This is a not-edited version. For Published version and citation:
Savini F. (2017) Deconstructing urbanity and disaggregating the cityregion: the effects of self-organization in Amsterdam, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 40, Issue 6, 1152–1169 http://www.ijurr.org/article/self-organization-urban-development-disaggregating-cityregion-deconstructing-urbanity-amsterdam/
SELF-ORGANIZATION AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: Disaggregating the CityRegion, Deconstructing Urbanity in Amsterdam FEDERICO SAVINI
Abstract The idea that cities are self-organizing systems, and that the state has a limited capacity to control and shape them, has gained momentum in the last decade among planning professionals, designers and politicians. Recent political discourse on new localism and liberal individualism builds on a similar understanding of cities, giving responsibility to citizens and their collective associations in light of state rescaling. The consequences of such perspectives for urban development have yet to be conceptualized. This article proposes a critique of the use of self-organization in policy practice, building on the argument that this concept destabilizes two constitutive categories of urban intervention: spatial boundaries and temporal programs. In so doing, self-organization conveys two peculiar understandings of agency in city-regional spaces and of urbanity: the disaggregation of city-regions and the deconstruction of urbanity. Looking at the recent change in Amsterdam’s urban development practice, I show that, while self-organization is used to emphasize that city-regions constitute interconnected systems of dynamics, when applied in policy making it, in fact, leads to the disaggregation and fragmentation of urban regions. Moreover, while the capacity of selforganization to deconstruct codified notions of urbanity that frustrate urban relations is often celebrated, its use in policy produces newly exclusive urban fabrics.
Introduction
The less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital. The result has been the production of fragmentation, insecurity, and ephemeral uneven development within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows’ (Harvey, 1990: 296)
This article critically discusses the use of self-organization in policy making and provides a conceptual framework for understanding its implications for urban development. Since the 1960s, self-organization has been understood as the mechanism of internal change within complex urban systems and widely used to build models of city evolution (Allen and Sanglier, 1981; Allen, 1997; Thrift, 1999). Since then, definitions of this concept have proliferated in different fields, from biology to information sciences, natural sciences and sociology (for a historical view see Partanen, 2015 and Batty, 2010). These definitions build upon the assumption that self-organizing systems show the ‘emergence of order on the global level (of a system) from the individual dynamics of its components without any central coordination and without specific action from outside’ (Ismael, 2010: 333; Haken, 2006).
While a definition is highly elusive, what makes this concept so fascinating for experimental research and policy practice is primarily its capacity to problematize the notions of ‘control’, ‘order’ and ‘agency’. In urban and regional research there is agreement that cities, as complex systems, emerge from the uncountable interdependencies of different variables and therefore feature unpredictable dynamics. Any attempt to influence their change might lead to unexpected results. Building from this ontology, planning scholars have problematized the meaning of collective action for spatial intervention and urban development (Boelens, 2010; de Roo et al., 2012). These works emphasize that, when viewed as a state practice that influences sociospatial dynamics, planning is largely limited to predicting and achieving particular outputs. Self-organization is therefore lauded as a useful practice for establishing new conditions of innovative collective agency in urban intervention (Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; Moroni, 2015). Building on systemic theories and evolutionary resilience frameworks, planners struggle with the socio-political implications that self-organization brings with it when it is used as a normative goal in planning (Davoudi, 2012). Conceptual frameworks for ecological and physical systems fail to appreciate that the distinguishing property of human agency is the capacity to organize, in space and time, purpose-led collective action (Davidson, 2010, also Wilkinson, 2011). Within the realm of politically bounded human agency, self-organization is therefore translated into the liberal and individualistic principle of self-reliance (Davoudi, 2012: 305). In practice, the term self-organization continues to inspire visions of an urbanism beyond the state. The concept is increasingly used to legitimize sociocratic approaches to urban change, like do-it-yourself (Iveson, 2013), everyday (Fraker, 2007), tactical, open source, emergent and smart urbanism (Oosterlynck and González, 2013). In its different uses, the term substantiates ideas of new localism, in which self-providing citizens take a central position in the welfare state (Peck, 2012a; Davoudi and Madanipour, 2015). The ‘big society’ in the UK, the Wijkaanpak (neighborhood approach) in the Netherlands, and policies concerning housing associations in China (Zhou, 2014) constitute examples that are currently redefining the relationship between the state and citizens. Based on principles of socioentrepreneurialism, these models propose an understanding of urban society based on the principle that the ‘self’ is the fundamental unit by which cities are governed. While self-organization ‘stimulates a contradictory—clumsy, creative, ferocious— reconfiguration of relationships within communities and between communities and the government’ (Uitermark, 2015: 2), the inherent logics of this reconfiguration remain to be theorized. The challenge is to uncover the emerging ontological and epistemological implications for urban theory and policy: by referring to an (undefined) ‘self’ as the unit of urban agency, the ontological difference between planning subjects and planning objects appears to be lost. Empirically, this article contributes to current studies on the multiple ways in which neoliberal reforms impact on urban development. Like other elusive and politically appealing terminologies (e.g. resilience or creativity), self-organization becomes a ‘vehicular idea’ for practices of deregulation and depoliticization when applied to social settings (Swyngedouw, 2010; Peck, 2012b). In particular, self-organization appears to undermine the capacity of public governments to balance increasing socio-economic inequalities across cityregions and to sustain exclusionary and selective practices of spatial appropriation (Soja, 2015). In this article, I argue, first, that self-organization is a problematic concept when applied as a principle to policy making, because it avoids two constitutive categories of urban intervention, spatial boundaries and temporal programs. Second, I argue that, by deconstructing spatio-temporal frames, self-organization conveys peculiar understandings of two concepts: agency in city-regional spaces and urbanity. I call these understandings the
