Practices of Land Allocation as a Governance Instrument

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Hansson, Fredrik Hallberg, P.
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Increased urbanization has led to a housing shortage in many cities in Sweden. This creates a pressure on local authorities to find and assign new land areas for housing development. The municipal owned land can be appointed to a construction client through a land allocation. Previous evaluation of the municipal land allocation process indicates several issues such as transparency in evaluation, different practices and an underdeveloped follow-up system. The purpose of this thesis is to understand the practices, follow-up and control mechanisms in two major Swedish cities, and also to set the land allocation in perspective of a governance instrument to understand if the practices support the objectives of urban development. To fulfil this purpose 13 semistructured interviews with government officials, an urban development organization and construction clients were carried out and analysed by a qualitative content analysis. The findings confirm different practices, unclear selection and evaluation of proposals and what motives underlie the selection of construction clients. Moreover, the findings identify several follow-up mechanisms and indicate that a control mechanism is present in the transfer agreement to ensure the initial conditions are fulfilled in the development projects. Additionally this thesis establishes the land allocation process as an urban governance process embedded in both a local and national context. When the local constitutes changes so does the governance, hence the political objectives frames the land allocation policy and therefore also the practice. Lastly among practitioners, the land allocation process is considered to be an efficient governance instrument to assign public land and the optimal way to assign public land is to involve stakeholders early and to collaborate.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/220230/220230.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article