The Interdisciplinary center for Behavioral EXperiments (IBEX) has been live since the start of 2024. Rutger van Bergem and Sander Renes – the co-founders and co-directors of IBEX – used the lab’s facilities to run its inaugural experiments involving new spatial planning rules.
The allocation of land to competing interests is a difficult process. In the Netherlands, we cannot allocate sufficient land to projects that drive the energy transition, we have a shortage in housing space, and the rise in housing prices contributes strongly to rising wealth inequality. The research project proposes new spatial planning rules to combat said allocation and inequality problems. We develop innovative land use rules and test those rules in an experimental setting. The experiments will be mediated by newly developed, open-source software that facilitates experimentation with the newly developed procedures.