Addressing Goal Conflicts: New Policy Mixes for Commercial Land Use Management

Abstract

Commercial land use management that focuses on a future-oriented urban and regional development must address multiple goals. Effective policy mixes need to simultaneously (1) improve city-regional and inter-municipal cooperation, (2) reduce land take, and (3) assure the long-term economic development of a region. Using the Northern Black Forest in Germany as a case study, we brought together planning and land use research with public policy analysis. We applied cross-impact balances (CIB) to build and analyze a participatory policy-interaction model. Together with a group of 12 experts, we selected effective individual measures to reach each of the three goals and analyzed their interactions. We then assessed the current policy mix and designed alternative policy mixes. The results demonstrate that current approaches to commercial land use management present internal contradictions and generate only little synergies. Implementing innovative measures on a stand-alone basis runs the risk of not being sufficiently effective. In particular, the current practice of competing for municipal marketing and planning of commercial sites has inhibiting effects. We identified alternative policy mixes that achieve all three goals, avoid trade-offs, and generate significant synergy effects. Our results point towards a more coherent and sustainable city-regional (commercial) land-use governance.

Evaluation of Urban Commercial Land Use Intensification Based on Land Parcels: Taking Wuxi City as an Example

“…In contemporary theories of urban planning, early urban planning concepts mainly emphasize function and the pursuit of an ideal urban condition [46]. With the rapid development of global urbanization and the use of a large amount of open space, the intensive use of urban land has become more important [52,53].…”

“…However, due to the great differences in the degree of development and industrial structures, it is not possible to directly measure the degree of intensive use of commercial land in different cities using the economic output per unit area. For different cities, the degree of intensive land use of different properties can be objectively read by whether the property is vacant or not [46]. For this reason, this study chooses the occupancy rate of commercial properties as an indicator of the efficiency of commercial land use to objectively assess the degree of intensive use of commercial space.…”

“…This also shows that location factors significantly affect the amount of commercial land use. Therefore, when planning commercial land use and developing optimization plans for intensive land use, it is necessary to consider the influence of location on commercial land use [46].…”

“…However, most of the existing studies have focused on the evaluation of land use intensification at the city level. Because the characteristics of the sparing and intensive use of different spatial scales and different types of land can vary greatly, a single land use policy cannot be used to promote the intensive use of urban land [25,46]. The results of existing studies cannot be used to guide the behavior of specific parcel-based urban commercial land use at the micro level or city level [47].…”

Comprehensive Evaluation of Land Use Planning Alternatives Based on GIS-ANP

“…The long-term results indicate the need for planners to be aware of the profound and lasting impacts on the ecological and socio-economic conditions of the area that their decisions may have, even if it is not obvious in the early stages of planning implementation [32]. Land use alternatives may not necessarily have a significant effect on sustainable development of an area [33].…”