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The theory – and practice – of establishing autonomy from the hegemony of growth is central to the imaginary of degrowth. Yet to envisage pathways towards a degrowth society, scholars need to explain how autonomy coalesces into autonomous institutions. This article addresses this institutional challenge of how to secure autonomy in the provision of collective, affordable and decommodified housing in cities. Building on the tradition of autonomist and (post-)workerist thought, it conceptualises this challenge as one of maintenance. It argues that autonomy occurs through its perpetual reproduction, which is made possible by nesting and federating practices among autonomous communities. Nesting and federating practices allow these communities to avoid becoming enclaves and co-optation by market logics. The article illustrates these arguments through reference to the struggles of de Nieuwe Meent, a recent housing commoning project in Amsterdam. 摘要 从增长霸权中建立自治的理论和实践是去增长的核心。然而，为了设想走向去增长社会的道路，学者们需要研究自治如何结合成自治机构。本文探讨了如何确保城市自主提供集体的、负担得起和非商品住房这一体制挑战。基于自主主义和（后）工作主义思想的传统，它将这一挑战概念化。它认为自治是通过其永久性的再生产实现的，而这是通过自治社区之间的嵌套和联合实践实现的。筑巢和联合实践使这些社区避免成为飞地和市场逻辑的共同选择。本文通过引用de Nieuwe Meent所开展的斗争来说明这些论点，这是阿姆斯特丹最近的一个公共住房项目。

Circular economy and degrowth offer two different imaginaries for a future social metabolism: both seek to downscale waste and the demand for raw materials. Yet whereas degrowth proposes a circular metabolism to reduce consumption and production, mainstream circular economy sees waste as an opportunity for sustainable growth. This paper puts these two visions of circular futures into dialog. It unpacks the institutional dimensions of these two approaches, focusing on how they produce relations with and responsibilities to the future. It argues that the extent to which circularity can deliver its promise of reduction depends on the value that is ascribed to both present and future waste. This value is defined by the institutional conditions that regulate the responsibilities, geographies and conceptions of value mobilized in dealing with waste. The paper dissects three institutional shifts necessary for a degrowth circularity: from individual consumers to collective responsibilities in waste reduction, from global regional waste markets to bio-regional waste economies and from monetary to socio-ecological value of waste.

This article examines how the political economy of waste utility services is changing in response to circular economy programs. It focuses on the financial composition, economic position and geography of three sectors: waste recycling, incineration, and urban waste reuse. Building on an empirical analysis of these sectors in the Netherlands, specifically the Amsterdam city-region, it puts forward three key arguments. First, waste recovery corporations are becoming increasingly global and dependent on steady flows of waste. Second, incineration facilities play a central yet uncertain role in planning for the circular economy. Third, the circular economy is driving an emerging material reuse market in cities. The paper concludes by arguing that ongoing changes in waste markets run the risk of making (circular) economies even more dependent on wasteful consumption and production.

Responsibilities are a central matter of concern of environmental politics because they underpin regulatory frameworks of utility services. Yet, in scholarship concerned with sustainability transitions and governance, responsibility is reductively understood as a legal obligation or allotted task. Building on an institutionalist perspective, this paper conceptualized responsibility as a field of contention where actors negotiate, contest, and articulate what we define as subjectivist and collectivist responsibilities. Defining and using the concept of ‘fields of responsibility’, the paper analyzes how responsibilities (mis)match and contradict in controversial policymaking around the ‘circular economy’: a wide policy program for restructuring water, energy, and waste utility services and infrastructures in Amsterdam region. In so doing, it reveals the logic of contemporary environmental governance: in approaching climate targets, actors actively take on responsibilities while at the same time maintaining a conservative view of their role and responsibilities. We call these phenomena over-stretching and under-reaching.

Planning is political. It mobilizes a particular body of knowledge to address public concerns. The knowledge embodied in professional practice becomes political at the moment in which it is activel...

