Regenerative Green Infrastructure Governance in Weak, Rebounding, and Wealthy Land Markets

Too often scholars valorize green infrastructure without critically examining the dynamic and multi-faceted ways that greening impacts urban environments. Cities are complex, evolving forces of their own, which grow and shrink according to time and place. Governance strategies in different economic conditions powerfully shape the impacts of specific green infrastructure installations. They determine the value, quality, quantity, and spatial arrangement of green infrastructure. However, most scholarship focuses on the psychological, social, economic, and environmental benefits of urban greening. Green infrastructure is overwhelmingly studied as apart from historical urban governance trajectories, and it largely fails to consider the role of greening within the process of urban regeneration. This disconnect constitutes a significant gap that constrains understanding of green infrastructure for regenerative cities, and it limits our ability to strategically deploy it in beneficial rather than harmful or irrelevant ways. In this article, I argue that green infrastructure lays fundamentally different roles in poor and wealthy parts of cities, and that these roles change as the overall rank and status of the cities change over time. These changing meanings cause city governments to treat green infrastructure as fundamentally different targets of management. These conclusions are based on an ethnography of the public policy processes surrounding urban greening in three cities with different land markets. In the strong land market, the emphasis is placed firmly on revenue-generating projects, and the major players are private firms in conjunction with city departments. Greening is conceived as a byproduct of large-scale development projects, and rarely apart from them. In the weak land market city, in contrast, the environmental and civic organizations play major roles, and they conceive of green infrastructure apart from development projects. Weak land markets seem to create the possibility for increased political participation of environmental actors and for the installation of green infrastructure for the primary purpose of community health and well-being. However, the increased strength of environmental civic coalitions appears negatively correlated with the city's economic capacity to fund greening projects without support from the business community. These dynamics suggest a counter-cyclical relationship between the political will for urban greening and the investment capacity to pay for it. The analysis of green infrastructure in different land markets demonstrates that green infrastructure is deeply embedded in the historical and geographical legacies of cities.

Market Power in Agricultural Land Markets: Concepts and Empirical Challenges

This paper provides review about challenges and opportunities to assess and quantify market power in agricultural land markets. Measuring land market power is challenging because the characteristics of this production factor hinder the direct application of familiar concepts from commodity markets. Immobility, fixed availability, and large heterogeneity of land and potential users contradict assumptions of fictitious point market for homogeneous goods. Moreover, the use of concentration indicators for policy assessments is hampered by two problems. First, defining the relevant regional size of the market is challenging and concentration indicators are not robust with regard to market size and number of actors. Second, high concentration of land ownership or land operation may point at potential market power, but it may also be the result of an efficient allocation of land due to structural change in agriculture. The aforementioned challenges are illustrated with a case study for the Federal State of Brandenburg in Germany. Using available data for land sales, a regression analysis reveals a negative relationship between land use concentration and farmland prices. This result can be interpreted as an indication of market power on the buyer side in agricultural land markets. However, it is hardly possible to translate this finding into recommendations for land market regulations because the evaluation of the potential misuse of dominant positions in land markets requires a case-specific analysis. Providing evidence for the exertion of market power in land markets is extremely complex and deserves further attention from researchers and politicians.

Urban Containment Planning: Is It Effective? The Case of Portland, OR

The paper attempts to evaluate Oregon’s and Portland’s growth management policies as for their tradeoffs between effectiveness in containing urban sprawl and impacts on housing markets and on property values. Carruthers argued that in order to correctly evaluate growth management policies, it is necessary to jointly consider their effects on urban development patterns, on land and housing markets, and on the fragmentation of land use controls. Nowadays, we have sufficient empirical research to evaluate the effects of Oregon’s growth management policies both on land markets and housing affordability and on urban development patterns. Therefore, the time has come to comprehensively reanalyze this longstanding case of public regulation. Once again, the issue of comparing grounded-on-planning–regulations’ effectiveness with grounded-on-price regulations’ effectiveness is at stake. The paper finds that urban-containment centralized-planning in Portland and Oregon have not been effective in containing sprawl and that price-based mechanisms are the most logical solution to the excess of sprawling urban growth.

Measuring liquidity in agricultural land markets

PurposeLiquidity is an important aspect of market efficiency. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first, this paper aims to discuss indicators that provide information about liquidity in agricultural land markets. Second, this paper aims to reflect on determinants of market liquidity and analyze the relationship with land prices. Third, this paper aims to conduct an empirical analysis for Germany that illustrates these concepts and allows hypothesis testing.Design/methodology/approachThis study reviews liquidity dimensions and measurement in financial markets and derives indicators applicable to farmland markets. In an empirical analysis, this study exhibits the spatial and temporal variability of land market liquidity in Lower Saxony, a German federal state with the highest agricultural production value. This study uses a rich dataset that includes 72,547 sale transactions of arable land between 1990 and 2018. The research focuses on volume-based (number of transactions, volume and turnover) and time-based (trading frequency and durations) measures. A panel vector autoregression and Granger causality tests are applied to investigate the relation between land turnover and land prices.FindingsThe paper confirms the thinness of farmland markets but also reveals regional and temporal heterogeneity of land market liquidity. This study finds that the relation between market liquidity and prices is ambiguous. This study concludes that a high demand from expanding farms absorbs supply shocks regardless of the current price level in agricultural land markets.Originality/valueEven though the relevance of agricultural land markets’ thinness is widely acknowledged in the literature, this paper is one of the first attempts to measure liquidity in agricultural land markets and to explain its relationship with land prices.

FACTOR MARKETS IN BULGARIAN BEEKEEPING

The aim is to determine the size and development trends of land and labor markets in the national beekeeping. The study is focused only on them, as the size and trends of national financial markets in beekeeping are defined in another study by the authors. The urgency of the problem stems from the important role of factor markets in achieving sustainable development of beekeeping and other sectors dependent on it, given the pollination activity of bees. The study finds that the land markets in the beekeeping sector are over 0.5 BGN million/year, and the labor markets are over 77.2 BGN million/year, i.e. form joint factor markets in the Bulgarian beekeeping for over 77.7 BGN million/year. Their development trends are positive and derived from those in the beekeeping sector and other related markets - financial and others.

Land Acquisition Regulation through the lens of expert stakeholders’ mental models - what are the implications for business development among Swedish farmers?

Agricultural and forestry land markets are regulated in several European countries. However, assessing the economic consequences of land market regulation for agricultural and forestry firms is methodologically challenging for various reasons. The aim of this study is to highlight the usefulness of exploring expert stakeholders’ mental models in order to gain insights into the economic impacts of agricultural and forestry land market regulation. We use thematic analysis based on in-depth interview data to explore Swedish expert stakeholders’ mental models concerning the regulation of the Swedish agricultural and forestry land market. This research strategy facilitated a rich understanding of the effects of land regulation on economic consequences. Findings indicate that current regulation does not have any major impact on the economic situation of agricultural and forestry firms in Sweden. This is interesting from the perspective of agricultural and forestry land market policy.