Impact of national policies on patterns of built-up development: an assessment over three decades

Globally, built-up development is taking place at unprecedented rates. To mitigate and limit its effects, recent scientific and spatial planning communities call for built-up management to be addressed on broader scales, from regional to national, and coordinated with multiple policy domains. In this paper, we aimed to analyze the evolution and impact of Romania’s national policies on built-up management during the entire period from the fall of the communist regime to the present. The new perspective offered by our study concerns the use of spatiotemporal built-up development assessment with policy analysis and visualization. Moreover, policies and built-up land changes are addressed in direct relationship with major political events and global economic influences. Our findings reveal that policies were influenced by the communist legacy, accession to the EU and the global economic crisis. Most effective were the policies adopted during the pre-EU accession period and after the economic crisis. The strongest impact on patterns of development came from policies in the domains of transportation, regional development, public administration and the environment.     

Upzoning and value capture: How U.S. local governments use land use regulation power to create and capture value from real estate developments

The public sector can harness its authority to control land uses to secure valuable public benefits from real estate developments. This paper investigates how five major U.S. cities—Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle—are using their land use regulation powers to create and capture value for the public benefit. An analysis of the zoning and entitlement processes of the 20 largest real estate development projects in each city reveals that value has been captured from all 100 projects. Furthermore, these cities implicitly differentiated value capture into two distinct components: value creation and value capture. Among the 100 projects, cities created value for 90 projects by allowing greater density and height—a practice often referred to as “upzoning.” Distinguishing such upzoning incidences from traditional land use exaction tools is important because the added value gives local governments greater legitimacy in asking for public benefits. The experience of the five cities further revealed that value capture strategies can be customized to adapt to unique regulatory, political, and cultural contexts. Lastly, despite the fact that the majority of the upzoned projects increased density and height through project-specific negotiations, none of the cities had clear standards or evaluation frameworks for determining: how much value was created, what can be asked for in return, and who should benefit from the value captured. Cross-national scholarship on value capture can be leveraged to address these important questions.     

Evaluation of forestland use in mining operation activities in Turkey in terms of sustainable natural resources

Mining has been necessary for human activities and is conducted in line with this need. The location of mines must sometimes be where land use overlaps with other activities because the location of the mined substance cannot be changed. In Turkey, forestland are the most common of these overlapping areas. Therefore, mining has frequently occurred on forestland in Turkey—and worldwide. After the mining operation activities are conducted, the forestland are rehabilitated and returned to the forest administration. The examination of used and returned areas provides an opportunity to create an optimal situation between “mining for sustainable development” and “protection of forestland.”Accordingly, several questions, such as mining production amounts, degrees of social and economic development of the cities in which enterprises are conducting mining, the quantity of the areas they used for mining activities in forestland, the areas which were returned to the forest administration, operating license areas and operation permit areas, and the life of mining operation, were asked to the mining enterprises in Turkey through the “Survey Monkey” program in 2018. Thus, according to mineral groups, different land use rates were compared with the operating license areas, and the land uses for each mineral group were analyzed by considering the operation activity periods. The results indicate that the sustainability of the use of forestry in mining activities in Turkey has changed in a positive direction, particularly because of changes in mining and environmental legislation in Turkey over the last decade.     

Rural Residential Land Transition in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region: Spatial-Temporal Patterns and Policy Implications

Rural residential land transition (RRLT) dominates rural land use transition. Therefore, analysing the laws of transition and differentiation of land use is not only the basis for the differential management of rural residential areas but key to the sustainable use of rural land. This study constructs a conceptual model of RRLT using multi-period remote sensing monitoring data based on a comprehensive index method, ArcGIS, and FRAGSTATS landscape pattern analysis, among others. It also analyses the characteristics of the transition extent, transition trend, transition morphology, and transition intensity of rural residential land in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region from 1980 to 2018. The results show that, from a vertical comparison of long time series, the transition extent is characterised by a process of ‘slow growth—expanding start—fast expansion—slowing down’; the transition trend is characterised by an increase in the amount of cultivated land occupied by rural residential land, followed by a large number of rural residential land is reclaimed as cultivated land; the transition morphology is characterised by an increase in mean patch size and degree of irregularity, as well as aggregation; and the transition intensity is characterised by fluctuations in the process of ‘small-scale reduction—small-scale growth—substantial growth—small-scale growth and reduction’. A horizontal comparison of counties in the BTH region reveals a long-lasting and active growth trend in transition extent and transition intensity in the Beijing-Tianjin region, and a gradually slowing trend in the areas around the region. The transition morphology features of the northwest Hebei region are more prominent, and show that the scale of rural settlements is small, the plaques fragmented and irregular, and the layout more scattered. The BTH region should formulate a differentiated transition direction for rural residential areas based on the different functional areas, and play into the agglomeration, scale, and synergy effects of urban agglomerations. It should also coordinate and improve the human–land relationship in rural areas, and construct an orderly and densely distributed pattern of urban and rural spatial development with a reasonable layout and complementary functions.     

