Everyone would agree that urban development, especially when involving the building of residential areas, should be accompanied by sufficient and good public infrastructure and facilities. We all want neighbourhoods with the necessary roads, green areas, social facilities, affordable housing and public spaces of high quality. At the same time, nowadays, governments are facing severe cuts in public expenditure. So who is going to pay for all that quality? In the Netherlands and in many other countries, achieving these public goals has become a problem, especially in the regeneration of deteriorated inner-city sites. This book offers insight in how the economic value increase that arises from urban development can serve to finance the quality we want, without the need for public subsidies. The findings and recommendations made in this book focus on Western Europe, mainly on successful and alternatively less successful recent experiences in Spain, England and the Netherlands. Public bodies can use the recommendations to create the necessary conditions to improve the involvement of property developers and landowners in the financing of infrastructure and facilities. Property developers and landowners can find formulas for private-public partnership that can lead to lower development costs and risks, allowing them to pay for good infrastructure and facilities while maintaining profitability. Scholars will find here the theoretical backgrounds for this relevant topic. The author has both an academic and a professional background in the practice of urban development.

Traditionally, the public sector has been responsible for the provision of all public goods necessary to support sustainable urban development, including public infrastructure such as roads, parks, social facilities, climate mitigation and adaptation, and affordable housing. With the shift in recent years towards public infrastructure being financed by private stakeholders, the demand for transparent guidance to ensure accountability for the responsibilities held by developers has risen. Within planning practice and urban development, the shift towards private financing of public infrastructure has translated into new tools being implemented to provide joint responsibility for upholding requirements. Developer obligations are contributions made by property developers and landowners towards public infrastructure in exchange for decisions on land-use regulations which increase the economic value of their land. This book presents insight into the design and practical results of these obligations in different countries and their effects on municipal financial health, demonstrating the increasing importance of efficient bargaining processes and the institutional design of developer obligations in modern urban planning. Primarily written for academics in land-use planning, real estate, urban development, law, and economics, it will additionally be useful to policy makers and practitioners pursuing the improvement of public infrastructure financing.

Nothing provides as much material for comparative legal study as the great variety of rule-making that characterizes land law. Land law is perhaps the only legal area in which the leveling march of globalized uniformity has had to yield to the progressive development of local customary law. It is a rich and rewarding field for comparative law scholars, a field with a diverse past that resists classification and an equally unpredictable future. This engaging book presents fourteen stimulating essays, all originally presented at the 2001 Annual Colloquium of the International Association of Legal Science, held in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, in October 2001. These essays, all by leading scholars in the field, deal with a broad array of significant issues, including such debates as the following: Public vs. private property: a meaningful distinction? How customary law defeats the purpose of state land law Land ownership: to pollute or not to pollute? There are also detailed discussion of the special land needs of small islands, private residential governments, regulatory takings, land transfer, mortgage law, securities in property transactions, housing, town planning, agricultural land use, and water and riparian rights. The scope is global, with attention to the great differences in terminology and even in basic legal concepts. The lasting contribution of this symposium lies in its exposure of the enormous intellectual wealth arising from the numerous different legal techniques used to solve land use problems. No lawyer or legal scholar, no matter how conversant with land law, will come away from this book without valuable new ideas.