Governing regional affordability:rethinking the production of affordable spaces across the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (MRA)

The Covid-19 pandemic has coincided with increased residential property investment outside the Amsterdam urban core and the ongoing departure of residents into its surrounding, more affordable metropolitan area. Underlying these developments, we have found increased regulatory efforts scattered across diverse public administration scales to improve housing delivery and access throughout the metropolitan region. Within these increasingly complex landscapes, we argue there is an urgent need to develop coordinated regional governance mechanisms to respond to fragmented regulatory efforts and dynamic residential investment landscapes to ensure long-term affordability and accessibility to housing across the region. We introduce an approach to affordability that centres on regional governance, moving away from popularized urban-centric interventions to affordable housing delivery and investment

Hybrid contractual landscapes of governance: Generation of fragmented regimes of public accountability through urban regeneration

In this article we explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities, which are influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. We specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest. We argue that within these complex contractual governance environments public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment, which contains context-specific characteristics set by the specific rules of public-private collaboration. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control. Moreover, our understanding of contractual urban governance remains vague and unclear due to very limited empirical studies focusing on the actual technologies of contractual urban development. By deciphering the complex hybrid landscapes of contractual governance, with comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil, we demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process

Brazilian urban porosity

Urban areas have spatial discontinuities, such as disconnected neighbourhoods, brownfield areas and leftover places. They can be captured by the metaphor of urban porosity. This article aims to highlight potential social consequences of urban porosity by creating a “porosity index”. We argue that these areas can provide capacity for flexibility, fluidity, and absorption in major cities, but that they can also be a source of fragmentation, disconnection, and isolation between different social groups, eroding the adaptive capacity of metropolitan systems. Porosity may thus have both positive and negative influences on the resilience of urban systems. Brazil’s rapid process of urbanisation over the last 50 years shows both these sides of porosity, which create treats and threats for its urban systems. This paper develops an analytical framework within which to study how porosity manifests itself in Brazilian metropolises, which helps to identify porosity in contexts of urban growth and decline. It uses statistical data from IBGE relating to 12 Brazilian metropolises to generate the proposed porosity index. Additionally, the paper discusses the added value of the concept of urban porosity in addressing urban resilience and briefly elucidates the issues and opportunities caused by discontinuities in the urban fabric in Brazil’s metropolises

Corrigendum: Alienated and politicized? Young planners’ confrontation with entrepreneurial and authoritarian state intervention in urban development in Turkey

TUBITAK (2219); TUDelft; Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment; Department OT

A Tale of Two Cities: Framing urban diversity as content curation in super-diverse London and Toronto

In major cities across the world policy-makers are searching for new ways to represent and govern their increasingly diverse populations.  In this paper we analyse the ways in which authorities in two global cities, London and Toronto, have drawn on corporate, public management, strategies as their principal mode of diversity governance.  In both we see a shift in policy making as a conscious attempt to reframe and re-imagine cities as corporate-like structures that can be conceptualised, represented, and managed through the lens of diversity management. In both cities specific representations of the city and its populations are curated to fulfil wider policy objectives. City governments present both as iconic centres of diversity, super-diversity or hyper-diversity, that embody and represent an era of progressive globalisation and new forms of contemporary cosmopolitan living.  The presence of diversity is celebrated and seen a key component of ‘success agendas’. This paper is based on empirical evidence derived from a policy-oriented research project in both cities.  Policy analysis and critical discourse analysis are conducted in both cities on the basis of review of policy documents at national, local and community scales, and interviews with policy makers. The paper first frames diversity as a technology of description, where we explain how diversity has become a curation strategy in public management within the framework of growing mobility of management frameworks and shifts in framing diversity in urban policies. We will then provide a comparative analysis of London and Toronto

Love thy neighbor? Remnants of the social-mix policy in the Kolenkit neighborhood, Amsterdam

In the mid-1990s, one of the main objectives of housing policy in the Netherlands was to stimulate the integration of diverse socio-economic groups through housing strategies, with the goal being to create social cohesion and to address the problems encountered in low-income neighborhoods. Existing literature has studied the impact of social mix policies and policy interventions, concentrating on such outcomes as the spatial consequences of these policies in post-war neighborhoods; macro scale transformations in social mix areas; or shared perceptions of community in gentrifying neighborhoods. Taking a different perspective, this paper studies the impact of such policies at the individual interaction level to assess whether social mix policies can lead to new forms of interaction between the existing residents and newcomers, and consequently, to further cohesion in the area or city from a broader perspective. The paper studies the interaction between new and former neighbors inside out in a special area, Amsterdam Nieuw West neighborhood, Kolenkitbuurt Zuidelijk Veld 1-2, which is recognized as being one of the most deprived neighborhoods in the country. The research of the Kolenkitbuurt case shows clearly that social interactions between the Dutch-Turkish and the new native Dutch residents have been limited to more casual or neither positive nor negative interactions