Governmentalities of land value capture in urban redevelopment

Major urban redevelopment projects entail the drawing upon and coordinating of vast resources including land, capital, and expert knowledge. At the core of urban redevelopment emerge policy instruments, including Land Value Capture (LVC), that smooth the way for desired project outcomes. This article explores three major urban redevelopment projects carried out by different coalitions of societal actors, often depicted as having irreconcilable interests and resources, in three Danish towns and cities—Aarhus, Aalborg and Køge. We suggest that a governmentality perspective, with its attentiveness to the rationalities and technologies activated in governmental projects, helps us to interrogate the ways in which the interests and resources of different actors are mobilised and reconciled for value creation in LVC based redevelopment. This paper argues that land value increment, central to LVC instruments, offers limited insight into accessing the success of, or ‘best practices’ in, LVC based redevelopment. LVC instruments create fields of action where the interests and resources of state and non-state actors can coalesce around broader, and some competing, ideas of value. Examining the conditions in which value is created, captured and used in LVC based redevelopment further challenges stereotypical views that depict the logics and practices of state and non-state actors as essentially antagonistic. •A governmentality framework highlights the central role of the state in processes of value creation in urban transformation•The idea of land value increment, dominant in LVC processes, offers limited insight in assessing LVC ‘best practices’•More holistic conceptualisations of value suggest non-antagonistic conceptualisations of state/non-state actor relationships.