Two technologies are converging and could make a huge impact on the search for policies that support sustainable land management, writes Tony Vickers.
Computer Assisted Mass Assessment (CAMA) within the property valuation field, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) more generally, have the capability of bringing the intangible reality of global and local economic landscapes to life.
Evaluating the potential of this new science, which I term term ’eco-morphology', is the task I have set myself in a research programme at England's Kingston University. The first stage is to establish what the current global state of the art of value mapping is, through a pilot survey of members of the World Congress of Surveyors, known by its French initials as ’FIG'.
Responses from 18 countries on four continents indicate that the predictions of the man who last did such a survey were right. In 1980, Christopher Howes (now, as Crown Commissioner, responsible for managing all the land owned by the British monarch) published the result of his own research on value maps, concluding: “Value maps will increasingly play a major part in research into causes and effects of changes in land and property values.
Howes had noted that, prior to 1980, value maps were generally compiled for one-off research and development projects. They were very labour-intensive to prepared without computers. He only rarely found value maps in connection with tax administration, because that would require them to cover the entire area of a tax authority.
Now, however, the countries surveyed almost all have computerised map and land ownership cadastres. All also have property taxes, with the majority valuing land separately from buildings, usually for a tax-related purpose but only rarely for a separate land value tax. About half already use or are implementing CAMA and all use GIS extensively.
Rudd Kathmann, of the Netherlands Council for Real Estate Assessors, states: “Value maps are used for analysing results of CAMA assessments and market developments. Professor Kauko Viitanen, of the Institute of Real Estate Studies at Helsinki University, says: “We are using many kinds of value maps in tax, statistics, market analysis, planning, etc. Chan Hak of the Hong Kong Lands Department claims: “Value maps would be widely used not just by government departments but also the private sector.
My own research has a UK focus. Countries have such a variation in their political, legal, cultural and technological status that it would be far too complicated to draw conclusions as to the cost effectiveness of value maps everywhere. In England we have a peculiarly secretive and disjointed collection of publicly held information about land, with different ministers responsible for different bits of the picture.
If the information could be brought together and maintained, the potential is there to discover the ’economic signatures' of all kinds of physical interactions between mankind and nature: from moving a bus route to assigning special status to a high school, even to predictions on the sea-level effect of global warming.
It seems to me that for governments to attempt the complex task of managing land use sustainably without developing and exploiting value maps, alongside land use and topographic maps, would be like weather forecasters denying themselves barometers. Just because measurement of air pressure is more difficult than measuring temperature and precipitation and the phenomenon is itself unseen, does not make it less important. Land values, as distinct from building values, are not created by the owner of a piece of land but by the entire community within which each site sits. Therefore there should be no privacy attached to land value maps: they are a reflection of the economic health and wealth of a community and not of individual effort. Land value maps can and ought to be in the public domain just like weather maps and street maps. The property industry and its clients effectively all of us ought to demand that much more research goes into exploiting CAMA and GIS to ensure that this happens.
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