Over the last decade, degrowth has offered a concrete alternative to eco-modernization, projecting a society emancipated from the environmentally destructive imperative of competition and consumption. Urban development is the motor of economic growth; cities are therefore prime sites of intervention for degrowth activists. Nevertheless, the planning processes that drive urban development have yet to be questioned from a degrowth perspective. To clear a path for a degrowth urban agenda, this paper rethinks the institutions governing urban development in growth-dependent contemporary economies. It starts by problematizing the regional territorialization of economic competition, ideology of land scarcity, and institution of zoned property rights, which together make urban development an engine of growth. It then outlines three transitions toward urban degrowth, arguing for a regional imaginary of polycentric autonomism, a paradigm of finity in development, and care for habitability as principle of spatial organization.

Conventional wisdom holds that the circular economy will provide a sustainable pathway to economic growth. Advocates of circularity insist that maintaining economic growth, while simultaneously reducing both inputs of materials and outputs of waste, entails closing material streams in cities. This article examines the roots and legacy of these prescriptions in environmental policymaking. It argues that the circular economy represents a regime of eco-accumulation in which waste is main resource of production and consumption. Focusing on the legacy of circular economy policies in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, the article provides an account of the building of a nationwide green-growth urban agenda underpinned by the valorization of waste. It dissects three social, economic, and institutional processes and factors through which circularity takes shape: (a) the reconfiguration of the multi-level structure through which waste processing has been governed; (b) the promotion of a city-regional economy of micro-logistics and industrial manufacturing for waste materials; and (c) the centrality of households in producing and consuming waste in the urban environment. The article concludes by questioning the limits of an economy dependent on waste.

This chapter discusses the rise of a new technocracy in urban governance. It further argues that the shift to a new technocracy is leading to the re-fashioning of planning's core objectives and purpose from an earlier focus on the value of input-centred forms of deliberation, place-making, and social justice to an enhanced concern with output-centred agendas premised on expedited development and growth. The rolling out of entrepreneurial planning requires the employment of new governance technologies, such as quantitative systems of managerialism and the implementation of a multiplicity of codifications and models that are used to define urban problems and their solutions. The rise of a new technocracy is also reflected and reproduced by the expansion of increasingly complex landscapes of knowledge production. This co-evolution has been given additional impetus as the presence of more technocratic modes of governance carries advantages for policymakers and governments struggling to maintain their wider legitimacy in contexts of growing crisis.

To address the social, spatial and environmental problems of cities, planners often promote and engage with spatial practices that are intended to be experimental, innovative or transformative of existent processes. Yet, the actual nature of the novelty of these practices is often not explicit nor problematised by their proponents. This article develops an institutionalist framework to better appreciate the variegated nature of change in planning practices. It understands planning as embedded in, and simultaneously impacting on, three types of institutionalised norms: operational norms that define and allocate responsibilities among actors, collective norms that (re)produce planning polities and constitute the spatial-temporal context of their actions and constitutional norms that substantiate the idea of value defining the eligible stakeholders of a particular process. The article mobilises this framework and argues that contemporary planning practices convey a (a) shifting of responsibility towards individuals and households, (b) disaggregation of city regions through polycentric localism and (c) the reproduction of the process of accumulative valorisation of land. The article concludes reflecting on the complexity institutional change.

The circular economy is becoming a field of experimentation to trigger site-specific laboratories oriented towards connecting material flows and citizens&rsquo, practices. Despite their wide use, a critical perspective of the transformative paths of these Urban Living Labs (ULLs) is still missing. This paper compares the paths followed by two such experiments, one in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the other in Turin (Italy). To this end, we build an analytical framework that targets three dimensions: unconventionality, autonomy, and systemic impact on policies. We conclude that ULLs can take very different transformation paths over time due to a wide range of enablers and barriers. In Amsterdam there has been an assimilation in the neighbourhood as well as a transformative effect on an urban scale, while the case of Turin has turned out to be potentially transformative but also at risk of marginalization.

