Post-Growth City: a new ground attitude

More than two years ago, BURA and Crimson Historians and Urbanists started the design research Post-Growth City on their own initiative: a search for spatial concepts and ideas for a more sustainable and equitable city. Creating and strengthening sustainable and healthy cities, neighbourhoods and villages is now the objective of almost every spatial development in the Netherlands. While hard work is being done in many places to achieve this, we see that the current way of urban development still too often produces areas that are less inclusive and diverse than one would like and that still too often have a major impact on the environment and climate. This story looks at the land and value aspect.

The current system
When we consider the current system from land and value, we see two main topics that we briefly touch upon here, namely: cities as growth machines and land and value development.

Cities are centres of growth, both demographic and economic. Urban development has been used for decades to facilitate the growth of production, consumption, trade and exchange of services and goods (Xue, 2022 – Urban planning and degrowth: a missing dialogue. The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability). This has brought a lot to the city on the one hand, but also leads to extreme excesses that are difficult to control publicly. Think, for instance, of the discussions on data centres, expansion of large-scale business parks, hyper-tourism, land speculation, gentrification and housing shortages.

We see urban development that seems to have become a practice where, on the one hand, we facilitate growth (growth of offices, jobs, mobility, housing, tourists, etc.) and, on the other hand, try to compensate as much as possible for the negative effects of growth. The difficult part here is that urban development wants to facilitate this growth, but is itself extremely dependent on growth. Indeed, the revenues from this growth, such as land sales, parking revenues and tourist taxes, are necessary within this system to invest in the quality of the city. This involves all kinds of contemporary tasks such as greening, climate adaptation, social equality and energy transition.

‘’The public domain and services have been made dependent on land revenue housing and real estate‘’ (Edwin Buitelaar, PBL)

Besides the city as a growth machine, the concept of ‘land ownership’ has had a huge impact on urban development as we know it today.The problem is that it gives the landowner the right to build housing himself, the so-called self-realisation right.This raises a competition issue and eliminates competition.Existing instruments to distribute land value development more fairly, such as a land tax, are politically very sensitive. In addition, urban development is so intertwined with finance that changes are difficult to implement. For instance, project returns are linked to pension funds, and market demand is linked to interest rate developments, investments and mortgages.

Changing the balance of power within the urban development process is a challenge. An approach where residents are equal partners and where value is not only determined financially is crucial. Municipalities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are experimenting with other forms of land ownership and types of parties, such as self-build, CPO (Collective Private Ownership), Housing Cooperatives and CLT (Community Land Trust), but their share on the total remains limited. It is important that there is much more diversity in types of parties who are allowed and able to build, and have a say in the development of neighbourhoods‘

’The connectedness is very important, how do you make sure there is room for democracy and ownership‘’ (Theo Stauttener, Stadkwadraat).

Land and value in the Post-Growth City
The Post-Growth City will be a city where the well-being of the planet and its inhabitants is paramount. Economic growth will no longer drive the city. To ensure the city’s level of well-being, the city will lean on a wide range of collective facilities maintained by urban communities/ collectives and municipalities. Municipalities play a coordinating and facilitating role here, through the department of meenten.

Within land and value, we see three principles that outline the contours of the Post-Growth City:

• More say for residents, to make a truly democratic decision-making process.
• Retention of created value within an area, so that future ambitions are funded from a local source, rather than requiring an external investor.
• Not passing on negative impacts, considering the impact of a development both locally and globally, now and later

Can we rethink the concept of land ownership?
Land and real estate are vulnerable to speculation. As a society, we have lost control over our land, while all major transitions have a spatial impact. This calls for an approach that takes the dynamics of land ownership as a basis and guides a more diverse land policy. In the long term, instruments such as land tax, ground rent and plan income tax can have its effect, but these measures are politically complicated. In the short term, the government could steer even more towards using and transforming land with parties who want to make a truly socially and environmentally sustainable contribution to society. Think of cooperatives, housing associations, progressive developers, civic initiatives, central government, municipalities themselves and semi-governments such as the Forestry Commission, Natuurmonumenten, foundations and water boards. This ‘land map’ must of course be set against the spatial tasks at hand (urbanisation, energy transition, climate adaptation) and see whether it enables the right use in the right place.

‘Coming up with new instruments like building duty and taxation is complicated. But existing instruments like expropriation are not or hardly applied‘’ (Erwin van der Krabben, Radboud University).