stakeholder interaction, stakeholder value network, and stakeholder multiplicity, m...

For decades, policymakers in developing countries have used mega-infrastructure project development to achieve economic growth. However, in practice, megaproject management does not live up to this ambition due to the contradiction between the temporary organisation of megaproject management and the long-term strategic goals embedded. Because of th...

The current paper examines the legitimacy dilemmas that rise from local governments’ direct policy instruments and market interventions. It takes the case of public land management strategies. The paper argues that current societal challenges—such as energy transition, climate change and inclusive urban innovation—require planning practices to be m...

Investing in large transport projects affects the (potential) economic development of metropolitan areas. Yet, very little critical research has been performed to understand how to assess these effects. The relationship between infrastructure investments and regional economic development is complex and indirect, and many theoretical and methodologi...

The underground provides many spatial planning opportunities as it offers space for structures, but also functions as a resource for energy. To guide developments and use the capabilities the underground provides, the Dutch national government started a policy process for the Structuurvisie Ondergrond (a master plan). Stakeholders are involved in t...

Rapid urban expansion often has negative social, environmental, and ecological consequences. In China, urbanization rates have increased rapidly over the past decades, commensurate with economic growth. This article evaluates how Chinese urban planning was effective in containing urban expansion. To this end, we examined discrepancies between the L...

For decades, megaprojects have been on the agendas of policymakers worldwide. The positive effects are often illustrated at the national or regional level, whereas the negative impacts are mostly felt at the local level, which is something that most literature on megapro-jects neglects. Therefore, the following research focused on local people (res...

Contemporary water-governance approaches lack an understanding of the differences revealed when land and water governance interact. Conflicts arise because the spatial component is less regarded in water-governance approaches. This explorative paper introduces an analytical framework for the common management of land and water along three frontiers...

A port-city interface can be characterized as an area of conflicts between port development and city land-uses. Unfortunately, most research is limited to a technical and managerial perspective on port development and focuses less on the impacts on the communities in the area. This paper offers a new direction to acknowledge the impacts of port dev...

Land subsidence has severe physical and economic implications for both areas and people. Numerous scholars have shown that land subsidence has had massive impacts at global, national and regional levels, and that the impacts were usually responded to by the government. However, little attention has been paid to what land subsidence means to people’...

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of land markets and sheds light on a specific element of the process through which land is traded, namely the formation of land transaction prices. It argues that the specific features of inner-city land markets and public involvement in particular, adds to the social and institutional character of...

The underground provides many spatial planning opportunities as it offers space for structures, but also functions as a resource for energy. To guide developments and use the capabilities the underground provides, the Dutch national government started a policy process for the Structuurvisie Ondergrond (a master plan). Stakeholders are involved in t...

The transition from fossil to renewable energy needs changes in land use. The development of renewable energy sources introduce extra and sometimes new externalities, such as shadows and noise on landscape. There are governments who are experiencing difficulties when developing renewable energy sources especially when existing land owners (and othe...

The transition from fossil to renewable energy requires changes in land use. The development of renewable energy sources introduces extra and sometimes new externalities, such as shadows, noise, and changes to the landscape. Several governments are experiencing difficulties when developing renewable energy sources, especially when existing land own...

This paper looks at the consequences of the recent property market boom-bust cycle from the planners’ perspective. It takes the case of Dutch local governments and, in particular, the instrument of public land development. The analysis focusses on the question whether the economic downturn has given rise to a reconsideration of the intertwinement o...

Urbanization represents a challenge for plans aimed at controlling urban expansion and protecting farmland, such as the land use master plan (LUMP) instituted by the Chinese national government. This paper studies the effectiveness of such top–down plans under the authoritarian regime through the case study of Nanjing. In contrast to previous studi...

Tourists are particularly vulnerable when natural disasters occur in regions that they are visiting. It is assumed that they lack awareness and understanding of the actions that they need to take in such circumstances. This study examines the responses of tourists in times of disaster, building on empirical data collected through large-scale survey...

The complex nature of large urban planning projects often results in delays or budget overruns. One of the causes is conflicts of interests between stakeholders. Recent planning failures in projects, due to limited public participation, sparked debates to increase citizen participation in formal planning procedures. This paper investigates how plan...