The State as Both Regulator and Player: The Politics of Transfer of Development Rights in China

The conventional argument that the introduction of transfer of development rights (TDR) shifts the power of land use regulation from the state to the market is increasingly under challenge. In China, the state's grip on land is reinforced through TDR, in which the state is both regulator and player. This state-dominated form of TDR affects China in three ways. First, competing aspirations of different scales of government complicate how TDR is implemented. Although the central state promotes TDR to maintain a national balance of arable land, some local states instrumentalize it to expand their landed basis of accumulation. Secondly, TDR tends to benefit the state but not its people. It may increase the fiscal income of the sending government and lessen the land shortage of the receiving government, but sometimes at the expense of the interests of land users without land ownership. Thirdly, given the state's deep involvement in TDR programs, the key for China's TDR to protect arable land lies not so much in clear property rights or a fully fledged market as in effective checks and balances regarding the state's powers over TDR. These three observations attest to the embeddedness of TDR in the local political economy.     

Creative Cities,Graffiti and Culture-Led Development in South Africa: Dlala Indima (‘Play Your Part’)

Creative cities and culture-led development discourses have come under increasing scrutiny as elite-centric economic development agendas tend to trump ‘civic creativity’ ideals as imagined by Charles Landry. In South Africa, culture-led development and cultural policy tends to primarily mimic that of the global North, largely focusing on culture as a catalyst for economic and property development. Public art commissioning processes tend to focus on decorative projects as part of urban upgrading, which are often associated with ensuing gentrification and displacement of the urban poor. In contrast to focusing on these kinds of regeneration strategies, this article investigates Dlala Indima, a hip-hop-led graffiti project in a rural township in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This article situates graffiti as a critical social and spatial practice to argue that this case challenges normative cultural planning paradigms. Dlala Indima's work is an alternative approach to cultural development by and for young people who are usually marginalized by the mainstream practice of culture-led economic development. The project challenges dominant creative cities and culture-led development discourses in three ways: first, it challenges the normative processes of regeneration; secondly, it grounds participatory practice; and finally, it shifts participation from ‘tyranny to transformation’ through the ubuntu of hip-hop, the notion of ubuntu being based on the communitarian notion of ‘ubuntu, ngubuntu ngabantu’—‘I am because you are’.     

Does more finance mean more inequality in times of crisis?

Many recent empirical studies show that both banking crises and financial development (FD) play an important role in understanding the dynamics of income inequality (IncI) over the last decades. However, so far no study has investigated the role of FD in the amplification of IncI following banking crises. This paper seeks to address this issue based on a sample of 69 banking crises in 54 countries over the 1977–2013 period. Our analysis suggests that FD is associated with a significant increase in IncI in the aftermath of banking crises. This result is robust to a broad range of alternative specifications and is unaffected by various potential sources of endogeneity. We also show that the relationship between FD and the redistributive consequences of banking crises is not subject to a threshold effect and is stronger for developing countries.     

UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL PROGRAMS AND LONG-TERM CHILD OUTCOMES: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

What are the long-term effects of universal preschool programs on child outcomes? We review 26 studies using natural experiments to estimate the effects of universal preschool programs for children aged 0–6 years on child outcomes measured from third grade to adulthood. Studies comparing universal preschool with a mix of parental, family, and private modes of care show mixed effects on test scores and on measures related to health, well-being, and behavior. All estimates for outcomes related to adequate primary and secondary school progression, years of schooling, highest degree completed, employment, and earnings indicate beneficial average effects of universal preschool programs. Three of the included studies calculate benefits-to-costs ratios and find ratios clearly above one. Universal preschool tends to be more beneficial for children with low socioeconomic status and there are not consistently different effects for boys or girls. Only three studies compare two alternative types of universal preschool programs in terms of long-term outcomes.     

The interplay of corporate entrepreneurship,environmental orientation,and performance in clean‐tech firms—A double‐edged sword

Clean‐tech innovations are an important driver in solving global issues such as climate change and for the sustainable development of economies around the world. Whereas a large part of the literature focuses on clean‐tech ventures, less is known on corporate entrepreneurship, that is, entrepreneurial behavior in established firms and its relation to sustainability. This paper extends the sustainable entrepreneurship debate to corporate entrepreneurship, which represents a fruitful avenue to further developing clean technologies. We focus particularly on clean‐tech firms' organizational preparedness for corporate entrepreneurship (OPCE), that is, how well a firm's structures and processes are set for entrepreneurial activities. On the basis of contingency theory, this study investigates how the level of OPCE influences the environmental and financial performance of clean‐tech firms and whether their environmental orientation affects these relationships. Building on data from 103 firms, we find support for a positive effect of OPCE on both environmental and financial performance. Both effects are stronger the higher the external environmental orientation. In contrast, the leverage of internal environmental orientation is not equally positive. Our study reveals that the effect of OPCE on financial performance diminishes for firms that are more strongly driven by an internal than an external environmental orientation.     

Partner‐diversity effects on alliance termination in the early stage of green alliance formation: Empirical evidence from carbon‐emission reduction projects in Latin America

Partner diversity is a key influencer in interorganizational alliances, and several empirical studies have shown that its outcomes are contingent on alliance‐specific factors. We extend this research as well as the growing literature on green alliances, in which partner diversity is uniquely high. Specifically, we examine partner‐diversity effects on alliance termination in the early stage of green alliance formation. We hypothesize that in this context, size disparity increases termination likelihood, whereas organizational variety and cultural separation have the opposite effect. To test our hypotheses, we use a sample of 366 alliance projects located in Latin America and submitted to the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism for evaluation, validation, and registration from 2004 to 2014. Our findings contribute to several research streams and provide practical guidance for successful formation of alliances focused on environmental protection.