disaggregation of city-regions and the deconstruction of urbanity. The two notions indicate two paradoxical consequences: first, while self-organization emphasizes that urban systems are made up of multiple connections between different dynamics, when the term is used in practice city-regions are instead treated as a nexus of disconnected units. Second, while selforganization is used to deconstruct the codified boundaries of—and construct new possibilities for—urban living, in practice it constructs new boundaries that can be even more selective than the old ones. I use the recent reform of public-led planning in Amsterdam (with a particular look at the IJburg project) to illustrate how these two phenomena raise issues for city-regional planning and urban design. The legacy of IJburg, a major residential project in Amsterdam, shows how narratives of self-organization have been recently used to legitimize extensive re-regulation of land use, consequently weakening the public capacity to frame the development within strategies of regional redistribution and changing the principle of public urban design. I conclude by sketching a much-needed critique of the idea of self-organizing cities from three perspectives: governability, relational geography and political economy. These three dimensions are crucial to sophisticate current reflections on the fundamental tension between an ontology of city-regions as self-organized systems and the practice of governing urban dynamics according to normative principles of justice and inclusiveness.
Urban intervention: spatial boundaries and temporal programs The starting argument of this article is that any intervention in complex urban dynamics requires a degree of stable selectiveness in spatial and temporal frames of action. Therefore, the first theoretical critique of the notion of self-organization as a driver of urban policy making lies in the fact that the ‘self’ is both the agent and the goal of intervention, thus making any stable definition of space and time selectiveness impossible. Spatial interventions on social dynamics always run the risk of stabilizing, and thus constraining, social dynamics (Savini et al., 2015). The enhancement of citizens’ individual and group capacities is recursively referred to as an imperative for policy reform purposes. However, every policy geared to enable such capacities bears the intrinsic risk of de-vitalizing any unknown possibility of social organization. Any practice of spatial intervention is in fact a ‘killer of alternatives’ (Metzger, 2015), because it stabilizes particular expectations for a future state of society. Resources are allocated to selectively promote some phenomena over others, guided by political interpretations of complex problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973). Like any human action, such interpretations are partial and selective as well as stable and resource-bounded. From modernist interventions to recent examples of participative and mediatory roles, urban policies have always been oriented to influence certain social dynamics according to a set of ideas that define the society of the future (Isserman, 1985). Space and time are essential categories of spatial intervention, their changing configurations driving the history of capitalism. Capital destabilizes and restabilizes spatio-temporal frames that organize relations of production and consumption, and this dialectic is the inherent logic of state formation (Harvey, 1990). These processes of stabilization are inherently selective. In spatial policy, the selectivity of space and time are constituted through boundaries and programs of action and built on principles of exclusivity, such as in–out and now–later. These are not physical notions per se, and can refer to both material and immaterial frames of distinction for organizing action. Boundaries constitute the first elements to spatialize social interaction. They can be represented as physical zones, city areas, or instead as bounded sets of targeted subjects (e.g. specific social groups, a neighbourhood). Semantically, boundaries have the capacity to simultaneously limit and
enable policies by providing a reference space for the use of resources. Spatial boundaries give meaning to social action because they are discursively produced to create properties of identification, discerning a particular community as a polity (Paasi, 1998; 2013). Yet, even though they can be fuzzy and contested, they always provide the properties of difference and uniqueness, which are necessary for any policy intervention (van Houtum, 2005; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009). For the same reason, spatial boundaries are also a necessary condition for political struggle because they are the objects of contestation (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2016). Any political contestation thus aims at breaking discursive (as well as physical) boundaries and then at redefining the range of reference of an established set of spatial categorizations (e.g. the boundaries of ‘political arenas’ or ‘cityregions’). Temporal programming is a second element of spatial intervention based on a distinction between before and after or now and later. Harvey (1990) argued that control over time is a precondition for capital accumulation, linking the history of capitalism and the state to the changing ‘turnover time’ of capital investments. In urban planning, programming is a necessary activity in any decision-making process because it is based on some sort of juxtaposition between a present condition and a (desirable) future condition (Healey, 2004). In strategic thinking, programs follow an indicative time horizon, building upon change events in the city and expectations for the future state of society and markets. In land use planning, temporal programs are constitutive for the governing of urban change and its externalities: they indicate the turnover of capital on land investments, expressed through cost-recovery plans, they allow for practices of redistribution of