Unlocking value in property investment and development for urban planning

Introduction

Planning decisions often generate substantial economic value, yet transforming these economic gains into social returns remains one of the field’s most persistent challenges. Planning tools, regulations, and legislative instruments influence the redistribution of land and property values more directly than any other policy domain. Value is central to urban planning, and it is frequently invoked in planning debates, but it remains an ambiguous and unsettled concept, making it difficult to link to tangible outcomes (Jain et al., 2020). A single planning intervention can simultaneously generate economic, social, spatial, environmental, symbolic, and governance-related values. These different interpretations of value complicate how planning scholars analyse planning outcomes and how practitioners design mechanisms to manage and redistribute value.

Planning literature reflects this complexity. Scholars have examined social, environmental, spatial, and economic values (Carmona, 2019; Ryan, 2011), while real estate research has mostly concentrated on financial measures (Lindholm and Leväinen, 2006; Roulac et al., 2006), traditional valuation models, and increasingly sophisticated appraisal techniques (Pagourtzi et al., 2003). Although both planning and market instruments aim to mobilise value from the same land and property assets, they do so for different purposes and according to distinct epistemological traditions. Moreover, they are grounded in fundamentally different conceptualisations of value itself, with planning typically framing value in collective and societal terms, while market actors operationalise it through financial metrics, risk assessments, and return expectations. What has remained underdeveloped is an integrated approach that brings these diverse conceptualisations into dialogue in order to deepen our understanding of how value is produced, mobilised, and governed across planning processes, geographies, and property market dynamics, as it is the fundamental component that creates the tensions around land and property. This gap is not only conceptual but also deeply embedded in practice, where both practitioners and academics rarely succeed in bridging these perspectives, reinforcing their separation in everyday decision-making and knowledge production.

This special issue fills this gap by providing an opportunity to understand the mechanisms through which value is constituted and governed, from the legal and institutional foundations that shape ownership, rights, and responsibilities, to the market and planning tools that mediate investment, development, and redistribution. Planning decisions routinely generate substantial economic value through land-use changes, infrastructure provision, and regulatory interventions. Yet, the translation of these development gains into broader social outcomes remains uneven and fragmented. This raises a fundamental yet underdeveloped question in planning: how can urban planning better understand, govern, and harness the multiple forms of value generated by property investment and development for societal benefit?

By bringing these dimensions together, we see value as a multi-layered and institutionally embedded phenomenon rather than merely a financial outcome of urban development. The contributions in this special issue, therefore, approach value as shaped by legal frameworks, financial architectures, and planning practices that together structure how development gains are produced and distributed. In doing so, we argue that planning must move beyond narrow, site-based value capture mechanisms and instead develop a broader framework for governing value creation across legal regimes, financial systems, and planning practices.

This integrated approach has become ever more pressing as cities face intersecting environmental, social, and economic crises. Under contemporary urban conditions, questions of value extend well beyond technical niche debates over measurement and value-capture instruments, encompassing broader concerns about distribution, responsibility, and long-term collective outcomes. New conceptual openings are required to rethink how value is understood and harnessed, to respond effectively to global concerns, as well as more localised urban inequalities.

Meanwhile, the planning profession continues to operate within a paradigm centred on controlling urban growth. While this regulatory orientation seeks to manage development impacts, it often contributes to rising land values, intensified speculation, and the structural conditions that fuel financialisation. Current debates on postgrowth and degrowth expose the limits of this paradigm by challenging the growth-oriented economic models underpinning planning practice (Savini, 2024). However, where postgrowth perspectives disengage from the mechanisms through which value is produced and captured, they risk leaving these processes intact, thereby enabling continued value accumulation, rising land prices, and the reproduction of the very speculative dynamics they seek to challenge.

These debates remain only partially reflected in mainstream planning practice, which continues to be closely tied to systems that produce, stabilise, and redistribute urban land rents. Land and property development sit at the core of these tensions. Instruments such as land-value capture have been advanced as mechanisms to reclaim development gains for public benefit. In practice, however, land-value capture has largely remained a technical and procedurally bounded instrument. This points to a deeper limitation: the problem is not simply one of instrument design, but of a persistent disjunction between conceptualisations of value and their translation into practice, which constrains planning’s capacity to actively govern the distribution of land and property value. In its dominant form, it focuses on extracting value from specific sites or projects, without addressing the broader question of how planning might engage with value-creation processes more systematically to support wider social benefit and the provision of essential public services.

