Jean-David Gerber

The business of densification refers to more or less aggressive urban development practices that use the broad political consensus on the need for urban densification to promote profit-driven development, often dressed up in the rhetoric of eco-efficiency, and to the detriment of social policy objectives (e.g. affordable housing, cultural heritage, community cohesion). The implementation of urban densification requires deep changes in the practice of land-use planning because, as opposed to greenfield developments, it occurs in a complex web of established rights and interests. These more active forms of planning interventions are referred to as “land policy” in a growing body of literature (including in this special issue). In the context of densification, land policy tends to be appraised in planning debates as purely instrumental, that is, as a more effective and proactive administrative strategy for improved project implementation. In this commentary, relying on empirical data from the Netherlands and Switzerland, we argue that land policy is in fact a hybrid construct that merges both progressive and neoliberal elements. We discuss how the hybrid nature of land policy generates tensions in project implementation as different discourses and representations collide. Therefore, there is a real need to accurately assess the true ideological scope of urban changes implemented in the name of densification, as land policy is fundamentally value-loaded. If planners remain blind to the political dimension of land policy, the business of densification will flourish, and social sustainability objectives will be systematically relegated to the background.

One of the difficulties in implementing densification objectives is that planners often do not have sufficient coercive power to restrict property rights, which means that landowners can resist the implementation of land use plans. As a result, planning increasingly takes place on the project level, allowing planning authorities and developers to renegotiate the terms and conditions of densification. While project-level negotiations have been researched, these studies do not focus on individual landowners but rather on developers. This article examines how developers and public authorities manage the property rights of individual landowners to prevent delays or blockages in project implementation. Drawing on a comparative case study of Thun (Switzerland) and Utrecht (Netherlands), we show how project-based planning takes different forms depending on legal frameworks and planning norms. In Thun, strategies focus on consensus building and input legitimacy; in Utrecht, more coercive instruments such as expropriation are used and legitimized based on their output. The findings suggest that project-based planning tends to exclude individual landowners from negotiation, framing their objections as obstructions to be managed. While individual owners’ interests are often sidelined, the private economic interests of developers and large landowners often appeal to collective goals such as climate change mitigation or housing supply. This raises broader questions about which interests are recognized, or dismissed, in the construction of social sustainability in urban densification.

The concept of commons has gained traction in housing research. However, when translated to the housing field, the notion of commons is interpreted in various ways and applied to a large range of situations. This increasing interest in the commons has thus resulted in a high degree of conceptual pluralism in the field. While this pluralism is inevitable, and, to a certain extent, necessary to grasp a complex social reality, it can also lead to confusion. This article addresses this issue by conducting a systematic scoping review of the literature from 1990 to 2023 to capture how the concept of commons is used in housing research. Using thematic coding and k-mode clustering, we identify five distinct clusters: (i) “commons in housing”, with a focus on collective action problems, (ii) “housing as commons”, with a focus on the use-value of collective housing arrangements and their de-commodification, (iii) “commoning in housing”, with a focus on socially reproductive collective practices, (iv) “commons/commoning for housing”, with a focus on co-production in housing and urban governance, and (v) “commons/commoning as a political practice”, with a focus on everyday politics and housing activism. Our cluster-based approach thus provides a valuable framework to navigate the pluralism of the field and can be replicated in other subject areas.

