Thomas Hartmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 3700953 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Hartmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Hartmann |
| SIGNATURE | HARTMANN T |
| AFFILIATIONS | TU Dortmund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6707-7174 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 155 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Densification in European city-regions
Urban densification is widely promoted as a strategy to limit land-take and provide housing, yet its sustainability and effectiveness remain debated. The impacts of densification depend heavily on the form of densification, but systematic knowledge about these forms and the policies and actors shaping them is still limited. To better understand this relationship, we present an approach to measure densification on the level of urban form through m…
Challenges of an integrated management of public space
The public space that is vital for the quality of life and the functioning of the urban area faces significant pressure. The fragmented arrangement of actors leads to inefficiency and problems in coordination between actors. Public space managers strive for integration to tackle these challenges, prompting a fundamental shift of the policy arrangement. This study explores, through a qualitative multiple case study conducted on Dutch municipalitie…
Densification policy between state and market
Urban densification has become a central policy goal to deliver much-needed housing while reducing net land take. At the same time there has been a significant shift between the role of the state and the market in how to deliver planning outcomes and the type of regulation to achieve densification. This article investigates recent policy changes to promote densification in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, looking at the role of …
Stepping up regionally
This paper examines how land use conflicts in renewable energy expansion can be addressed through regional planning. These conflicts often arise from competing spatial claims and limited local support. Drawing on a case study of the Regional Energy Strategy (RES) in Flevoland, the Netherlands, the study applies conformance-performance planning framework to assess how different regional policy approaches influence spatial outcomes and governance p…
The rationales of managing public space
Public space managers are facing multiple transitions and increasingly complex challenges, prompting the emergence of new approaches that address diverse aims and involve a broader range of actors. As a result, the rationale behind management of public space is gradually changing. Gaining insight into the values that drive management of public space is essential. This research shows that, from the managers' perspective, the rationale behind manag…
Unpacking property owners’ perceptions of flood damage
Floods cause damage to lands and thereby often prevent property owners from using their property in the way they intend. Because of flood damage, property owners face challenges such as destruction and decreased value of their property, not finding tenants, etc. While land policy predominantly treats damage as solely economic, it also has emotional and social implications. Memories linked to a home, a spatial attachment to a specific piece of lan…
Why urban densification ignores the social dimension of sustainability
The business of densification refers to more or less aggressive urban development practices that use the broad political consensus on the need for urban densification to promote profit-driven development, often dressed up in the rhetoric of eco-efficiency, and to the detriment of social policy objectives (e.g. affordable housing, cultural heritage, community cohesion). The implementation of urban densification requires deep changes in the practic…
Small plots, big stakes
One of the difficulties in implementing densification objectives is that planners often do not have sufficient coercive power to restrict property rights, which means that landowners can resist the implementation of land use plans. As a result, planning increasingly takes place on the project level, allowing planning authorities and developers to renegotiate the terms and conditions of densification. While project-level negotiations have been res…
Tailored Flood Risk Communication
Flood risk is increasing, and residents are expected to undertake adaptation measures to minimize flood damage. This requires them to be aware of the risk they face and how they can adapt, but this is often not the case. Through risk communication, residents’ relation to their flood-prone environment could be strengthened, but the effect remains limited. This article aims to understand how residents across countries prefer flood risk communicatio…
Land policy and land valuation
Making room for affordable housing
The emerging objective to combat urban sprawl has put densification on the political agenda. Simultaneously, the complexity of planning within the existing built environment means that planning increasingly occurs on the project level. Project-based negotiations between planning authorities and landowners, in which agreements between parties are formalized in negotiated land use plans or private law contracts, thus shape the outcomes of densifica…
Multidimensional resilience - flood recovery on private land
Flood damages are increasing and thus flood resilience is gaining importance. Various definitions of resilience and the identification of different resilience dimensions have been the focus of past research, but there is a lack of understanding how these dimensions systemically interrelate. Using an exploratory research design, this study examines multidimensional resilience in the context of flood recovery on private land. The results show that …
Compensating Downzoning. A Comparative Analysis of European Compensation Schemes in the Light of Net Land Neutrality
Most spatial planning systems are growth-oriented and focus on upzoning. However, downzoning is becoming increasingly important, as European planning is taking a “resourcial turn” and needs to integrate net land neutrality. Yet downzoning may entail financial compensation for landowners losing their development rights. Understanding the legal and financial mechanisms of compensation schemes is therefore essential for planners. This comparative st…
Land value capture
Land value capture refers to a range of methods utilised by public authorities to obtain a portion of the rise in land values from landowners. To enable both researchers and decision-makers to comprehensively assess the outcomes and effects of land value capture, evaluation frameworks are necessary. This special issue adopts four generic evaluation criteria as a framework for analysing the various land policy instruments: effectiveness, efficienc…
Land for densification
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
Non-compliance and non-enforcement
In many urban areas, governments are struggling to curb urban sprawl while simultaneously trying to keep up with growing pressures on the housing market. As a result, housing developments increasingly take place within the existing housing stock through soft densification in the form of subdivisions. Municipalities aim to regulate this type of densification because of growing pressure on existing infrastructure, neighborhood cohesion, and (rental…
Homeowners and the Resilient City
Homeowners and the Resilient City
This book focuses on the issue of urban resilience and how has become central to the debate around response and adaptation to climate change.
