From the Dublin conference

Last week planning academics from across the world met at the joint congress organised by UCD in a very sunny Dublin  for the European and North American associations of planning schools: http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/. Around a thousand people attended so difficult to summarise the discussions or even the main themes! There was plenty of continuing evidence that market-led development often failed to deliver for local communities and, further, that it was running into problems as a strategy in current economic climates. But there were also a couple of interesting papers that linked very directly to the arguments and proposals in The Future of Planning.
A fascinating paper by David Adams, of Glasgow University, discussed urban land reform in Scotland - where he is advising the Scottish Government - and proposed a Community Right to Sell. This would be a measure whereby a community could force a plot of vacant or derelict land in their area to go to auction and be sold. The idea is that the auction process would result in the land being sold for a beneficial use even if this was a price below that desired by the current landowner. David's view is that often this lower price would enable communities to buy the land; even if they were outbid, land would be brought into use rather than being blocked by landowners.
Another interesting analysis was put forward by Peter Phibbs of the University of Sydney. His paper outlined the ACT Land Rent Scheme under which households are able to rent land and then buy a building to put on it, purchasing the land at a later stage to unify the two elements. There is an annual land rent fixed at 2% of the land value for lower income households and 4% for others. This seems an innovative idea which Peter describes as a government CLT and as having some significant success. He also points though to the opposition that it faced at the outset, a reminder of the need to build wide coalitions of support to challenge the existing growth-dependent paradigm.
Two ideas to watch....