Technology-driven experiments—techno-experiments—have become a central mode of spatial intervention in a paradigm of smart growth. They are often considered a manifestation of a techno-managerial approach to governance, built upon the increasing influence of IT corporations on urban politics. Yet, there is little evidence indicating how these interests articulate techno-experiments and shape their legacies over the long run. This paper questions the varied politics of techno-experiments by comparing four projects in Stockholm and Amsterdam: two smart energy grid pilots and two online community-based platforms. Mobilizing the notion of the “social appraisal of technology,” it argues that techno-experiments can take different forms depending on how the role of digital technology is defined and negotiated by actors throughout the process of experimentation. The paper empirically shows that experiments can evolve in two main ways, defined as “whirlpools” and “mosaics.” As whirlpools, they upscale self-referentially; as mosaics, they instead extend into a set of scattered spin-offs. The key factors producing such outcomes, these cases show, are the form of partnership established at the outset of techno-experiments, and the ability of research funding and governmental agencies to steer projects as they develop.

Since the last decade, rising concern related to uncertainty in urban dynamics has encouraged alternative approaches to land development in order to reduce financial risks of public spending while stimulating new investments. In particular, municipalities are experimenting with more open-ended, incremental and co-produced forms of urbanism that aim to reform existent supply-led urban development models. This paper shows that these practices underlie a neoliberal reform of public spending and that they have important socio-political implications for urban welfare. By discussing the relation between uncertainty and risk, it shows that recent reforms of urban development policies do not reduce risk but rather reorganize it in two ways. First, by resizing the time horizon of action and prioritizing short-term delivery, and second, by simultaneously privatizing and collectivizing risk to individuals and public budgets. An in-depth analysis of recent reforms in Amsterdam public financing model is provided. This paper concludes that a risk-sensitive view of planning innovation is today necessary in order to address future socio-economic challenges of urban change.

Experimentation has become an increasingly dominant and celebrated practice in urban governance. Used by planners and policy-makers seeking to manage and organize a positive transition to a ‘better’ world, experiments are generally seen as desirable and even necessary to achieve this goal. The quintessentially political nature of this approach to urban change, however, remains insufficiently addressed in planning and policy literature. This paper argues that experimental agency entails a set of political biases and normative assumptions that deserve to be problematized. Critically building on the analytical insights of evolutionary theory, we develop a critique of experimental action, arguing that experiments express a ‘politics of niches’ which occur across three processes: the creation, selection and retention of emergent practices within established institutional orders. Using empirical evidence from contemporary practices in Amsterdam, we sketch four trajectories of niches: death, marginalization, assimilation and transformation. We conclude by reflecting on the political implications of experimentation for urban theory and practice.

The idea that cities are self-organizing systems, and that the state has a limited capacity to control and shape them, has gained momentum in the last decade among planning professionals, designers and politicians. Recent political discourse on new localism and liberal individualism builds on a similar understanding of cities, giving responsibility to citizens and their collective associations in light of state rescaling. The consequences of such perspectives for urban development have yet to be conceptualized. This article proposes a critique of the use of self-organization in policy practice, building on the argument that this concept destabilizes two constitutive categories of urban intervention: spatial boundaries and temporal programmes. In so doing, self-organization conveys two peculiar understandings of agency in city-regional spaces and of urbanity: the disaggregation of city-regions and the deconstruction of urbanity. Looking at the recent change in Amsterdam's urban development practice, I show that, while self-organization is used to emphasize that city-regions constitute interconnected systems of dynamics, when applied in policymaking it in fact leads to the disaggregation and fragmentation of urban regions. Moreover, while the capacity of self-organization to deconstruct codified notions of urbanity that frustrate urban relations is often celebrated, its use in policy produces newly exclusive urban fabrics.