Furthermore, across the planning literature, different conceptualisations, measures, and approaches to value are present. Some focus on developing approaches to social values (Berke, 2002; Reiner, 2017; Rutten and Gelissen, 2010), while others focus on economic (Quigley et al., 2008; Sohn et al., 2012), transformative (Othengrafen and Levin-Keitel, 2019; Song, 2015), spatial values (Auzins and Chigbu, 2021; Ives et al., 2018), or urban planning principles, norms, or regulations (Smolka and Amborski, 2000). In contrast, real estate scholarship, traditionally rooted in economic traditions and theory, generally works to formalise and employ financial measures (de Vries and Voß, 2018; Dröes and Koster, 2021; Dröes and Koster, 2022; Koster and Van Ommeren, 2019; Watson et al., 2016); focuses on expanding traditional valuation assumptions (Eppli and Benjamin, 1994; Jefferies, 2010); and refines appraisal methods (Crosby et al., 2020; Tajani et al., 2020; Bourassa et al., 2024). Despite engaging with the same land and property assets, these bodies of work rarely intersect in ways that allow for a shared understanding of how value is constituted and governed.

A multifaceted approach to analysing value is therefore pivotal. While traditional interpretations of values in urban development are predominantly economic, planning literature has shown that values created by urban development projects are also spatial, symbolic, and change over time. Values play a pivotal role in steering planning and urban development processes as they are embedded in institutions that shape planning norms and actions (Healey, 1998; Savini, 2019). It is, therefore, the multi-faceted concept of value that this special issue aims to address. The symbolic connectivity (Madanipour, 2010) between the complex network of actors involved in urban development influences the value-creation process. As interpretations of value shift over time, so too does the social and economic meaning of property itself (Adams and Tiesdell, 2012).

In practice, both public and private market actors realise the importance of accounting for environmental, social, and governance factors in urban developments (Brounen et al., 2021). However, the increasing importance of sustainability standards and value-creation mechanisms within the real estate industry often goes unrealised by public institutions. Many spatial and social values created by urban development remain uncaptured, as they are usually project-specific and difficult to measure. Or they are confined within project boundaries, benefiting primarily direct users, such as tenants and owners. Existing public instruments and private mechanisms, such as Environment, Sustainability, and Governance frameworks, remain partial, inconsistent, and limited in their capacity. Therefore, alternative approaches to conceptualise and measure value are needed.

In the past decades, planning scholarship has continued to challenge the norms of planning practice. Planners are faced with the paradox of economic growth and their social responsibility (Tait, 2016; Voogd, 2001), prompting ongoing debate about the fundamental values of planning and the role of planners themselves (Campbell and Marshall, 2002). As planning has increasingly accommodated private-sector-led development, governance arrangements have become more fragmented, and accountability has shifted between public and private actors (Taşan-Kok and Özogul, 2021). Much of the existing planning scholarship has focused on the negative impact of changing planning processes, missing the opportunity to leverage new, innovative mechanisms with the capacity to contribute to more sustainable urban development. More importantly, identifying alternative conceptual and practical avenues for planners and planning (Campbell et al., 2014; Parker et al., 2020) has also been missed.

In assembling the collection, the special issue editors particularly focused on contributions engaging with a wide range of value dimensions, including social, spatial, environmental, economic, and transformative values. Authors were encouraged to incorporate elements of both real estate economics and planning theory into their submissions for the special issue. As a result, the special issue received a collection of articles that examine the concept of value from multiple disciplinary and theoretical vantage points. They can be grouped under three categories: The first group reflects on rethinking the legal and institutional foundations of value. The second group focuses on governing economic value, capital flows, and market instruments. And finally, the third group contains a discussion on understanding and mobilising values within planning and development processes.