When tensions become conflicts
Governments all over the world experience institutional conflicts in transforming their fossil-based energy system into a more renewable one. Between national, regional, and local tiers of government tensions rise on meeting renewable energy objectives. Under the institutional arrangement of subsidiarity, decisions on renewable energy policy objectives are taken on the international level, while the implementation of policy increasingly becomes a…
Land valuation and land policy
This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0
The OECD Water Governance Principles in Flood Risk Management
The OECD Water Governance Principles provide a guideline for good water governance. However, these principles can conflict with each other when applied in practice. This contribution aims to understand which dilemmas arise and how such conflicts play out. It is explored in an in-depth case study on Dutch flood risk management in which conflicts between the principles emerge when applied to flood risk management practice. Interviews with water man…
Land for housing
The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other (qualitative) policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces. In public debate in the Netherlands, too high ambitions and a ‘piling-up’ of policy objectives are often mentioned as causes of no…
Fertile ground, complex matter
The adoption of sustainable soil management practices such as the use of green waste from road-side management and nature reserves is thwarted in practice by hesitance on the side of farmers. To foster the use of these practices, it is crucial to understand farmers' decision perspectives and attitudes towards them. Using Q-methodology, the perspectives of 12 dairy and arable farmers in The Netherlands were analysed. It was studied which barriers …
Smart Urban Governance for Climate Change Adaptation
Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro-meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate-resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt cities to the consequences of climate change, new ideas and concepts need to be adopted. This often…
Strategies of municipal land policies
How do municipalities strategically use land policy to develop land for housing? The development of housing is a challenge for many European countries, though the scale and time of it differs. Issues are not always about the absolute number of houses that need to be supplied in a country. The distribution and quality of houses affect the demand for housing. Land policy determines where and how future developments take place, and as a result, it h…
Dilemmas of involvement in land management – Comparing an active (Dutch) and a passive (German) approach
The strategic use of time-limited property rights in land-use planning
While land-use plans are regularly revised, property rights are extremely stable over time. Yet, the stability of property rights resulting from the current conception of exclusive ownership makes the implementation of land-use plans increasingly complicated, difficult and long. Planners recognized the need for more flexibility in many urban contexts to effectively steer spatial development in the already built environment. Relying on a detailed …
Wicked problems and clumsy solutions
In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing…
Strategic use of land policy instruments for affordable housing – Coping with social challenges under scarce land conditions in Swiss cities
For decades, many cities have introduced densification policy objectives to stop urban sprawl or to promote efficient use of natural resources. In the urban housing sector, however, densification projects often intensify social challenges. Due to rising rents after modernization of existing housing stocks as a consequence of densification, low-income tenants are forced to leave their apartments. Risks of social exclusion and segregation increase …
Legitimizing differentiated flood protection levels – Consequences of the European flood risk management plan
Why municipalities grow
It is generally assumed that municipalities attract residents and businesses as a result of intermunicipal competition for tax revenues. This growth-oriented behaviour poses a serious problem considering internationally acknowledged goals to limit land take. Nonetheless, research on how fiscal incentives affect municipal land policies is scarce. Adapting a neoinstitutionalist approach, we compare the two contrasting fiscal systems of Germany and …
Active land policy in small municipalities in the Netherlands
Non-compliance and non-enforcement
In many urban areas, governments are struggling to curb urban sprawl while simultaneously trying to keep up with growing pressures on the housing market. As a result, housing developments increasingly take place within the existing housing stock through soft densification in the form of subdivisions. Municipalities aim to regulate this type of densification because of growing pressure on existing infrastructure, neighborhood cohesion, and (rental…
Unraveling the self-made city
Informal real estate markets have developed as a result of deficiencies of formal real estate markets and play a crucial role in providing housing to the urban poor. This contribution combines an adaptation of Ostrom's rules with property rights theory to study the rules that have developed in the informal real estate, their spatial impact and implications of formal-informal interactions in an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. It is argued t…
Certain flexibilities in land-use plans Towards a method for assessing flexibility
