Public Land Development for Sustainability-Profiled Districts
A value co-creation perspective
Time: Fri 2022-12-09 13.00
Location: Kollegiesalen, Brinellvägen 8, Stockholm
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69286003221
Language: English
Subject area: Real Estate and Construction Management
Doctoral student: Melissa Candel , Fastighetsvetenskap
Opponent: Professor Ellen van Bueren, Delft University of Technology
Supervisor: Universitetslektor Jenny Paulsson, Fastighetsvetenskap; Professor Tina Karrbom Gustavsson, Ledning och organisering i byggande och förvaltning
QC 221116
Abstract
Swedish municipalities are developing sustainability-profiled districts incollaboration with private actors to achieve their public sustainability objectives.These districts are comparable to developments found in many other Europeancountries and the wider world. They are intended to model sustainable urbandevelopment and act as testbeds for collaborative innovation and urbanexperimentation. To initiate and govern the districts, Swedish municipalities areusing public land development, which provides them with more options to influencehousing development and increases their leverage during land use planning. It alsoforms exchange relationships between the municipalities and housing developers.Although previously acknowledged, there is a lack of research investigating thispractice in-depth. In the Swedish context, land ownership has a substantial influenceon the structure of the development process and collaboration betweenmunicipalities and housing developers, which are considered two key actors fordriving sustainable urban development. In sustainability-profiled districtdevelopments, these public and private actors collaborate during the municipal landallocation process, an important part of the public land development process, inorder to develop and implement new sustainable solutions and practices. Thiscollaboration during the land allocation process is investigated in the dissertation.
The purpose of the dissertation is to increase the understanding of municipal landallocation processes in sustainability-profiled district developments by applying acollaborative perspective to public-private exchange. Municipal land allocations insustainability-profiled districts are first analysed and interpreted as public-privatevalue co-creation processes specifically intended to generate sustainable innovation.This is complemented with theories on conflict management, project relationships,and public value capture. The utility of using municipal land allocations for framingpublic-private collaborative innovation is then evaluated using value co-creationtheory. A single and multiple case study approach was employed to investigate indepthmunicipal land allocation processes in sustainability-profiled districts at thedistrict- and building project-level. Focusing on the perspectives of municipalitiesand housing developers, interviews and documents were used to reveal complexprocessual and relational dynamics mired in conflicting value creation objectives.The research is focused on sustainability-profiled district developments in Swedento gain an in-depth understanding of the intricacies and influences of this nationalcontext. The findings are then discussed in relation to public land developmentpractices in other European countries.
The results reveal that the possibilities for municipalities to co-create public valueusing public land development are ultimately determined by housing developers’ ability to implement municipal sustainability requirements and co-create privateproject value. These municipal sustainability requirements are included in landallocation agreements and are negotiable throughout the rest of the land allocationprocess. Thus, the potential for public value creation is determined by the ability ofmunicipalities and developers to co-design sustainability requirements forimplementation during the land allocation process, in order to translate municipalsustainability requirements into developer procurement requirements. Areoccurring theme in the dissertation is that problems are rooted in inter-actor valueconflicts, which are central drivers for value co-creation processes betweenmunicipalities and housing developers.
The dissertation contributes to public land development research by introducing apublic-private value co-creation framework to describe and explain collaborativeexchange and innovation between municipalities and developers. It also provides indepthknowledge of public land development, and more specifically municipal landallocation processes, in sustainability-profiled district developments, which differfrom more typical developments in regards to innovation ambitions. Finally, thedissertation contributes with a micro-level analysis of municipal land allocationprocesses, at the district- and project-level, in the Swedish context. Building on theanalysis and evaluation, recommendations for enhancing private project value andpublic value creation in sustainability-profiled districts are provided. Thedissertation ultimately illustrates how collaboration between public and privateactors aimed at achieving divergent and oftentimes conflicting sustainable urbandevelopment objectives is shaped by the specific planning processes and systemsthey are embedded in.