Property Rights And Urban Regeneration In The Netherlands

The person or organisation that owns property rights over land is entitled to determine how land is used, though within the limits that are set out by public land use regulations. Therefore, property rights over land are crucial in the process and the result of urban regeneration. In the light of urban regeneration it is often necessary to acquire the property rights, for instance because the original owner is not willing or not capable to redevelop. In those cases a temporal landowner - in the Netherlands this often includes housing associations, property developers but also municipalities ñ redevelops the land. The intent of this paper is to unravel how the way property rights are (re)assigned, and the way owners deal with them in the process of urban regeneration, affects the physical result of urban regeneration. This paper reports on an empirical research in which eight regeneration projects in the Netherlands have been investigated. All the projects include a significant and comparable number of housing units, but vary in the particularities of the property rights regime. The approach that has been applied is as follows. In each case a morphological analysis is made of the situation that precedes the conversion. In addition, the ownership configuration at that stage has been reconstructed. Both these exercises have been repeated for the final result of the regeneration project. An important part of the research is aimed at revealing the process between these starting and finishing points, with particular attention for the way the owners have dealt with the property rights. Obviously, the way each project was carried out and the product that was delivered varies greatly. But there are also similarities. The paper concludes that the assignment of property rights over land affects the physical result both directly and indirectly. Directly, since many of the initial property boundaries are clearly visible in the footprint on the site at the end of redevelopment. Indirectly, because the total land acquisition costs often weigh (too) heavily on the whole project. This is compensated by physical measures (among other measures), such as increasing the number, the size and the type of houses or reducing the quality of the public spaces.