Land for flood risk management—Instruments and strategies of land management for polders and dike relocations in Germany
Constructing risks – Internalisation of flood risks in the flood risk management plan
Planning By Law and Property Rights Reconsidered
Contents: Introduction: why reconsider planning by law and property rights? Thomas Hartmann and Barrie Needham Part I Methods for Exploring the Possibilities: Interests and rights in property, and their place in land-use Exploring the effects of property rights using game simulation, Esther Geuting and Barrie Needham. Part II Coping with the Wider Institutional Framework: Planning law reform and change in post-apartheid South Africa, Mark Oranje …
Making room for affordable housing
The emerging objective to combat urban sprawl has put densification on the political agenda. Simultaneously, the complexity of planning within the existing built environment means that planning increasingly occurs on the project level. Project-based negotiations between planning authorities and landowners, in which agreements between parties are formalized in negotiated land use plans or private law contracts, thus shape the outcomes of densifica…
The introduction of catchment-wide co-operations
Land for housing
The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other (qualitative) policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces. In public debate in the Netherlands, too high ambitions and a ‘piling-up’ of policy objectives are often mentioned as causes of no…
Fertile ground, complex matter
The adoption of sustainable soil management practices such as the use of green waste from road-side management and nature reserves is thwarted in practice by hesitance on the side of farmers. To foster the use of these practices, it is crucial to understand farmers' decision perspectives and attitudes towards them. Using Q-methodology, the perspectives of 12 dairy and arable farmers in The Netherlands were analysed. It was studied which barriers …
Strategic use of instruments of land policy for mobilising private land for flood risk management
Managing public space – A blind spot of urban planning and design
Managing public space is a big and important blind spot of urban and regional planning and design. Important, because major transition challenges, such as climate adaptation, energy transition, circular economy, mobility, and governance require substantial changes in public space – both physical and social changes. Big, because managing public space entails enormous budgets and potentials over a long period of time in which management and mainten…
From diversity to justice – Unraveling pluralistic rationalities in urban design
The rationales of managing public space
Public space managers are facing multiple transitions and increasingly complex challenges, prompting the emergence of new approaches that address diverse aims and involve a broader range of actors. As a result, the rationale behind management of public space is gradually changing. Gaining insight into the values that drive management of public space is essential. This research shows that, from the managers' perspective, the rationale behind manag…
Land policy and land valuation
Financial schemes for resilient flood recovery
Options for the increase of flood resilience during the recovery phase is, to a large extent, overlooked. The special issue Financial Schemes for Resilient Flood Recovery investigates how the implementation of financial schemes (government relief subsidies, insurance schemes, buy-outs, etc.) might increase flood resilience. Five papers address following questions: Shall government relief subsidies exist when there is flood insurance in place, and…
Travelling without a helmet
Tourists are particularly vulnerable when natural disasters occur in regions that they are visiting. It is assumed that they lack awareness and understanding of the actions that they need to take in such circumstances. This study examines the responses of tourists in times of disaster, building on empirical data collected through large‐scale surveys conducted in Bali and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2015. Both are important tourist destinations in t…
Reframing Polyrational Floodplains
Why are recent attempts to give space to the rivers so unsuccessful? Floodplain management is a complex social process with many stakeholders, who pursue different rationalities before, during, and after floods. The resulting patterns of activities of the stakeholders have led to a technological lock-in. This article uses Cultural Theory to analyze the stakeholders' different framing of floodplain management. The concept of Large Areas for Tempor…
Wicked problems and clumsy solutions
In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing…
Legitimizing differentiated flood protection levels – Consequences of the European flood risk management plan
Dilemmas of involvement in land management – Comparing an active (Dutch) and a passive (German) approach
Planning By Law and Property Rights Reconsidered
Contents: Introduction: why reconsider planning by law and property rights? Thomas Hartmann and Barrie Needham Part I Methods for Exploring the Possibilities: Interests and rights in property, and their place in land-use Exploring the effects of property rights using game simulation, Esther Geuting and Barrie Needham. Part II Coping with the Wider Institutional Framework: Planning law reform and change in post-apartheid South Africa, Mark Oranje …
Constructing risks – Internalisation of flood risks in the flood risk management plan
The introduction of catchment-wide co-operations
The strategic use of time-limited property rights in land-use planning
