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Land readjustment A modern approach to urbanization
Book reviews
effects or impacts of growth before they occurred and to establish a requirement of cross-acceptance process. As noted by the authors, crossacceptance, according to state law, is the following: A process of comparison of planning policies among governmental levels with the purpose of attaining compatibility between local, county and state plans. The process is designed to result in a written statement specifying areas of agreement and areas requiring modifications by parties to the cross-acceptance. [p 381
DeGrove and Miness offer interesting insights into the evolution of the Florida approach to state growth management. They discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the system and the challenges facing its development and implementation. The authors also examine the role regional government (in this case, Councils of Government) has played in state growth management strategies. While some states used the existing government structure in their strategies, other states have had to alter the structure and function of regional governance. According to DeGrove and Miness, ‘the historically weak and often underfunded COGS have taken on new, mandated respon-
sibilities for reviewing local plans, preparing regional plans, assisting local governments in compiling their comprehensive plans, and providing for conflict resolution’ (p 137). DeGrove and Miness have written an interesting and informative monograph on state and regional growth management which offers readers insights into the various complexities of developing state growth management policies. Their concluding chapter does a nice job of summarizing the findings of the text and providing a glimpse into the future of state and regional growth management. While I would recommend the book to individuals interested in alternative state responses to managing growth, I would question the timing of its publication. In the preface DeGrove notes that the systems covered in the monograph, along with other states and regions added, will be more fully analysed and compared in 1994-95. I might want to wait for the fuller discussion. Roger Caves School of Public Administration and Urban Studies San D[ego State University San Diego, CA, USA
A concise manual for town planners LAND READJUSTMENT A Modern Approach to Urbanization by Gerhard
Larsson
Avebury, Aldershot, pp, f32.50
UK,
1993,
146
This small book fills a gap on the town planner’s bookshelf. Clearly written (in translation from the original Swedish) and well referenced, it provides a broadly based introduction to a key technique of modern town planning in the market economy. Land readjustment is the method of urban development in which groups of adjacent landowners and - sometimes - tenants temporarily pool their property in-
LAND USE POLICY
April
1994
terests in order to improve the area. Some of the pooled estate will be taken for physical improvements roads, public spaces, drainage - and some more will have to be sold off to cover the cost of the project. At the end of the readjustment each owner’s property has a new set of boundaries. Its superficial area has been depleted but, in principle, its value has been enhanced. The technique of land readjustment was developed originally in the context of agricultural improvements. As a modern town planning instrument it has been applied both to building land development on the urban fringe and to the redevelopment of built-up areas. Its appeal is twofold. On the one hand it achieves improvement
without displacement; it appeals to the property interest; existing owners do not have to be bought out and relocated; equity among them is preand blighting municipal served; monopoly is avoided. On the other hand, insofar as project costs are met in part from land sales, land readjustment reduces public outlay on improvement, so it appeals to government too. That being said, it remains an exceptional device, used only in the few countries that have the right ideological mix of private proprietorship and social cooperation, and then only under the right circumstantial combination of landownership, public interest and potential economic return on the improvement.
