No document available.
Abstract :
[en] Zoning compensation for zoning neutrality: a useful planning instrument?
The instrument of zoning compensation aims to compensate newly designated buildable zones by downzoning existing ones. Our presentation will address the following question: is zoning compensation a useful planning instrument? This question seems particularly relevant as many European countries are striving to drastically reduce land artificialization, in line with the “no net land take” (NNLT) strategy (Lacoere et al., 2024).
To our knowledge, zoning compensation exists only in Belgium. It was introduced into the Walloon Planning Act in 2005. In 2022, a decision was taken to also incorporate this instrument into the Flemish Planning Act, with the aim to achieve NNLT.
In Wallonia, zoning compensation was introduced as early as 2005 in a context marked by strong demand for new economic estates on greenfield sites and the possibility to easily downzone large industrial brownfields. In parallel, the history of land use planning in Wallonia explains that the need to register new residential areas remains very limited, due to the overabundance of such areas within the sub-regional land use plans developed in the 1970s and 1980s (Halleux et al., 2012).
Our investigation focused on the Walloon case, analyzing the administrative files of the 85 compensations carried out since the mechanism came into force up to 2025. The results are mixed. On the one hand, zoning compensation has not significantly contributed to reducing land take. This can be explained, first, by the oversupply of potential residential zones allocated in the 1970s and 1980s, and second, by the fact that many of the areas downzoned would never have been urbanized in practice. On the other hand, we found that the instrument has been used to transfer development rights from peripheral locations to sites better served by public transport.
In conclusion, our findings suggest that the limited impact of zoning compensation in Wallonia is strongly linked to the structural oversupply of residential building land. In a different configuration, particularly in contexts without such an abundance, the use of zoning compensation could prove more effective in curbing land take.
Halleux, J.-M., & Leinfelder, H. (2025). Land Policy in Belgium: How to Limit Land Take in a “Landowners’ Paradise”?. In Land Policies in Europe: Land-Use Planning, Property Rights, and Spatial Development (pp. 35-52). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Halleux, J.-M., Marcinczak, S., & van der Krabben, E. (2012). The adaptive efficiency of land use planning measured by the control of urban sprawl. The cases of the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland. Land Use Policy, 29(4), 887-898.
Lacoere, P., & Leinfelder, H. (2023). Land oversupply. How rigid land-use planning and legal certainty hinder new policy for Flanders. European Planning Studies, 31(9), 1926-1948.
Lacoere, P., Decoville, A., Delattre, R., Melot, R., Grimski, D., Schamann, M., & Halleux, J.-M. (2025). National introduction of no net land take: a comparative study of five pioneering countries seeking to limit their land consumption. Town Planning Review, 96(4), 347-371.
