- Urban Finance Instruments Analyzed Through the Concepts of Collective Action, Incentives and Externalities    104 kb by    van Hasselt, Kai & Robinett, Peter | kai@shinsekai.nl    Short Outline We analyze urban finance instruments, a range of legal, economic and fiscal mechanisms to fund improvements to the built environment. We explore their consequences through the concepts of externalities, incentives and collective action. Abstract We are covering different ways improvements to the urban environment can be funded. There are a variety of different legal, economic, financial and fiscal mechanisms available, with different histories and benefits. In exploring them, we seek to both make them better known and investigate the far reaching consequences that they have. The Seattle Project is particularly interested in externalities, incentives and collective action, topics that have not always been adequately considered with urban development, either by real estate developers, architects, planners or governments. However, giving these ideas proper time enables both better projects and for the total value of them to be better realized. By grouping these urban mechanisms in this way, we hope to reframe their place in urban development and create new ways of considering urban investment. Through a comparison of the following examples we look for lessons how and when to apply a certain urban finance instrument. We look at: 1) Business Improvement Districts, 2) Tax Incremental Financing, 3) Land banks, 4) Community Development Corporations, 5) Floor Area Ratio Bonuses, 6) Tradable Development Rights, 7) Public-Private Partnerships/ Private Finance Initiatives, 8) Value capture finance, 9) Privatization, 10) Special Government Entity, 11) Usage pricing, 12) real estate investment trusts, 13) Micro-finance, -insurance, -incentives and 14) externalities trading. Each urban finance instrument has a different purpose, history, and institutional-legal background. The three interlinking concepts of collectivity, externalities and incentives.help to frame how the landscape is influenced by economic factors. As a counterpart to the field of landscape urbanism, a line of thinking and practice within current landscape architecture theorized by among others Charles Waldheim, we group the above examples together as landscape economics. These are forces of varied order but they often occur together. Which of these instruments would be most useful for the urban (re-)development of Sub-Saharan Africa? Keywords Urban finance instruments, collective action, externalities, incentives Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper