Reference: Sara Özogul (2020): Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Investigating
Planners’ Learning Experiences in Amsterdam’s Fragmented Governance of Property
Development, Planning Practice & Research.
Collectie
(7)
Planning and Property Dynamics (UvA)
-
Artikel
After the crisis is before the crisis: Reading property market shifts through Amsterdam’s changing landscape of property investors
Shifts in property markets are closely tied to changes in investment actors’ relations, shaped by wider economic and regulatory processes. However, the existing literature generally neglects the role of actors’ behaviour and agency within property market shifts, and how market shifts affect cities. In response, we establish a framework that systematically unpacks the role, characteristics and behaviour of property investors in investment market shifts within urban development. We consider market shifts as modifications to established economic and regulatory processes and argue that a multidimensional approach is required to understand property investors and their role within property investment markets that shapes the urban built environment. Empirically, we focus on Amsterdam’s changing investor landscape over the last 15 years. We investigate how crises, represented by far-reaching institutional disruptions of economic and regulatory systems, relate to Amsterdam’s landscape of property investors.
-
Artikel
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Investigating Planners’ Learning Experiences in Amsterdam’s Fragmented Governance of Property Development
ABSTRACT
Fragmentation in terms of institutional complexity and a multitude of governance actors involved in property development changes the nature of planning practice. I investigate how planners in Amsterdam, who operate as project managers, learn from interacting with property industry actors, and how their learning experiences travel beyond the project scale to instigate wider institutional change. Planners in Amsterdam struggle as the distance between municipal policy directions and development practices ‘on the ground’ grows. I argue that putting a human face on these governance intricacies and incorporating private sector considerations in literature on institutional change in planning becomes increasingly pivotal. -
Artikel
Fragmented governance architectures underlying residential property production in Amsterdam
While the entrepreneurialisation of local administrations is widely acknowledged, the extent and format of institutional and organisational structures that accompany market-oriented ideological shifts and transitions in urban governance often remain unnoticed. This article provides an original theoretical argument and frame of analysis to forensically study the underlying infrastructures of entrepreneurial governance systems. We argue that complex institutional and organisational arrangements in market-oriented urban development can be comprehended through fragmented governance architectures, a conceptual perspective that we borrowed from governance studies and operationalised in relation to property development. We illustrate the application of the framework by examining entrepreneurial transformations in Amsterdam’s residential property production. Based on rich empirical evidence, including discourse analysis, policy analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy and property industry actors, we illuminate divergent public-sector regulation of market activities, intra-organisational discrepancies, and fuzzy narratives in policy interventions which are tied to specific spatial interventions mushrooming in the city. Uncoordinated and sometimes contradictory institutional ties link public and private actors in these property production processes, forming a complex and chaotic landscape of regulations, actors, and relations. This fragmentation, we posit, warrants recognition as it lies at the heart of scattered investments in the urban built environment.
Source: Taşan-Kok, T., & Özogul, S. (2021). Fragmented governance architectures underlying residential property production in Amsterdam. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 53(6), 1314–1330. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X21996351
-
Artikel
Plurality of Expert Knowledge: Public Planners’ Experience with Urban Contractualism in Amsterdam
This chapter zeroes in on the role of the public planner when it comes to closing contractual deals with public and private sector partners in urban projects where neither public nor private sector actors can realize their objectives on their own, hence often a form of cooperation is established through a contractual arrangement. Little is known, however, about how public planners manage the contracting process and how their involvement in contracts may change their role. We argue in this chapter that the role of public planners has become more than just that of ‘professional elites’ or ‘technocrats’ in this era of urban contractualism. Even in more established and traditionally strictly coordinated planning systems like the Netherlands, practitioners have dynamic roles, they push boundaries, and they have transformative learning practices based on contracts. We seek to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how public planners’ learning reflects to their expert knowledge. The chapter will draw this dynamic picture based on the diversity in shifting positions of contract making, shifting dynamics in contract making, and safeguarding mechanisms.
Tasan-Kok, T., & van den Hurk, M. (2019). Plurality of Expert Knowledge: Public Planners’ Experience with Urban Contractualism in Amsterdam. In M. Raco, & F. Savini (Eds.), Planning and Knowledge: How New Forms of Technocracy Are Shaping Contemporary Cities (pp. 47-58). Bristol: Policy Press.
-
Artikel
Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration
Contemporary urban planning dynamics are based on negotiation and contractual relations, creating fragmented planning processes. On the one hand, they trigger technocratic forms of governance, which require the ‘legal instrumentalisation’ of planning in a piecemeal approach ensuring legal certainty. On the other hand, these processes require flexibility to enable easy, fast and efficient forms of implementation due to the increasing involvement of private sector actors in urban development. This article unravels the influence of these conflicting dynamics on the fundamentals of urban planning practices by focusing on changing public accountability mechanisms created through contractual relationships between public and private sector agencies. Dutch urban regeneration has demonstrated changing governance principles and dynamics in the last three decades. Representing instrumental and institutional measures, we connect accountability mechanisms to these changes and argue that they ‘co-exist’ in multiple forms across different contexts. This article embeds this evolution in wider theoretical discussions on the changing relationships between public and private sector actors in urban governance relative to the changing role of the state, and it addresses questions on who can be held accountable, and to what extent, when public sector actors are increasingly retreating from regulatory practices while private sector actors play increasingly prominent roles.
Tasan-Kok, T., van den Hurk, M., Özogul, S., & Bittencourt, S. (2019). Changing public accountability mechanisms in the governance of Dutch urban regeneration. European Planning Studies, 27(6), 1107-1128. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1598017
-
Artikel
Complex planning landscapes: regimes, actors, instruments and discourses of contractual urban development
This special issue provides a collection of articles that contribute to a better understanding of the complex dynamics of property-led planning and urban governance, not only by providing empirical evidence to illustrate the sophisticated regimes, actors, instruments and discourses involved in it, but also by offering new ways to understand private sector involvement in public planning.
Tasan-Kok, T., Atkinson, R., & Refinetti Martins, M. L. (2019). Complex planning landscapes: regimes, actors, instruments and discourses of contractual urban development. European Planning Studies, 27(6), 1059-1063. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2019.1598018 -
Artikel
One and the Same? A Systematic Literature Review of Residential Property Investor Types
This article presents a systematic literature review on residential property investor types in selected social science disciplines and critically evaluates the status quo of academic engagement within this diverse group of property market actors. A recurring critique in recent years has been the minimal acknowledgment of investor heterogeneity particularly in relation to urban development andthe financialization of housing. Yet, to date, there is no systematic evidence supporting these contentions. Therefore, we conducted an exhaustive literature review of residential investment landscapes through the Web of Science citation database in the following fields: Urban and regional planning, geography, sociology, urban studies, public administration, and economics. Following a meta-categorization of the results, we demonstrate how existing literature differentiates investors in terms of their spatial scale of operation, size and social composition, investment object and finance, or investment and social behavior.
Özogul, S., & Tasan-Kok, M. T. (2020). One and the Same? A Systematic Literature Review of Residential Property Investor Types. Journal of Planning Literature, 35(4), 475-494. https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412220944919