Rob van der Heijden

Citizen participation is a cornerstone of urban planning. One common criticism is that the process can be cumbersome and slow. However, in the face of recent advances in information and  communication technologies (ICT), those problems can be easily overcome, making it possible to extend public participation to a wider sphere of urban planning matters. But what do we know of how ICTbased public participation affects urban form? What does a city shaped by social networks and other ICT-tools look like? We develop an agent-based model of urban growth to improve our understanding of these issues. Our model consists of a spatially disaggregated, micro-economic-based, real estate market model coupled with an ICT-based planning process. In the model, public participation is based on social network affiliation and preferences over the height of buildings.

Negotiations have always played an important role in urban planning and in land and property development processes. Numerous case-study-based researches have been done to demonstrate the significance of negotiation to resolve the divergent interests of stakeholders. In this article, an alternative methodological perspective is applied by analysing the negotiation as a more generic mechanism through a role-playing face-to-face negotiation experiment with experts in the field that resembles – to a certain extent – real-life negotiation processes.

A number of important aspects of the outcomes were analysed to get useful insights into stakeholders’ behaviour in the negotiation processes where the negotiation takes place voluntarily and spontaneously. It is shown in this study that within the setting of the experiment, the stakeholders can still be expected to concern about the equality of outcome. Moreover, it also confirms that the information availability, especially regarding the financial conditions under which the developments take place, plays an important role in defining the success of the negotiations. Finally, based on the experiment, it is possible to define the urban planning equilibrium satisfying all stakeholders in the negotiation process.

This paper reports an experiment based on the model of bilateral sequential bargaining over the distribution of a certain value in a laboratory setting within a real specific context of property development in the Netherlands. We have involved only property development professionals as participants in the experiment who have experience with the context. We have also extended the experiment into three different negotiation games distinguished by the availability of information to the participants: a negotiation game with incomplete information, asymmetric information, and complete information. We have found in this experiment that the availability of information could affect the plausibility to reach an agreement, particularly due to a restricted communication setting. This study also provides evidences that it is in the negotiators’ concern to reach an agreement with a fair outcome, which is defined here as the equilibrium, regardless the availability of the information to them.

"Value capturing is considered as a promising additional way of funding infrastructure development. However, its implementation is often problematic because the instruments that can be used for it (i.e. taxes, fees, and other types of fiscal regulation) most likely will face a lack of support. An alternative approach to value capturing might be to stimulate the stakeholders to bargain over the distribution of the increment values.

This paper presents the analysis of the bargaining process with respect to the implementation of value capturing based on concepts drawn from cooperative game theory in partition function form. The institutional setting of location development related to infrastructure development in the Netherlands is used to provide an empirical context to the analysis. As a validation, the game is played with experts in Dutch planning and infrastructure development practice. Our study shows that a game theoretical approach offers a useful method to conceptualise relations between different stakeholders and to analyze the bargaining and negotiation processes to reach an agreement about the efficient and fair allocation of the increment land values."