Buildable land overzoning. Have new planning regulations in Poland resolved the issue?

Anita Kukulska-Kozieł

Land Use Policy, 2023, vol. 124, issue C

Abstract: The scarcity of space as a resource and dynamic social changes call for rational management of the available land. However, many countries today struggle with inefficient space management. One of the relevant issues is the surplus of land zoned as buildable. The paper investigates whether one of such countries, Poland, has developed an effective tool to resolve the issue. The paper analyses literature, government reports and opinions, and discourses of spatial planners and identifies primary drivers of changes in buildable land zoning policies introduced to the Polish spatial planning law in 2015. It focuses on one factor particularly, the overestimation of the demand for buildable land. An analysis of masterplans drafted according to the new regulations revealed that the new policy that seemingly offered alternative and effective tools for controlling buildable land overzoning turned out to be ambiguous and ineffective. Consequently, the regulations failed to eliminate the abuses they were designed to control. The example of the Polish planning regulations shows that ambiguous laws fail to produce the expected results and need to be specified more precisely, particularly regarding nomenclature, even if the intention behind them is good.

Keywords: Spatial policy; Planning reform; Spatial problems; Buildable land balance, masterplan; Current practices (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837722004677
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:124:y:2023:i:c:s0264837722004677

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106440

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().