The Longer-Term Potential of Land Value Uplift: Insights from Great Britain and the Yangtze River Delta Region

In many cities, the largest public policy interventions in infrastructure and urban development tend to target the periphery of cities. For instance, both the UK and China are keen to spread their business activities and populations from overheated cores to the periphery. Such policy narratives are gaining momentum, such as in the UK government’s ‘Levelling Up’ agenda and the Chinese government’s regional development and coordination plan. However, in such cases including in the UK and China, knowledge about what could happen to land value capture (LVC) is particularly deficient. We present here the development of a recursive spatial equilibrium model to understand and measure the land value uplift potential in those peripheral areas, as well as the traditional ‘honey-pot’ LVC locations. Great Britain and the Yangtze River Delta region are chosen for data sufficiency reasons to carry out in-depth modelling to pinpoint the causes and effects in terms of land values and their implications for value capture and future growth over the long term. The insights from the study contribute to policies for sustainably managing land resources across the respective metropolitan areas and their hinterlands, and they shed light for similar interventions in other countries and regions.