added value or enable zoning procedures. Programming identifies urban change as series of interdependent and connected actions that stabilize spatial use. Like boundaries, temporal programs are discursively constructed and politically contested. Today’s advocates for slow urbanism, for example, ground their critique of globalization in their rejection of the rapid temporal frames of global markets. In the last two decades, non-positivistic thinking about planning has attempted to emancipate spatial interventions from a predetermined and authoritatively constructed configuration of boundaries and programs. A non-Euclidean (Friedmann, 1994), non-linear, and non-objectified conception of time and space suggests that boundaries and programs are emergent elements in the practice of social interaction (Graham and Healey, 1999). Institutional pragmatists in particular have recognized the definition of space and time as problematic and technocratic, but have also showed that episodes of social innovation need to transform institutions for collective agency, which are durable and spatially bounded (Healey, 2004b). In the communicative planning tradition in particular, spatial boundaries and temporal programs are the very contested subject of place-based deliberation. Within this stream of thought, the goal is to enable (stable) institutional conditions in order to encourage participation (Savini, 2011) The main challenge, therefore, is not to reach a stable spatialtemporal configuration per se, but instead to determine the principles and drivers by which this stability is brought into being (Forester, 2000; Healey, 2000). If spatio-temporal selectiveness is a necessary condition in a spatial intervention, then what are the implications of self-organization for such interventions? This problematization of spatial-temporal selectiveness and stability is necessary in order to understand the contemporary meaning of planning and the role of the state. Van Houtum (2005: 676) stresses that the ‘self-fulfilling geometrical fantasy of drawing lines in spaces (and times) contributes to the Self and the Us in daily life’. Concern about the use of self-organization in coordinating (individual or collective) action originates therefore from a common referencing to a general ‘self’ as the agent of this spatial and temporal framing. Since planning is a (collective) endeavour based on a spatially and temporally selective understanding of urban
society, policy for self-organized urban space implies the perpetual and simultaneous redefinition of those frames by a constantly shifting individuality. Below, I argue that destabilizing spatio-temporal frames of spatial intervention runs the risks of disengaging both with an understanding of cities as an aggregate of interdependent parts and with a normative approach of organizing human relations.
Spatial interventions for the self-organizing city Many attempts to build policies on relational and flexible space–time boundaries have clashed with the demand for certainty from planners, governments, markets, or even citizens, against opportunistic actions and state authoritarianism (Davoudi and Strange, 2009). Inspired by evidence of urban complexity, Batty (2010: 115) has argued that ‘planning interventions are potentially destructive unless we have a deep understanding of their casual effects’ and that planners therefore need to concentrate only on short-term and slight changes. Others have instead asserted that planners should not be prescriptive, but instead should establish stable, but always contextually defined, principles of spatial and social organization (van Rijswick and Salet, 2014). In a similar vein, Balducci and colleagues (2011) show that planners in practice provide multiple spatial boundaries to enable stakeholders to interact and define urban policies. This discussion seems to advance the idea that the social task of planners is to understand, mobilize and create coherence across complex social dynamics. However, at the root of this debate lies the constitutive tension between an ontological view of city-regional spaces as entities in perpetual becoming, where boundaries of space and time are always changing in social practices, and an epistemology of planning that refers to the practices and principles used to stabilize those boundaries. Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Hillier has argued that in order to reconfigure practices of spatial intervention, it is fundamental to cope with the ‘abyss’ between becoming and being (Hillier, 2005). Accordingly, planning should ‘make the virtual intelligible (ibid.: 281), through the ‘mapping of flows’ and ‘open for future potentialities’ (ibid.: 282; Hillier, 2011). This argument embraces the notion that the city is indeed a self-organizing assemblage of agents (both human and non-human) and that spatial intervention involves visualizing the virtual possibilities of this organization. However, Hillier (2005:284) also argues that ‘in order for planners to represent an entity in a plan or to act purposefully, they need more than just ideas’ and that ‘they require some point of stability’. Such an understanding of stability in spatial intervention is not explicitly normative. Contributing to this debate, Purcell notes that it is, instead, crucial to valorize the ‘revolutionary’ implications of an ontology of becoming. This means asking ‘both existential questions about what planning is and normative questions about whether we should be planning at all’ (Purcell, 2013a: 20, emphasis in original). He further proposes that it is fundamental to rethink urban societies beyond state and capital, achieving a condition of collective self-management by the citizens (Purcell, 2013b). Below I argue, instead, that in order to be truly collective, it is important to pursue a normative idea of planning that continues to involve spatio-temporal stability and selectiveness. By promoting selforganization as a goal for policy, based on principles of self-management of spatial intervention, planning begins to promote an exclusionary form of urban development. This occurs through a set of new regulatory and design practices. First, narratives of selforganization underlie the erosion of visions of the city-region as a constellation of interdependent localities, with the consequential weakening of important redistribution
