Area development gets lost in its own travel guide

It has become an impressive and admirable book, the new Area Development Travel Guide 2026. In over 250 pages, this guide tries to capture everything: from force field analyses to the Didam judgment, from participation strategies to land exploitation.

Those who read it immediately understand why building in the Netherlands has become so painfully complicated. But something else also appears between the lines: a sector that is slowly beginning to realize that it has become stuck in its own system logic.

The authors describe that struggle honestly and carefully. That is precisely why the document sometimes reads like a mirror of a system that is making itself increasingly difficult to govern.

No blueprint, but a swamp

The travel guide acknowledges that there is "no blueprint available" for area development "anymore. The process has become an iterative search in a swamp of nitrogen, grid congestion, European regulations, legal procedures and climate adaptation.

What follows is a predictable reflex. The solution is sought in more process architecture, more governance, more assessment frameworks and more cooperation. As if a system that becomes structurally overloaded can be saved by drawing the roadmap in an even more refined way.

The paradox of the soft side

The most striking passage deals with the "soft side" of cooperation. It calls for trust, communication and connecting leadership. Area development is ultimately "people work," according to the authors.

But that is precisely where the legal shoe pinches. How do you build trust within a system that, at the same time, is fully regulated to exclude any form of risk? The government invites professionals to "go on a journey together," while constantly forcing them to treat each other as potential adversaries via Didam procedures, procurement rules and discussions about Article 23.7 of the Environment Act. The system demands cooperation but organizes distrust.

Steering for value instead of profit

At the same time, the travel guide is remarkably honest about where things go wrong financially. Projects get stuck because original landowners count with high speculative land values, while public investments in social tasks only become visible much later. The sector is actually saying here: our way of valuing is part of the problem.

In the end, the solution still lingers in process optimization. While just the opposite seems necessary. Not increasingly complicated customized constructions, but a few clear principles that remove the financial noise from area development:

1. Real valuation: Settle the land residually with the original landowner only when it is clear what can actually be built and what social quality is desired. The basis is the value at the moment before we as a society considered it important to give the land another purpose. Not speculating in advance on maximum yields, but valuing based on the final realized reality.
2. Focus on quality: Remove competition on price as much as possible from selection procedures. Providing clarity about budgets or minimum land bids in advance prevents quality from being supplanted by opportunism, speculation or haggling afterwards. Then the question shifts fundamentally. No longer: who offers the most financially? But: we choose the party who can realize the highest social value and quality within these financial conditions.
3. Predictable rules of the game: The guide rightly warns against the "Ferrari-Dacia dilemma": the tendency to pile up ever higher ambitions without clear financial and technical preconditions. But it is precisely this constant variation in local requirements, exceptions and consideration frameworks that makes building slow and unpredictable. It is not ambition that is the problem, but fragmentation. Those who work with uniform national indicators and a predictable selection framework enable scalability, standardization and industrial optimization. Precisely because of this, many of the perceived additional costs in future-proof building disappear.

Lost in the roadmap

It is ironic that we now need hundreds of pages to explain why building a simple street is almost impossible. The travel guide offers an impressive process guide. But as long as we remain trapped in managing complexity rather than simplifying the basics, the construction site will remain empty. Once everything is organized: the participation, the governance, the selection strategies and the legal procedures, we still need to build.

The author about this section

Directions is my way of taking the conversation about renewal in construction a step further. Not by shouting louder, but by looking more sharply. I write about what is going on under the surface: the assumptions, the systems and the choices that determine what we build and why. My ambition is to give direction to a sector that is always in transition, but unintentionally still thinks in old patterns too often. What systems are still holding back a construction that wants to be faster, more affordable and more future-proof?

Jan Willem van de Groep