Wer verdichtet unsere Städte, wo, und wie? Beitrag systematischer Grundeigentumsanalysen zur effektiven Umsetzung von Innenentwicklungszielen

Abstract

The lack of housing supply in the context of increasing housing demand has become a key challenge for global urban development. This is particularly true in densifying cities, where land is scarce and highly contested among urban actors. In such conflicting land use situations, the question of who owns, controls, and decides on the land available to meet the housing demand is critical to the effective and sustainable development of our cities. As legal title holders, landowners have significant territorial power to shape the socio-economic geography of cities. While they cannot be legally compelled to meet public land use objectives within a given time frame (e.g., with respect to zoning for densified housing), they have the legal capacity to block, delay, or redirect planned housing (re)development. This makes landowners key decision-makers in implementing housing provision goals. Little is known however about how different categories of landowners (e.g., institutional investors, owner-occupiers, cooperatives, and public owners) influence housing provision in densifying urban contexts. This project’s overarching goal is thus to address this housing challenge from a landownership and property perspective. The starting point is that, while conditioned by the state and the market, landownership and property represent an understudied key mechanism influencing effective and sustainable housing provision outcomes (i.e., number of dwellings, housing space consumption per capita, rental prices; Adisson & Artioli, 2020). The specific aim is to conduct an in-depth empirical investigation of how different landowners influence city housing provision. To address this aim, this research puts forward a quantitative case study design for 'Opfikon' (Switzerland). The Swiss agglomeration city represents a highly urbanized densifying environment and faces growing housing supply challenges. Through an innovative mixed-methods approach that combines geospatial analysis (GIS) of provided land and property market data with statistical and R-analysis approaches, the housing and densification outcomes in this city are analyzed. This project’s results contribute significantly to the “property-oriented turn” (Jacobs & Paulsen, 2009) in land use policy, which calls for urban planning to reopen the contested land issue and its diverse political-economic implications. These issues are not only evident in global urbanization and the struggle for natural resources (e.g., land, energy, climate adaptation), but also in the analysis and understanding of the socio-economic and political power imbalances attached to it. In addition, the data analysis approach allows policymakers to raise important and evidence-based questions for debates about income, wealth distribution, socio-economic inequality, and the role of property therein.