The struggle of cities to achieve quantitative housing objectives can partly be explained by the struggle to cope with increasing value conflicts with other (qualitative) policy objectives, including the realization of affordable housing, climate adaptive areas, inclusive neighborhoods, and high-quality public spaces. In public debate in the Netherlands, too high ambitions and a ‘piling-up’ of policy objectives are often mentioned as causes of non-conformance of quantitative housing objectives. However, despite such non-conformance, a plan or policy may still function well by informing the decision-making process and invoking scrutiny of conflicting objectives. This paper aims to understand how municipalities cope with the implementation of housing developments with pluralistic policy objectives. Therefore, the performance of the policy objective to accelerate the production of housing is studied by exploring how value conflicts between this quantitative and qualitative objectives are addressed. A survey among Dutch municipalities and two additional in-depth case studies reveal that the non-conformance of the acceleration of the housing production not only results from exogenous processes, but is also a result of accumulating policy decisions favouring qualitative ambitions. The case studies reveal that municipalities especially struggle with trade-offs between qualitative and quantitative objectives. This result shows the relevance of additional research that focus on value conflicts in public policy implementation processes.@en

How do municipalities strategically use land policy to develop land for housing? The development of housing is a challenge for many European countries, though the scale and time of it differs. Issues are not always about the absolute number of houses that need to be supplied in a country. The distribution and quality of houses affect the demand for housing. Land policy determines where and how future developments take place, and as a result, it has a considerable impact on both supply and demand of housing. Municipalities use different strategies of land policy to pursue housing goals. This paper aims to explore the rationalities underpinning such strategies of land policy. Therefore, a theory on pluralism – Cultural Theory – is employed to understand municipal strategies in different contexts, i.e. Germany (Ruhr region), Belgium (Flanders), and Netherlands. Applying Cultural Theory to land policy results in four ideal-typical strategies of active, passive, reactive, and protective land policies. Despite the fact that the decisions of municipalities are made within (or constrained by) their institutional environments (i.e. national/regional planning systems, development cultures, etc.), we found that there are key similarities between the strategies of the studied municipalities regardless of their different institutional environments.@en

We carry out a numerical study of the spinless modular bootstrap for conformal field theories with current algebra U(1)^c× U(1)^c, or equivalently the linear programming bound for sphere packing in 2c dimensions. We give a more detailed picture of the behavior for finite c than was previously available, and we extrapolate as c → ∞. Our extrapolation indicates an exponential improvement for sphere packing density bounds in high dimen- sions. Furthermore, we study when these bounds can be tight. Besides the known cases c = 1/2, 4, and 12 and the conjectured case c = 1, our calculations numerically rule out sharp bounds for all other c < 90, by combining the modular bootstrap with linear programming bounds for spherical codes.

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In view of the anticipated climate change, many countries face increasing risks of flooding. Since the end of the 20^th century, the traditional hard flood protection measures have been increasingly complemented with spatial flood risk reduction measures. These measures, though in the public interest and as such, benefitting many people, almost inevitably affect landowners adversely. In other words, spatial flood risk reduction measures affect private land. The impact may extend from mere decreases in property values as a result of changes to zoning plans and to obligations to tolerate certain acts related to the construction or maintenance of water defence structures. Most of the time, implementation of spatial flood risk reduction measures thus discriminates between landowners, as some profit from better protection but others are affected negatively by the measures. Spatial flood risk reduction measures thus raise issues of social justice. Compensation plays a crucial role in flood risk management to mitigate the impact on land. How and in which cases this compensation is paid differs from country to country. Some national jurisdictions compensate for loss as a result of lawful administrative acts if and to the extent that it is considered unreasonable for this loss to be the full responsibility of the affected party. In this paper, we compare two different legal compensation frameworks in two European countries: Austria and the Netherlands. Based on a comparative analysis, we discuss how these different compensation schemes affect social justice, both in terms of substantive distributions but also in terms of procedural justice.

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De Nederlandse woningmarkt staat onder druk. De woningbouwproductie is in de periode 2010-2015 als gevolg van de economische crisis sterk afgenomen, waardoor een achterstand in de productie is ontstaan. De sleutel tot woningbouwproductie ligt echter niet op nationaal, maar op gemeentelijk niveau. Een belangrijke uitdaging voor gemeenten is het beschikbaar krijgen van voldoende potentiële woningbouwlocaties om deze woningen te kunnen bouwen en tegelijkertijd doelstellingen voor bijvoorbeeld verdichting en verduurzaming te realiseren. Maar lukt dat ook?@en