Urban regeneration projects involve complex contractual deals between public- and private-sector actors. Critics contend that contracts hamper opportunities for flexibility and change in these projects due to strict provisions that are incorporated in legal agreements. However, empirical evidence on what is actually written within contracts is often missing.

In this new article, Martijn van den Hurk and Tuna Tasan-Kok address how practitioners deal with contractual arrangements for urban regeneration, presenting an analysis of what is included in contracts and how the actors involved navigate within contractual arrangements. This article taps into data sources that are difficult to access, addressing what is included in contracts and how they are used by practitioners, and presents questions for future research on contracts in the urban built environment.

The analysis draws attention to two common practices in Dutch urban regeneration projects. First, the authors show that local authorities tend to avoid confrontation and conflict with their contractual partners. Second, although contingency provisions are designed to render adaptability and facilitate the redefinition of task allocations between the public- and private-sector parties, we demonstrate that actors find other ways of changing the original arrangements.  

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Sara Özogul and Tuna Tasan-Kok previously raised concerns that even though investors differ vastly from one another, they are often generalized in the Planning and Urban Studies literature. In a new publication, they provide the scientific evidence of this claim, as well as a way forward: a new interdisciplinary perspective to better understand the complexities of investors as residential property markets actors.

Conducting a systematic literature review allows for the identification of research gaps and for shaping future research frameworks. In the analysis, Sara Özogul and Tuna Tasan-Kok focused on articles that mentioned investors combined with residential investment or housing in six disciplines: Urban and Regional Planning; Geography; Sociology; Urban Studies; Public Administration; and Economics. This inquiry led us to 4,602 publications between 2000 and 2019. Within the 4,602 journal articles, they systematically searched for those publications that went beyond using ‘investor’ as a generic term by mentioning different types of investors or by providing a categorisation of investors. The result: 117 publications. They analysed these 117 articles thoroughly and concluded that many scholars still fail to define and describe the type of investors they are naming. Differentiations that are made are frequently one-dimensional.

The authors compiled all types and existing categorisations of residential property investors that we could find, and manually grouped them to let the data ‘speak’. Ultimately, they were able to create a meta-categorisation, assigning all entries to differentiate investors either in terms of their i) spatial scale of operation, ii) size and social composition, iii) investment object and finance, or iv) investment and social behaviour. In the paper, they discuss each meta-category in-depth. Additionally, they illustrate the prominence of the meta-categories among the six disciplines and review the key themes that scholars raise in relation to each meta-category.

Only when the phenomenon of residential property investors as an increasingly influential actor group in urban development is properly understood and differentiated, can practicing planners and urban policy makers make informed choices in their efforts to influence and regulate these actors. Therefore, Sara Özogul and Tuna Tasan-Kok propose to turn the four meta-categories into a multi-dimensional analytical framework as a point of departure for a more nuanced and in-depth understanding of investor differentiations, a tool that is urgently needed in Planning Studies and related disciplines.

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