Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom: Strategies for Existing Cities to Adopt Polycentric, Bottom-Up Regulation of Land Use

Abstract

Urban planning reform proposals have generally failed to provide bottom-up rules that, given local geography and politics, can overcome political opposition to change and allow Coasean bargaining while sufficiently capturing externalities. I suggest four strategies to fill that gap in the literature.Recent research on the commons has rarely addressed deficiencies in regulation of new urban construction, and yet multiple studies estimate that such deficiencies cause large impairments of productivity and welfare. Many places face transitional gains traps where homeowners and others block any move to a more efficient system. I argue that allowing bottom-up approval of better uses of land may reverse the current Olsonian problems by allowing the formation of groups with strong incentives and the means to lobby for such changes. It can be seen as a tactic from Riker's heresthetic: splitting the blocking homeowner-voter majority by allowing former objectors to defect from the regulatory cartel and benefit from more intensive land use.One example is the recent law in New Zealand, allowing a landowner to waive the protective setback rule binding a specific adjoining property. In England, a recent change now permits a parish to approve development on its own green belt, albeit subject to tight constraints. Ellickson's suggestion of allowing a vote by individuals on a single stretch of street ('face block') to upzone that stretch is a third approach that has not yet been tried in practice. Analogously, a fourth rule could allow upzoning by vote of the residents of a city block, subject to restrictions on altering external façades of the block and to angled maximum height planes to preserve light to other blocks.

Actor Resistance Influences Effectiveness of Ostrom’s Design Principles for Governing Contested Landscapes

“…Ostrom's design principles can provide a systematic, structured framework for governing the use of common property resources (Fleischman et al, 2014), especially when top-down approaches for natural resource governance are ineffective in controlling ecological degradation (Haase et al, 2014;Okpara et al, 2018;Vij & Narain, 2016;Zhang, de Roo, & Rauws, 2019). However, there are gaps in understanding and operationalizing the design principles in the context of spatial relationships and managing the ways in which local interactions scale up to produce regional patterns, as in the case of urbanizing landscapes (Foster & Iaione 2019, Myers 2020. Our analysis show how exploring the consequences of simple assumptions for a spatially dynamic landscape and urbanizing areas can guide policy decisions, linking heterogeneous local stakeholders to broader institutional context by evaluating the outcomes of conflict across scale (Ratner et al, 2013).…”

Creating the city step-by-step : When incremental development strategies meet institutions

“…The accuracy of her institutional analysis is the primary justification for this argument. Also, other urban planning scholars are applying her institutional analysis (see the recent work of Van den Hurk et al, 2014;Salet, 2018;Savini, 2019;Spijkerboer et al, 2019;Myers, 2020). Furthermore, this dissertation has illustrated the utility of her approach to a qualitative case study design, in addition to its frequent and recognised application to quantitative analysis (Forsyth and Johnson, 2014).…”