Traditional flood protection methods have focused efforts on different measures to keep water out of floodplains. However, the European Flood Directive challenges this paradigm (Hartmann and Driessen, 2013). Accordingly, flood risk management plans should incorporate measures brought about by collaboration with local governments to develop and impl...

Based on a review of recent literature, this paper addresses the question of how urban planners can steer urban environmental quality, given the fact that it is multidimensional in character, is assessed largely in subjective terms and varies across time. A novel perspective of urban environmental quality is proposed, simultaneously exploring three...

Land subsidence can have a considerable impact on the socioeconomic viability of areas. In urban areas, land subsidence tends to damage buildings and infrastructures gradually, while in rural peat land it slowly destroys vegetation. The damages will worsen since climate change has further implications for the areas affected by land subsidence. In I...

In many European policy documents, the integration of transport, spatial and economic dimensions in corridor development is advocated as a means to cope with challenges that occur within corridors. For many years, however, knowledge about corridors was only developed from a sector perspective and with a more or less technocratic approach – despite...

Urban physical public infrastructure is a frontline defense mechanism to manage and mitigate climate-related impacts. Market instruments are often cited as possible means to spread risk and reduce financial burdens on the public sector. The authors argue that existing research tends to focus on the technical issues of instruments and neglects consi...

Inland ports are becoming more important in enhancing hinterland accessibility of deep-sea ports. Their increasing size and number can however also pose a threat to quality of life in adjacent urban regions, for spatial conflicts between port and urban functions may arise. Therefore, inland port governance strategies are needed. The aim of this pap...

Devolution is advocated as a solution to scale mismatches in urban environmental governance. However, urban environmental quality is a multi-scalar issue: its various aspects - noise, soil, odour, air, water et cetera - are influenced by processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Decisions by municipal authorities that benefit local environ...

The European flood risk management plan is a new instrument introduced by the Floods Directive. It introduces a spatial turn and a scenario approach in flood risk management, ultimately leading to differentiated flood protection levels on a catchment basis. This challenges the traditional sources of legitimacy for flood risk management, which are p...

Water management increasingly deals with spatial aspects; spatial planning interferes and depends in various ways on water management. Particularly in urban areas, this interference calls for an integrated water management. As a result, water management and spatial planning meet. Laws frame the interaction of the two institutions. In this contribut...

Most scientific attention in port studies centers on deep-sea ports, in particular container ports. In our paper, in contrast, we focus our attention on the characteristics of inland waterway ports in a European context. This is an overlooked part in the scientific literature on inland port development, which is up to now mainly concerned with US-b...

Most scientific attention in freight transportation port studies centers on the characteristics of deep-sea ports, in particular container ports. In our paper, in contrast, we focus our attention on the performance of inland ports in a European context, which is up to now an overlooked part in the scientific literature on port development. Based on...

EU policy and projects have an increasing influence on policymaking for climate adaptation. This is especially evident in the development of new climate adaptation policies in transnational city networks. Until now, climate adaptation literature has paid little attention to the influence that these EU networks have on the adaptive capacity in citie...

The aim of the paper is to assess the institutional (mis)fit of tax increment financing for the Dutch spatial planning financial toolkit. By applying an institutionally oriented assessment framework, we analyse the interconnectivity of Dutch municipal finance and spatial planning structures and practices. Empirical findings from the case study high...

The role of expert knowledge of the environment in decision-making about urban development has been intensively debated. Most contributions to this debate have studied the use of knowledge in the decision-making process from the knowledge providers’ point of view. In this paper, we reverse the perspective and try to understand how local decision-ma...

In response to the extreme flood events of recent decades, the European Union has released the Floods Directive (2007/60/EC), which requires the creation of flood risk management plans. These plans do not yet exist in practice, as water management agencies have until 2015 to put them into action. This contribution will discuss two questions regardi...

Policy summary All cities in the Netherlands, large and small, are vulnerable to the effects of climate change. The degree of vulnerability varies considerably within urban areas. This means that making cities more climate proof can be done most efficiently by taking many relatively small and local measures. Many of these can be carried out simult...

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...

Despite all international, national and local initiatives to mitigate climate change, a certain degree of climate change is unavoidable. Urban environments in particular seem vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. How can cities, which are dynamic systems where most people live and work, prepare for such changes in climate? In the Nether...

Water management increasingly deals with spatial aspects; spatial planning interferes and depends in various ways on water management. Particularly in urban areas, this interference calls for an integrated water management. As a result, water management and spatial planning meet. Laws frame the interaction of the two institutions. In this contribut...

