Seeing the Trees, Missing the Forest: Why Public Planning Fails to Harness Social Value in Fragmented Urban Development

In contemporary urban development, “social value” has become a shared ambition across both public planning institutions and private property actors. From ESG dashboards to vision documents like Amsterdam’s Environmental Vision 2050, everyone claims to be working toward inclusive, healthy, and sustainable cities. Yet, when we examine the lived outcomes of these projects, the promised social value often dissolves into a fog of disconnected ambitions, shifting responsibilities, and unaccountable compromises.

Our recent study in the European Journal of Spatial Development, based on case studies of four major development projects in Amsterdam, shows that public planning organizations are increasingly unable to harness social value for the wider public interest. Why? Because property-led projects each develop their own isolated “value sets”, project-specific packages of aspirations and deliverables negotiated in silos. These are rarely linked across projects or embedded within a city-wide accountability framework. As a result, value is created, but it remains locked in: hyper-local, fragmented, and largely untranslatable across the urban fabric.

This is not just a coordination problem. It is a deeper issue of structural disconnection. Public authorities often assume that developers will internalize public goals simply because those goals exist in vision documents. But there is little follow-through. Our research found no firm or enforceable definition of “social value” in Amsterdam’s planning regime. The city’s ambitions remain abstract, allowing private actors to selectively adopt social aims, when convenient, and often only temporarily.

The planning process itself exacerbates this problem. As our earlier work on hybrid contractual landscapes (Taşan-Kok et al., 2021) shows, municipalities are caught in fragmented governance arrangements that blur public accountability. In such environments, each negotiation with a developer becomes a unique contractual moment, with its own logics, compromises, and trade-offs. There is no institutional memory. No baseline across projects. No mechanism to see the forest before the trees.

Crucially, the municipal role diminishes across the property development life cycle. While planners may help define ambitions during the early framing stages, their influence often evaporates during implementation and post-construction. Social value creation, especially in the operational phase, depends almost entirely on whether developers or investors choose to prioritize it. And they may, but only if it aligns with brand strategies or enhances resident satisfaction metrics. The wider public interest, those who are not direct clients or end-users, has no structured seat at the table.

This leaves city authorities chasing social value in the rear-view mirror. Surveys, dashboards, and “signals” from departments like Wonen may hint at outcomes, but they fail to capture how and why certain values were prioritized, or neglected, in the first place. Without regulatory teeth and without continuity, the idea of social value is performatively reproduced across projects but substantively lost.

If planning institutions truly want to harness social value, they must resist the temptation to treat each project as a standalone puzzle. Instead, they need to reassert themselves as stewards of the bigger picture, connecting value sets across space and time, institutionalizing long-term accountability, and defining the terms of value not just with, but for the public. Until then, public ambitions will remain fragmented echoes in a city built on private terms.