Municipalities develop individual land policies and can choose not to apply available planning instruments or to apply them differently than intended. While this strategic action can endanger the effectiveness of public policies, it is rarely considered in large-scale analyses. A new geospatial method is presented that captures such strategic action. Empirical evidence from the Canton of Bern, Switzerland, reveals municipalities’ application of planned unit development (PUD), an instrument potentially allowing for flexible zoning negotiations to promote densification. Detailed zoning and building data from the period 2002–23 are used to examine the variation in PUD application by municipalities and whether they apply it to enable densification. Distinguishing by municipality type (i.e. urban core, small town, suburban, rural or touristic) reveals that PUD application is connected to projects with higher building density, more complex parcel changes and, for urban and suburban municipalities, higher density gains in low-density neighbourhoods. However, rural municipalities seldom apply PUD. New indicators of planning complexity provide an insight into whether municipalities apply instruments to enable densification under difficult circumstances. Practice relevance Many policy instruments are provided for in the law, but it is unclear whether and how they are used in practice by municipalities. Following urban densification objectives, municipalities often struggle to implement planning or housing policy instruments, which target private landowners and developers. Therefore, evaluating how different municipalities apply policy instruments and how this application contributes to reaching stated policy goals is crucial. Therefore, this research explores new ways to capture the effect of policy instruments with spatial analysis. Furthermore, by examining the real-world implementation of PUDs, this research sheds light on possible barriers to PUD application for densification, thereby helping policymakers and urban planners improve the effectiveness of public policies.

For several years, women demand more decision-making power from their husbands and the society. Studies indicate that egalitarian decision-making power can be beneficial in many important ways to the household and society, and the pathway to this desire policy objective is through women empowerment. Yet, this is not as obvious as it seems. On the one hand, women empowerment is a game changer. On the other hand, the problem of women empowerment is complex. Thus, our goal is to evaluate the gendered intersectional power dynamics operating in informal artisanal and small-scale mining and the impact on women’s empowerment to balance decision-making power in the household. Theoretically, we ask: How does women empowerment enable women to demand more decision-making power from their husbands following their participation in informal mining? And how do men react to women empowerment? Empirically, 38 biographic interviews, 6 key informant interviews and 8 focus group discussions were conducted. Results show that informal mining improves the financial power of women and increases their bargaining power to demand more decision-making power from their husbands. Moreover, increase in women’s financial leverage can have a nuanced effect on their empowerment since men can intervene there by playing on the patriarchal rules. In conclusion, women empowerment is complex, and the major challenge is societal. Consequently, policy actions are required to vigorously address societal norms through formal education and awareness creation to bring about transformations.

In many cities, there has been renewed interest over the last 30 years in densification as part of wider efforts to combat urban sprawl. In daily practice, however, densification is a contested process because of its redistributive effects. Next to potential environmental advantages, it produces both benefits and losses for different individuals and households. The redistributive effects are an expression of conflicts between environmental, economic, and social dimensions of sustainability. We show that the latter is heavily impacted: if densification projects are not designed to the needs of people who are actually supposed to benefit from it—the residents—low-income groups are at risk of social displacement. This scenario is highly unsustainable. By using a neo-institutional approach and comparative case study methodology conducted in Switzerland, we analyze the institutional rules and the involved actors’ strategies when dealing with densification projects. We explain the mechanisms leading to the loss of social qualities when competing with economic interests of investors and authorities.

Decentralization policy forms part of a broader global ideology and effort of the international donor community in favor of subsidiarity and local participation, and represents a paradigm shift from top-down command-and-control systems. Since 2003, the formalization of property rights through titling became an integral component of decentralized land administration efforts in Ghana. The creation of new forms of local government structures and the related changes in the distribution of responsibilities between different levels of government have an impact on natural resource management, the allocation of rights, and the unequal distribution of powers. This paper aims to understand how decentralization reforms modify the balance of power between public administration, customary authorities, and resource end-users in Ghana. Decentralization’s impact is analyzed based on two case studies. Relying on purposive and snowball sampling techniques, and mixed methods, we conducted 8 key informant interviews with local government bureaucrats in land administration, 16 semi-structured interviews with allodial landholders, 20 biographic interviews and 8 focus group discussions with small-scale farmers. The interviews analyzed the institutions and the roles of actors in land administration. Our case studies show that decentralization has the tendency to increase local competition in land administration where there are no clear distribution of power and obligation to local actors. Local competition and elitism in land administration impact the ability of small-scale farmers to regularize or formalize land rights. Thus, the paper concludes that local competition and the elitism within the land administration domain in Ghana could be the main obstacles towards decentralization reforms.