Cyprus is not short on good ideas. It is occasionally short on the courage to try them out loud. Elsewhere, governments, municipalities, employers, schools and institutions have already run the experiment: they tried the bold policy, braced for backlash, and mostly got a shrug and a thank-you instead. In this series, Politis to the Point brings those tested practices to Cypriot decision-makers with a simple, friendly nudge: the hard part, the actual risk-taking, has already been done by someone else. All that's left is the paperwork.
Every town has a plot like it: fenced off, overgrown, quietly forgotten. In England, councils have been taking these neglected corners and giving them back to the community as parks, and doing so in a way that does not leave the municipality carrying the cost. The land is reclaimed for public use, transformed into green space, and the investment sustains itself over time, without diverting money from other local services or asking residents to pay more.
A neglected plot given a purpose
The underlying idea is simple and has a name in planning circles: land value capture. When a council invests in an area, whether through a new park, a transport link or other infrastructure, the surrounding neighbourhood tends to benefit and improve alongside it. Government estimates have found that land in England granted planning permission for housing can rise in value from around £23,000 per hectare to roughly £2.67 million per hectare once its status changes, and research for Transport for London found that the Jubilee line and Docklands Light Railway extensions each lifted nearby land values by more than 20%. A council that acquires and improves land itself, rather than waiting for a private developer to do so, keeps that improvement working for the public rather than only for a private buyer.
The scale of the benefit has been measured directly in several cities. One study estimated that Philadelphia's 10,000-acre park system adds around $220 million in additional assessed value to the homes around it, feeding back into the city's tax base and, in turn, its public services. In New York, homes within 500 feet of a park carry an estimated $15.2 billion in extra combined property value, generating roughly $101 million a year in additional property tax revenue that supports the city. Decades of research into what economists call the "proximate principle", tracing back to an analysis of the impact of Central Park itself, has examined around 30 separate studies and found the pattern holds widely: the additional tax paid by nearby homeowners is often enough, on its own, to cover the annual cost of building and maintaining the park, meaning the community gets the green space permanently, without it becoming a recurring drain on the municipal budget.
How England is putting this into practice
England's Pocket Parks programme has turned this principle into a running, funded scheme dedicated to giving communities exactly this kind of green space. Since launching in 2016, it has funded 352 grants, creating 146 brand new parks and reviving 206 derelict urban plots for public use, land that was previously either unused or actively neglected. Islington Council, one of London's most densely built boroughs with very limited room for green space, went further still in 2022, establishing a formal Green Finance for Islington Pocket Park Framework as part of its wider Greener Together Programme, specifically to make sure these community spaces could be funded sustainably and expanded, rather than remaining one-off projects.
England's parliamentary committees have separately examined how to extend this approach further. A cross-party inquiry into land value capture has looked at whether existing tools, such as the Community Infrastructure Levy and Section 106 planning obligations, do enough to ensure that the value created by public investment and planning decisions benefits the public that paid for it, rather than being captured entirely by private landowners. Analysis by the property firm Savills found that developer contributions and public land sales currently capture only around half of the total uplift in land value generated in England, which the committee's work suggests is an argument for councils to take a more active role, not a less active one, in shaping how their neighbourhoods develop.
Proven well beyond England, too
The same principle has taken root in different forms elsewhere. In Atlanta, in the United States, the city funded the BeltLine, a 22-mile greenway and park corridor built on a former rail line, through a tax allocation district that channels the new tax revenue generated along the corridor back into the project itself, so that the community's investment in the space is continually renewed by the value it creates. Chicago has used a related tool, tax increment financing, where a district's tax base is fixed at the point a scheme begins, and the growth in revenue above that base is reinvested locally, into parks as well as infrastructure and other community facilities.
In Germany, the city of Leipzig transformed a former industrial brownfield site into what is now Lene-Voigt-Park, and researchers who studied the change found it became a genuine catalyst for the renewal of the surrounding neighbourhood, restoring both the physical and social fabric of the area around it. More broadly, research into urban regeneration across France, the Netherlands and Germany, countries that place strict limits on how much undeveloped land can be built on, has found that well-planned green regeneration can lift the vitality of an area not only within the reclaimed site itself, but for up to two kilometres beyond it.
What it would take in Cyprus
Cyprus has its own share of overlooked land: disused industrial plots, forgotten corners at the edges of growing towns, sites that currently serve no one. The English model suggests a municipality does not need a large budget or a new tax to change that. It needs the will to reclaim a neglected plot on behalf of the community, invest in turning it into a lasting public space, and trust that the benefit it creates, socially and economically, will go on sustaining it.
The idea is proven. The only thing left to decide is who picks it up first.
Have a good practice worth bringing home? If your country, company or institution does something Cyprus should be trying, we want to hear about it. Send your ideas to peggy.s@politis.com.cy - the next instalment of Proven Elsewhere could be inspired by you.
