Across much of Central and Eastern Europe, the post-1989 liberalisation of markets produced a model of urban development in which private investment largely determines the pace—and often the direction—of urbanisation. Historically compact, transit-supported post-socialist urban forms now face a paradox. While market liberalisation occurred rapidly, the adaptation of regulatory and financial tools that could steer market forces towards the public good lagged far behind. This created an institutional gap: post-socialist metropolises are rapidly catching up with the problems of Western cities, but without the robust regulatory frameworks found in countries such as Germany or the Netherlands.
A central issue in this model is the externalisation of burdens: developers focus their resources on vertical construction (residential and office space), while the costs of the necessary horizontal expansion of infrastructure are socialised and passed on to municipalities. Land-use plans, which should form the backbone of strategic development, become negotiation arenas rather than binding documents. Developers continually push for changes that increase building density (which is not inherently negative), raise height limits, or alter land use.
The outcome is a vast and growing “infrastructure debt”: a long-term deficit in investment into roads, high-capacity public transport, green spaces, and particularly measures for climate adaptation and improved air quality. Property profits are immediate, yet the public infrastructure required to support this development lags far behind.
The consequences are most visible in mobility and quality of life. Bratislava, like other metropolises in the region, faces a critical contradiction: the city’s strategic documents commit to the idea of a “city of short distances”, while the prevailing development model does the opposite—concentrating jobs and housing into narrow, high-density clusters. This concentration generates systemic traffic collapses, severely worsens air quality (especially NOx and particulate emissions), and forces thousands of people to commute across the city daily, undermining the city’s own strategic plans. Instead of reducing transport-related emissions, planning practices paradoxically generate more of them.
This dynamic reveals that public planning is on the defensive. While high real-estate value is inseparable from existing public investment in accessibility, private profit becomes the direct result of exploiting the value of a public good without adequate reinvestment. The primary function of the land-use plan is thus reduced to moderating the extent of profit-maximisation rather than proactively steering development and securing financing for citywide infrastructure.
When the Suburbs Deepen the Paradox: From Short Distances to Long Journeys
While much of the debate on “infrastructure debt” focuses on developments within the city, the true paradox of the “15-minute city” vision lies in uncontrolled suburbanisation. This phenomenon is the second pole of tension between the market and planning. Satellite towns and villages around the metropolis respond rapidly to housing demand, but they perfectly illustrate the shift of profits into the private sphere and costs onto the public.
A developer collects profit from the sale of a house, but the costs of roads, sewage, schools, or public transport fall on small, often underfunded municipalities. This “satellite debt” means that every new family moving to the edge of the city becomes a potential daily commuter returning to the metropolis each morning for work and services. Satellite developments dramatically increase traffic pressure on the arterial routes into the city, leading to massive air pollution along key urban corridors and undermining sustainable planning efforts. The result is a network of “bedroom communities” that are socially homogeneous, car-dependent, and often lack basic amenities, while consuming agricultural land. Expanding development into the countryside damages valuable ecosystem services and reduces the region’s natural resilience to rising temperatures and drought. The city grows not only inward but outward, transforming the metropolitan area into a “city of long journeys”.
In response to collapsing traffic, the most common demand is for more bypasses and new motorways. Yet these billion-euro investments are merely a treatment for symptoms, not causes. According to Braess’s paradox, new road capacity induces additional demand: the easier it becomes to drive, the more people choose to drive, and the further from the centre they buy homes. New roads thus quickly refill, shifting or worsening the problem. Bypasses make commuting from satellites easier, encouraging further peripheral construction and deepening car dependence. Moreover, resources spent on road building drain funding that could be used for critical public transport, schools, or green infrastructure essential for climate adaptation.
Breaking the infrastructure debt and the tension between market forces and the public interest requires a radical shift in transport priorities and a major change in mobility standards—both of which are necessary for climate mitigation. Public transport remains the most efficient, sustainable, and affordable way to move large numbers of people. Car dependency and uncontrolled suburbanisation are among the largest urban sources of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution, contradicting EU climate goals.
