Lisbon, Jan. 16, 2025 (Lusa) - Engineer Pedro Bingre do Amaral believes that construction on rural land, approved by the government, transfers speculation on urban land to the countryside, where the construction rates in the plans allow for "19 million houses".
According to the forestry engineer from the Escola Superior Agrária of the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, in the municipal master plans, with an urbanisable perimeter, "there is land that hasn't been built on yet", abandoned, taxed as rustic, but "on this urban land, according to the building rates that are there, 19 million houses could be built".
The president of the environmental organisation Liga para a Proteção da Natureza (League for the Protection of Nature), who relies on data from the Portuguese Association of Urban Planners, has no doubts about the outcome of the law that allows rustic land to be reclassified as urban land for construction, through a municipal resolution: "What we're going to do with this is that, through taxation, we won't fight this speculation in land on the urban perimeter and we'll transfer this speculation to rustic land."
For the researcher, the amendment to the Legal Framework for Territorial Management Instruments (RJIGT) poses several risks, financially, urbanistically and environmentally, by preserving "a principle that has been destroying the country's property economy, or the economy of the territory, which is to keep the so-called urban capital gains in the hands of private individuals".
Urban capital gains are "the increase in value that a piece of land undergoes due to an administrative decision to change the land from rustic to urban", which can "easily multiply its value by 10, a hundred, sometimes even a thousand times".
"In Europe, everywhere, these urban capital gains revert to the public purse because they result from a decision by the public administration. The landowner retains the initial agroforestry value of the land. This makes the price of the land low and [...] the state retains this appreciation," with which it “builds public infrastructure and manages to make plots available at low prices” for construction, he explained.
"So, if the state is the only person who can subdivide - I'm not saying build, but subdivide - public land, the state can control land prices and, through that, bring down housing prices," he added.
On the other hand, he continued, by going back to the times "between 1965 and 2014, when building was authorised everywhere", we will "continue to build a dispersed, dysfunctional urban network, which has tremendous costs in terms of infrastructure maintenance and commuting".
"Because what we're going to have with this law is that we're going to go back to the days when urban developments were made according to the agricultural cadastral network," said Bingre do Amaral, advocating that the state, as is done in the rest of Europe, should “expropriate the agricultural land around the city at a fair price, which compensates for the loss of agricultural activity”, make the reparcelling and design “new neighbourhoods according to urban criteria, without being hindered by the agricultural network”.
By giving councils and municipal assemblies the power to reclassify rural land as urban for housing construction, the researcher acknowledged that the new law "further precipitates the end of the rural world", as the country has "around %" of its territory in shale and granite, with "land that cannot be ploughed", and the best agricultural land is "in the Lisbon and Tagus Valley area", a little "in the centre-west coast and in some veins" around Porto.
"As soon as the prospect of a landowner multiplying the value of his land by a thousand times with a subdivision licence hangs in the air, he immediately becomes disinterested in agriculture and forestry," he said.
"The land remains outside the agroforestry market. And so, as we already have little land suitable for agriculture, and those that are most suitable are the ones that will suffer the most from this price contagion, from the moment the law was announced, prices already started to rise," the researcher emphasised.
For this reason, Bingre do Amaral warned that with the amendment to the RJIGT, "apart from a fraction of the National Ecological Reserve and part of the classified areas", such as "the Natura 2000 Network and the National Network of Protected Areas", all "the other land will become potential building areas".
The law was published in the Diário da República on 30 December, after being promulgated by the President of the Republic. However, he considered the law to be "a significant twist [sic] in terms of the generic regime for land use and planning, at national and local level", but the BE, PCP, Livre and PAN requested parliamentary scrutiny of the decree-law that makes construction on rural land more flexible.
LFS/ADB // ADB.
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