mechanisms; second, these narratives propose a new idea of the city as a space of individual self-determination, designed according to particular (market-dependent) ideas of urban form. Self-organized urban development: disaggregation of city-regional spaces and deconstruction of urbanity Post-structuralist reflections on space and time have challenged the meaning and construction of spatial boundaries and temporal programmes in urban policy making (Graham and Healey, 1999). These studies build upon the ontological assumption that space and time are not detached, but constitutive of social reality (Massey, 2005). The separation of these two elements is an artefact that enables control and manipulation by powerful subjects. By detaching the space-time unity, urban development policy establishes a hierarchy of actions that are politically defined and recursively discussed when conditions change. This artificial disentanglement of space and time is, in fact, the same logic by which authority and domination are exercised on individuals (Foucault, 1975; Crampton and Elden, 2007). It is based on a parcelled understanding of the city, organized into an aggregate of specific parts, such as zones with their own economic function and role in the urban system. As James Scott (1998) and Harvey (1990) have shown, this ‘parcellization’ of borders and zones is constitutive of the modern state and a condition for capital accumulation. This market-driven and permanently contingent parcellization of cities has, first, implications for the (re)organization of the socio-economic inequalities between different localities and communities. Structural notions of space and time characterize urban space as an ‘extensive multiplicity’, a whole characterized by a series of differences, juxtapositions, and quantitative differentiations with distinct but interconnected parts (Murdoch, 2005). Poststructural conceptions of space and time instead characterize a process of ‘smoothing’ differences, making the city a system of ‘intensive multiplicities’ where each part is qualitatively distinct (Grosz and Eisenman, 2001). Within an extensive multiplicity, each of the parts can be interchanged without threat to the overall coherence and unity because of its considered ‘separateness’. On the basis of this understanding, urban policy making then becomes a practice aimed at managing the linkages between interventions. It is geared to instrumentally adapt boundaries and programmes to maintain certain visions of urban space (Wood, 2009). Conversely, a unitary view of space and time considers the city as permanently mutable. Deleuze metaphorically defines this view of space as smooth, in contrast to the striated, discontinuous nature of the state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The identity of each part depends on the others and any mutation carries the possibility of change to the whole. This unity is creative, each small dynamic having the potential to reveal unexplored views of the city as a whole. As an ‘intensive multiplicity’, urban space is thus not rationalized into separate projects—it is instead viewed as a unity of a permanently dynamic spaces, in which change that deviates from pre-constituted visions is emancipated. This dynamic unity therefore tends to be unpredictable. These conceptualizations of time and space reveal that state action, like any collective action, inevitably frustrates self-organized urban space. Yet, they also raise the normative question of which principles any form of organization should follow. Current policy practice seems to convey the idea that, because of this complexity, objective demarcation between spatial boundaries and temporal programme should be actively dissolved through reregulation. This argument hides a misunderstanding that confuses the ontology of cities as an ‘intensive multiplicity’ with the role of policy as a practice of organizing that multiplicity. Any post-structuralist perspective is ultimately concerned with this dialectic between movement (becoming) and stability (being) and, in fact, recognises that each is dependent upon the other. Deleuze and Guattari argue that de-territorialization inevitably leads to a re-
territorialization. The two are not exclusive, but rather work simultaneously in the process of consolidating regional polities through a ‘hardening’ of boundaries (Metzger, 2013). Advocates of a self-organized city policy instead propose the idea that such policies have the task of deconstructing spatial boundaries and temporal programmes to increase the creative potential of collective and individual agency. As argued above, this idea is fundamentally paradoxical precisely because stable spatio-temporal selectiveness is a necessary condition for promoting any collective policy. On the one hand, new localism and individual liberalism emphasize the potentialities of abandoning an understanding of city-regions as a constellation of interlocked and interdependent interventions, while promoting an unpredictable patchwork of events. On the other hand, these ideas are undermining the capacity to (re)think cityregions as constellations of interconnected events and unequal relationships between wealthy and poor areas, between natural and built surfaces or between public and private spaces. This is seriously undermining the redistributive capacity of public government to address one of the contemporary challenges for planning urban regions: ‘accentuating’ the relations between localities in order to ‘take maximum advantage of the positive effects of agglomeration’ and to deal with the ‘inevitable accompanying negative effects on social justice and environmental quality’ (Soja, 2015:379). The second implication of imagining cities as constellations of autonomously organized units has to do with the way social relations are organized at the micro-level: it concerns the particular sets of principles, beliefs and ideas that sustain social interaction. These sets of beliefs are generally systematized into operational notions of urbanity within urban design, urban policies and planning. Today, problematizing the idea of the ‘urban’ is a priority if the established paths of socio-spatial change under capitalism are to be challenged (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). This particular task has also been taken on board by planners to query the political logics of capital investments in urban development (Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). In post-structuralist thought, urbanity, in its permanent mutability, is appreciated as emergent, not fixed, and embedded in individual perceptions. Lefebvre (1991) stressed the irresolvable difference between how we perceive human behaviour and how humans actually behave, arguing that codified knowledge is limited in its ability to fully grasp the conditions of human living and the urban experience. His definition of lived space goes beyond conceived space, and is also different from the perception of space. Any operational understanding of the lived space is a fetish because it builds on a selective, and thus reductive, spatio-temporal