The Role of Swiss Civic Corporations in Land-Use Planning

Abstract

Public authorities in charge of managing public real-estate assets at the local level face conflicting interests. In Switzerland, short-term solutions often prevail. This paper looks at another group of actors which are characterized by their long-term real-estate management strategies: civic corporations. In Switzerland old civic corporations, which share many characteristics with common pool resource (CPR) institutions, are large landowners, some of them very powerful, which seem to have been successful in the management of their assets over centuries. The objective of this paper is to address the role played today by large urban civic corporations in the implementation process of land-use planning policies, as well as to understand the conditions of their perpetuation within the complex policy framework characterizing Swiss and European welfare states. This research examines the real-estate strategy of the civic corporations of Bern and Chur—ie their choice to buy, sell, or lease parcels of land depending on their location—in order to highlight their complex relationship with local authorities in charge of land-use planning. We show that CPR institutions such as civic corporations must not be dismissed too quickly as relicts of the past: quite the reverse, their strategies gain a renewed significance in a time when public bodies are looking for new ways to improve the sustainability of their spatial footprint and incorporate long-term thinking in their management objectives. More concretely, we show that their significance within land-use planning processes depends on their capacity to complement local authorities through the mobilization of their real-estate assets in order to support the implementation of land-use and urban planning policies.