Aims The book opens with a short analysis of the principal aims of land readjustment, or as Larsson prefers to call it, ‘joint development’. The author explains his intention to focus upon its application to urban contexts, embracing greenfield site development and planned urban renewal, including reconstruction after devastation by war or natural disaster. He goes straight into a country-by-country account of the application of land readjustment in Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway and the USA. In each case we are provided with a clear description of legal and procedural aspects, the context of use and the limitations. The opening distinction between greenfield development and urban renewal is not always followed through. In the Japanese entry, which rightly has pride of place among the national case studies, more could have been made of the remarkable application of land readjustment (kukuka-seiri) to redevelopment in already built-up areas. Here the cooperative association must accommodate a diverse membership of large and small stakeholders, including tenants, and far greater technical problems of improvement than are encountered at the urban edge. The extensive reliance on voluntary urban renewal in the city plans of Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka is a fascinating phenomenon that seems to have no real parallel else-
153
Book reviews
where in the world. The description of the role of the Japan Housing Corporation misses this dimension, and also its significant name-change to Housing and Urban Development Corporation. Larsson’s second national example is Germany. He leaves out the pioneering 19th century innovations in urban redevelopment under Frankfurt’s Lex Adickes and similar legislation, concentrating instead on the modern applications of Umlegung to building land subdivision. A similar emphasis on land conversion runs through the entry on France, though we learn in passing that the French land readjustment associations Associations Foncieres Urbains - can in principle undertake redevelopment of built-up areas as well as greenfield urbanization, as can joint associations of landowners under Sweden’s Planning and Building Act of 1987. The remaining national cases lie further from the mainstream of urban planning. In Norway, a form of land readjustment appears in the Shoreline Planning Act of 1971, a measure against strip development of holiday cabins along the waterfront of lakes and fjords, since extended to mountain areas. In Florida, USA, it featured 10 years ago in legislation to control remote speculative subdivisions with no immediate prospect of development; the bill was voted down by the state legislature as an excessive encroachment upon private property rights, as were similar enactments in California and Miami. Larsson ends his whistle-stop tour on a more positive note, with brief resumes of the procedures used in South Korea, Taiwan, Western Australia and India. The municipal role is paramount even in Korea, which learned the techniques at first hand from Japan. If Larsson’s survey shows the universality of land readjustment it also confirms the uniqueness of the property-led, bottom-up kukaku-seiri practised in Japan.
Comparisons The second half of the book offers a thoughtful comparative analysis of differences observed above. Larsson ex-
154
plores the institutional factors which give a greater weight to the private sector in some land readjustment systems, the public sector in others. The material is then trawled a second time, with a procedural commentary on each step of a joint development project, from initiation through formal setting-up and appeal stages to development, reinstatement to original owners, and final profit-sharing If the discussion is rather generalized, that is
because the author has written not just for his sponsors, the Swedish Council for Building Research, but for town planners and land reformers everywhere. The book achieves its aim of providing a concise manual of land readjustment in theory and practice. It should be read widely. Michael Hebbert Planning Studies Programme London School of Economics
Historical developments land tenure LAND IN AFRICAN AGRARIAN SYSTEMS edited by Thomas J. Bassett and Donald E. Crummey University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1993, 4 18 pp, f4O/f21 This publication brings together a number of papers first prepared for a workshop at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1988. The contributors are scholars working in the fields of African studies, anthropology, history, political science and geography. The Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, as a focal point of research in this field, also assisted in the preparation of this meeting. After a thoughtful introduction by T.J. Bassett on the ‘Land question and agricultural transformation in subSaharan Africa’ the volume is divided into three parts: (1) ‘Flexibility and conflict in indigenous land holding systems’; (2) ‘Access to land and agrarian politics’; and (3) ‘Radical agrarian reform and agricultural performance’. Each of the main parts opens with a contribution underlining the more general aspects of these themes. In Part 1 J.W. Bruce questions the importance of indigenous tenure systems in customary agricultural development. In Part 2 M.J. Watts presents a thought-provoking contribution on ‘Idioms of land and labour: producing
of African
politics and rice in Senegambia’; and in Part 3 H.W.O. Okoth-Ogendo assesses African agrarian reforms in relation to state responses to the African agrarian crisis and their implications for agricultural development. These introductory ‘lead’ papers are followed by more local, regional and nationally oriented case studies, such as (in Part 1) on transactions in cropland held under customary tenure in Lesotho (S.W. Lawry), on land customs in Burkina Faso (M. Saul), on geopolitics of land in Botswana (R.P. Werbner) and on land use conflicts in pastoral development in the Northern Ivory Coast (T.J. Bassett). In Part 2 F. Mackenzie reconceptualizes land tenure in a smallholding district in Kenya, and P.C. Bloch asks for egalitarian development projects in stratified societies: ‘Who ends up with the land?’ Finally, Part 3 includes essays on land, peasants and the drive for collectivization in Ethiopia (D. Rahmato), on land policies and tenure impacts in Somalia (M. Roth), on socialist transitions: policy reforms and peasant producers in Mozambique, and on the communal areas of Zimbabwe (T. Ranger).
