FI-14 :: Development of land use policies and planning methods

Integrative governance of land use and spatial structure calls for new planning methods and ways of using policy instruments. Many and often controversial objectives are related to land use choices, and decisions are often based on difficult weighing of benefits and disadvantages. One of the biggest challenges related to land use planning is considering urban region as a whole. Most urban regions consist of several municipalities that compete with each other trying to attract new jobs and inhabitants. There are significant differences between municipalities in land use policy. Because of the lack of common master planning and co-operation, the development has led to suboptimal results in the whole urban region. Consolidation of the urban form should be based on an analysis of urban region to determine best locations for future development.
There are big differences between growing and declining areas, and same policy instruments don’t work for both of them. Land use policies need to better enable and support the choosing of sustainable options.
Possible research questions may be:
Land management
• How to enhance integrated governance of urban regions, policy coherence and co-operation of different administrative bodies?
• How to deal with different values and objectives in decision-making e.g. with the help of multiple-criteria decision analysis?
• How to target policy instruments to different areas taking into consideration the differences between growing urban regions and sparsely populated rural areas.
• How to develop the use policy instruments to enable sustainability transitions?
• How to define best locations for new developments and infrastructure in order to consolidate the existing of urban form?
• How to take into account the geotechnical properties of development sites?
• How to take into account cultural historically and archaeologically valuable areas in land use planning?