This article aims to relate intrinsic aspects of urban planning that are becoming increasingly important both within the international scientific debate and within urban planning tools. These aspects are land consumption and land value capture. Their centrality is given by the growing importance that in recent years have assumed the aspects related to the sustainable development of settlements. This article aims to summarize the main theories regarding the relationship between the efficiency of land use and the policies of capturing public value. The reference scenario is dictated by sustainable development policies that, if contextualized in the sphere of urban development, imply a rational use of resources to ensure the formation of resilient, safe, and inclusive settlements. This aspect introduces the existing link between urban form and sustainability. It is therefore understood how the achievement of the targets set at the international level are implemented in local urban policies. For this reason, many scholars have argued that the challenge of adapting to new pressures, such as climate change, necessarily means creating efficient urban settlements. The question becomes: which land use can be considered more efficient than the others? This article intends to answer this question by investigating the main theories that have tried to define the mechanisms and methods of comparison of different urban development scenarios. The article goes on to reconstruct the steps that have helped to evaluate urban development according to purely fiscal aspects up to the introduction of qualitative aspects related to public value. To do so, it analyzes the terms and tools related to the concepts of public value and the capture of public value and attempts to synthesize the main theories and research in the sector.