Today Progress Ireland is publishing a new policy paper on land readjustment. You can read it in full here.
Ireland has its share of problems with building. But one of the biggest is that we can’t build at scale.
We can build housing estates, or one off bits of infrastructure. But we can’t build big, dense, complex new neighbourhoods with the infrastructure to match. That’s not something we’re good at.
We need housing, yes, but also transportation links to serve it. We need commercial units for shops and restaurants and public spaces for exercise and socialising. And we need these new neighbourhoods to be close to job-creating areas, especially Dublin.
Progress Ireland’s new policy paper, on land readjustment, could address an important bottleneck that prevents us from building like this: fragmented land ownership.
Ireland’s problem
There are dozens of well-located Irish greenfield and brownfield areas, near lots of jobs. But due to inadequate infrastructure, restrictive planning rules, or fragmented ownership, they aren’t viable as projects. Places like Cork’s docklands, or greenfield land along the Dublin Cork rail line, just west of Adamstown.
To create a large development scheme, first up is the land. If you don’t already own the area in question, you need existing landowners to sell. The bigger the project, the more landowners who need to be convinced to sell. Getting multiple landowners to agree on a scheme is incredibly challenging. If even one landowner isn’t willing to participate, a scheme can’t go ahead.
For example, the following picture shows finely plotted lands that surround Rush train station. It’s fragmented into many different plots of varying sizes and shapes. Their owners would have to work together in order to fully realise the area’s potential as a new neighbourhood.
Rush already has some good infrastructure in place, the second ingredient. Its DART station could support much more intensive use of the land. But to do this most efficiently, the land would need to be combined into a big site, and a new road layout would be needed. Public parks and other amenities would enable denser development by making it more liveable and attractive.
The last ingredient of a big scheme is planning approval. As we’ll see below, our current planning system needs an extra tool to make schemes like this really come together.
Our planning tools
Our current system offers two ways for the government, developer, or AHB who is seeking to develop an area of fragmented plots to address these coordination problems. But they don’t work at scale.
First, agencies can try to persuade the landowners to sell. This can work where the landowners are amenable. But not every landowner can be persuaded. Some may hold out for a higher price, or refuse to sell altogether, potentially jeopardising the entire project.
However, CPO is a blunt tool. It’s slow and expensive from the perspective of whoever is assembling the land. It’s also legally fraught and controversial. Ultimately, it’s a very limited tool, only to be used as a last resort.
Local authorities do have some ability to encourage large developments. Development Plans, for example, are how local authorities set out the development they want to see across their given area. Local Area Plans do the same for smaller areas.
Urban Development Zones (UDZs), a new tool, are a step in the right direction for the planning system. They create detailed plans for specific areas, which helps cut down on the uncertainty of the planning permission process. However, UDZs don’t incentivise landowners to pool and reassemble land. Even after identifying, masterplanning and getting consent for a UDZ, a scheme is likely to struggle if land ownership remains fragmented.
Ireland’s planning system still lacks a tool to overcome the problem of fragmented ownership. This is where land readjustment comes in.
The principle of land readjustment
To recap: coordination problems between landowners, infrastructure providers and planners make it hard to build big, complex schemes. Our current tools are inadequate to the problem. Landowners are left with no real incentive to work together, even when that would allow more valuable land parcels and infrastructure to be created. The costs and benefits of that development don’t fall evenly across all landowners, so they’re reluctant to proceed.
Land readjustment is a tool to solve this coordination problem.
At its core, land readjustment involves pooling the land in a given area, replotting it into a new development that has higher density and better infrastructure, and giving the original landowners a plot of land in the new development.
This changes the incentives of landowners. Instead of getting a fixed cash amount reflecting the current value of the property, as compulsory purchase orders provide, land readjustment provides financial upside.
Landowners can expect to make money because their new plot is worth more than the old one. It will be smaller than their old plot because some land has been given to the public, but its new value is higher because of the replotting and replanning. These landowners now have a huge incentive to say yes to development. More broadly, the scheme aligns the incentives of all participants, from landowners to the local authority to utility providers.
Here’s an overview of how it works. A more detailed proposed process can be found in our paper.
On a suitable site – with high demand for land, inadequate infrastructure, and fragmented ownership – a new scheme is drawn up. The land is replotted to make it more suitable for intensive development. Roads, parks, and public transport are added alongside more intensive development of the sites. The preexisting land parcels are reorganised around the new infrastructure and reapportioned pro-rata to the original landowners.
