Candel examines how Swedish municipalities use public land development and negotiable developer obligations to produce forms of value that exceed infrastructure cost recovery. Across five sustainability-profiled districts, developer obligations are used to pursue ecological, social-cultural, political and economic public-value outcomes, often through requirements for innovation, learning, collaboration and new sustainable practices. The article’s iconic contribution is to widen the object of value capture: the relevant output is not only revenue or physical infrastructure but a multidimensional public-value field. Methodologically, the study compares municipal practices and stated objectives across distinct district developments, using interviews and project documentation to trace how obligations are attached to publicly controlled land. A productive tension remains unresolved: some obligations clearly create public benefits, yet it is difficult to identify precisely which value increment they capture beyond what may already be capitalised in land prices. This ambiguity is theoretically important. The bridge to planning governance lies in showing that public landownership can become an institutional platform for experimentation, coordination and value definition rather than merely a fiscal asset.
