This paper addresses the governance of the ‘live-work mix’. This concept refers to the renewed intertwining of living and working activities in new housing and urban development in the context of welfare state restructuring, development of the knowledge economy and globalisation. Implementing live-work goals can be difficult because a consensus between public and private actors is usually needed to develop such projects. In this paper, we examine the actors and instruments that assist in the implementation of live-work goals in targeted areas. We survey live-work development by analysing three illustrative projects in Brussels and Amsterdam, cities with comparable strategies but distinct planning systems. Our results indicate that state support is essential to enhance live-work mix, especially because the market remains reluctant to mix functions and focuses primarily on housing development. Flexible and tailor-made instruments are used, sometimes co-authored by public and private actors, to reach consensus. These instruments illustrate variants of strategic planning. Despite a shared interest in attracting target groups to redevelopment areas, the consensus-building process is affected by discrepancies in the nature of live-work mix.

This research addresses the shared housing market, that is, large-scale developments targeting students and ‘young professionals’, equipped with shared spaces and services for the residents. This housing segment has emerged in response to young adults’ demand for flexible and affordable housing. It has developed in cities that concentrate students and young single professionals, plan densification strategies and face housing commodification. We specifically explore the production side of this market, through the comparison of two projects in Amsterdam. Our objective is to understand the institutional context in which these projects were developed and their outcomes. Consequently, the research questions are: which actors develop these projects, what instruments do they use, and what are the outcomes in a commodifying housing market? From our analysis, the actors need to collaborate on shared housing developments and receive support from local governments, through the strategic use of planning instruments and tenure regulations. However, the shared facilities seem to merely serve to commercialize small housing production, while housing affordability and accessibility are threatened. We, thus, recommend local and national authorities to regulate the provision of shared spaces and suggest further research on the effects of the shared housing market in cities facing housing commodification.

Social media provides big data for researchers to perform real-time analytics, as digital ethnographers, on what places and attributes people value in the historic urban landscapes they live or visit, enough to share with their social network. However, the use of these data to further our knowledge on heritage and their values, or to support heritage planning and management is still very limited. This article proposes a methodology for the analysis of viewpoints location-view scenes-tags data for photos posted on Flickr to provide insights into all facets of the perceived landscape character that identifies people-centered heritage at the city level. The analysis visualizes convergence and divergence between locals’ and tourists’ preferences. It also reveals heritage concerns in the context of daily-life practices and everyday landscape, as well as political and religious concerns in post-conflict areas. Additionally, the analysis questions the limits of heritage areas and categories used for identifying cultural values. Results showed that the different analyses complement one another to eventually provide insights into everyday encounters with the historic urban landscape. They also show the difference between experts’ and users’ documentation and characterization languages when defining heritage. When the first apply domain-specific classification models, the latter express personal reflections without following a specific hierarchy or a closed categorical system. It is believed that the outcome can help heritage scholars to further our understanding for the diversity of heritage places and attributes, as well as, heritage professionals, to inform decision-making processes in heritage planning and management on both experts’ and users’ understanding of heritage.