This paper scrutinises the effects that the financialisation of land has on the land use planning process. Although finance is increasingly penetrating not only real estate but also land planning and development, there are few in-depth case studies describing and analysing this process. Contemporary urban development is characterised by the clustering of investments, the relocation of projects into peripheral areas and an instrumental approach to planning. These trends are expressions of a change in the development process, characterised by the increased detachment between land use planning processes at the local level and financial investor logics located at other scales. We call this the de-contextualisation of land capital. An in-depth analysis of the internal economic mechanics of an urban project in the Milan area is provided to illustrate these trends. We conclude by reflecting on the challenges that the conditions of financialised land capital pose to local and national governments.

Frameworks of environmental regulations are fundamental yet problematic factors in achieving climate mitigation and adaptation policy goals. Recent theoretical arguments claim the value of general legal frameworks to enable experimentation and contextual adaptation of policies. However, empirical research regarding the effects of both general and specific norms in the practice of urban intervention remains limited. In this article we empirically discern how city governments deal with the tension between control and flexibility in the implementation of urban climate change goals. We argue that policies of adaptation/mitigation face two types of implementation problems: non-adaptive implementation and non-implementation. The first stems from an excessively constraining use of rules, while the second derives from a too general and undefined regulatory framework. Analysing two empirical cases in Amsterdam, Netherlands and Boston, MA, USA, we conclude that there are three elements that affect the way actors deal with these deficits: the level of scale at which regulations are established, the degree of land ownership which provides margin of manoeuvre to public authorities, and the sense of political urgency behind mitigation and adaptation policies.

In Amsterdam, development contracts are increasingly used to provide legal certainty for stakeholders in land-use planning. Under changing conditions, they are more difficult to adapt than other legal frameworks. This paper investigates the legal articulation of certainty; it scrutinises how instruments of both public and private law are interacting with each other and how they limit adaptation in practice. Two cases from Amsterdam are presented to demonstrate that development contracts signed between governments and private sector developers are more rigid than zoning regulations in the face of changing circumstances. The paper concludes that, instead of deregulation, a careful articulation of different legal instruments can enhance adaptive capacity.

Experimentation and urban innovation are becoming central references in the discourses of local politicians and urban policymakers aiming to trigger spatial change in times of austerity. Emerging electoral parties and political groups frequently make use of symbolic references to advocate new urban agendas, especially when urban change has high socio-political impacts. This paper explores the relation between political change and spatial interventions by examining how symbols are used to carry out post-industrial urban development. Amsterdam North, once a historical stronghold of the Labor electorate, is today the living laboratory for liberal-progressive parties. Despite initial political dissent against transformation in the area, the planning approach employed in the redevelopment of North currently inspires a new urban agenda for the city. Looking at symbolic acts, languages and objects, we explain how this political change was conveyed through symbols that link past images of manufacturing industry and human labor to emerging narratives of creative urbanism and entrepreneurialism.

This chapter looks at how planners attempt to enable imagination in cities. It defines planning as those practices aiming at organizing the tension between the production of new imaginaries of cities and the existent context of institutionalized imaginaries, encapsulated in systems of rules, codes, physical artifacts, and existing meanings of place. The main argument is that the emerging repertoire of imaginative planning practices, broadly categorized under the approach of the “urban living laboratory”, reproduce three problematic logics of imaginary production: the orientation to experimentation, the instrumental design of processes, and the artificial spatial and temporal isolation of imagination from existing institutions. These practices are seen as both the result and source of an emerging market of commodified future-building. This is represented in the profiling of future-building agencies and services, which are primarily concerned with substantiating a future as a product of a process, a substance, or goal. In conclusion, this chapter suggests that these approaches to imagination inevitably frustrate imagination, turning it into a crafted task of addressing problems “here and now”, and that they fail to capture the long-term urgency of radically rethinking urban socio-economic processes.

