Fragmented governance architectures underlying residential property production in Amsterdam

Abstract

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.

How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the UK's Cladding Scandal

“…The flexibilisation of building regulation was driven by a neoliberal ideology which held that the market is best placed to allocate risk and companies’ profit motive was incentivisation enough not to engage in dangerous practices. However, in the UK's deregulated market‐oriented system governance is increasingly “fragmented” (Taşan‐Kok and Özogul 2021), with housing production reliant on hybrid contractual arrangements through which accountability mechanisms become dispersed and reduced to performance management (Raco 2013). In terms of building safety, this created what Hodkinson (2019) calls an “accountability vacuum” in which there is no mechanism for holding actors involved in producing unsafe living conditions to account, with post‐hoc attempts to do so running into difficulties of identifying responsible parties or that identified responsible companies have gone out of business in the years since completing the work.…”

“…Whether this process of pursuing responsible parties for costs can be maintained within the fragmented market‐oriented governance (Ferm and Raco 2020; Taşan‐Kok and Özogul 2021) of the UK's residential sector remains to be seen. Active government intervention to stop the building safety crisis destabilising the housing market by spreading costs of remediation away from leaseholders has shifted the terrain in leaseholders’ favour after five years of being disempowered but this remains a politically parlous process.…”

After the crisis is before the crisis: Reading property market shifts through Amsterdam’s changing landscape of property investors

“…As the capital city and financial centre of the Netherlands, Amsterdam is experiencing steady population growth and attracts considerable (foreign) investments (Deloitte, 2020). At the same time, the city’s property investment market is strongly shaped by regulations and policy directions as there remains limited land for new developments (Taşan-Kok and Özogul, 2021). Our main finding is that to understand investor behaviour, different dimensions of investor characteristics and behaviour should be analysed concurrently; investors’ scale of operation, ownership composition, type of capital, and locational and strategic behaviour help configure investment decisions in relation to property market shifts.…”