Legal frameworks: Rethinking the institutional foundations of value

Debates on values in planning have long highlighted the extent to which legal and institutional arrangements shape how land, property, and development are governed (Hodgson, 2015; Webster and Lai, 2003). Property regimes, planning statutes, administrative procedures, and judicial doctrines construct the very conditions under which value is recognised, protected, extracted, or redistributed. Much of the literature has examined how liberal legal systems prioritise individual ownership, exchange value, and market efficiency, often producing institutional mismatches when confronted with collective claims, use-specific relationships to land, intergenerational stewardship, or ecological thresholds (Marella, 2017; Rauws and De Roo, 2016). These legal architectures do more than regulate land use; they stabilise particular imaginaries of value, structure who is entitled to benefit from land-based wealth, and influence the distribution of risks, responsibilities, and rights across society. Critical legal scholarship, political economy, and socio-legal studies have all shown how legal norms reproduce specific value hierarchies and limit the space for alternative valuations grounded in justice, sustainability, or shared responsibility.

Building on these insights, recent scholarship has begun to examine more closely how legal regimes shape the ways in which value is defined, produced, and distributed within planning systems (Moroni, 2007; Nowak et al., 2024). Rather than functioning merely as neutral frameworks that regulate development, legal institutions actively structure the allocation of rights, responsibilities, and entitlements that determine how value is created and who ultimately benefits from it (Smolka and Amborski, 2000; Li et al., 2023). François-Xavier Viallon’s (2024) contribution to this issue, titled Beyond the blinders: Disclosing the episteme of land ownership to re-frame legal and economic values in planning, illustrates this point by examining the epistemological foundations of land ownership embedded within Western legal systems. By comparing the dominant law-and-economics framework with the alternative land master theory, the paper shows how prevailing legal conceptions of ownership prioritise exchange value and individual property rights while overlooking collective, use-based, and stewardship-oriented understandings of land. This institutional bias limits the ability of planning systems to respond to emerging challenges such as environmental sustainability, social equity, and complex land-use arrangements. Reframing legal conceptions of ownership toward stewardship-based models may therefore provide new avenues for aligning property governance with broader societal objectives.

A complementary perspective on legal frameworks is provided by Niels Tobias Arnoldussen’s (2026) analysis for this special issue, titled Adaptivity, resilience and justice for all: A confrontation between adaptive planning law and environmental justice, on the Dutch Environmental Planning Act, which evaluates the emergence of adaptive planning law through the lens of environmental justice. The study demonstrates that legal frameworks designed to promote flexibility, experimentation, and adaptive governance may unintentionally reinforce neoliberal planning dynamics if concerns of justice and distribution are insufficiently integrated. Even when legal reforms introduce more flexible and participatory governance structures, their outcomes depend on how principles of equity, recognition, and participation are embedded within regulatory systems. This highlights that legal frameworks do not merely enable planning interventions but actively shape the distributional consequences of value-creation processes. This also suggests that adaptive legal frameworks function as selective filters that privilege certain forms of value creation over others, often aligning with market-based logics while marginalising alternative, collectively grounded valuations. In this sense, flexibility and adaptivity do not simply open up governance but can become modalities through which value creation is stabilised and channelled in ways that reinforce existing property regimes and patterns of accumulation.

Taken together, these perspectives highlight how renewed attention to legal and institutional foundations can open up new ways of understanding value in planning. Building on the earlier discussion, Viallon’s contribution illustrates how entrenched legal-economic frameworks in liberal democracies struggle to account for diverse land use practices, ecological pressures, and widening inequalities. By juxtaposing law-and-economics with land master theory, he exposes the conceptual blind spots embedded in mainstream property epistemologies and demonstrates how prevailing regimes fail to recognise collective, relational, or use-specific valuations of land. His proposal of land stewardship offers a legally grounded yet normatively transformative alternative that puts sustainability and shared responsibility at the core of ownership.

Extending this argument, Arnoldussen’s contribution highlights another crucial dimension of the legal foundations of value. While adaptive approaches promise greater flexibility, participation, and responsiveness, Arnoldussen shows that without substantive legal principles rooted in equity and environmental justice, such regimes risk replicating the procedural openness of neoliberal governance without delivering fair or sustainable outcomes. His analysis of the Dutch Environment and Planning Act demonstrates how legal norms can either reinforce or counteract unequal distributions of risks and benefits, and how substantive justice principles are essential for ensuring that adaptive systems do not become vehicles of discretionary or exclusionary forms of value-making.

