Muñoz Gielen and Tasan-Kok identify flexibility as a temporal relation between certainty, negotiation and development rights. Rather than treating flexible planning as inherently progressive, they ask when binding development possibilities become fixed relative to negotiations between public authorities and developers. Through case-based comparison of regeneration projects in the United Kingdom, Spain and the Netherlands, the paper links this sequencing to public-value capture: infrastructure, public space, facilities, affordable housing and portions of land-value uplift. Its iconic idea is that flexibility redistributes bargaining power. If development rights are secured too early, public authorities may lose leverage; if uncertainty persists too long, feasibility and investment can be undermined. The conceptual operation therefore converts “flexibility” from a stylistic planning virtue into an institutional variable with distributive consequences. The wider bridge is to regulatory economics and negotiation theory, where the timing of rights allocation determines who can appropriate value created by collective planning decisions.
URBANISM MEETS ART