Planning instruments enhance the acceptance of urban densification

Abstract

Dense and compact cities yield several benefits for both the population and the environment, including the containment of urban sprawl, reduced carbon emissions, and increased housing supply. Densification of the built environment is thus a key contemporary urban planning paradigm worldwide. However, local residents often oppose urban densification, motivating a need to understand their underlying concerns. In order to do so, we examined different factors driving public acceptance of housing densification projects through a combination of a conjoint survey experiment and different proximity frames among 12,402 participants across Berlin, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Paris. Respondents compared housing densification projects with varying attributes, including their geographic proximity, project-related factors, and accompanying planning instruments. The results indicate that the acceptance of such projects decreases with project proximity and that project-related factors, such as the type of investor, usage, and climate goals, impact densification project acceptance. More specifically, we see a negative effect on acceptance levels for projects with for-profit investors and a positive effect when the suggested developments are mixed use or climate neutral. In addition, planning instruments, such as rent control, inclusionary zoning, and participatory planning, appear to positively influence acceptance. Interestingly, a cross-continental comparison shows overall higher acceptance levels of densification by US respondents. These multifaceted results allow us to better understand what drives people's acceptance of housing projects and how projects and planning processes can be designed to increase democratic acceptance of urban densification.

Experts as Game Changers? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Climate Measures in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam

“…Amongst experts, public opposition is often attributed to the NIMBY effect (Verhoeven, 2021;Wicki et al, 2022), often ignoring the potential of residents' other genuine concerns, such as a fair distribution of costs and benefits amongst residents, equal rights in public decision-making, and the impact of local projects on the identity and symbolic value of a place. Lumping everything into NIMBYism also disregards the complex balancing of value categories in individual decisionmaking processes, in which egoistic values are not necessarily more influential than biospheric and altruistic value categories (Perlaviciute, 2022).…”

Public Preference Formation Towards Sustainable Global Supply Chains Policy

“…Political science scholars have increasingly implemented choice experiments to study preferences towards policy instruments and policy design mixes (Beiser-McGrath and Bernauer, 2019). While recent choice-experimental designs focusing on policy preferences have adopted framing vignettes prior to the choice experiment (Wicki, Hofer, and Kaufmann, 2022;Rudolph, Kolcava, and Bernauer, 2022), here we invert the sequencing, where we leverage respondent familiarity with policy instruments generated within the choice experiment to evaluate expected consequences at varying levels of policy stringency. Accordingly, such designs allow for researchers to have a look 'under the hood' of citizens' preference formation in the face of concrete policy proposals.…”

Stringent sustainability regulations for global supply chains are supported across middle-income democracies

“…While the ‘proposal support’ measure allows for comparative evaluation across policy instruments (levels) to be made alongside substantive, absolute levels of support (e.g., 55% of proposals containing an instrument are supported). The ‘proposal support’ methodology has been adopted in recent policy acceptability analyses 45 , and is preferable over common rating evaluations, which often adopt Likert-scale outcomes that are difficult to interpret substantively 46 .…”