In this paper we question the political and financial drivers of urban development in the contemporary context of multiactor and multilevel governance. We focus on the processes that drive spatial planning and large-scale development projects in the inner periphery of three metropolitan areas: Amsterdam, Paris, and Milan. Peripheral development is conceptualized as the outcome of the realignment of three major sources of urban power: the national government, the core city, and large market investors. Early research has largely demonstrated how each of these elements influences metropolitan transformations, often separately, with special focus on economic logics of development. We propose to instead empirically investigate the political drivers of the changing relationship between these three powers. Focusing on three particular projects, we show how different spatial outcomes of peripheral development spring from a particular articulation of the relationship between the three sources of power. These relationships are pinned over electoral strategies of power consolidation, political confrontation between emerging parties, and their (dis)connections with business interests.

The paper introduces the challenges of this theme issue with regards to the dilemmas of political governance in upcoming urban peripheries. While becoming more and more topical in processes of urban transition and ongoing rescaling, urban peripheries struggle with the gap between the potential of new centrality and the consolidated sociopolitical marginality. The authors highlight the dilemmas of transforming subjects in the urban periphery positioned in asymmetric contexts of political power (the central city, the state, and the market). Furthermore, they set the agenda for the investigation of politically constructing cross-border planning within metropolitan areas.

Practices of urban activism are increasingly viewed as a new form of engaged citizenship. Because of their insurgent and informal nature, however, these initiatives are at risk of marginalization from exclusionary urban policy processes. Employing the concept of social capital, this paper analyzes the internal organization of two activist communities and their capacity to connect with and influence public and formal institutions. Through a cross-national comparison of two case studies, we show that such groups are likely to achieve end goals when they feature selective membership, maintain a common purpose and identity, and make strategic use of intermediaries and experts to create bridges to external institutions and resources. We conclude by arguing that, today, urban activists face a fundamental trade-off between inclusiveness and instrumentalism.

Today's metropolis is polycentric. Core city borders are undergoing major transformations and the urban periphery is becoming an attractive area for investment as well as an experimental ground for planning innovation. Yet, its development entails deep political tension. This paper starts from the assumption that the role of political dynamics and political agendas of elected groups is under-investigated in today's spatial planning research, even though they are crucial in enabling innovation in times of economic change. This paper contributes to this field of research in two ways: first, it conceptualizes the political challenges for planning into three major dilemmas: over approaches to spatial investment, over regulation, and over spatial interventions in the periphery. The paper then empirically demonstrates that to address these tensions in spatial planning there is a need to consider more fundamental political issues over future city-regional agendas. Examining recent transformation efforts in Amsterdam's northwestern areas, where industrial, housing, and environmental change all conflict, the paper shows that these dilemmas are attached to broader political questions over growth strategies, the meaning of regulation, and the role of governments in land management.

This paper investigates the change of the urban periphery, exploring the tension between the socioeconomic, financial, and political implications of postindustrial transitions. It presents and elaborates an analytical framework to conceptualize the interlocked influence of different dimensions of urban development in smaller municipalities, considering in particular how political and electoral dynamics impinge on other aspects of land development. In the article, three types of challenges are thus identified. The paper adopts an explorative approach to detect how political and electoral logics of action affect urban development in the changing periphery. It thus advances that under conditions of metropolitan fragmentation, urban projects are prone to lengthy gridlocks of localistic bargaining, and local governments are unable to fully govern the fundamental challenges of land development.

Neo-liberalism and decentralisation are eroding the capacity of central governments to implement their national spatial objectives. National government, with fewer financial and political resources at its disposal, has little power to intervene in strategic urban development, because cities have sufficient autonomy to define their own land use plans. This paper challenges this understanding of the contemporary condition of national spatial planning. It demonstrates that, although national governments have a weaker grip on local spatial dynamics, they play an active role in governing complex spatial development. Two urban development projects in the Dutch Randstad will be discussed in order to demonstrate empirically four different logics of involvement: endorsement, monetary impulse, propulsion and effectuation. It is concluded that there is great potential for national planning in a ‘lighter’ profile, with instruments used to strengthen the interconnectivity of networks—a condition for generating strategic capacity and ensuring the governability of spatial policies.

