| The issue of land policy has become very important in the Netherlands the last couple of years. The main reason for this is that the practice of spatial planning has changed greatly: where municipalities used to be the main provider of building land, they recently discovered that, without the powers that they used to have as providers of building land, their statutory powers for spatial planning do not enable them to achieve what they want (see Needham, 1997). As a result, the issue of the relationship between property rights and spatial planning gained political attention, but has been till now marginally researched from a Dutch perspective, definitely compared with countries as the United States and United Kingdom. Insights and experciences from these countries can provide useful information on how to research this relationship both in general and case-specific. In doing so, new approaches from a property rights perspective can be used for the Dutch planning practice to tackle current problems regarding the way physical development takes place. The central problem of this study is therefore: How are property and planning institutionalized in different countries and how do these institutions relate to each other?The first part of the research will deal with general theoretical notions existing in literature about institutions and institutional change and the application to both property and planning. Based upon these insights translated into general hypotheses, the second part will explore the wider institutional environment of property rights and spatial planning in different countries. The different societal dimensions of property (such as law, politics, economics and culture) will be described and geographically positioned, making use of the work of Zweigert and Kötz (1987) on the legal families of the world. In the third part we will explore the link between property markets and planning more specific. Our perspective will move towards local development processes and projects where planning and property market organizations meet each other and mutually construct the local property rights regimes. By doing case-studies in different countries, our hypotheses will be tested and applied to the Netherlands. |
