Land consolidation for large-scale infrastructure projects in Germany

Abstract

Large-scale infrastructure projects require the acquisition of appropriate land for their construction and maintenance, while they often cause extensive fragmentations of the affected landscape and land plots as well as significant land loss of the immediately affected land owners. A good practice in this field comes from Germany. In Germany, the so-called “land consolidation for large-scale projects” is used to distribute the land loss among a larger group of land owners and to reduce the damages caused by land dissection. In this article, the results of detailed analyses of the land consolidation for large-scale projects’ procedures in Germany are presented. The procedure is coordinated by the land consolidation authority, which has to check several formal and content requirements before implementing a land consolidation procedure. The needed land for the large-scale infrastructure project has to be provided by the owners of the land plots in the land consolidation area by selling it to the developer, by balanced land-loss following the land consolidation plan or relinquishment of re-allocation of particular land owners. The main objective of this article is to introduce and analyse the aims, requirements and procedure of German land consolidation for the purpose of land acquisition by large-scale infrastructure projects associated with remarkable spatial interventions.

Keywords

• land consolidation
• land reallocation
• infrastructure projects
• spatial intervention
• infrastructure
• land acquisition
• expropriation
• Germany