This city profile provides a multi-dimensional overview on the most recent social, economic, political and spatial changes in the city of Amsterdam. We map the social-geography of the city, discussing recent housing and spatial development policies as well as city-regional political dynamics. Today, the city of Amsterdam is more diverse than ever, both ethnically and socially. The social geography of Amsterdam shows a growing core–periphery divide that underlines important economic and cultural asymmetries. The tradition of public subsidies and regulated housing currently allows for state-led gentrification within inner city neighborhoods. Public support for homeownership is changing the balance between social, middle and high-end housing segments. Changes in the tradition of large-scale interventions and strong public planning are likewise occurring. In times of austerity, current projects focus on small-scale and piecemeal interventions particularly oriented to stimulate entrepreneurialism in selected urban areas and often relate to creative economies and sustainable development. Finally, underlying these trends is a new political landscape composed of upcoming liberal and progressive parties, which together challenge the political equilibriums in the city region

In fragmented agglomerations, urban development in peripheral areas tends to express the hegemony of the core city over its suburbs. However, this paper demonstrates that, despite deep-rooted political conflicts, intermunicipal cooperation can still take place in the context of cross-border development. I argue that cross-border development has a political and economic logic that is driven by a different power configuration in the metropolis: cross-border coalitions. These coalitions emerge when the redevelopment of areas around municipal borders provides an opportunity for political interests to strengthen their electoral alliances and for business interests to exploit possibilities of growth. This paper investigates urban development in Paris North East, an area on the periphery of Paris that crosses municipal boundaries. It examines how a coalition of public and private actors is cooperating based on the shared benefits they can derive from developments in this area. The case study captures the complex political and economic dynamics driving intermunicipal cooperation by examining the role of local political coalitions, their link with planning agencies, and the behavior of emergent metropolitan entrepreneurs. Keywords: intermunicipal cooperation, metropolitan governance, large-scale development projects

The spatial and socioeconomic development of the European Union (EU) member states is highly intertwined. Even though the EU has no official competence in urban or regional planning, its policies i...

La progressiva decentralizzazione dei sistemi di pianificazione territoriale e la forte riduzione di capacitŕ di spesa dello Stato centrale sollevano questioni importanti sul ruolo dell'attore sovra-locale nelle pratiche di trasformazione urbana. Questo articolo dimostra che un possibile valore aggiunto della pianificazione sovra-locale si realizza nell'utilizzo di strumenti di governance, che agiscono sull'organizzazione e attivazione di processi decisionali complessi. A fronte dei suoi recenti sviluppi istituzionali, l'Olanda č trattato come caso studio per comprendere la mutazione del ruolo del Ministero della Pianificazione, delle Politiche abitative e dell'ambiente nella promozione e realizzazione di interventi strategici sul territorio.

Enhancing local democracy and empowering communities in decision-making are top priorities of European political agendas. However, the abundance and heterogeneity of existing examples of inclusive practices have provoked an ongoing debate on the implications and outcomes that deliberation might generate under specific conditions. Among these practices, urban regeneration is usually welcomed as a vehicle for engaging communities in public decision-making; nevertheless, the specific participative settings designed to implement those programs tend to generate peculiar communicative dynamics, which can in turn lead to unexpected results. The specific manner in which participation is set up by local governments does influence empowerment results. This hypothesis is verified through a cross-case comparison of two neighbourhood regeneration initiatives in Copenhagen and Milan. The empirical results show to what extent issue-centred and structural models of participation differ in terms of the institutional devices they adopt, the type of participants, the nature of the controversies occurring, and the empowerment outcomes. Furthermore, participatory settings tend to reproduce institutionalized practices of interaction between third-sector agencies, voluntary associations and public authorities. Specifically, consolidated third-sector regimes in Denmark and Italy tend to influence the devices that their local governments adopt in order to engage local civil society.

Burgerparticipatie in stedelijk regeneratiebeleid moedigt de betrokkenheid van buurtbewoners in besluitvormingsprocessen aan. In dit artikel wordt bekeken hoe de organisatie van het participatieproces de graad van bereikte ‘empowerment’ beinvloedt.