Many accounts of urban governance emphasize municipal and neighbourhood scales, featuring local participation, social cohesion and the relationship between local government and residents. By contrast, our focus is the vertical governance processes of integrated urban policies. We concentrate on the effectiveness of the steering of urban policies. Using a Dutch city as a case study, we evaluate local stakeholders’ experiences in the vertical governance processes of integrated urban policy and the extent to which their experiences fit in with the theoretical notions of multi-level governance or multi-scalar meta-governance and the EU principles of good governance. The key result is that Dutch urban policy incorporates dominant neo-liberal multi-scalar meta-governance, owing to the simultaneously strong market orientation and state regulation. The legitimacy of urban policy is brought into question when city authorities have very little influence on its contents but are judged on its results. The major lesson learned is that neo-liberal centralistic steering in the core domains of local government that aim to achieve effective and coherent urban governance practices is counterproductive.

Cities in deltas are vulnerable to climate change, especially their unembanked neighborhoods that are not protected by dikes. Rising sea levels and extreme water levels in the rivers can lead to the flooding of these urban areas. The Netherlands has a long history in water management. However, building dikes and the elevation of land are traditionally treated as rather stand-alone measures. Attention is rarely paid to the surrounding area, let alone to the complex context of cities and certainly not to disadvantaged neighborhoods. Yet, inner-city area redevelopment may provide opportunities to integrate flood management in these planning processes. In order to investigate the support of stakeholders for risk-reducing adaptive measures and more resilient measures, we did research in an unembanked inner-city area in the city of Rotterdam (The Netherlands), in which we conducted in-depth interviews with the central stakeholders. The main conclusion is that the most important barriers for integrating climate adaptation measures into that neighborhood are the fragmentation of water-safety policy (e.g. elevation of rebuilding locations) and the hierarchical governance arrangement in water management. This type of fragmentation led on its turn to fragmentation with other policy goals for the neighborhood. It also led to fragmentation between different areas in the same neighborhood that received political attention and those that are excluded from water-safety policy. This questions the approach in terms of social justice. An important side effect is that this governance arrangement also restricted innovation towards climate adaptation. Therefore, integrating water-safety policies in urban planning (in its capacity as a more integrative and comprehensive spatial approach) should be considered the best option to increase the adaptive capacity in delta cities. Not only can the negative effects in terms of policy fragmentation be dealt with effectively, but also spatial fragmentation can be tackled.

This article addresses an often neglected perspective on e-participation in urban planning: the citizens' perspective. Usually, the debate focuses very much on the planners' perspective. In a case study, two issues are analysed: First, what are the motives of participants and non-participants; second, how citizens' perception of influence and equality in the process affect their satisfaction with it. It is concluded that getting more people involved requires addressing three different types of motives, and that e-participation easily scores high on the perception of equality, but that citizens' perception of influence requires particular attention of the planners.

In urban governance literature, much attention is paid to the ideas and ideals of cooperation in policy networks, in particular to the motives and objectives of cooperation at the start of urban restructuring processes. However, little consideration has been given to the dynamics of working in partnerships or to the conditions for long-term joint capacity building. In this article, we call attention to these issues. The main question addressed is: Which factors contribute to long-term cooperation? We have elicited the information required to answer the question through in-depth interviews with professionals and residents' representatives working in six Dutch urban restructuring neighbourhoods. Although we found some attempts to build long-term joint working capacity to address residents' needs, the findings indicate that this endeavour is impeded by the dominance of a scaled neoliberal governance arrangement in Dutch urban restructuring that features a strong market rationality with fragmentation in policies, time, space and decision-making power. We show that this situation hampers success in integrally addressing residents' needs in urban restructuring neighbourhoods. We conclude that, for more inclusive and coherent policies, the abandonment of neoliberal rationalities in urban policies is a first requirement for developing a real joint working capacity to address residents' needs in distressed neighbourhoods.

Distressed urban areas suffer, by definition, from a number of serious problems. It is often assumed that all relevant stakeholders agree about the character of these problems and the right policy solutions. Reality, however, is more complex. In this paper we investigate how local stakeholders and residents in a Dutch post-WWII neighborhood perceive urban problems and solutions. The findings show the very opposite perceptions about reality and about effective solutions in distressed neighborhoods held by local managers and residents. The main conclusion is that a power-driven narrative of problematic post-WWII neighborhoods within a neoliberal strategic urban agenda has led to a power-driven urban governance arrangement to the exclusion of residents.