Strategic considerations in land use planning: the case of white sites in Singapore

This paper adopts a game‐theoretic Nash equilibrium approach to examine the issue of planning flexibility in terms of land use zoning and development by appealing to the ‘white sites’ programme in Singapore as a natural experiment. The key insight is that the existence of competing white sites diminish the potential profit‐maximizing supply. While the flexibility in land use is valuable, it potentially introduces a supply inefficiency through the uncertainty embedded in the development decision ‐ making process. In addition, it is never optimal to defer development when competing white sites exist and when demand stays unchanged, unless exogeneous factors constrain commencement of construction. It is further demonstrated that a first‐mover advantage exists such that subsequent white sites released shortly after the first white site are likely to fetch lower land prices. Nevertheless, the land price would still reflect the alternative land use value. The predictions of our model are consistent with an empirical case study of proximate white sites.