Preventing Informal Urban Development: Through Means of Sustainable Land Use Control

The issue of informal development was discussed in details at the joint FIG Com 3 and UNECE/WPLA workshop in Sounio, Greece, March 2007. Emphasis was given to the scale of the problem in Southern and Eastern Europe and to means of legalising such informal urban development.

This paper, instead, addresses the main issue of how to prevent informal urban development, especially through the use of adequate and sustainable means of land use control and good governance. Three key means are addressed:

Decentralisation: There is a need to separate central policy/regulation making and local decision making. This is directly linked to citizen participation in the process of land use control. Decentralisation should aim to combine responsibility for decision making with accountability for financial, social, and environmental consequences. Decentralisation requires access to appropriate quality of land information.

Comprehensive planning: This should combine the overall land use policies and the more detailed land-use regulations into one planning document covering the total jurisdiction. Presentation of political aims and objectives as well as problems and preconditions, should then justify the detailed land-use planning and the more detailed land-use regulations. This understanding is important - also as a basis for citizen participation - since planning regulations creates different land use options for the various land owners and citizens.

Participation: This should serve as a means to create broader awareness and understanding of  the need for planning regulations and enable a locally based dialogue between government and citizens around development opportunities and the need for development control. Eventually, such dialogue should legitimise the local political decision making. But how to involve the citizens in the decision making process? Legislation in itself is not enough. A cultural change within society may need to be encouraged. Again, access to participation requires access to land information.

Comprehensive planning at local level supported by citizen participation should also enable establishment proper monitoring systems and enforcement procedures to control and legalise actual informal development.