Water International and IWRA Policy Briefings are published by IWRA with the support of Routledge. They aim to provide high quality analysis and practical recommendations for policy makers on important development issues. Key Policy Messages: • As urbanisation intensifies, good governance must include better integration of shifting boundaries bet...

Based on a case study of the Stadshaven port redevelopment in Rotterdam, this paper explores whether existing spatial planning mechanisms and processes can be used to facilitate local-level investment in climate-resilient public infrastructure and/or whether new processes and mechanisms are required to encourage investment in climate adaptation. Th...

We develop conceptual understanding of political commitment in two approaches to organising municipal responses to climate adaptation. The dedicated approach, based on direct political commitment to climate adaptation, implies political agenda setting, resource allocation, and clear policy objectives which are expected to facilitate rapid implement...

A society that intensifies and expands the use of land and water in urban areas needs to rethink the relation between spatial planning and water management. The traditional strategy to manage land and water under different governance regimes no longer suits the rapidly changing environmental constraints and social construction of the two key elemen...

The special issue is edited by Thomas Hartmann & Tejo Spit; contributions are: Cuadrado-Quesada explores in her contribution with examples from Australia and Costa Rica how land uses and groundwater interfere and what in these cases the specific governance challenges are. Hartwich, Bölscher and Schulte present a very specific example of a verti...

Mainstreaming climate adaptation requires the inclusion of climate adaptation in the policies of various policy domains such as water management and spatial planning. This paper investigates the organizational values present in several municipal policy departments in order to explore their willingness to act upon climate adaptation and the implicat...

Most scientific attention in port studies centres on deep-sea ports, in particular container ports. In our paper, in contrast, we focus our attention on the determining characteristics of inland port performance in a European context, which is up to now an overlooked part in the scientific literature on port development. Based on a large-scale quan...

Purpose – This article aims at analysing the different institutional aspects of the rural land market that are manifest at the transactional level. Second, it answers the question whether including these aspects in a land price model increases the understanding of rural land market outcomes. Institutional economics scholars have challenged the limi...

The present understanding of bottlenecks in the European transport network fails to grasp the cumulating and culminating effects of bottlenecks, for the scope of the research is in most cases limited to a one-sided (logistics) perspective. A theoretical framework has been created, which argues that bottlenecks should be interpreted as integrative,...

Inland ports have been put forward as crucial linkages for efficient global freight transport and corridor development. However, the present understanding of inland ports appears to be limited to network-based views with a maritime port focus (Outside-In), in which inland ports play second fiddle. We argue that inland ports as independent structure...

The institutions of the Dutch (urban) planning system face four challenging characteristics of climate adaptation measures. These measures are uncertain in their effects, in competition with other interests, multifaceted, and inherently complex. Capacity building is a key issue for the implementation of climate adaptation measures in urban planning...

Transport corridors are viewed as a promising way forward in European Union (EU) transport policy, assumed to contribute positively to regional economic development. However, the validity of this assumption is not evident. The aim of this paper is to empirically test whether agglomeration economies in European transport corridor regions are positiv...

Sustainable urban development requires the integration of environmental interests in urban planning. Although various methods of environmental assessment have been developed, plan outcomes are often disappointing due to the complex nature of decision-making in urban planning, which takes place in multiple arenas within multiple policy networks invo...

After half a century of corridor development in Europe, the corridor concept is well-established in the academic discourse on transportation. Transport corridors have also been common practice in European transport policy since the creation of a borderless Europe in the 1990s. What is largely lacking in present-day research on European transport co...

Sustainable urban development entails integration of environmental interests into decision-making at the local level. To achieve this, higher tiers of government may compel municipalities to explicitly consider environmental objectives or even prioritize them by demanding compliance with national standards, thus, at least theoretically, restricting...

Adaptation to climate change necessitates serious adjustments to the spatial organization of our environment. However, the uncertainties, the controversial character of the climate debate, the variety of climate change consequences and the inherently complex character of climate change puts specific demands on adapting spatial planning to climate c...

There are big challenges in the governance of land and water in urban regions – managing ground water resources, flood risk management and space for the rivers policy, water supply and wastewater treatment in dynamic urban regions, and many more. These challenges affect many different disciplines and reach beyond administrative and national boundar...

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...