Post War land reform and the impact on planning in Japan

One feature of Japanese urban areas in the 21st century that is bound to strike any Western visitor is the extensive spread of its suburbs with their varied mixing of land-uses. It is almost impossible to pinpoint precisely where the city begins and where it ends. During the post-War period, this characteristic pattern of land-use sprawled over the countryside, seemingly unimpeded by planning restrictions. The number of studies that highlight the problems of Japanese planning outweighs the research that explores its underlying causes. This paper aims to partly redress this imbalance by describing a case study of the failed implementation of the green belt around Tokyo and to link this with the Allied Occupation’s postwar land reforms and drafting of a new constitution in the period 1946-1951. Overall, we aim to highlight how the ostensible benefits and aims of a land reform programme can entail substantial disbenefits or unforeseen outcomes in terms of land-use planning..

Perspectives on the role of UK planning in land and property markets

There is a popular view that land use planning regulations (‘planning’) is hostile to both development and the development industry. Part of the reason for the prominence of this view is the homogenising of the notion of ‘planning’ and its reduction to development control. This paper argues that panning controls in the UK are far more sophisticated and, drawing upon empirical evidence of key property interests proposes a more complex and nuanced view of planning controls that, in large part, has the support of the developers and others.

Lease maturity and initial rent: is there a term structure for UK commercial property leases?

This paper investigates the relationship between lease maturity and rent in commercial property. Over the last decade market-led changes to lease structures, the threat of government intervention and the associated emergence of the Codes of Practice for commercial leases have stimulated growing interest in pricing of commercial property leases. Seminal work by Grenadier (1995) derived a set of hypotheses about the pricing of different lease lengths in different market conditions. Whilst there is a compelling theoretical case for and a strong intuitive expectation of differential pricing of different lease maturities, to date the empirical evidence is inconclusive. Two Swedish studies have found mixed results (Gunnelin and Soderbergh 2003 and Englund et al 2003). In only half the cases is the null hypothesis that lease length has no effect rejected. In the UK, Crosby et al (2003) report counterintuitive results. In some markets, they find that short lease terms are associated with low rents, whilst in others they are associated with high rents. Drawing upon a substantial database of commercial lettings in central London (West End and City of London) over the last decade, we investigate the relationship between rent and lease maturity. In particular, we test whether a building quality variable omitted in previous studies provides empirical results that are more consistent with the theoretical and intuitive a priori expectations. It is found that initial leases rates are upward sloping with the lease term and that this relationship is constant over time.

Are property agents to blame for upward only rent reviews?

In negotiating commercial leases, many landlords and tenants employ property agents (brokers) to act on their behalf; typically these people are chartered surveyors. The aim of this paper is to explore the role that these brokers play in the shaping of commercial leases in the context of the current debate in the UK on upward only rent reviews. This role can be described using agency theory and the theories of professionalism. These provide expectations of behaviour which show inherent tensions between the role of agent and professional, particularly regarding the use of knowledge, autonomy and the obligation to the public interest. The parties to eleven recent lease transactions were interviewed to see if the brokers conformed to the expectations of agency theory or professionalism. Brokers that acted for industrial and office tenants behaved as professionals in using their expertise to determine lease structures. However, those acting for landlords and retail tenants simply followed instructions and behaved as conduits for their clients, a role more usually associated with that of an agent within the principal-agent relationship. None of the landlords’ brokers saw themselves as having responsibilities beyond their clients and so they were not promoting the discussion of alternatives to the UORR. The evidence from these case studies suggests that agents are not professionals; to behave entirely as an agent is to contradict the essential characteristics of a professional. While brokers cannot be held entirely responsible for the lack of movement on the UORR, by adopting predominantly agent roles then they must take some of the blame. However, behind this may be a much larger issue that needs to be explored; the institutional pressures that lead to professionals behaving in this way.

Land re-use, complexity and actor-networks: a framework for research

This paper will present a conceptual framework for the examination of land redevelopment based on a complex systems/networks approach. As Alvin Toffler insightfully noted, modern scientific enquiry has become exceptionally good at splitting problems into pieces but has forgotten how to put the pieces back together. Twenty-five years after his remarks, governments and corporations faced with the requirements of sustainability are struggling to promote an ‘integrated’ or ‘holistic’ approach to tackling problems. Despite the talk, both practice and research provide few platforms that allow for ‘joined up’ thinking and action. With socio-economic phenomena, such as land redevelopment, promising prospects open up when we assume that their constituents can make up complex systems whose emergent properties are more than the sum of the parts and whose behaviour is inherently difficult to predict. A review of previous research shows that it has mainly focused on idealised, ‘mechanical’ views of property development processes that fail to recognise in full the relationships between actors, the structures created and their emergent qualities. When reality failed to live up to the expectations of these theoretical constructs then somebody had to be blamed for it: planners, developers, politicians. However, from a ‘synthetic’ point of view the agents and networks involved in property development can be seen as constituents of structures that perform complex processes. These structures interact, forming new more complex structures and networks. Redevelopment then can be conceptualised as a process of transformation: a complex system, a ‘dissipative’ structure involving developers, planners, landowners, state agencies etc., unlocks the potential of previously used sites, transforms space towards a higher order of complexity and ‘consumes’ but also ‘creates’ different forms of capital in the process. Analysis of network relations point toward the ‘dualism’ of structure and agency in these processes of system transformation and change. Insights from actor network theory can be conjoined with notions of complexity and chaos to build an understanding of the ways in which actors actively seek to shape these structures and systems, whilst at the same time are recursively shaped by them in their strategies and actions. This approach transcends the blame game and allows for inter-disciplinary inputs to be placed within a broader explanatory framework that does away with many past dichotomies. Better understanding of the interactions between actors and the emergent qualities of the networks they form can improve our comprehension of the complex socio-spatial phenomena that redevelopment comprises. The insights that this framework provides when applied in UK institutional investment into redevelopment are considered to be significant.

Hyperresolution global land surface modeling: meeting a grand challenge for monitoring Earth's terrestrial water

Monitoring Earth's terrestrial water conditions is critically important to many hydrological applications such as global food production; assessing water resources sustainability; and flood, drought, and climate change prediction. These needs have motivated the development of pilot monitoring and prediction systems for terrestrial hydrologic and vegetative states, but to date only at the rather coarse spatial resolutions (∼10–100 km) over continental to global domains. Adequately addressing critical water cycle science questions and applications requires systems that are implemented globally at much higher resolutions, on the order of 1 km, resolutions referred to as hyperresolution in the context of global land surface models. This opinion paper sets forth the needs and benefits for a system that would monitor and predict the Earth's terrestrial water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles. We discuss six major challenges in developing a system: improved representation of surface‐subsurface interactions due to fine‐scale topography and vegetation; improved representation of land‐atmospheric interactions and resulting spatial information on soil moisture and evapotranspiration; inclusion of water quality as part of the biogeochemical cycle; representation of human impacts from water management; utilizing massively parallel computer systems and recent computational advances in solving hyperresolution models that will have up to 109 unknowns; and developing the required in situ and remote sensing global data sets. We deem the development of a global hyperresolution model for monitoring the terrestrial water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles a “grand challenge” to the community, and we call upon the international hydrologic community and the hydrological science support infrastructure to endorse the effort.