The Netherlands was traditionally lauded for its planning system, including its land policies. In this chapter, we argue that the picture has always been more nuanced and local planning practice has always been more pragmatic; it was an ambiguous utopia at best. Moreover, the Netherlands has experienced a transition over the last thirty years from active land policy with land ownership of municipalities towards facilitative (or passive) land policy in which developers typically own land and are active in initiating zoning changes. The latter can also be couched as ‘institutional entrepreneurship’ of landowners, where distinctions between the private and public become fuzzy, sometimes in problematic ways. We illustrate this conundrum through the case study of Rijnenburg, a polder close to the city of Utrecht, which has been a ‘planning battle scene’ for over thirty years, with different claims—housing, renewable energy, climate adaptation—and its concomitant representatives competing for prevalence. We conclude that the current system of public–private fuzziness is particularly vulnerable in times of a polycrisis. This predicament calls for a thorough consideration of long-term consequences, for instance in relation to climate adaption and urban development.@en

Zoning is one of the key roles of land use regulation by the state. In engaging with this land use regulation, developers do not stay put and passively await rules to be imposed upon them. Instead, they proactively seek to (co)produce new rules or change existing rules to their advantage: they are ‘institutional entrepreneurs.’ We analyze how institutional entrepreneurship strategies play out empirically in Rijnenburg, a large greenfield site located southwest of the city of Utrecht. We find a complex and reciprocal interrelationship between planning decisions on the one hand and strategies of developers on the other.@en

Urbanites increasingly turn to digital mobility platforms to make use of means of transportation and to plan and book journeys. While these platforms can contribute to making urban travel more sustainable and efficient, they can also lead to governance challenges and have negative external effects, raising questions about how public values can best be safeguarded. In this article, public values are defined as normative concepts that describe both the impact on and democratic control of an affected public. This article aims to initiate a more structured discussion about platform urbanism, specifically how and to what extent public values are incorporated in platform design and operation in the realm of mobility. It introduces an assessment framework for mobility platforms that was developed as part of a transdisciplinary research project in the Netherlands. This framework is grounded in two academic debates regarding 1) the rise of platform urbanism and 2) new forms of mobility that accompany the densification of cities. The paper refers to the mobility pilots Kutsuplus, UbiGo and Whim to illustrate how the safeguarding of public values can be evaluated. In the concluding section, the paper discusses some ways in which the assessment framework can be used for future research, for instance through scenarios.@en

Background: Merwede is an envisioned neighbourhood in Utrecht (the Netherlands) that provides an instructive case to learn about the governance challenges of digital mobility platforms. Unique about Merwede is how the development of a mobility platform is envisioned to be integrated into the development of a new neighbourhood. Methodology: This article discusses the case of Merwede and provides insights into its proposed mobility platform and how it is made. It illuminates governance challenges relevant to the design and operation of an unconventional mobility concept by disentangling outstanding practical issues concerning three key governance dimensions—organizational structures, decision-making processes, and instruments. Results: The research provides an empirical illustration of governance questions that come up when mobility becomes a service and is integrated into the urban fabric from the very beginning of a development process. Already in the plan development stage, Merwede illustrates that difficult decisions are to be made and competing interests come to the fore.@en

The current ecological crisis will transform the face and fate of cities. Neighbourhoods for the Future is based on the conviction that we should rethink cities from the ambit of the neighbourhood. It revisits the neighbourhood as the designated scale and arena to build our urban futures. The neighbourhood is small enough to be tangible, yet big enough to make a difference. In order for neighbourhoods to really work, residents need to be engaged and the tactics should be embedded within a wider social policy, if we want thriving cities.

By introducing the concepts of neighbourhood arrangements and ecologies, based on examples in Europe and North America, this book provides a new perspective on the relation between participants, resources, and rules, to spark change and prepare urbanites and policymakers for realizing their own sustainable neighbourhoods for the future.@en