REGENA

Problem background

IIt is usual practice that every single community selects special zones for commercial or industrial purposes within its own community district. This practice leads to suboptimal results. First, communities develop more land than necessary since they want to be competitive in the market. Second, communities engage in a ruinous competition for attracting investors, thus selling land below market value. Third, ecological criteria for development are widely ignored when pursing this strategy. In a pool of commercial zones selection, development and management can be performed according to criteria of optimal resource management, including nature preservation goals. The main task for accomplishing such a pool solution is to provide a fair and efficient evaluation mechanism for land to be included in the pool and a distribution rule for sharing the revenues. All earlier attempts for such a pool were unsuccessful because this task was too difficult to undertake given the legal obstacles and the lack of willingness of actors to engage in such an exercise. The project REGENA constitutes an innovative approach for planning and administering commercial and industrial zones by a voluntary association of communities. A group of communities negotiate a set of industrially and commercially zoned areas that are selected, planned and managed as a common pool by all communities together.

Major objectives

• to assist these communities to form an association managing the pool of industrially or commercially zoned areas and to design the legal and programmatic regulations for such an association;
• to design and test models on the basis of advanced GIS programs and joint management schemes for evaluating areas and distributing revenues that could be included in the pool;
• to provide incentives for meeting economic as well as ecological criteria and aspects of urban planning that would lead to an optimal management path with respect to resource allocation and environmental quality enhancement.

With the REGENA project the prospects for a successful introduction of a common pool are much better. First, in a feasibility study all involved community leaders have expressed their interest and political will to establish this solution. Second, the legal possibility of founding a pool has been explored by a legal specialist with the result that, from a legal perspective, this pooling effort can be accomplished. Third, the project group composed of experts in regional planning, in new methods of evaluation and computer aided support systems as well as in mediation and communication techniques. Fourth, the project is supported by the regional and state authorities.

Major tasks
The first phase of the project covers the design of the evaluation process and the distribution scheme for all communities. In parallel, a Round Table with all the actors involved has been established to generate the rules of cooperation and to find the most suitable legal form for the cooperation. In the second phase, the major task is to establish a working model for this cooperation and develop the appropriate database and knowledge pool from which the new association can benefit. Furthermore, the model will be extended for brownfields and privately owned plots.