LANDTIME - The Planning and Building Act between market demand, land policy, sustainability, temporality, and intergenerational justice

LANDTIME is a collaborative project to develop the knowledge base concerning how planning according to the Planning and Building Act (PBA) together with relevant sector legislation promotes a sustainable societal development.

prosjekt

About/Aims

Background

The Norwegian Constitution’s §112 establish that public authorities must take long-term responsibilities to ensure future generations’ right to a healthy environment, and the nature’s diversity and production capability. However, there are tensions in the system. The numerous plans and planning procedures made according to the PBA and other sector specific legislation take place at different hierarchical levels, have different spatial scales and time perspectives, and are subject to periodic changes and practices of exemptions. LANDTIME has particular emphasis on planning at regional and municipal level, i.e., from regional strategy plans to detailed zoning plans.

In Norway, land consolidation and land readjustment are partly decoupled from public planning, and private developers initiate and prepare most detailed zoning plans. Urban transformations usually rely on private development.

Objective

LANDTIME’s main objective is to investigate the Norwegian planning system’s functional capacity to handle multiple temporalities of spatial development, hereunder its set of plans and instruments, the role of property and property rights for public planning, and related challenges in different geographical contexts.

LandTime's secondary objectives are to explore the planning system from a temporality perspective, as the content of plans, temporalities of the planning processes, including transmission between plans, empirical investigations of the interplay between public spatial planning and private property, and property rights, and how the two systems lay out the premises for temporality management in terms of market demands and intergenerational justice.

LANDTIME will also investigate whether the PBA is an adequate framework for regional and municipal planning to facilitate sustainable industrial and business development, and how the PBA and relevant sector legislation handle development conflicts, i.e., environmental protection and sustainability vs. equity, social and intergenerational justice.

More about the project

Work packages
LANDTIME includes six work packages:

WP1: Managing multiple temporalities in spatial planning
WP2: Time horizons, static and dynamic elements in local planning
WP3: Tensions between predictability and flexibility in detailed zoning plans
WP4: More time efficient plan implementation
WP5: Comparison, synthesis, and policy recommendations
WP0: Project Management and Communication

Case areas
LANDTIME’s research questions have been developed in cooperation with the collaborating partners. The research questions will be investigated in three different case areas.

The first is municipalities in two of Nordland County’s regions, Lofoten and Salten. In these municipalities there are few cities, but some of these municipalities are defined as World Heritage and buffer zones. Steep mountains almost from the water’s edge have establish a scarcity of land for housing and commercial activities that often is comparable to the situation in large cities. During the main tourist season, the tourists usually outnumber the inhabitants.

The second case area is the City of Bergen, representing a metropolitan planning context. The topography between the sea and steep mountains effectively limits the available land. City of Bergen aims for sustainable development through a series of urban transformations to establish a compact polycentric city with well-developed public transport infrastructures.

The third case area Indre Østfold Municipality, representing an inland rural planning context, was established in 2020 through merger of five former small and medium sized municipalities. Indre Østfold municipality is in the periphery of three regional gravity areas: East of the Greater Oslo area, within its commuting range; south of the fast-growing region Romerike area, with the national airport; and north of the Lower Glomma urban region. Indre Østfold Municipality is currently in the middle of political and administrative processes to consolidate the new municipality.

Norwegian Courts’ Administration, which manages Norway’s 19 Land Consolidation Courts, will not provide a specific case area, but provide relevant Land Consolidation Court cases from Nordland County, City of Bergen, and Indre Østfold Municipality to elucidate urban land consolidation.

Funding
The Research Council of Norway. 10.0 million NOK.

Partners
Our collaborative partners are Nordland County Council, City of Bergen, Indre Østfold Municipality and the Norwegian Courts’ Administration.

Our research partners include Institute of Transport Economics (TØI), Aalborg University, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Université Rennes 2, Normandy Chair for Peace, and Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research.

News/Findings

Reviews

Researchers

Participating NMBU researchers