Self-financing land and urban development via land readjustment and value capture

• A unique application of land readjustment for regional infrastructure.
• A 76 km ring road developed via 46 neighborhood scale LR plans.
• At regional scale, ring road was created, at neighborhood scale, 21,000 acres land was serviced.
• It is a case of self-financing development via land value capture without displacing land owners.
• This success story is a model for capital intensive urban infrastructure projects.

This paper is about a unique case of a 47 mile long ring road in Ahmadabad, India, planned and implemented using self-financing land readjustment (LR) technique. Uniquely, no landowners were displaced, while the road's 200' wide right-of-way (ROW) was reserved while land abutting the road's ROW was also developed in a self-financing manner. Forty six different – neighborhood scale LR plans were formulated, systematically planned, and spatially arranged to carve the road's ROW and service abutting land with infrastructure. This paper showcases how a regional level infrastructure asset can be created using the LR technique, and how rapidly growing fringe area can benefit using the LR technique. This case is becoming a new model for capital intensive road projects now in India, inspiring other financially constrained similar size cities to follow Ahmadabad's LR based ring road development model. The case study is useful for land management and planning professionals, especially those who are engaged with fiscally constrained and rapidly urbanizing cities of the developing world.