Together, these interventions highlight how revisiting the legal and institutional infrastructures of planning can open new pathways for governing value creation. They show that rethinking value requires more than technical adjustments; it demands a re-examination of the epistemological and normative assumptions embedded in property regimes, planning law, and regulatory practice. By situating value within its legal foundations, these contributions open pathways toward institutional frameworks that better align planning with sustainability, equity, and the collective dimensions of land and property.

Financial architectures: Governing economic value, capital flows, and market instruments

Questions of economic value in planning are inseparable from the financial architectures and regulatory instruments that shape contemporary urban development. A substantial body of literature in political economy, urban finance, and planning has demonstrated how value is produced through complex interactions among investment logics, capital flows, fiscal instruments, and development incentives (Mazzucato, 2018; Sorg, 2025). These mechanisms often extend far beyond the local scale at which planning traditionally operates. They link global investment circuits to national financial regulation and local zoning decisions, thereby generating multiscale processes of value creation, extraction, and redistribution. Scholars have shown that planning tools designed to manage or capture value, such as development contributions or land value capture instruments, generally operate within narrow spatial and temporal boundaries (Fainstein et al., 2014; Mah, 2025). As a result, planners often have limited capacity to intervene in the broader financial currents that shape property markets, speculation, and investment cycles. This has generated a growing interest in understanding not only how value is captured, but how it is governed within the larger financial and regulatory environment that assembles urban space.

While legal regimes define the institutional foundations of value, financial architectures shape how value circulates within urban development processes. Contemporary urban change is increasingly driven by complex flows of capital moving across multiple regulatory and geographic scales. Andre Legarza’s article (2025) titled Planning and its spatiotemporal traps: Rethinking economic value capture and the planner’s role in governing capital flows within the United States speaks directly to this challenge by highlighting how planners are embedded in dense regulatory landscapes that influence and direct capital flows. Legarza’s contribution demonstrates that prevailing value capture approaches remain largely confined to localised interventions that extract value from individual development sites or projects. Such instruments often fail to address the broader financial dynamics that assemble urban space, particularly the multi-scalar flows of investment capital that increasingly shape development trajectories. By mapping the regulatory landscape that influences capital allocation, the article argues that planners must move beyond the narrow role of capturing value and instead engage with the governance of capital flows themselves. Repositioning planners as strategic coordinators within multi-level regulatory systems opens new possibilities for influencing how investment capital interacts with the built environment and for aligning financial dynamics with broader public interest goals. This perspective also reinforces the need to better connect financial analyses of property markets with the spatial realities of urban development. By tracing the movements and allocation of capital within property markets, planning scholars can gain a more nuanced understanding of how investment decisions translate into spatial transformations and distributional outcomes across cities (Legarza, 2025).

Moving beyond conventional value capture logics, a growing body of scholarship has begun to conceptualise planners as strategic actors capable of shaping the institutional and fiscal conditions under which investment attaches to the built environment (Adams and Tiesdell, 2010; Alexandri et al., 2026; Tasan-Kok, 2010). Research on the financialisation of urban development and the governance of property markets has shown that capital flows that influence urban change operate across multiple regulatory scales and institutional arenas, often extending well beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of individual projects (Knox-Hayes, 2013). Within this context, conventional value capture instruments appear increasingly limited (Smolka and Amborski, 2000), as they focus primarily on extracting surplus from specific development sites while leaving broader investment dynamics largely untouched (Crook and Whitehead, 2019; Rybeck, 2004;). These insights have prompted calls to reconceptualise planning not merely as a mechanism for reclaiming development gains, but as a form of institutional governance capable of shaping how capital flows interact with land, property, and urban development across multiple scales.

Minjee Kim’s contribution (2025) in this issue, titled From exchange value to social value of real estate development: A Planner’s perspective, addresses a complementary dimension of this nexus by interrogating the valuation techniques that structure investment decisions. Her critique of discounted cash flow modelling reveals how traditional appraisal practices privilege exchange value and obscure the social use values that matter for planning objectives, including the distributional consequences of development. By drawing on insights from social entrepreneurship, she proposes a framework that quantifies the social value generated by development and its impacts on inequality. This methodological intervention equips planners with tools to evaluate development not only through financial metrics but also through its capacity to produce or erode social welfare.

