The Need to Explicitly Identify (Unambiguously) to Determine How the Areas Would Be Used According to the Local Spatial Development Plan with Respect to Interpretation of the Concepts of the Blurred Definitions and General Clauses: Commentary on the Judgment of the Supreme Administrative Court of 13 February 2020, II OSK 893/18

Abstract

This commentary discusses the case of the assessment of the plan’s compliance with the study of land use conditions and directions of land development, the issue of interpretation of the concepts of the blurred definitions and general clauses, and in the context of all provisions, the essence of the local plan and its effects on the addressees of this act. Refraining from repeating the planning procedure to the extent necessary is a significant violation of the procedure for preparing the local plan and results in the annulment of all the provisions of the local plan relating to the areas designated in the plan for which the violation occurred. The obligation to specify the intended use of the land in the local spatial development plan means the necessity to specify the method of its future development and use through such expressions that clearly indicate what function a given area is to perform. This does not mean, however, that the same area cannot have different purposes in the plan, and thus it is unacceptable to establish different functions for one area. The condition for such a solution is to establish that these functions are not mutually exclusive and are not contradictory. The above argumentation indicates that it is unacceptable to use multi-significant terms in the text part of the plan that may lead to inconsistent results of their interpretation and pure arbitrariness of legal uses.