We developed a conceptual perspective arguing that complex institutional and organisational arrangements in market-driven urban development can be comprehended through fragmented governance architectures. We propose an original thesis: entrepreneurial urban governance requires, and ultimately creates, fragmented governance architectures that accommodate complex institutional and organisational arrangements in market-oriented urban development.

Focusing on the increasingly complexifying and problematic residential property production in Amsterdam, our comprehensive frame of analysis focuses on the way property industry activity is regulated by the public sector; the way public administrative structures relate to property market activity; and the way policy interventions and tools are narrated in regulations affecting residential property production.

Even though entrepreneurial governance arrangements in Amsterdam are not new, our article poses that the degree of fragmentation has intensified since the 2008 financial crisis with the subsequent de-regulation, particularly at the national level, and – once the repercussions were felt in Amsterdam – with various attempts to re-regulate residential property production at the local level. The Dutch national government loosened its regulatory framework to make more room for private market activities. Meanwhile, housing shortages across the Netherlands turned residential property production into a highly politicised issue. Correspondingly, in recent years various government layers and agencies began to produce more guidelines, visions, and ambitions to push forward their own agendas based on their constituencies.

Based on rich empirical evidence, including discourse analysis, policy analysis and in-depth interviews with key policy and property industry actors operating in Amsterdam, we illuminate a complex regulatory environment expressing divergent attitudes toward property market activity, intra-organisational discrepancies within Amsterdam’s local administration up to the level of individuals engaging with property development, and the circulation of fuzzy policy narratives on property industry actors. In Amsterdam, we argue, these factors create the underlying infrastructure that allows an increasingly entrepreneurial governance system to roll out at the local level. Without strong and consistent public-sector leadership, this fragmentation is likely to increase.

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In a new publication in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Tuna Tasan-Kok, Rob Atkinson and Maria Lucia Refinetti Martins explore the idea of public accountability in the contemporary entrepreneurial governance of cities.

The contemporary governance of cities is strongly influenced by market dependency and private sector involvement. Within this complex setting, the authors specifically focus on the fragmentation of public accountability through hybrid contractual landscapes of governance, in which the public and private sector actors interactively produce a diversity of instruments to ensure performance in service. This situation, they argue, stands in sharp contrast to the traditional vague norms and values appealed to by urban planning institutions, to safeguard the public interest.

Tasan-Kok et al. illuminate how public accountability is produced by public and private sector actors, through highly diverse sets of contractual relations and diverse control instruments that define responsibilities of diverse actors who are involved in a project within a market-dependent planning and policy making environment. These complexities mean public accountability has become fragmented and largely reduced to performance control.

They demonstrate how public accountability is assuming a more ‘contractual’ and unpredictable meaning in policy and plan implementation process on the basis of comparative empirical evidence from The Netherlands, UK and Brazil. While context-specific institutional relations exist in these three countries, the authors are able to show how the creation of regulatory instruments that attempt to hold those involved accountable at multiple scales of governance makes overall public accountability difficult to enforce.

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