This research addresses the shared housing market, that is, large-scale developments targeting students and 'young professionals', equipped with shared spaces and services for the residents. This housing segment has emerged in response to young adults' demand for flexible and affordable housing. It has developed in cities that concentrate students and young single professionals, plan densification strategies and face housing commodification. We specifically explore the production side of this market, through the comparison of two projects in Amsterdam. Our objective is to understand the institutional context in which these projects were developed and their outcomes. Consequently, the research questions are: which actors develop these projects, what instruments do they use, and what are the outcomes in a commodifying housing market? From our analysis, the actors need to collaborate on shared housing developments and receive support from local governments, through the strategic use of planning instruments and tenure regulations. However, the shared facilities seem to merely serve to commercialize small housing production, while housing affordability and accessibility are threatened. We, thus, recommend local and national authorities to regulate the provision of shared spaces and suggest further research on the effects of the shared housing market in cities facing housing commodification.
This paper addresses the governance of the 'live-work mix'. This concept refers to the renewed intertwining of living and working activities in new housing and urban development in the context of welfare state restructuring, development of the knowledge economy and globalisation. Implementing live-work goals can be difficult because a consensus between public and private actors is usually needed to develop such projects. In this paper, we examine the actors and instruments that assist in the implementation of livework goals in targeted areas. We survey live-work development by analysing three illustrative projects in Brussels and Amsterdam, cities with comparable strategies but distinct planning systems. Our results indicate that state support is essential to enhance live-work mix, especially because the market remains reluctant to mix functions and focuses primarily on housing development. Flexible and tailor-made instruments are used, sometimes co-authored by public and private actors, to reach consensus. These instruments illustrate variants of strategic planning. Despite a shared interest in attracting target groups to redevelopment areas, the consensus-building process is affected by discrepancies in the nature of live-work mix.
This paper examines the impact of institutional frameworks on ontologies of 'live-work mix', i.e., the renewed intertwining of residential and economic uses in urban developments. We aim to understand how local housing and planning regimes influence the nature of live-work mix by comparing three contrasting institutional frameworks (Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm), using an institutionalist approach to governance drawing on the concept of path dependency. We address two research questions: how have each city's housing and planning regimes influenced current urban development strategies, and what ontologies of live-work mix do these regimes and strategies underlie. Based on a literature review, document analysis and exploratory interviews, we show that live-work goals are defined in instruments underpinned by different discourses and early planning directions, but in which housing supply is instrumental to economic growth. Market parties play an essential role in implementing these goals as a result of critical junctures and dependencies affecting the actors involved and their governance capacity. Overall, the local ontologies of live-work mix reflect broader city understandings and are either consistently oriented towards attractiveness or, on the contrary, overlapping between, sometimes, antagonistic agendas. Used sensitively, our analytical framework appears to be relevant to understanding the local mitigation of global developments.
Local governments support community empowerment in urban neighbourhoods through citizens’ active participation in urban renewal. While specific actors implement empowerment goals using dedicated instruments, implementation gaps remain, partly due to a lack of knowledge of neighbourhood governance. Our study aims to understand the actors’ roles and interactions in four cities of the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, combining action research and comparative case-study analysis. Our results illustrate contrasting approaches to empowerment, influenced by cultural and institutional contexts. Local governments that play an enabling role adopt a project-based approach involving internediaries and dedicated governance tools, making it possible for citizens to become co-producers. In contrast, facilitative governments adopt a neighbourhood-based approach relying on third-sector actors and consultation instruments, less favourable to community achievements, unless well-established citizen networks are present. Through the improved understanding of actors’ and institutional settings’ influence on the empowerment process, we hope to feed reflections on innovative empowerment methods that foster collaborative planning. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .
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