Active and passive behavior of landowners in local planning and development processes

Abstract

The role of landowner in the development process has attracted increasing scrutiny in recent years. Classical models of the supply of land allowed little scope for the preferences of individual landowners. When land use allocation became a matter for public policy, such models may be implicitly incorporated in the statutory system of town and country planning. Land ownership was not considered to be a legitimate issue for planners and, indeed, the assumption was made that land allocated by the planning system would normally be made available for development by the landowner. Previous research has concentrated on the role of the landowner in either the process of production or the process of development. Attractive conceptualizations of landowner behavior have been offered from both structuralist and behaviorist perspectives. While the structural approach seeks to relate the various types of landowners to their function in the process of production, the behaviorist approach places its emphasis upon individual landowner characteristics. While in certain circumstances both approaches may provide useful explanations of why particular landowners behave as they do, they each experience considerable difficulty in coming to terms with the great variety of landowner behavior. The detailed work reported in this paper is intended to highlight the empirical variety in outcomes and to demonstrate the clear links which exist between landowner involvement in the local planning process and landowner activity in the development process. A more sophisticated understanding of landowner behavior may well need to draw upon each of these three approaches, for different functions might be associated with characteristics of different relative importance which result in different outcomes. Of course, this would demand further specific research but such research would, it is argued, help lay the basis for the construction of a more comprehensive model enabling landowner behavior to be predicted.