Land valuation in densifying cities: The negotiation process between institutional landowners and municipal planning authorities

Land valuation—the normative and socio-political process through which land is assigned a value—is a highly contested procedure, as the value of land strongly affects how land is used and distributed and ultimately affects who can live where, how, and why. We argue that it is thus important to gain a better understanding of land valuation processes through examining (1) how the process of land valuation functions in a context of urban land scarcity and densification; (2) how involved actors’ strategies of land valuation vary in such a context. To answer these research questions, we introduce an actor-centered new institutionalism approach for the qualitative case study analysis of the Rohr/Platten densification area in the city of Opfikon within the Zurich metropolitan area. We find that the diverse goals of the involved stakeholders (i.e., the profit-orientation of private actors versus the socio-environmentally sustainable spatial development of public planning authorities), in combination with the existing rules, can explain actors’ land valuation strategies. The current planning paradigm of densification and the strong legal protection of land titleholders support the strategies applied by for-profit developers and landowners. Local planning authorities must find ways to deal with the power and the profit-oriented logic of titleholders by means of active land policy to create more ecological and socially inclusive outcomes.