Waarom is Rijksregie het antwoord op ruimtelijke opgaven?

De roep om een meer centrale en sturende rol van de Rijksoverheid op het gebied van ruimtelijke ontwikkeling in Nederland neemt al enige tijd toe. Op het eerste gezicht lijkt er een brede consensus te bestaan. Maar wat zijn precies de problemen die vragen om regie vanuit de nationale overheid? En wat houdt die regierol precies in? In dit artikel...

Patterns of distributive justice: social housing and the search for market dynamism in Amsterdam

Housing policy changes in the Netherlands have been in line with OECD and IMF policy advice to increase market dynamism by downsizing the large social rental sector. The impact of such policies on households, however, is rarely acknowledged. Therefore, in this article, distributive effects on social housing tenants in Amsterdam between 2004 and...

Land-policy instruments for densification: the Dutch quest for control

Land-policy instruments are important to local governments for the implementation of densification. This article explores the factors behind local governments’ motives that determine the use of specific land-policy instruments to achieve densification. The aim is to increase understanding of how available land-policy instruments are applied in...

Strategies of municipal land policies: housing development in Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands

How do municipalities strategically use land policy to develop land for housing? The development of housing is a challenge for many European countries, though the scale and time of it differs. Issues are not always about the absolute number of houses that need to be supplied in a country. The distribution and quality of houses affect the demand...

Land Consumption and Land Take: Enhancing Conceptual Clarity for Evaluating Spatial Governance in the EU Context

Rapid expansion of settlements and related infrastructures is a global trend that comes with severe environmental, economic, and social costs. Steering urbanization toward well-balanced compactness is thus acknowledged as an important strategic orientation in UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG-11) via the SDG-indicator “Ratio of land...

Reinterpreting Existenzminimum in Contemporary Affordable Housing Solutions

During the housing crisis of the 1920s, the German concept Existenzminimum (minimum dwelling) was developed and applied to the construction of public social housing. It was considered a design laboratory, where research, design, and experimentation would focus on a unique goal: create a space-efficient affordable housing typology, based on...