**Land Management for Socially Integrative Cities in Europe**

#### **Julia Suering, Andreas Ortner and Alexandra Weitkamp**

#### **1. What Are the Challenges Facing Rapidly Growing Cities?**

Fast-growing European cities are increasingly confronted with a shortage of usable space. In 2015, almost three-quarters of all Europeans lived in a city. It is projected that the urban population in Europe in cities will increase to around 80% by 2050 (UN United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division). Due to the increasing concentration of inhabitants in agglomerations, these areas, in particular, have to take different trends into account in their urban development. As a result, more and more cities are facing numerous environmental, economic and social challenges. In addition to various positive aspects of population growth, municipalities are faced with the challenge of insufficient housing, therefore there is a need for urban expansion. Above all, urban development has to deal more and more with social challenges such as (poor) housing conditions, unemployment, poverty and lack of access to certain services (e.g., health care or mobility), segregation and gentrification in urban renewal (Musterd et al. 2017).

In many of these cities, population density has reached a level that poses a threat to both the natural and human environments. The consequences of this are housing shortages and further need for affordable housing. This raises the pressure on public infrastructure. For this reason, urban development should not be left only to the free action of the market. Cities can use various steering instruments for land management. Thereby, the most important challenge is to develop cities in a socially integrative way (for the concept of socially integrative cities cf. Chapter 2).

This chapter gives an overview of land management in urban renewal and urban expansion areas and introduces land management instruments in European agglomerations regarding the promotion of social integrative and sustainable cities. The land management instruments will be systemized into legal instruments, financial instruments and voluntary instruments. Furthermore, this chapter gives an inside view on the implementation of land management instruments in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Finally, the opportunities and limits of land management instruments are presented in a comparative way.

In general, the land management instruments are relevant and applicable for both urban renewal and urban expansion. In this context urban renewal means the development of little used or derelict land, building gaps or resolving land-use conflicts (e.g., interfering with housing and commercial use). Urban expansion refers to the development of arable land to building land, often on the outskirts of cities.

Hereby, the realization of urban aims is important. They differ according to the preconditions: often, the cities want to pass the development cost, mobilize affordable housing or allow the public to participate (Drixler et al. 2014).

The following questions therefore arise:


#### **2. Methodological Approach**

First, a systematization of land management instruments in general is elaborated by a literature review. Furthermore, the application of instruments in the Netherlands, Germany and France are compared in a qualitative way. The literature review provides the above-mentioned introduction to the topic and leads to initial keywords for the systematization and criteria for the analysis.

The systematization is based on a structured literature search. The selection of European countries which are presented are based on a literature search using the snowball principle. The results of the literature review are applied a content analysis. The individual steps are examined in more detail below.

#### *2.1. Approach Systematization*

A structured literature search was used for the document review and the subsequent systematization of land management instruments in urban development. The selection of relevant literature was based on keywords for steering instruments for urban expansion and urban renewal areas in the field of land development. Examples of these keywords are "urban development", "land policy" and steering instruments such as "planning", "fiscal", "legal" and "land banking" instruments.

The search results were assessed by criteria and the relevant articles were saved.<sup>1</sup> The quality of the literature was measured with criteria such as objectivity, traceability, validity and whether the literature was scientifically reviewed for the publication process. The relevance was measured by the content regarding the spatial extent of steering measures and the availability of a description of various instruments. Furthermore, the literature includes different steering instruments, their definitions and how they are applied. The literature search was not aimed at the completeness of

<sup>1</sup> Selection of publications according to relevance and scientific quality.

all existing steering instruments but focuses on the most commonly used instruments (frequently mentioned instruments) in Europe.
