Real estate and urbanism – In search of a rationale that inserts real estate into mainstream spatial sciences

Urban design influences the value of private properties when it does not simply generate new ones. Furthermore present urban planning, which is the most common institutional framework for urban design, requires financially balanced urban plans or even beyond it in search for public funds to interventions outside the plan area. This enhances the role of real estate in urbanism as it is the value added to real estate that allows for the funding of public features within urban planning.Two relevant issues derive from this approach – urban planners have to give a new and awkward place to real estate knowledge within their teams and the value added by the urban plan has to be calculated.The current Portuguese planning law requires municipal plans to evidence their economic feasibility without public disbursements and to provide an algorithm to allocate costs and benefits among initial property owners. This is however done without either the least mention to the role of real estate or to a purposeful concept of value added by the plan. The latter issues are the subject of the presentation with illustrations from the Portuguese urban planning framework.