A comparative institutional perspective on urban land use and revitalisation policy

In the context of the devolution of public policy, recently much administrative competence in land use policy is given to decentralised forms of decision-making in which local (or regional) authorities and the private sector play a more prominent role. The paper describes the pathway to a more institutional multi-actor mode of urban land use in the framework of deregulated land markets and maps out various relevant aspects of competitive land use. In particular, an attempt is made to identify the crucial ‘drivers’ of this complex decision process in an urban context, against the background of revitalisation objectives for cities. The analysis is illustrated by means of a comparative study on urban development projects in The Netherlands. A particular type of qualitative classification analysis, originating from artificial intelligence, coined rough set analysis, is developed to assess and extract the most important key factors that are responsible for successes and failures of recent development plans in Dutch cities. The approach allows us to pinpoint the most critical policy variables.