Kim’s analysis (2025) also highlights a deeper structural tension between the financial logics that govern property markets and the normative commitments of planning. Conventional valuation techniques such as discounted cash flow analysis translate urban development into a stream of future revenues, thereby aligning real estate assets with broader capital market logics. In doing so, they narrow the definition of value to financial performance, rendering many socially relevant outcomes invisible in investment calculations. Kim demonstrates that this technical framing is not merely methodological but institutional: valuation practices shape negotiations among public authorities, developers, and investors, ultimately influencing which projects are considered viable. By introducing a framework to estimate the social value of development, including its impacts on public service provision, fiscal capacity, and socioeconomic inequality, the article opens a pathway to integrating broader planning objectives into the financial evaluation of development projects. In this sense, the paper bridges planning theory and real estate valuation by showing how planners can intervene directly in the calculative practices through which development value is defined and negotiated.

Together, the contributions in this special issue highlight that economic value in urban development cannot be understood as an autonomous outcome generated solely by market forces. A large part of the scholarly literature still tends to treat markets as external mechanisms that produce value, with planning responding to or correcting their outcomes. However, as Adams and Tiesdell have long argued (2010), property markets are themselves institutional and socially constructed arenas in which planning decisions, regulatory frameworks, and public sector interventions play constitutive roles. Building on this perspective, and as further elaborated in Taşan-Kok et al. (2026) work on spatial governance landscapes, planning should be understood not simply as regulating markets from the outside but as actively shaping the conditions under which markets operate, the expectations of investors, and the forms through which value is recognised and captured.

We can, therefore, expand the discussion beyond financial instruments alone and draw attention to a broader set of mechanisms through which economic value is produced and governed. These include regulatory frameworks that structure development rights, institutional arrangements that organise public–private relations, valuation practices that define what counts as economic worth, and governance processes that shape the circulation of knowledge, risk perceptions, and investment expectations. In this sense, markets do not merely generate value to which planning subsequently reacts; rather, markets are continuously constituted through regulatory choices, institutional arrangements, and governance practices in which planners themselves participate. Planning actors influence development feasibility, investment timing, land values, and development trajectories through zoning decisions, infrastructural commitments, negotiation practices, and the structuring of development opportunities.

Seen from this perspective, the relationship between planning and markets is fundamentally a two-way process. Markets shape planning agendas and development possibilities, but planning simultaneously shapes market conditions and the ways in which value is produced, interpreted, and distributed. Together, the contributions underscore that economic value is not a static outcome of urban development, but a dynamic and governable process shaped by financial conventions, regulatory choices, valuation methodologies, and institutional arrangements. By examining the institutional environments in which capital circulates and by questioning the metrics and practices through which property is valued, the articles deepen our understanding of how planning can intervene more strategically in the governance of economic value and its societal implications.

Planning practices: Mobilising values in planning and development processes

A rich strand of planning and urban studies scholarship has drawn attention to the lived, procedural, and relational dimensions of value in development practice. Rather than approaching value solely as a financial or regulatory construct, this literature shows that values emerge through situated interactions, project dynamics, and the everyday practices of planners, developers, communities, and other actors (Fuller, 2012; Kady et al., 2024). Values circulate through vision-making, consultation processes, design negotiations, and partnership arrangements, and they influence how problems are defined, which futures become imaginable, and whose interests are prioritised (Christmann et al., 2020). Pragmatist, interpretive, and institutional perspectives have demonstrated that planning outcomes are shaped not only by formal instruments but also by the diverse normative orientations, professional cultures, and symbolic expectations that actors bring into development arenas. These insights position value as a socially constructed and negotiated phenomenon that becomes embedded in project narratives, governance relations, and implementation strategies.

Planning practices play a crucial role in translating abstract notions of value into concrete development outcomes. Rather than treating value as a purely economic attribute of property, recent scholarship emphasises how planning processes mobilise multiple forms of value through negotiation, coordination, and institutional design. Emma Street and Victor Nicholls, with their contribution to this special issue titled Vision making and values in urban regeneration, demonstrate this dynamic, where vision-making processes help align diverse actors around shared principle-based values that extend beyond narrow financial objectives. Their study shows that regeneration initiatives often succeed when planners and public actors are able to articulate and institutionalise broader civic and place-based values that guide development decisions while still enabling commercial viability. In this sense, planning practice becomes a mediating arena in which different interpretations of value are negotiated and translated into development strategies. Moreover, they also showed how transactional values, which focus on financial returns and deliverability, intersect with principle-based values grounded in professional ethics, social purpose, and place-based aspirations. Their work illustrates how these value orientations are mobilised within project teams, governance networks, and collaborative decision-making fora, and how they shape the production and refinement of regeneration visions. The value is thus actively constructed through interactions, artefacts, and representations, and regeneration outcomes depend on aligning diverse and sometimes competing actors’ values to create shared narratives and actionable compromises.

