Håkan FORSELL - Urban Planning and Property Cultures Takings Clauses and Temporary Solutions in European and US Urban Regeneration Projects

Many cities today in both Europe and in the United States are faced with serious economic, social and physical challenges including shrinking populations, unemployment, poverty, decreasing tax revenues and squalid living conditions. These problems have a dramatic effect on the physical fabric of declining cities, where large parts of the urban areas are characterized by under-utilized infrastructure, deteriorated buildings and vacant land.

Declining and de-industrialized cities in the modern western world was for a long time regarded as isolated incidents, but major research projects and state funded information campaigns, above all in Germany and in Great Britain, have during the 2000s provided a corpus of investigations that highlight the global range of the occurrences. Urban planning, on state and municipal level, is however still shaped in terms of new growth and construction. It is an ongoing process for the urban researchers as well as the distressed urban communities to encourage city governments to become more of an activating and less of a regulating force in future urban planning.

The dominating interest in recent studies has unquestionably been on urban government achievements to rearrange the legal framework, the administrative routines and the financial investments to infuse fresh life in the urban communities. Less attention has been drawn to the actual implementation of governmental policies vis-à-vis private property owners and investors for revitalizing or successfully reorganizing urban space and urban social relationships.

The present study wishes to examine an assumption being made elsewhere, but seldom scrutinized, in current research on ‘Shrinking cities’, namely that the outcome of public intervention is highly dependent on the ownership structure and the capacities and interests within a specific “property culture”. In declining cities planning tools like zoning have had little to offer since empty or deteriorated space dominates the urban landscape, and private actors have been more or less unwilling to engage in continuous investments. Long-range planning for these areas has recurrently been unsuccessful.

The research approach will study two highly diverse features of private-public property relationships in regeneration projects in the US and in Europe: 1. the takings actions and 2. the “interim solutions” of city or state governments in declining urban areas.

Takings action (expropriation, eminent domain) is a longstanding implementation technique of urban planning involving the power of government to take private property against the will of the owner, as long as the taking is for a public use and just compensation is paid. During the last decade, not least in the USA, governments have used takings action not only to promote public utilities, but to revitalize urban land through economic development by private or semi-public projects.

Interim solutions represents the opposite side of the implementation field that governmental planning and private property owners are involved in. The interim-concept refers to the temporary activation or disposal of vacant land or buildings, and the legal and political framework that makes such a disposal possible. In several cities in Europe, interim solutions have abridged maintenance and security costs for property owners, simplified the building permit process and reduce legal and administrative barriers.

Hence, the study will focus on the extremes of urban planning in post-industrial urban areas, the “hard” vs. the “soft” tools to deal with urban decline. The overarching goal of the study is to test the presupposition that the legal and economic integration or disintegration of private property depends on the city’s political climate, and hence on the city government’s ability and willingness, inability or unwillingness, to mediate new use patterns of land and buildings to empower community and social resources.