More than 50 percent of the global population resides in urban areas where land policy and infrastructure interactions facilitate economic opportunities, affect the quality of life, and influence patterns of urban development. While infrastructure is as old as cities, technological changes and public policies on taxation and regulation produce new issues worthy of analysis, ranging from megaprojects and greenhouse gas emissions to involuntary resettlement. This volume, based on the 2012 seventh annual Land Policy Conference at the Lincoln Institute, brings together economists, social scientists, urban planners, and engineers to discuss how infrastructure issues impact low-, middle-, and high-income countries. Infrastructure drives economic and social activities. For urban areas, the challenges of balancing economic growth with infrastructure development and maintenance are reflected in debates about finance, regulation, and location and about the sustainable levels of infrastructure services. Relevant sectors include energy (electricity and natural gas); telecommunications (phone lines, mobile phone service, and Internet); transportation (airports, railways, roads, waterways, and seaports); and water supply and sanitation (piped water, irrigation, and sewage collection and treatment). Recent research shows that inadequate infrastructure is associated with income inequality. This is likely linked to the delivery of infrastructure services to households, such as direct health benefits, improved access to education, and enhanced economic opportunities. Because so much infrastructure is energy intensive, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other negative impacts must address services such as electric power and transport. Bringing the management of infrastructure up to levels of good practice has a large economic payoff, and performance levels vary dramatically between and within countries. A crucial unmet challenge is to convince policy makers and voters that large economic returns can result from improving infrastructure performance and maintenance.

Land Use and Society is a unique and compelling exploration of interactions among law, geography, history, and culture and their joint influence on the evolution of land use and urban form in the United States. Originally published in 1996, this completely revised, expanded, and updated edition retains the strengths of the earlier version while introducing a host of new topics and insights on the twenty-first century metropolis. This new edition of Land Use and Society devotes greater attention to urban land use and related social issues with two new chapters tracing American city and metropolitan change over the twentieth century. More emphasis is given to social justice and the environmental movement and their respective roles in shaping land use and policy in recent decades. This edition of Land Use and Society by Rutherford H. Platt is updated to reflect the 2000 Census, the most recent Supreme Court decisions, and various topics of current interest such as affordable housing, protecting urban water supplies, urban biodiversity, and "ecological cities." It also includes an updated conclusion that summarizes some positive and negative outcomes of urban land policies to date.

"Zoning has for a century enabled cities to chart their own course. It is a useful and popular institution, enabling homeowners to protect their main investment and provide safe neighborhoods. As home values have soared in recent years, however, this protection has accelerated to the degree that new housing development has become unreasonably difficult and costly. The widespread Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome is driven by voters’ excessive concern about their home values and creates barriers to growth that reach beyond individual communities. The barriers contribute to suburban sprawl, entrench income and racial segregation, retard regional immigration to the most productive cities, add to national wealth inequality, and slow the growth of the American economy. Some state, federal, and judicial interventions to control local zoning have done more harm than good. More effective approaches would moderate voters’ demand for local-land use regulation—by, for example, curtailing federal tax subsidies to owner-occupied housing"--Publisher's description.

"Attention to value capture as a source of public revenue has been increasing in the United States and internationally as some governments experience declines in revenue from traditional sources and others face rapid urban population growth and require large investments in public infrastructure. Privately funded improvements by land-owners can increase the value of their land and property. Public actions, such as investments in infrastructure, the provision of public services, and planning and land use regulation, can also affect the value of land and property. Value capture is a means to realize as public revenue some portion of that increase in value through various revenue-raising instruments. This book, based on the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's sixth annual land policy conference in May 2011, examines the concept of value capture, its forms, and applications. The first section, on the conceptual framework and history of value capture, reviews its relationship to compensation for partial takings; the long history of value capture policies in Britain and France; and the remarkable expansion of tax increment financing in California. The second section reviews the application of particular instruments of value capture, including the conversion of rural to urban land in China, town planning schemes in India, and community benefit agreements. The third section focuses on ends instead of means and examines the use of value capture by community land trusts to provide affordable housing, the use of land development to finance transit, and the use of various fees to fund airports. The final section explores potential extensions of value capture mechanisms to tax-exempt nonprofits and to the management of state trust lands in the United States."--Publisher's website.

Until now, an approach to land use management planning that not only addresses economic issues, but also environmental concerns and health issues of land use has been lacking. These issues are vital for public policy makers, decision-makers throughout the private sector, as well as all businesses and industries that share space with the communities they serve and draw from. This volume covers the legal and regulatory aspects of land use management, the process of land use planning, and all of the related environmental, health, and societal impacts that land use planning entails. This book provides a clear, multidisciplinary approach to a very complex set of issues. An essential resource not only for public administrators, policymakers, and planners, but for people with corresponding responsibilities in business and industry, their attorneys and other advisors, and for their colleagues with similar concerns. Because of their inestimable importance, land use decisions require thorough study and evaluation before project implementation—but what makes this a challenge is the uncommon breadth of knowledge and familiarity with a wide range of disciplines that decision makers must process—and yet few have the necessary background and training. El-Ahraf, Qayoumi, and Dowd have thus had to attack their topic from a variety of viewpoints and disciplines, such as urban plannning, environmental science, energy use, public health, as well as from the viewpoints of people whose concerns are primarily socioeconomic and legal. They take these disparate and often conflicting viewpoints and integrate them, giving readers a systematic way to acquire a holistic appreciation of the topic. Although the book focuses primarily on land use in the United States, it borrows relevant examples from international data. It is therefore useful not only as a text for college courses in the area of public health and urban planning, but as a reference for professionals in many different fields with related concerns.

Much of the preparation of this book has been generously supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It evolved from a colloquium held in October 1977, under the sponsorship of the Lincoln Institute. The three-day symposium entitled "Land Policy: Making the Value Choices" involved the preparation of major papers and formal discussions, most of which appear here in considerably revised form, along with additional pieces commis sioned later. The colloquium was an idea jointly conceived by myself and Edward Wood, a colleague at the time in the Tufts University Program in Urban Social and Environmental Policy. We were concerned about two major limitations in the literature and debates over land use. On the one hand, there was little explicit recognition of the latent values that motivated land use policy. On the other, there was no common forum where people from the different land use fields could discuss the issues and learn from one another. A small group of about two dozen people was invited to the colloquium. Each member was a leading spokesman for a different perspective and area of expertise. All participated formally in some fashion. All the papers were written expressly for the col loquium, with the exception of Ann Strong's, which was a keynote address to the American Society of Planning Officials earlier in the year. None of the papers has been published elsewhere.

"The management of public lands in the West is a matter of long-standing and oft-contentious debates. The government must balance the interests of a variety of stakeholders, including extractive industries like oil and timber; farmers, ranchers, and fishers; Native Americans; tourists; and environmentalists. Local, state, and government policies and approaches change according to the vagaries of scientific knowledge, the American and global economies, and political administrations. Occasionally, debates over public land usage erupt into major incidents, as with the armed occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. While a number of scholars work on the politics and policy of public land management, there has been no central book on the topic since the publication of Charles Davis's Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics (Westview, 2001). In The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands, Erika Allen Wolters and Brent Steel have assembled a stellar cast of scholars to consider long-standing issues and topics such as endangered species, land use, and water management while addressing more recent challenges to western public lands like renewable energy siting, fracking, Native American sovereignty, and land use rebellions. Chapters also address the impact of climate change on policy dimensions and scope. The Environmental Politics and Policy of Western Public Lands is co-published with Oregon State University Open Educational Resources, who will release an open access edition alongside this print edition"--