A related challenge concerns the tools through which planners evaluate and communicate value in development processes. Kim (2025) addresses this by deconstructing the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis, arguing that its singular focus on exchange value (the building as an investment asset) obscures the multifaceted use value that reflects a project’s impact on society and socioeconomic inequality. She applies the logic of social entrepreneurship to real estate through the Net Present Social Value (NPSV) framework, which quantifies social contributions as tangible cost savings to public welfare programs, such as valuing an affordable housing unit as a direct saving to federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) subsidies or Section 8 voucher programs.

This methodological shift reconfigures traditional financial logic, which typically classifies social benefits like affordable housing or higher wages as negative cash flows that reduce a property’s investment value. By reframing these costs as social assets, Kim (ibid.) provides community advocates with a more familiar economic language through which to more effectively communicate with dominant market-oriented actors, helping to create a more balanced dialogue within urban development processes. Ultimately, she emphasises that these metrics must be guided by the mētis, or the situated practical intelligence of experienced planners, to ensure that valuation remains an exercise of sound judgement grounded in local geographic and temporal contexts.

By foregrounding the social and procedural life of value, this perspective underscores the importance of examining how planning practice itself becomes a site of valuation. Values are not only governed through legal frameworks or constituted through financial techniques; they are also produced, stabilised, and contested through the everyday institutional practices that assemble urban development. In practice, however, these processes unfold within increasingly fragmented governance architectures (Taşan-Kok and Özogul, 2021), where planning decisions, investment negotiations, regulatory instruments, and development agreements are dispersed across multiple actors, institutions, and spatial scales. As a result, value creation mechanisms often remain inward-looking and project-bound. Development negotiations typically focus on the immediate financial feasibility and regulatory conditions of individual projects, while the wider spatial consequences of value creation across neighbourhoods, infrastructure networks, and urban systems remain weakly connected or largely unaddressed.

This fragmentation means that the various forms of value generated through economic, social, spatial, and environmental urban development frequently circulate across the city without being systematically recognised or coordinated within planning practice. Planning interventions may shape significant value outcomes beyond project boundaries, yet the institutional frameworks through which planners operate rarely enable these wider effects to be captured, aligned, or strategically governed. Recognising this disconnection highlights the need to better understand how planning institutions can engage with the dispersed and relational nature of value creation in contemporary urban development. Doing so requires moving beyond project-level negotiations and toward planning approaches capable of connecting the multiple sites where value is produced across the urban landscape, thereby enabling more coherent and socially responsive development trajectories.

Final thoughts and the road ahead

This special issue advances the understanding of value in urban planning by demonstrating its complex, relational, and institutionally embedded character. The contributions reveal that value is not a singular or self-evident outcome, but a phenomenon constituted through legal frameworks, governed through financial and regulatory architectures, and mobilised through the social and procedural dynamics of planning practice. By bringing together scholars working across planning, real estate economics, and legal studies, the collection develops a more integrated and critically informed approach to how value is produced, distributed, and contested in contemporary urban development.

Furthermore, this special issue makes possible a perspective that cuts across these domains, enabling patterns, tensions, and interdependencies to emerge that would otherwise remain invisible within any single disciplinary lens. Taken together, the contributions demonstrate that value creation cannot be adequately governed through any of these domains in isolation, but by situating them in relation to one another. Such a relational perspective allows for a more comprehensive understanding of how value is constituted and what institutional arrangements are needed to ensure it serves the public interest.

