Land Policy in Finland : Public Land Development Still Standing Strong, Even on Brownfield Land

Abstract

Finland is a country where planning and other land policy are quite strictly separated both in the legislation and in the practice. Within this context, the public land development approach, where the municipality acquires the land, approves the land use plans, services the land with infrastructure and sells/leases the serviced building plots for private development, has been used as the standard approach for the development of previously undeveloped land. During the recent decades, this approach has also been increasingly employed to redevelop large previously developed sites. This chapter discusses the redevelopment of Penttilänranta in Joensuu, Eastern Finland. This redevelopment case has taken place on an old sawmill site. The case illustrates how the Finnish institutional framework, with the strong reliance on the public land development approach, offers limited alternatives for municipalities to facilitate the development by other approaches than public land development if the owner of the site is uninterested in developing the site. The analysis of the estimated costs and incomes of the Penttilänranta project plan highlights how these kinds of brownfield redevelopment projects increase the need for more comprehensive debate and discussion on the financial risk-taking by the municipalities with the public land development approach.