Development industry structure into the global era: The challenge for planning, cities and sustainability

Development ¡s a concentrated industry. Moreover, concentration is increasing and posing serious consequences for urban development and sustainability, which planners will struggle to deal with. One image of development is an industry dominated by large powerful players (sometimes trampling the rights of local communities and overriding the plans of local authorities). The other is a competitive, quasiDarwinian industry comprising many small players: the industrial economist's perfectly competitive industry. In fact both perspectives can be right industries can be simultaneously concentrated and have many firms. Industry structure is complex and variable in space, over time and between sectors. This is partly due to the unique nature of the industry and a combination of many diverse factors. Development offers opportunities and advantages for both large and small firms and almost anyone can be a developer given the right circumstances. Markets in land are spatially limited and so all developers enjoy some degree of spatial monopoly. Also, developers enjoy some degree of monopoly power in different sectors and, increasingly, within submarkets within those sectors. Some try to specialise in submarkets, for instance in the residential sectors in second home buyers markets or investor sub-markets, and by various means attain some degree of monopoly power and power to exclude entry to competitors in such markets. The current trend to greater product differentiation and some attempts at branding in development markets are manifestations of these phenomena. Because of the development industry's uniqueness, it is extremely difficult to gather appropriate data and measure concentration in standard measures. My research piecing together data from thousands of DAs just scratches the surface. So far it shows that even where there may be many developers in an area and sector, output may be concentrated in few hands.