Willem Korthals Altes is a professor in Land Development, in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Willem has been with PLPR for over a decade, and this month we sat down with him to discuss his recent research projects.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
I am a professor in land development (since 1997), and I am currently leading the section Urban Development Management at the department of Management in the Built Environment at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Earlier positions at TU Delft were at OTB Research for the Built Environment, the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management and the Department of Geodetic Engineering. I have a background in planning, and I published over time several papers on planning, law and property rights.
What are you passionate about?
My research interests relate to the governance of land development, which is about the interaction between planning, property rights and property markets, and the governance of the relationship between private interests of landowners and common societal goals. Issues that play in this field are about authorities acting as land developers, new land development legislation, the Europeanization of the governance of land development, access to land and rural development, and a legitimate governance of land development.
What are you working on these days?
There is often a combination of short-term projects (such as on municipal ground lease revaluations or land policy evaluation) and longer-term projects, such as a Horizon 2020 project, RURALIZATION, on new generations (including access to land ) in rural areas and farming (a € 6 million project, which I coordinated from 1999 to 2023 but that still has some offspring) and Horizon Europe project FLIARA on female-led innovation in agriculture and rural areas (that currently runs: 2023-2025), both funded by the European Commission. The last paper I presented at PLPR has been based on a smaller project for the Ministry of Spatial Planning, that is, studying whether the system of property formation in Nordic countries could inspire to adapt Netherlands legislation to prevent land being shredded into tiny parcels that have no access to public roads, no property boundaries and are not formed to be used but for speculative purposes to be sold to non-professional individuals who pay a price for the land that can be as much as twenty times the market value.
What brings you to PLPR?
PLPR is a conference where most of the contributions fit my field of interests. I do not have to bother about whether I will choose the right session, as all sessions bring research that discusses themes I like to learn more about.
Anecdote: things we don’t know about you?
I have been coming to PLPR for such a long time to PLPR that there are not many things that PLPR members collectively do not know about me. Maybe that I organized a MOOC on creating new opportunities in rural areas. https://online-learning.tudelft.nl/courses/ruralization-creating-new-opportunities-in-rural-areas/