Perspective In spite of some good up-to-date editing the long delay (1988-93) in the publication of this workshop had the result that much of the material pre-
LAND USE POLICY
April 1994
effects or impacts of growth before they occurred and to establish a requirement of cross-acceptance process. As noted by the authors, crossacceptance, according to state law, is the following: A process of comparison of planning policies among governmental levels with the purpose of attaining compatibility between local, county and state plans. The process is designed to result in a written statement specifying areas of agreement and areas requiring modifications by parties to the cross-acceptance. [p 381
DeGrove and Miness offer interesting insights into the evolution of the Florida approach to state growth management. They discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the system and the challenges facing its development and implementation. The authors also examine the role regional government (in this case, Councils of Government) has played in state growth management strategies. While some states used the existing government structure in their strategies, other states have had to alter the structure and function of regional governance. According to DeGrove and Miness, ‘the historically weak and often underfunded COGS have taken on new, mandated respon-
sibilities for reviewing local plans, preparing regional plans, assisting local governments in compiling their comprehensive plans, and providing for conflict resolution’ (p 137). DeGrove and Miness have written an interesting and informative monograph on state and regional growth management which offers readers insights into the various complexities of developing state growth management policies. Their concluding chapter does a nice job of summarizing the findings of the text and providing a glimpse into the future of state and regional growth management. While I would recommend the book to individuals interested in alternative state responses to managing growth, I would question the timing of its publication. In the preface DeGrove notes that the systems covered in the monograph, along with other states and regions added, will be more fully analysed and compared in 1994-95. I might want to wait for the fuller discussion. Roger Caves School of Public Administration and Urban Studies San D[ego State University San Diego, CA, USA
A concise manual for town planners LAND READJUSTMENT A Modern Approach to Urbanization by Gerhard
Larsson
Avebury, Aldershot, pp, f32.50
UK,
1993,
146
This small book fills a gap on the town planner’s bookshelf. Clearly written (in translation from the original Swedish) and well referenced, it provides a broadly based introduction to a key technique of modern town planning in the market economy. Land readjustment is the method of urban development in which groups of adjacent landowners and - sometimes - tenants temporarily pool their property in-
LAND USE POLICY
April
1994
terests in order to improve the area. Some of the pooled estate will be taken for physical improvements roads, public spaces, drainage - and some more will have to be sold off to cover the cost of the project. At the end of the readjustment each owner’s property has a new set of boundaries. Its superficial area has been depleted but, in principle, its value has been enhanced. The technique of land readjustment was developed originally in the context of agricultural improvements. As a modern town planning instrument it has been applied both to building land development on the urban fringe and to the redevelopment of built-up areas. Its appeal is twofold. On the one hand it achieves improvement
without displacement; it appeals to the property interest; existing owners do not have to be bought out and relocated; equity among them is preand blighting municipal served; monopoly is avoided. On the other hand, insofar as project costs are met in part from land sales, land readjustment reduces public outlay on improvement, so it appeals to government too. That being said, it remains an exceptional device, used only in the few countries that have the right ideological mix of private proprietorship and social cooperation, and then only under the right circumstantial combination of landownership, public interest and potential economic return on the improvement.