stability of urban relations (Merrifield, 1993). Lees (2010: 2302) similarly argues that ‘urbanity is about unplanned events and coincidences, it is about paradoxes and possibilities’. Massey (2005) identifies ‘throwntogetherness’ as the main condition for urbanity, conceiving the urban as a sphere where distinct plural trajectories of spatial use coexist. Following the above-mentioned work of Deleuze and Guattari, space is a mutable and permanently changeable patchwork of situated practices. Rather than a coherent unity, urbanity emerges as a scattered system of practices, a ‘space of dispersion’ (Philo, 1992), an assemblage of formal and informal practices (Dovey, 2012), or a system of emergent tactics within consolidated structures of time and space (De Certeau, 1984). When discussing spatial intervention and urban development, it is necessary to address the inherent tension between an ontology of the urban and an intervention from public policy on the urban form. According to Foucault ‘space is fundamental to any form of communal life; space is fundamental to any exercise of power’ (Rabinow, 1984: 252). Human relations cannot be understood out of this field of power. Spatio-temporal selectiveness is an essential condition for governmentality in the state, as it frames codes of conduct that serve as the basis for the very constitution of social relations (Gordon, 1991). Any reappropriation of
urban space in fact builds upon, and advances claims for, new codes of conduct and new principles to organize social relations in cities, which are spatially and temporally selective. In the field of planning in particular, urbanity is understood as a quality that can be created and promoted (Gualini and Majoor, 2007). However, planning scholars are increasingly aware that the process of defining spatial order has become voluntarist, subjectivist and instrumental. The problem therefore is not the presence of an authority responsible for organizing urban relations in space and time, but rather the fact that the logics of this organization are discretionally defined by entrepreneurial actors following market fluctuations in the urban fabric (Salet, 2016). In addressing this problem, urbanity should rather be understood as an act of reconstructing stable (and collectively defined) principles of urban living, tailored to specific contexts (van Rijswick and Salet, 2012). These works point out the limitations of instrumental and discretionary planning, asserting the necessity, especially under conditions of uncertainty, to provide stable norms for the spatio-temporal organization of human relations. In contrast, the current ideologies of self-organized urban forms further strengthen the misunderstanding that cities are governed by instrumental, voluntarist and utilitarian practices of self-regulation by individuals. The fundamental question is, therefore, whether policy makers should abandon the task of organizing and stabilizing certain forms of urbanity or whether, instead, it (still) makes sense to strive for a collectively defined and normative framework of ‘good city form’ (Lynch, 1984). The policy objective for an inclusive urbanity lies not only in deconstruction, but also in reconstructing and redefining notions of urbanity in order to address issues of exclusion, marginalization, accessibility and quality of life. I will now illustrate how, in urban policy, self-organization often refers to a selfgenerated and self-managed urban form in which users make an instrumental claim on space. Such an idea resonates with the principles of lassez-faire, which have the potential to establish new boundaries of selectiveness and exclusion.
Self-organization in Amsterdam Self-organization is an underlying narrative that is being used today to carry out important reforms in Amsterdam’s spatial policy. These reforms have three main objectives: first, in reaction to the slow delivery of large-scale projects in the wake of the world financial crisis, to promote new investment in real estate by stimulating opportunities for small developers; second, to change land-use frameworks to reduce the turnover times of investments and enable the direct financing of self-realized interventions by individual households; third, to adapt the planning framework in order to allow for more diversification, flexibility and temporariness in urban projects. These reforms are inevitably problematizing Amsterdam’s traditional public-led planning, which has been built on a proactive public capacity to develop land by capitalizing real-estate development revenues via a land lease system and interventions within regional governance frameworks (Salet et al., 2003). Taking the overly regulated planning approach as a negative point of reference, advocates of selforganization have proposed the reregulation of land use planning frameworks in order to (1) accommodate more small-scale and short-term investments, (2) respond to the aesthetic, architectural and functional requirements of new real-estate investors and (3) favour a more diversified, community-based, urban fabric. As I show below, these reforms do not advocate deregulation exclusively, but rather use narratives of self-organization to justify new regulatory frameworks to diversify and reorganize urban development in the city. Current reforms: doing more with less
This trend of austerity reforms (Peck, 2012a) first targets the position of public governments within the planning and development sector, urging local governments to do ‘more with less’ (meer met minder).In contrast to the tradition of measurement and control, current policy narratives associate the functioning of urban change with that of ecological systems, advancing a new model of urban development defined as ‘organic’. Organic development envisions the city as an open space in which emergent demands for the use of land can be realized. This view has stimulated a new practice of small-scale interventions (based on the plot or kavel) and a more rapid management of projects through short-term cost-recovery plans. In strategic planning, this approach relates closely to the idea of incrementalism and non-linearity, which is built on gradual changes carried out by entrepreneurial and pioneering developers (Buiterlaar et al., 2012). Within this new model, the municipality’s role is to operate a system of ‘planning by invitation’ (uitnodigingsplanologie), not, therefore, one that controls citizens and emerging enterprises. These views are further stimulated by national debates on decentralization. In 2007 the Dutch parliament approved a so-called neighbourhood approach policy (Wijkaanpak), encouraging neighbourhood-based plans and reconsidering the role of active citizenship in the provision of