Unpacking the politics of urban density

Beyond the blueprint

This post was written by Elisha Aaron.

The city of Amsterdam articulates in its “Structuurvisie 2040” a specific strategy to make the built environment of the city denser and more compact. This includes “building more than 5,000 homes per year [by] 2025,” totaling 50,000 new homes, and 150,000 new homes by 2040. Planners assure residents they are committed to maintaining the city’s affordability and accessibility by directing policies and projects to decide “what kind of city Amsterdam wants to be in terms of greenery, accessibility, sustainability, economy, social facilities and housing.” All of this development and change will occur without the city expanding its borders.

This plan and many policies from the city include the word “verdichting,” or “densification.” It might seem innocuous: cities are, in many ways, intrinsically built upon dense—or at least “more dense”—settlement patterns (McFarlane 2016). But this word shouldn’t be taken for granted: planners, designers, leaders, and more have employed density as both the cause and elixir of urban ills (Keil, 2020; Perez, 2020). From crime to pathogen, from land use to social life and safety, calls for more or less density are never neutral and are always wielded for some aim.

In this blog post, I will suggest that planners should understand densification as a tool that should be used to achieve their goals, and not as an urban inevitability. First, I will summarize important aspects of the concept of densification explored in scholarly literature: density as a frame to understand the built environment, density as value creation, and density as a political practice. Through these summaries, I hope to make clear that density is not an inevitable part of urban processes but in fact involves decisions about who benefits from and uses urban space. That is why controlling or changing urban density is—and should be—a tool to achieve political and social goals within urban space.

Density is not natural: a frame to understand the built environment

Many quantitative measurements of density in the scholarly literature focus on the economic, environmental, health-related, or social effects of compact urban forms. Quantitative measurements of the effects of densification can provide the building blocks for planners to argue for various policies or plans related to what cities look like (Pont et al., 2021). But these measurements nearly always fail to capture the political motivations behind the drive to make cities more (or less) dense in the first place. Can we really understand the economic effects of densification policies, isolated from the economic motivations and controls planners put in place? That is, if planners support densification policies to provide affordable housing, but engage in neoliberal, property-led development strategies to build that housing, then the outcome of the densification policies might not be the provision of affordable housing.

Roger Keil (2020) and others have argued (Habermehl and McFarlane, 2021; Kjaeras, 2021), density is a relational concept that only takes on meaning through its social and spatial context. There is no “natural” density that cities exist through—nor is it a mere descriptive category (Perez 2020). The densities of the built environments worldwide have changed and shifted through time and place, as have our values in regard to them. If we understand the density of cities as a “taken-for-granted urban” way of being, we fall into what Perez identifies as a profound problem: treating densification as “a natural urban trend” (Perez, p. 627).

In today’s world, city leaders and planners are employ in the need for density as a means to save the planet. These calls often mask the way the densification of urban life inform or shape the organization of everyday life: the “design detail of private housing, and the provision of public goods such as tree coverage” (Keil, 2020, p. 1287). Questions of density flatten the built environment into “quantitative, technical and physical” terms. The Earth, and its climate emergency, become yet another problem that planners as managerial technicians must solve, removing politics and the economics of capitalism from the equation (see Taşan-Kok, Atkinson, and Refinetti Martins, 2021; Raco et al., 2021). And yet, with the COVID-19 pandemic, a renewed focus on urban density’s pitfalls came into the public eye: city dwellers became the carriers of pathogens. Calls for public green spaces and parks, enabling highly dense urban environments to function optimally, took on new meanings (Keil, 2020, p. 1289).

Density as value creation

Seeing density this way pushes us to understand land use and development through a historical materialist lens: how is value created through building the city and for whom? Habermehl and McFarlane (2021) encourage researchers to see density in terms of this value proposition. Whether through use value or economic value, land is transformed into a commodity to address some need, usually a financialized one. However, Habermehl and McFarlane go further to acknowledge that value created through land use is broad and dynamic taking on different forms and meanings with the same vocabulary of “density.”

McFarlane and Habermehl use the term “proposition” to frame the various claims “made about density in relation to proposed or existing urban development”—through discourse, an urban plan or vision, maps etc. These propositions always situate density within some concept of what iss valuable for cities to achieve—in terms of its function, how it fits into its surrounding ecologies, and how it supports resident life. Whether explicit or not, Habermehl and McFarlane suggest that density claims propose value creation that is actionable through three domains: speculation by investors, regulation by officials, or popular actions by residents themselves. Within each domain different actors will have varying goals and various mechanisms to achieve those goals. That said, these domains are not isolated and pure: speculators must navigate, and at times rely on, municipal land use regulation; popular propositions for density might involve state-backed or low-stakes forms of speculation. Nevertheless, the overarching terms provide useful categories.