Aims The book opens with a short analysis of the principal aims of land readjustment, or as Larsson prefers to call it, ‘joint development’. The author explains his intention to focus upon its application to urban contexts, embracing greenfield site development and planned urban renewal, including reconstruction after devastation by war or natural disaster. He goes straight into a country-by-country account of the application of land readjustment in Japan, Germany, France, Sweden, Norway and the USA. In each case we are provided with a clear description of legal and procedural aspects, the context of use and the limitations. The opening distinction between greenfield development and urban renewal is not always followed through. In the Japanese entry, which rightly has pride of place among the national case studies, more could have been made of the remarkable application of land readjustment (kukuka-seiri) to redevelopment in already built-up areas. Here the cooperative association must accommodate a diverse membership of large and small stakeholders, including tenants, and far greater technical problems of improvement than are encountered at the urban edge. The extensive reliance on voluntary urban renewal in the city plans of Yokohama, Nagoya and Osaka is a fascinating phenomenon that seems to have no real parallel else-
153
Book reviews
where in the world. The description of the role of the Japan Housing Corporation misses this dimension, and also its significant name-change to Housing and Urban Development Corporation. Larsson’s second national example is Germany. He leaves out the pioneering 19th century innovations in urban redevelopment under Frankfurt’s Lex Adickes and similar legislation, concentrating instead on the modern applications of Umlegung to building land subdivision. A similar emphasis on land conversion runs through the entry on France, though we learn in passing that the French land readjustment associations Associations Foncieres Urbains - can in principle undertake redevelopment of built-up areas as well as greenfield urbanization, as can joint associations of landowners under Sweden’s Planning and Building Act of 1987. The remaining national cases lie further from the mainstream of urban planning. In Norway, a form of land readjustment appears in the Shoreline Planning Act of 1971, a measure against strip development of holiday cabins along the waterfront of lakes and fjords, since extended to mountain areas. In Florida, USA, it featured 10 years ago in legislation to control remote speculative subdivisions with no immediate prospect of development; the bill was voted down by the state legislature as an excessive encroachment upon private property rights, as were similar enactments in California and Miami. Larsson ends his whistle-stop tour on a more positive note, with brief resumes of the procedures used in South Korea, Taiwan, Western Australia and India. The municipal role is paramount even in Korea, which learned the techniques at first hand from Japan. If Larsson’s survey shows the universality of land readjustment it also confirms the uniqueness of the property-led, bottom-up kukaku-seiri practised in Japan.
Comparisons The second half of the book offers a thoughtful comparative analysis of differences observed above. Larsson ex-
154
plores the institutional factors which give a greater weight to the private sector in some land readjustment systems, the public sector in others. The material is then trawled a second time, with a procedural commentary on each step of a joint development project, from initiation through formal setting-up and appeal stages to development, reinstatement to original owners, and final profit-sharing If the discussion is rather generalized, that is
because the author has written not just for his sponsors, the Swedish Council for Building Research, but for town planners and land reformers everywhere. The book achieves its aim of providing a concise manual of land readjustment in theory and practice. It should be read widely. Michael Hebbert Planning Studies Programme London School of Economics
Historical developments land tenure LAND IN AFRICAN AGRARIAN SYSTEMS edited by Thomas J. Bassett and Donald E. Crummey University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1993, 4 18 pp, f4O/f21 This publication brings together a number of papers first prepared for a workshop at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1988. The contributors are scholars working in the fields of African studies, anthropology, history, political science and geography. The Land Tenure Center of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, as a focal point of research in this field, also assisted in the preparation of this meeting. After a thoughtful introduction by T.J. Bassett on the ‘Land question and agricultural transformation in subSaharan Africa’ the volume is divided into three parts: (1) ‘Flexibility and conflict in indigenous land holding systems’; (2) ‘Access to land and agrarian politics’; and (3) ‘Radical agrarian reform and agricultural performance’. Each of the main parts opens with a contribution underlining the more general aspects of these themes. In Part 1 J.W. Bruce questions the importance of indigenous tenure systems in customary agricultural development. In Part 2 M.J. Watts presents a thought-provoking contribution on ‘Idioms of land and labour: producing
of African
politics and rice in Senegambia’; and in Part 3 H.W.O. Okoth-Ogendo assesses African agrarian reforms in relation to state responses to the African agrarian crisis and their implications for agricultural development. These introductory ‘lead’ papers are followed by more local, regional and nationally oriented case studies, such as (in Part 1) on transactions in cropland held under customary tenure in Lesotho (S.W. Lawry), on land customs in Burkina Faso (M. Saul), on geopolitics of land in Botswana (R.P. Werbner) and on land use conflicts in pastoral development in the Northern Ivory Coast (T.J. Bassett). In Part 2 F. Mackenzie reconceptualizes land tenure in a smallholding district in Kenya, and P.C. Bloch asks for egalitarian development projects in stratified societies: ‘Who ends up with the land?’ Finally, Part 3 includes essays on land, peasants and the drive for collectivization in Ethiopia (D. Rahmato), on land policies and tenure impacts in Somalia (M. Roth), on socialist transitions: policy reforms and peasant producers in Mozambique, and on the communal areas of Zimbabwe (T. Ranger).
Perspective In spite of some good up-to-date editing the long delay (1988-93) in the publication of this workshop had the result that much of the material pre-
LAND USE POLICY
April 1994