planning services, a policy comparable to English ‘neighborhood plans’ (Mullins and van Bortel, 2010). These policies bring back ‘creativity’ as an imperative for urban change. Backed by an emerging liberal-progressive political class, they all consider the community or neighbourhood as a fundamental unit in policies (Savini and Dembski, 2016). The image of the ‘city-maker’ (stadsmaker) is widely used today to represent a particular kind of active citizenry. Inspiring a new urban agenda in the city, this concept is motivated by the aim of giving space back to its users (also referred as its ‘owners’, see for example (Miazzo and Kee, 2014).These ‘city-makers’ are, however, particular individuals engaged in changing urban space by means of innovative technologies, experimental interventions and entrepreneurial investments for new economic activities (Franke et al., 2015). In Amsterdam, different sorts of initiatives and local policies aim at mobilizing ideas from citizen groups regarding the use of vacant spaces (e.g. kantoorenloods and broedplaats) and activate professional networks to favour new models of land development by putting the end users at the centre of the development process (team zelf-bouw). Both these national and local reformist agendas have impacted the way the city-region of Amsterdam copes with urban change. Particular narratives of self-managed urbanism and new imaginaries of urban living have further sustained these agendas. Examples include the promotion of temporary and unplanned use of vacant plots and the promotion of self-built houses. The city nowadays allocates vacant lots, primarily in central locations, to enable selected proposals from citizens for developing land for recreational activities and coworking spaces to be realized. In order to accommodate such new uses, regulatory frameworks are being amended to allow for greater flexibility in the architectural design of both private and public space. Approximately 55 out of 150 hectares of vacant land are currently being used in areas under development in Amsterdam. These areas are primarily located on sites where the municipality intends to promote development (versnellinglocaties). Self-built houses are another example of direct building concessions made by the city to future homeowners (particulier opdrachtgeverschap) or groups of homeowners (collectief particulier opdrachtgeverschap) who are given authorization to design and build personalized dwellings. Although not particularly innovative when compared to other European countries, this practice is viewed as a new development model in Amsterdam, that involves small developers, individuals, architects and a less intensive municipal bureaucracy. In light of several stalled projects after 2008, this approach has opened a new market for realestate investment, in which households become the direct financers of the interventions, and
has further stimulated new markets for the coordination of cooperative housing projects. In 2014 Amsterdam had approximately 1400 self-build housing projects. Currently there is a plan to make about 25% of all new houses self-built. This model is also widely used to stimulate ongoing large-scale projects, such as the Zuidas business district or New West, which are still experiencing difficulty following the crisis.
IJburg: from rigidity to flexibility The fact that such practices of urban intervention are, on the one hand, disaggregated from broader city-regional visions of urban development, and, on the other, propose a new form of self-managed urban fabric is best illustrated by zooming in on a specific project. ‘IJburg’, a newly built archipelago of islands in the east of Amsterdam, is the largest, most expensive and most strategic project built since the 1990s. The project is representative of the modern idea of urbanity, in which public planning provides a framework for urban relations. Its early design attempted to ‘promote’ urbanity through a controlled mix of urban, suburban and non-urban qualities, claiming to provide dense urban living in a more organized fashion than the city centre and in direct contact with nature and water. At the city-regional scale, this project was nested in a complex set of national, regional and local visions. IJburg was the largest unitary residential project in the city since the 1970s, but was also one of the main areas designed to reduce the suburban sprawl of the 1980s. The area is considered the main residential space within the Amsterdam–Almere axis and is expected to supply almost 10% of the total housing production in the Amsterdam metropolitan area. Since 2001, almost 23,000 people have moved into the 10,000 houses that have already been built, and another 4,000 are expected upon completion. The aims of the IJburg development cohered with an optimistic linear projection of demographic growth in Amsterdam over the coming 20 years. Accordingly, it was also supported by the national government (in its fourth national report on spatial planning published in 1988) and lately recognized as a node in the northeast sector of the region in the structural (Ministerie van IenM, 2009). Because of the strategic function of IJburg within the Amsterdam region, its boundaries and intervention programmes were fixed and kept stable over time. This fixity was proportional to the amount that national, regional and local parties had at stake. The plan was also to produce a mixed housing stock, of which 30% was to be social housing. IJburg was originally conceived as a project where elements of control and regulation would be combined. It would include both private housing markets and a regulated programme of social housing and public space delivery. To support the large investment and guarantee the completion of the dwellings on time, the project was precisely defined in respect of its borders, sub-zones and 30-year-long investment programme, with each intervention dependent on the prior delivery. The economic downturn of the last few years prompted local authorities and development corporations to discontinue this configuration of spatial intervention and to adapt the original vision. Today, the municipality promotes small-scale variation, the reuse of vacant plots and the creation of a more diversified housing stock in order to encourage completion of the project in a time of crisis. Moreover, local inhabitants are demanding more freedom to use and adapt public space. They want a ‘human scale’ in their neighbourhood and flexible services, including libraries, children’s playgrounds and spaces for local associations.These things are important to and valued by the local inhabitants, But, in practice, giving space to groups of active citizens promotes new selective forms of urban living.