If we want to address the chaos created by satellites and suburbanisation, the solution must extend beyond municipal boundaries and involve the state and regional authorities. If cities want to avoid endlessly chasing traffic congestion with new roads that quickly clog again through induced demand, they must invest heavily in regional public transport. Although the Bratislava Integrated Transport system formally exists, its effectiveness and coverage are weak, leaving many satellites cut off from services. This failure is the strongest argument for strict regional regulation of future development. The priority for the state and regions must be to halt satellite expansion in areas without a pre-existing, fully functional public transport network and basic public amenities. Instead of perpetual negotiations with developers, a new principle must apply: “infrastructure first, construction second”.
Transport as the Core, Not the Backdrop: The Financial Paradox of a Subordinated Transport Hub
A striking example of the tension between private capital and the public interest is one of Bratislava’s major transport-commercial complexes. Combining an international bus terminal with a shopping centre and offices, it was presented as a modern urban node. Yet its realisation has become a case study in the risks of subordinating vital public infrastructure to commercial dominance.
A key issue is architectural and functional subordination: the bus terminal, a critical public asset, was placed underground, physically and symbolically beneath the profitable retail and office spaces above. While the combination of transport and commerce is desirable and essential for good urban development, this project inverted the hierarchy of priorities. Secondary commercial interests (retail and real-estate profit) disproportionately influenced the primary public interest (transport efficiency and speed).
The dilemma becomes clearer in the operating model. The private operator charges bus companies for using the terminal’s platforms. Since the regional authority reimburses public-service transport operators for verified losses, these fees become part of the operators’ eligible costs—and are therefore paid from public funds. Thus, public money indirectly covers the running costs of a privately managed complex. Instead of profits generated by transport flows being reinvested into transport infrastructure (as intended in TOD systems), commercial interests monetised the essential public transport function, reversing the principle of value capture.
Carriers and the regional authority have also complained about insufficient platform capacity, which resulted from the operator reducing the station’s area compared with the original layout—justified by alleged under-utilisation. A more serious issue is likely air-quality deterioration in the underground terminal, which poses health risks to passengers. Measurements in the Branisko road tunnel have shown how dramatically pollution levels rise inside enclosed vehicle spaces. Nitrogen oxides and particulate concentrations become many times higher than in the open air, even with ventilation systems operating. An underground bus station functions on the same physical principles: an enclosed “trap” filled with vehicles with combustion engines. Without extremely robust air-cleaning technologies, waiting passengers are exposed to a concentrated cocktail of emissions similar to those in a tunnel.
These factors reveal that a commercial operator, motivated by retail and office profitability, has little incentive to allocate expensive space to a low-margin but essential public transport function. This illustrates how easily public transport infrastructure—meant to be the backbone of development and a generator of value for its own maintenance—can become subordinate to private gain. The problem is not the specific project, but the wider system in which the city, region, and state merely react to developments instead of driving them, deepening the infrastructure debt with every new project.
The Japanese Lesson: Railways as Developers and the Return of Value to Transport
At the other end of the world, a radically different and highly successful institutional model shows how transport and urban development can advance together. Japan’s long-standing Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) system treats public transport not as passive infrastructure but as the engine of urbanisation and economic value creation. In simple terms: transport routes create cities, not the other way around.
The key lies in institutional design and the principle of circulating investment and profit. Japanese railway companies are not merely operators—they are major real-estate developers acting as “Master Developers”. Their business model is based on long-term, generational planning that integrates transport and property into a single system. When planning a new line, companies buy land along the future route in advance and later develop residential districts, shopping centres, office buildings, and leisure facilities.
This allows them to internalise the positive externalities of public infrastructure and apply land value capture (LVC): mechanisms ensuring that the increase in property value generated by public investment (especially transport) returns to public budgets. The logic is simple: if society pays for a new tram line or park that increases the value of adjacent private properties, part of that value must return to the public purse.
In Japan, profits from real-estate development are reinvested directly into the railway system—into maintenance, upgrades, and new infrastructure. Instead of draining public money to support private operations (as happens in Central Europe), commercial success helps fund public transport, creating a self-sustaining cycle. Transport becomes an investment, not a cost. This model works both in dense city centres and suburban areas.
