Federico Savini

The de-contextualisation of land use planning through financialisation: Urban redevelopment in Milan

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.

Dilemmas of planning: intervention, regulation, and investment

Planning through processes of “co-creation” has become a priority for practitioners, urban activists, and scientific researchers. However, urban development still shows a close instrumentalism on goal-specific tasks, means, and outcomes despite awareness that planning should enlarge possibilities for social change rather than constrain them. The article explores the dilemmas of planning agency in light of the contemporary need to open spaces for innovative practices. Planning is understood as a paradox; a structural tension between organization and spontaneity. The article provides a detailed profile of three specific dilemmas stemming from this condition. We distinguish and conceptually explore the dilemmas of intervention, regulation, and investment in current practices. The article provides a specific understanding of today’s planning dilemmas, exploring the key notions of “space and time” in the intervention dilemma, “material and procedural norms” in the regulation dilemma, and “risk and income” in the investment dilemma. We suggest that planning practice today needs to make sense of these dilemmas, navigating through their extremes to find new contextualized forms of synthesis.

The Governability of National Spatial Planning: Light Instruments and Logics of Governmental Action in Strategic Urban 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.

What Happens to the Urban Periphery? The Political Tensions of Postindustrial Redevelopment in Milan

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.

Who makes the (new) metropolis? Cross-border coalition and urban development in Paris

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.

Political dilemmas in peripheral development: investment, regulation, and interventions in metropolitan Amsterdam

Todays 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 todays 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 Amsterdams 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.

Urban peripheries: reflecting on politics and projects in Amsterdam, Milan, and Paris

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 political governance of urban peripheries

Abstract 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.

Planning, uncertainty and risk: The neoliberal logics of Amsterdam urbanism

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.

Self-Organization and Urban Development: Disaggregating the City-Region, Deconstructing Urbanity in Amsterdam

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 Amsterdams 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.