Disaggregating the city-region: questioning the position of IJburg in Amsterdam’s housing production Because IJburg is considered a specific, homogenous area with an important role in the growth of Amsterdam, a more unpredictable and incremental approach to land development impacts the housing provision in the city-region. In fact, housing production was the first and most important of the items that became the object of innovative experiments in metropolitan cooperation from the early 2000s (noordvleugelconferenties). The project resulted from 20 years of national and regional planning for housing supply at national level (2nd and 3rd national spatial planning frameworks). After the initial projections of the 1980s, IJburg was proposed as a way of revitalizing the core city by avoiding suburban spill-out and by fulfilling national goals for more compact city development and urban regeneration (Gemeente Amsterdam, 1985). In June 1995 a contract between the national government and the city of Amsterdam programmed the development and design of housing on the island (VINEX uitvoeringcovenant). IJburg was to be a project of 660 ha, delivering 45,000 high-density residential units and its own water management system by 2011. Between 1995 and 2000, city planners focused on particularizing, defining, and agreeing upon the different items in the programme and specific limits for housing quotas. From 1995 to 1997 the spatial boundaries of various residential areas were specifically defined and the numbers of dwellings and living units were fixed in different documents. Both the housing mix and the grid-like urban structure were laid down. Each block in IJburg was programmed for social, mid-range and high-range housing in equal parts. Fifty-five per cent of the total were to be single-family dwellings. The expected increase in the number of inhabitants was also carefully programmed. Since the recent economic crisis, the planning process in IJburg has been reorganized to deal with these elements of fixity, as well as the elements of flexibility, while trying to maintain the initial vision for the area. Unfulfilled investments by developers left several blocks vacant, creating opportunities for new uses. The current proposal addresses the need to decrease ambitious real-estate expectations and to diversify the housing stock. As early as 2007, the land-use plan in the eastern area was revised allowing up to 50% flexible programming including 1,400 self-built houses. Today, Centrumeiland, the first part of the IJburg 2 project, is considered the testing ground for the new model of development. The current plans feature a more open and less predetermined urban design model, in which each block can be rethought at any time. Moreover, the total delivery has been left undetermined, allowing for a highly variable programme. The municipal council has, in fact, modified the proposed type of housing and delivered output several times over the last few years in response to projected market fluctuations. In 2009 for example, the project was actually suspended, and in 2012 the city planned to build 700–800 houses at a much lower density than originally anticipated and with a more suburban character. These were mostly to be sold on the private market. Today instead, following new investment in the development industry, the city is proposing to deliver 1300 houses that will be mostly self-built to high-end energy efficiency standards. At this stage, expectations are that there will be 20% low-range and 20% middle-range self-sufficient single family houses, with the remaining 60% being made up of cooperative houses and high-end dwellings. The redefinition of the programming, type and costs of dwellings, and the self-built development model, impinge on the way the Amsterdam region is strategically governed. Each change in the spatio-temporal configuration of the project has an effect on its overall capacity to be framed within a city-regional vision of housing production. While the apparent
motivation for newly proposed plans is to make the project more open and adaptive and less selective, the plans actually tend to be even more selective and mostly oriented on emergent land markets and urban demands. A reduction in the number of houses in IJburg firstly undercuts city-regional expectations of housing production in the whole north wing (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2011). Questioning the time of delivery, the price range, and the position within the urban market leaves planners needing to reconfigure their visions of regional housing provision, with respect to both quantity and type. More self-built houses on the island erode the city’s capacity to fund social housing, which is being concentrated in peripheral areas of the city (Hochstenback and Musterd, 2016). This in turn leads to higher prices, slower delivery and lower densities. This is likely to attract wealthier residents, and to decrease the tenure mix in the area. Current plans for the next development phase of IJburg show little, if any integration with a regional development strategy. On the one hand, the island is viewed as a versnellingslocatie (fast-track area), which allows for regulatory exceptions to promote development. On the other, planners are proposing an island of selfbuilt houses, where dwellers self-manage issues to do with energy production, parking and (in part) public spaces (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2016). A development approach open to incoming demands and based on principles of maximum diversification affects the way IJburg is positioned in the city-regional system of Amsterdam. Changing elements of programming also affects the long-term expectations of urban policies within the city. Amsterdam expects to supply 75,000 dwellings within city limits and approximately 140,000 over the whole region. These programmes have been agreed upon in strategic visions and combine issues of housing development with economic and environmental policies established in the 1990s (Gemeente Amsterdam 1995; 2011; Savini, 2014). Here, the city recognizes the imperative of producing new housing and residential areas to deal with demographic growth while avoiding sprawl. IJburg is intended to be a high-density residential district in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, complementing other development projects for which lower housing densities are planned. Within a structured view of the city as a coherent patchwork of connected projects, IJburg has a regional position. Changing temporal programmes for housing production and delivery affect this regional view and ultimately detach IJburg from the regional strategy. More self-built houses open up possibilities for new types of dwellings, lessening the planners’ grip on the future market value of the houses produced. This change impacts the balance of middle-range houses and social houses across the whole city, and is supported by housing policies geared to increasing private ownership (van Gent, 2013). This (ongoing) commodification of dwellings in Amsterdam can be also explained by looking at the way in which the development of housing is currently being disaggregated at the level of the city-region. Land policy in Amsterdam is sustained by a public infrastructure of land development, oriented to generate revenue for reinvesting in social housing projects and to govern land prices (through an instrument called a vereveningsfond [adjustment fund]). In the past, this policy allowed for different types of housing and a redistribution of revenues from high-end to less profitable functions. This redistributive capacity depends, however, on the ability to connect and organize the income from different interventions across the city and to balance profitable with less profitable projects. In the 1990s, the combination of strong city-regional planning capacities and proactive land-use policies already provided the framework for organizing the long-term production of houses and offices in the city, and consequently for enabling the redistribution of incoming revenues. By pursuing more flexibility through self-determined and property-led projects, the city is aiming to respond to current market fluctuations, but ends up undermining the institutional pillars of its own redistribution mechanisms (for a detailed analysis see Savini, 2016).
