ABSTRACT
Planners’ aims to develop sustainable cities often conflict with the priorities of land developers and consumers in the local government’s decision-making arena. In balancing these demands, municipalities often fail to resist development interests, and they change the regulations, in particularly because they themselves compete with their neighbouring authorities for jobs and inhabitants. Although this is explicable from local government’s individual rationality, it often results in suboptimal situations at the regional level. An example is the over-abundance of office space and planned new office capacity in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. This can be characterized as a lock-in situation in planning.
