Securing public amenities and city infrastructure: the case of value capture and municipal property formation in private-led development

Cities pursuing densification and compact growth must add social infrastructure, even as land becomes scarcer and more expensive. We examine vertical allocation as a tool for dealing with this challenge by creating municipally owned floors within predominantly private, mixed-use developments. Doing so requires upzoning existing parcels and using value uplift to compel developers to build public amenities. We argue that vertical allocation represents a form of municipal statecraft and property formation embedded in urban financialization processes. Rather than treating this practice simply as a conventional public-private partnership, we conceptualise it as an in-kind value capture instrument that converts high-value development and value uplifts into a durable municipal property asset. The relationship between the provision of these public amenities and additional development rights varies a great deal, reflecting a hybrid regime of statutory requirements and discretionary negotiation which creates long-term co-ownership, management, accessibility, transparency, and spatial-equity problems.