1.1.1 Land Use and Land-use Planning
It is called, prosaically, âland useâ, and we see it all around us. We see that land in one place is used for housing, in another place for shops, in another place for employment. We see streets, pavements, planting, parks, schools. We see land used for agriculture, for horticulture, for woodlands, for nature reserves. And we see how those separate land uses are related to each other. The housing is in big estates of all the same type of house, or there are different types of houses mixed together and interspersed with shops, offices, workplaces. We see that the countryside is open and unbuilt, with all urban land uses concentrated into towns and villages, or we see sprinkled over the countryside houses, firms, fun parks, hamlets new and old.
Some important aspects of land use we do not see, or not easily. We do not easily see whether poorer people are decently housed. Nor how people travel to work, to school, to visit family. Housing segregation â people of one social group or income living segregated from people of another group or income â is not always visible. If people with certain skills cannot find work except by travelling long distances every day, that also is an important aspect of land use, but not easily seen. Other aspects we hear or smell rather than see: traffic noise, polluted air, silence.
Yet other important aspects of land use can easily be seen, but the significance is not always clear. If, for example, in a country with a high population density like the Netherlands, there is a sharp division between town and country, this signifies that there is an effective policy for restricting building in the countryside. If, such as in the Netherlands, there are few out-of-town shopping centres, then those who know that in similar countries such shopping centres are common, can interpret what they see in the Netherlands as: there is an effective policy against out-of-town shopping centres. The person who sees that Dutch town centres are lively, even in the evenings and on Sundays, will not always know that that signifies a strong policy to support town centres.
If the residents of a country think that the way their land is used is important, they will introduce and support a public policy for influencing that. That is land-use planning. It is often called spatial planning, especially when referring to land-use planning at a more abstract level. This book is about land-use planning in the Netherlands. It aims to describe, analyse, and explain it.
The relationship between the way land is used and land-use planning is complex. Professional planners â for example those visiting the Netherlands and looking around â have a propensity to conclude that what they see is the result of Dutch land-use planning. Foreign planners in particular, when they see some exceptional developments in the Netherlands, admire them; and they assume that those developments can be attributed to the planning law and the planning system. In reality â this is one of the messages in this book â the achievements of Dutch planning are often the result of the way in which the formal planning system has been used informally.
This book will describe the formal planning system, also how it is used â often informally â to achieve the land use which the Dutch want. But we do not want to give the impression that the land use is determined only by land-use planning: there are many other factors which affect it. These include the soil and water (superficial geology and hydrology), the structure of the building industry, how property developers are organised and how property development is financed, the public and semi-public developers and land managers such as housing associations and nature conservation organisations, the way the public administration is structured. This book cannot describe all those factors and analyse their effects on land use, but it will mention the most important.
The land use today has come about over a very long period, so a satisfactory explanation must take account of the influences not just today but also in the past. This book does that selectively: it goes back about 30 years and mentions important influences before then only when that is necessary. There is a history of Dutch planning which goes much further back, written in English by van der Cammen & de Klerk (2012).
1.1.2 The Analytical Stance
The position from which Dutch spatial planning is analysed in this book should be made explicit.
About the theoretical position we can be brief, with a reference to Needham (2006) for a more detailed exposition and explanation. The starting point is the statement that the way in which land is used is the result of very many people deciding how to use their land and buildings, where to go and how to get there, where to live and work, and so on. Those individual decisions are taken within a context, part of which consists of formal and informal rules (institutions). The formal rules include the laws for how people should interact with each other (private or civil law, such as tort law, contract law, property law) and the laws which state agencies require us to follow (public or administrative law, such as building permits and environmental permits). The informal rules include the ways in which state agencies use their powers and responsibilities: passively or actively, rigidly or flexibly, creatively or mechanically, and so on. In this book, we study the formal rules in the Netherlands concerning the way people use land, and the informal rules about how the formal rules should be applied.
It makes no sense to analyse the effects of âgovernment interventionâ by asking the question: how would land be used if there were no government rules? For many of our actions would not take place without the certainty offered by some aspects of those rules, such as the knowledge that the actions of our neighbours are restricted by the rules governing permission to build, and the knowledge that if a partner reneges on a property deal she can be taken to court. Similarly, it is an illusion that it is possible to identify what âthe marketâ wants, and to judge spatial planning by the extent to which it facilitates or âdistortsâ the market. Spatial planning must be evaluated, in the first place, by the extent to which it succeeds in meeting the goals set for it by the politicians responsible for spatial planning â that is, by its effectiveness. Whether those goals are desirable is a political question. Whether those goals are feasible is a question, partly, of how people (which includes âthe marketâ) react to the measures taken to realise the spatial plans.
We take the normative stance that spatial planning should be evaluated in another way too. It is not just the results of spatial planning that should be evaluated, but also the process by which it is carried out. State agencies have been given powers over their citizens â including powers for spatial planning â and the citizens can expect that those powers be exercised responsibly. This book studies Dutch spatial planning in this respect too.
1.1.3 The Structure of the Book
This analytical stance has determined the structure of the book. The next Chapter (2) is about how the Dutch want their land to be used: that is the content of Dutch spatial policy, including agreements and disagreements about that. Then (Chapter 3) the planning agencies are described, the formal powers that they have for planning, including the relationships between the agencies.
Then we go over to a consideration of the formal powers which those agencies have been given for realising those plans (Chapter 4) â building permissions, compulsory purchase, and so on. In comparison with many other studies of Dutch planning (in particular those written for foreigners) we pay much attention to the means for realising plans and less to the plans themselves. The reason is that the citizen â for whom land-use planning should be carried out â is interested in the results of that planning on the ground (literally), rather than in plans, visions, and policies. The link between the two â what is built and what is planned â is made by planning permissions and investment decisions, so they get the attention here. It is for the same reason that this book is more about planning at municipal level than at the provincial and national levels.
The following chapter works out that concrete level in more detail. The formal powers described in Chapter 4 are felt by many Dutch people to be inadequate for realizing all the ambitions, so the Dutch practice pro-active non-statutory planning (Chapter 5). In Chapter 6 some examples are given of projects which have been, or are being, realised by pro-active planning: these are the kinds of projects which attract attention and followers, nationally and internationally.
We want to assess Dutch spatial planning in two ways. The first is: does it realise what it sets out to achieve? The preceding chapters provide the information for that assessment. The second is an assessment of the processes by which government bodies pursue their spatial planning. That requires consideration of the relevant administrative norms: these are described in Chapter 7.
The assessment is given in Chapter 8.