Water neutrality and housing in the Dutch water-metropolis

According to current social theory, global economic, political, social-cultural driving forces are reshaping the way we organize our production and consumption. This would result in the dawn of the era of the New Geography. This might explain that in Western Europe the countryside is changing rapidly into an arena in which many different stakeholders compete for the land and the countryside becomes multifunctional in time and space. In this contribution, we will focus on one challenging aspect of these dynamics: the combination of an attractive developed (pseudo) countryside, housing development and water-retention in the urbanized Netherlands. The challenge is to design an attractive and multifunctional area that is affordable for the state, for developers and the final consumer. Each of these stakeholders makes costs-benefit analyses as a part of a general risk-assessment procedure. This assessment has become important in the Netherlands due to deregulation politics. So, the question becomes: who pays for public amenities with positive and negative spill-over effects? The National Institute of Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) is a state agency that develops and uses GIS-based evaluation models to assess risks. It noticed that the valuation of housing nearby water was lacking in its models. It commissioned the Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility studies to review literature on the methodological aspects of the assumed relationships and to estimate the part-utility/part-valuation of water nearby housing location. This estimation of the monetarized evaluation (valuation in UK-English and appraisal in USA-English, price) by the final users, the housing consumers, is a necessary step in this risk-assessment since the value must at least be equal to the public and private expenditures. We discuss a variety of methodological problems. We also suggest a switch from a market price equilibrium to a choice and preference equilibrium perspective. Using expert interviews and trade-offs of preferences in a multi-criteria/dimensional setting may overcome problems with conventional tools such as contingent valuation and revealed preferences methods (hedonic, travel cost and input output approaches). Accepting that the reality is complex and fuzzy may in fact turn into strength, as the analysis becomes more valid. We also question the vitality of present spatial analytical models. The basic weakness of the GIS-models is that they assume spatial objects to act, instead of regarding these objects as elements of an opportunity-set for stakeholders (agents). Multi-agent-models may seem promising means to combine the best of individual choice modeling and system-analytical GIS-models that link the micro-macro perspective.