Europe’s Path to Balance: Legal Tools for Value Capture
European cities are gradually seeking ways to restore balance between private capital and the public interest and to address the growing infrastructure debt. As in Japan, the central concept is land value capture.
This shift is driven partly by stringent EU climate targets. Reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 90% by 2040 and reaching climate neutrality requires a radical departure from car-centric urban planning. Public transport is becoming a main tool of decarbonisation, demanding robust, sustainable funding.
In the UK, legal tools require developers to contribute to schools, parks, or transport projects. These contributions must be proportionate to the burden created by the development. Germany’s models (e.g., in Munich) require up to 40% of housing in new developments to be affordable or public, making LVC a tool of social inclusion. Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Austria rely on strong public land ownership, enabling municipalities to buy land before infrastructure is built and later sell the upgraded land to finance development.
The Danish model is a particularly successful example. The Copenhagen Finger Plan (1947) channels development along public transport corridors while protecting green wedges between them. Denmark’s metro was financed through LVC: a public corporation borrowed against expected increases in land value, built the metro, and repaid the loan by selling upgraded land to developers.
Bratislava is beginning to respond to its own infrastructure debt. The Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava introduced a new methodology for cooperation with developers, shifting from ad-hoc “voluntary donations” to transparent contributions tied to specific public projects such as tram lines, parks, or schools. This is an important step, though binding LVC tools will be necessary to ensure automatic financial responsibility regardless of negotiation outcomes.
Changing Mindsets and Institutions: Master Developers and Land Readjustment
Sustainable and resilient urban development requires a shift not only in rules but in institutional logic. The public sector must be an active partner—planning, investing, and recapturing part of the value it creates.
A key challenge in Central Europe is securing land for new transport corridors. Land readjustment offers an effective solution: consolidating fragmented development parcels into larger units, reallocating land for public purposes (roads, green spaces, transport links) in exchange for the overall increase in value that results from public investment.
One promising path is the creation of strong municipal or regional Master Developers, similar to those in Denmark or Japan. These institutions would coordinate construction, transport, and financing—not to maximise short-term profit, but to create long-term public value.
Crucially, the order of operations must be reversed: transport first, development second. High-density construction should be allowed only where high-capacity public transport already exists or is being delivered in advance.
Transparent, predictable rules for LVC and land readjustment reduce uncertainty for long-term investors and can significantly speed up permitting by eliminating prolonged negotiations. The shift from short-term returns to long-term, generational thinking is essential if transport is to become a genuine driver of sustainable urban development.
Transport as a Generational Investment: A New Social Contract Between Cities and Capital
Urban development is not merely an economic question but a cultural one—it concerns how a society defines and finances its public spaces. The Slovak experience, contrasted with Japan’s, clearly shows that sustainable cities depend on re-evaluating the role of transport infrastructure: it must be seen as an active generator of public value rather than a passive, costly add-on to private development.
The crisis illustrated by commercially driven transport hubs—where public money indirectly subsidises private operations—is a symptom of reversed planning logic. Cities must reclaim their role as the primary architects of growth.
This transformation is no longer just about economic efficiency but about health and climate resilience. Car-dependent suburban sprawl creates congestion and is one of the largest local sources of greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution. In the context of the EU’s climate-neutral ambitions, transport becomes a key mitigation tool. And infrastructure debt becomes a public-health threat.
Land-use plans must serve adaptation and mitigation. High-density construction should be allowed only where high-capacity public transport is already ensured. Meanwhile, value captured from development must fund green and blue infrastructure—parks, green roofs, and water-retention systems—essential for making cities resilient to heatwaves, drought, and extreme rainfall.
Robust LVC tools and a publicly controlled Master Developer could help align private investment with the public good. Critical transport nodes must be regulated to prioritise accessibility and capacity over commercial profit.
If this balance is achieved, cities can return to their original purpose: as collective projects that enhance quality of life, improve air quality, and strengthen climate resilience. Profit is not a problem—so long as part of it returns to where it was created: into streets, tracks, parks, and transport infrastructure.