Urban inequality and the social function of land value capture: The credibility thesis, financing tools and planning in Latin America

The use of Land Value Capture (LVC) tools in addressing urban inequality is a much-debated problem. A vital aspect of this problem is how the effectiveness of these tools could be measured. To this end, the article focuses on the credibility of LVC tools and assesses this in terms of the extent to which these instruments successfully embody the social function of property. The theoretical perspective of the credibility thesis could be a fruitful approach for understanding how LVC tools materialize (or not) the social function of property. Based on this, the article analyzes whether LVC tools arose endogenously from the interactions between social actors or whether they were exogenously imposed thereby generating the emergence of non-credible institutions. To deal with this complex issue, the article employs a broad qualitative and quantitative dataset (i.e. court cases, interviews, surveys, government/corporate statistics and textual materials), as well as integrated methods including the Conflict Analysis Model (CAM) to measure conflict intensity; the Formal, Actual and Targeted (FAT) Framework to identify actors’ perceptual divergences; and the Credibility Scales and Intervention (CSI) Checklist to relate credibility to desired policy effects. As a case-study, the paper examines LVC tools in a socio-economically skewed metropolis in South America: Medellín, Colombia.