The articles in this collection call for planning to be more reflective about value creation and more purposeful in using development gains for societal benefit. They highlight the need to move beyond narrow technical fixes and procedural adjustments to tackle the structural and institutional conditions through which value is produced and appropriated. Rather than treating value as an external outcome generated by markets and subsequently corrected through planning interventions, the contributions show that value emerges from interactions between regulatory frameworks, development practices, financial expectations, and governance arrangements. Value in urban planning is multifaceted and socially embedded, and planning systems shape how diverse values are created, mobilised, and distributed. This implies that planning cannot remain a reactive system responding to market outcomes but must actively engage with the mechanisms through which value is constituted in the first place. In doing so, planners can leverage their institutional position to proactively create the conditions necessary to frame and mobilise social value. Thus, ensuring that values are not captured as an afterthought, but are embedded into the very logic of development from its inception.

Several contributions also point to the importance of broadening the analytical lens through which value is examined. Economic value cannot be separated from legal definitions of development rights, institutional arrangements governing land and property, and valuation practices that define what counts as economically significant. At the same time, social and environmental values are frequently marginalised when development decisions are framed primarily through financial feasibility and market performance, although significant steps regarding incorporating environmental values have been made. Recognising these interdependencies requires a more relational understanding of value in which economic, social, and environmental dimensions are seen as co-produced through governance processes rather than existing as separate domains. This perspective invites planners to engage more critically with the institutional settings, valuation metrics, and knowledge systems that shape development decisions.

Another important insight emerging from the special issue concerns the role of planning institutions and actors in shaping market dynamics. Property markets are often portrayed as autonomous mechanisms that produce value independently of public action. Yet, the contributions demonstrate that planning decisions, regulatory instruments, and infrastructural commitments fundamentally shape development expectations, investment strategies, and land values. Zoning regimes, development rights, negotiation practices, and public investment programs all structure the conditions under which capital circulates in urban environments. In this sense, planners are not merely regulators of markets but participants in the institutional configurations that constitute them. In fact, planners have the strategic capacity to engage with market actors and can thus proactively frame social value by shaping regulatory and fiscal conditions. Furthermore, by adopting new analytical vocabularies, they can strategically mobilise these values to influence and shape development trajectories toward the public interest.

The collection also highlights the challenges that contemporary governance arrangements pose for value-oriented planning. Urban development increasingly unfolds within fragmented institutional landscapes characterised by multiple regulatory regimes, overlapping jurisdictions, and complex public–private relations. These governance environments often obscure where value is generated and how it is captured or redistributed. As a result, opportunities to align development processes with collective goals such as affordability, accessibility, and environmental sustainability can easily be lost. Addressing these challenges requires new analytical tools capable of tracing value creation across institutional boundaries and identifying where planning interventions can most effectively influence development trajectories.

From a research perspective, the special issue points toward several promising avenues for future inquiry. First, there is a need for more empirical research examining how valuation practices operate within planning processes and how they influence development outcomes. Second, greater attention should be paid to the institutional and regulatory frameworks that structure interactions between planning authorities, developers, investors, and other stakeholders. Third, comparative research across planning systems can shed light on how different institutional arrangements shape value creation and distribution in urban development. Such work would help clarify the conditions under which planning institutions are able to steer development processes toward more equitable and sustainable outcomes.

For planning practice, these insights underline the importance of strengthening the strategic capacity of planning institutions to engage with property markets and financial actors. This involves not only refining regulatory instruments but also developing institutional capabilities to understand investment logics, negotiate development conditions, and articulate alternative visions of value that extend beyond short-term financial returns. Planning education and professional practice, therefore, need to engage more deeply with the political economy of urban development and the institutional dynamics of value creation.

As urban development increasingly operates through fragmented governance structures (Taşan-Kok and Özogul, 2021), the capacity to understand and influence value creation processes is essential to planning’s commitment to the public interest (Kady, 2026). This special issue offers a foundation for that work by illuminating the multiple dimensions through which value is constituted, governed, and mobilised. The contributions equip planning scholars and practitioners with conceptual resources to engage more effectively with the institutional and normative dynamics of urban development and to advance more just and sustainable urban futures. To respond to contemporary urban challenges, planning must integrate legal, financial, and procedural dimensions of value. Such a framework recognises the interplay between market logics, regulatory tools, and social outcomes, positioning planners not merely as regulators or technical managers but as strategic actors capable of shaping how value is defined, mobilized, and shared for societal benefit. Ultimately, this requires a shift from treating value as an outcome to be managed to recognising it as a process to be governed, in which planners play a central role in shaping the rules, relations, and distributions that structure urban development.