Federico Savini

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 territori-alization 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.

The circular economy is becoming a field of experimentation to trigger site-specific laboratories oriented towards connecting material flows and citizens' 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-drivenexperiments—techno-experiments—havebecome 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 local ism 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.

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 papers 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 socioeconomic challenges of urban change.

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 scrutinizes 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 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 decontextualisation 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. Keywords: financialization, urban redevelopment, real estate, land use planning, brownfield

ABSTRACT 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.

For many years institutions, political parties, the world of urban planning and ordinary citizens have been asking the question of how to govern the urban development of Milan, a metropolis which has continued to extend its boundaries, transform within them and to thrive ...

ABSTRACT 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 book draws on a wide range of conceptual and empirical materials to identify and examine planning and policy approaches that move beyond the imperative of perpetual economic growth. It sketches out a path towards planning theories and practices that can break the cyclical process of urban expansion, crises, and recovery that negatively affect ecosystems and human lives.

To reduce the dramatic social and environmental impact of urbanization, this book offers both a critique of growth-led urban development and a prefiguration of ecologically regenerative and socially just ways of organizing cities and regions. It uncovers emerging possibilities for post-growth planning in the fields of collective housing, mobility, urban commoning, ecological land-use, urban–rural symbiosis, and alternative planning worldviews. It provides a toolkit of concepts and real-life examples for urban scholars, urbanists, activists, architects, and designers seeking to make cities prosper within planetary boundaries.

This book speaks to both experts and beginners in post-growth thinking. It concludes with a manifesto and glossary of key terms for urban scholars, students, and practitioners.

This book is a roadmap for urban professionals, planners and urban researchers in the challenging practice of integrating complexity, co-production processes and resilient thinking in urban development. Through an extensive set of in-depth case studies and a comparative framework of analysis, we explore and address the financial, legal and spatial challenges of adaptive urban development. The book comprises a collection of urban projects from Turkey, Denmark, The Netherlands and Finland. It is the result of an internationally funded research project coordinated by the University of Amsterdam.