Preventive Measures in Urban Development Plans and Compensation

Abstract

The preventive safeguarding measures of municipal land-use plans constitute an institute of urban planning law which impose significant and substantial restrictions on land property rights, since they entail the imposition of conditions and limitations on its use, occupation, and transformation. It thus becomes essential to determine whether their provisions — or at least some of them — have compensatory relevance, that is, whether they may be regarded as genuine cases of “expropriation by sacrifice.”

As such restrictions are generally considered to have merely a conformative effect on the right of property, the purpose of this article is to examine the cases and circumstances in which the application of preventive measures should, exceptionally, give rise to compensation for the landowners subject to them, drawing, in the absence of an express legal framework, on foreign doctrine and case law, particularly German and Spanish.