The new scheme now has more infrastructure, and land ownership is aligned with the new infrastructure. The next element is planning. Planning rules are re-drafted to align with the new scheme. The basic point here is that the land is now permitted to be used more intensively than before, and planning risk is removed.
The original landowners receive a plot of land in this revamped area. It’s smaller than their old plot because some land has been given to the public, but its new value is higher because of the replotting and replanning. These landowners now have an incentive to say yes to development.
To make this more concrete, consider the stylised diagram below. On the left, landowner A has an uneven plot of land among other uneven plots. His development prospects are limited. But moving to the right hand diagram, plot (a) is well serviced by infrastructure and ready for new development. He has every reason to want to get to that point, as do his neighbours.
Next, the scheme is put to a ballot. If a supermajority of landowners are in favour, the scheme may go ahead. Should the supermajority threshold be passed, all land is included in the scheme – whether or not the owners voted in favour of it. Original parcels of land are swapped for land of proportional value in the new scheme. Looser planning rules and new infrastructure mean that they usually profit materially from the deal.
Land readjustment aligns everyone’s incentives towards cooperating to create an intensive scheme. For land owners, new infrastructure and an increase in density pushes up land values. This is their carrot. The stick is compulsory participation in the scheme, should the ballot pass. Local authorities receive a high quality masterplanned neighbourhood, whose infrastructure is fully funded. Infrastructure providers are fully funded and can invest ahead of demand.
Taking our opportunity
Land readjustment has a strong track record around the world. In Japan, 30 per cent of the built-up environment has been created or redeveloped by land readjustment. Almost 10,000 projects were completed between 1954 and 2013.
Aerial photographs of the Shiodome project in Tokyo help show the scale of the achievement in just one area of one city:
South Korea has 397 land readjustment projects to develop 43,580 ha. over five decades. One Seoul project created a 13,000-fold land value uplift over 26 years. Germany has used land extensively (Umlegung) since the early 20th century. In one state, Baden-Württemberg, 84 per cent of the building plots were developed by land readjustment in the 1980s.
Progress Ireland is not the first organisation to have examined land readjustment’s applicability in a new jurisdiction. For instance, the European Commission and OECD have outlined how land readjustment can mitigate a whole host of problems facing developed countries today:
[Land readjustment] can mitigate climate change impacts, aid in post-disaster reconstruction and reduce urban sprawl, fostering more compact and sustainable urban forms. [It] facilitates greenfield development and can be broadly applied in brownfield redevelopment, transforming underutilized spaces into vibrant urban areas.
In a separate study, the World Bank assessed Japanese land readjustment. It noted that the policy is necessitated in Japan by its fragmented land ownership patterns and a low share of publicly owned land in urban areas. Again, these are crucial factors in Ireland. (See the appendix of our paper for more detail on international examples.)
Land readjustment has already received attention domestically. In 2018, the NESC proposed it as part of a suite of measures to enable active land management, and help deliver affordable housing and sustainable urban development. The 2024 Housing Commission report included it in recommendation #9, which calls for empowering local councils to “[unlock] complex brownfield sites through land assembly, coordinating infrastructure provision and readjustment to deliver viable development plots”.
There are many potentially suitable sites. Dublin’s City Edge scheme may use an Urban Development Zone, which would be complemented by land readjustment. Cork’s docklands could serve as a suitable brownfield site. The outskirts of Dublin is one of the best regions: the greenfield sites west of Adamstown, already served by the Dublin-Cork rail line. DART stations with underdeveloped land around them include Rush and Lusk, Donabate, Skerries, and Balbriggan.
Ireland is already due to reform its compulsory purchase order (CPO) process. It’s over a century old in parts, and no longer fit for purpose. The Law Reform Commission examined it in detail in 2023. Its draft Acquisition of Land Bill brings CPOs into the twenty-first century. Given land readjustment’s interaction with CPOs and the planning system more broadly, it is a natural complement to CPO legislation. Both policies should be brought to the Oireachtas at the same time.
Conclusion
In the past, Ireland didn’t need big new development schemes like City Edge. The population was growing slowly and there was plenty of space. One-off homes along country roads and housing estates at the edge of the towns was all the country needed.
That’s no longer the case. The population is growing quickly and infrastructure is struggling to keep up. Ireland can’t afford to waste its best land any more.
Land readjustment is a tool to make the most of Ireland’s most precious resource, which is its land. By tweaking the rules, it gives disparate groups of people a reason to work together for the common good. It has the potential to unlock new city extensions, transit oriented developments, and urban renewals. It's a proven solution to one of Ireland’s biggest planning and development problems. It’s about time we started using it.
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