While land-use plans are regularly revised, property rights are extremely stable over time. Yet, the stability of property rights resulting from the current conception of exclusive ownership makes the implementation of land-use plans increasingly complicated, difficult and long. Planners recognized the need for more flexibility in many urban contexts to effectively steer spatial development in the already built environment. Relying on a detailed …
Instruments of Land Policy
Land, scarcity, and property rights
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the strategies used by planners to reinforce their position in front of other well-protected interests. It aims to discover how planners can use different policy instruments, coming from either public or private law, to support the implementation of land use plans. The book also aims to bring together examples from diffe…
Active land policy in small municipalities in the Netherlands
Travelling without a helmet
Tourists are particularly vulnerable when natural disasters occur in regions that they are visiting. It is assumed that they lack awareness and understanding of the actions that they need to take in such circumstances. This study examines the responses of tourists in times of disaster, building on empirical data collected through large‐scale surveys conducted in Bali and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2015. Both are important tourist destinations in t…
The Usefulness of Interactive Governance for Underground Planning
The underground provides many spatial planning opportunities as it offers space for structures, but also functions as a resource for energy. To guide developments and use the capabilities the underground provides, the Dutch national government started a policy process for the Structuurvisie Ondergrond (a master plan). Stakeholders are involved in the policy process because of the many interests linked to underground functions. However, past polic…
People making cities – Cities making justice. The ethical relevance of Jane Jacobs' work
From diversity to justice – Unraveling pluralistic rationalities in urban design
The influence of tailored risk communication on individual adaptive behaviour
Hydro-meteorological hazards annually lead to considerable economic losses worldwide. Property level flood risk adaptation (PLFRA) measures have shown to decrease potential damages by floods and other hazards. However, such measures are often implemented inadequately, frequently because of lacking communication between public administration and homeowners. Thus, risk communication systems have been created by multiple actors, ranging from the gov…
Densification in suburban Germany
In many countries, densification is a central goal of land policies to promote sustainable development. However, while these policies intervene in existing built-up structures and thus affect diverse and complex arrangements of property rights, it remains unclear how they are applied by actors. We argue that an explicit normative point of view is required to better understand this application. To this end, we measure densification in space and in…
Enhancing understanding of strategies of land policy for urban densification
Financial schemes for resilient flood recovery
Options for the increase of flood resilience during the recovery phase is, to a large extent, overlooked. The special issue Financial Schemes for Resilient Flood Recovery investigates how the implementation of financial schemes (government relief subsidies, insurance schemes, buy-outs, etc.) might increase flood resilience. Five papers address following questions: Shall government relief subsidies exist when there is flood insurance in place, and…
Strategic use of land policy instruments for affordable housing – Coping with social challenges under scarce land conditions in Swiss cities
For decades, many cities have introduced densification policy objectives to stop urban sprawl or to promote efficient use of natural resources. In the urban housing sector, however, densification projects often intensify social challenges. Due to rising rents after modernization of existing housing stocks as a consequence of densification, low-income tenants are forced to leave their apartments. Risks of social exclusion and segregation increase …
Certain flexibilities in land-use plans Towards a method for assessing flexibility
Smart Urban Governance for Climate Change Adaptation
Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro-meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate-resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt cities to the consequences of climate change, new ideas and concepts need to be adopted. This often…
Strategies of municipal land policies
How do municipalities strategically use land policy to develop land for housing? The development of housing is a challenge for many European countries, though the scale and time of it differs. Issues are not always about the absolute number of houses that need to be supplied in a country. The distribution and quality of houses affect the demand for housing. Land policy determines where and how future developments take place, and as a result, it h…
Strategic use of instruments of land policy for mobilising private land for flood risk management
Land for flood risk management—Instruments and strategies of land management for polders and dike relocations in Germany
Business (37 works) · Geography (33 works) · Economics (31 works) · Political science (30 works) · Environmental planning (25 works) · Engineering (21 works) · Environmental resource management (19 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Land use (16 works) · Law (16 works)