Habermehl and McFarlane call for research that centers density as a “field of unequal and contested propositions that entails a politics of value” within the larger urban condition (p. 670). That is, we should always be aware of how decisions to use space—be it through a densification plan or otherwise—is an operative hinge in the creation of value through urban space.

Density as a political practice

Perez writes about densification as “a profoundly generative practice enacted in different ways by a range of actors” (Perez, p. 619). If we assume otherwise, we will be blind to the material relations involved in the densification of a city: urban development, whether dense or sprawling, involves economic and social relations and politics that provide benefits to particular groups. In Bogota, where Perez performed extensive field work, city planners between 2012 and 2016 were eventually, if only briefly, able to employ urban density as a “socio-spatial process to be actively intervened in and molded.” They molded this process for the sake of an “inclusionary densification” of urban space, prioritizing public goods such as affordable housing creation through taxes and development regulations (p. 629).

Their efforts, sadly, were blocked by national government bodies, and their creative workarounds were short-lived following the entry of a new mayor in 2016. Nevertheless, they brought attention to a new way to wield density for the sake of affordable housing and development for the sake of public value creation. They rejected the stance that cities naturally densify, and they refused to engage with developers as the leading stakeholders in the use of city space. Instead, they took a political stance, dictating to developers how they would use and fill urban space to benefit the public through “inclusionary densification” (p. 627). Interestingly, the way these inclusionary policies were structured resulted in the creation of a specific architectural form in the Bogotá skyscape known as the cake house. It begs the question: if inclusionary policies for densification lead to this specific architectural form, do market-driven policies have their own forms?

Why this is important

Recently, scholars have taken up the task to unearth the politics of value underlying densification processes. Kjaeras (2024) and Cavicchia (2023) have each separately explored the politics driving densification, and its effects on gentrification, in Oslo, Norway. Gerber and Debrunner (2022) develop a conceptual model that maps the politics of power at play in redevelopment urban densification in creating who wins and who loses in Zurich, Switzerland. These studies show how significant is the challenge of planning dense, sustainable, and healthy cities.

Scholarly research on densification should serve as a reminder that planning is not just a technocratic or managerial task, it is a political instrument. In our UGoveRN Urban Density Research Lab, we explored how planning effectively fosters consensus across multi-scale governance landscapes, in a fragmented manner. This process involves engaging a diverse array of stakeholders, each with their own unique and sometimes conflicting perspectives. Such research underscores the importance of acknowledging and navigating these diverse positions in urban planning processes.  What our future cities look like is a political question, one that planners have a lot of say in. Planning for density—or not—is a choice, and one we should question and analyze with our full attention.

Bibliography

Berghauser Pont, M., Haupt, Berg, P., Alstäde, V., Heyman, A. (2021). Systematic review and comparison of densification effects and planning motivations. Buildings and Cities, 2(1), pp. 378–401. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.125.

Cavicchia, R. (2023). Housing accessibility in densifying cities: Entangled housing and land use policy limitations and insights from Oslo. Land Use Policy, 127, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2023.106580.

Gerber, J-D, and G. Debrunner. (2022). Planning with power: Implementing urban densification policies in Zurich, Switzerland. Land Use Policy, 123, pp. 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106400.

Gemeente Amsterdam. (2019). Amsterdam Structuurvisie 2040. https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/page/42693/amsterdam-structuurvisie-2040.

Habermehl, V. and C. McFarlane. (2021). Density as a politics of value: Regulation, speculation, and popular urbanism. Progress in Human Geography, 47 (5), pp. 664–679. DOI: 10.1177/03091325231189824.

Keil, R. (2020). The density dilemma: there is always too much and too little of it. Urban Geography, 41(10), pp. 1284–1293. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2020.1850025.

Kjaeras, K. (2021). Towards a relational conception of the compact city. Urban Studies, 58(6), pp. 1176–1192. DOI: 10.1177/0042098020907281.

Kjaeras, L. (2024). The politics of urban densification in Oslo. Urban Studies, 61(1), pp. 40–57. DOI: 10.1177/00420980231178190.

McFarlane, C. (2016). The geographies of urban density: Topology, politics and the city. Progress in Human Geography, 40(5), pp. 629–648. DOI: 10.1177/0309132515608694.

Perez, F. (2020). ‘The Miracle of Density’: The Socio-material Epistemics of Urban Densification. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(4), pp. 617–635. DOI:10.1111/1468-2427.12874.

Raco, M., Ward, C., Brill, F., Sanderson, D., Freire-Trigo, S., Ferm, J., Hamiduddin, II., and Livingstone, N. Towards a virtual statecraft: Housing targets and the governance of urban housing markets. Progress in Planning,166, pp. 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2022.100655.

Taşan-Kok, T., Atkinson, R., and Refinetti Martins, M.L. (2021). Hybrid contractual landscapes of governance: Generation of fragmented regimes of public accountability through urban regeneration.” Politics and Space,39(2), pp. 371–392. DOI: 10.1177/2399654420932577.