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The purpose of this paper is to examine policies and planning for sustainable city tourism in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and relate them to the notions of ‘tourism reset’ that emerged during the COVID pandemic period. Amsterdam is a prime European tourist city and has been suffering from problems associated with overtourism. Rotterdam receives much less tourists and can be seen as an emerging tourist city. Both cities have recently adopted new tourism policies, essentially future tourism visions. The case of Amsterdam and to a lesser extent that of Rotterdam show that formulating and agreeing on a tourism policy vision is easier than the decision-making process and implementing a vision. The instruments and powers of local government to manage the quantity and qualities of tourism are limited. Overtourism problems have stimulated carrying capacity thinking, which is considered inadequate for a multi-faceted problem like urban tourism.

Territories as relational geographical constructs are in constant formation and reformation, or rescaling, which results in spatial typologies of complex governance. The voting containers of a territory are merely one typology, often not matching the numerous functions within the other typologies. Under the assumption that voting containers are politically fixed, governance that adapts to the dynamics of territorial rescaling is required. This paper explores the relationship between territorial rescaling and polycentric governance in Albania. It concludes that polycentric governance can enable cooperation and efficiency throughout rescaling, assuming some conditions are in place for addressing the polycentricity gap.

This paper looks at the uncommonness of open space Urban Commons, i.e., squares, playgrounds, plazas, etc., in Central and Eastern European Countries. Such spaces are complex urban commons in terms of governance and are often contested in the frame of urbanisation and market-led processes of city-making, as well as for what they represent as constructs of values and identity. The four open space Urban Commons examples (respectively in Tirana, Podgorica, Gdansk and Moscow) analysed in this paper showcase successes and failures of [co-]governance, which reflect the varying development context in each country, the respective local governments' roles, and the different pathways that citizens have taken towards city space [re]appropriation in the frame of post-socialism and neoliberalism.