Deconstructing urbanity: new claims on the urban fabric Today, local politicians and planners claim that IJburg does not respond to current demands for housing in the city, because of its large housing blocks, high densities and position far from the city centre. The minimal increase in housing prices in the area is often considered a symptom of this problem. Recent adaptations to the plan have been motivated by the principle that the urban fabric should be designed to address the demands of the inhabitants. The original design of the area was driven by the idea of combining liveability with dense development (Lupi, 2008). In the words of the then designer, the urban concept fosters a ‘balance between order and chaos, coherence and variation’ in the quality of space (Claus et al., 2001: 15). The project also gave the opportunity to create a manifesto of design principles, in which the main elements of traditional Amsterdam urbanism were combined with liberalistic ideas typical of the mid-1990s (Claus et al., 2001). A quality team (kwaliteitteam) consisting of major Dutch architects supervised the early stages of the design, guided by the idea that ‘concern for quality should not be limited to a posteriori reviews afterwards’ (translated from Rijnboutt, 2000: 16). Today, there are contrasting views concerning the viability of this scheme, with some pointing at the elements of the design that had an impact on the social atmosphere. The system of controlled quality has in fact produced a nexus of rules and norms, expressed in the extreme detail of the land-use plan. The spatial grid of the island defined the main living units and the housing blocks, in which different housing types and tenures could be combined. These housing types were also voluntarily decoupled from the organization of property units in order to favour social mix (Nycolaas, 2013). This organized spatial configuration of housing blocks responded to the need to combine different tenures, to favour social interaction, and to allow for greater variety of use and marketability of the estates. Variety was considered the principle required to realize a new piece of city, in the words of the alderman at the time. Elements of structural design (the ceiling height of the ground floor and the distance-from-street limits) were also fixed in order to allow for a versatile use as both living and working space, based on principles of flexible working-living conditions. This block design was a distinctive element of the project and indicated as compulsory for developers in all land-use plans of the area approved between 1996 and 2004 indicated. Recent plans recognize this spatial framework as a negative point of reference, proposing instead a less regulated form of zoning capable of accommodating more diversified types of estates and public spaces for local inhabitants. Since the first pioneers purchased homes in 2006, IJburg has become an active neighbourhood, with a greater presence of young, white middle-class families with children than expected. Such groups look for an urban form more suitable to their needs, including mixed work and living spaces, co-working, sport facilities and urban gardens. To claim their position as producers of urban space, inhabitants have employed different means such as online discussion platforms, temporary entertainment facilities on the beach (Blijburg), local urban farms (Boerderij), flexible public services (Flexbib) and temporary art spaces. Today, inhabitants have already claimed nine out of the 17 vacant blocks for activities including urban gardening, education for sustainable living, and facilities for children. These demands conflict with the design principles that originally drove the idea of the grid and were based on the idea of mixed housing blocks as social spaces of interaction. These new claims on space stress instead that urban design should follow use, and should therefore be perpetually changeable. The way local planners are dealing with these new claims is emblematic of the paradoxical nature of self-organized urbanity: by advocating a less predefined cityscape, new
proposals give space for more specific claims, usually from active inhabitants already living on the island. The new practices of spatial appropriation, informed by principles of selfmanaged urban space, appear to generate new selective, stable and exclusive cityscapes. The plans surveyed in this particular case are all oriented to lower densities, better facilities for young middle-class families (e.g. surf-schools and art spaces) and larger houses to be financed and built by households themselves. The result is an urban fabric that promotes particular architectural and functional conditions, suitable for a selected group of active citizens involved within a small part of the neighbourhood, a block or a street. Within IJburg 1, it is already possible to see some examples of these urban forms. The last strip of land is being (self-)built with low-density, villa-like, single-family houses, situated in a prime location next to the water (Rieteiland). The development of Centrumeiland shows similar features. In 2013 the city engaged in an open design process, coordinated by the Amsterdam Centre of Architecture titled Ztad in Zicht (city in sight), asking all citizens to contribute sketches of their ‘ideal’ island. A total of 147 proposals were handed in, mostly from architects and middle-class families living in the area. Loosely inspired by these proposals, the municipality drew up a design inspired by Mediterranean islands: low densities, houses self-sufficient in energy and self-managed parking spaces. Moreover, they made an attempt at incremental development by allowing temporary use and by generating market pressure on the available land. Furthermore, because of its experimental and strategic location, the project has been designated a versnellingslocatie (fast-track area), an exceptional status that allows the city to require no more than 20% of social housing, instead of the 30% compulsory at city level. Centrumeiland is being presented to the public as a laboratory for innovation where the city wishes to respond to inhabitants rather than impose a predetermined grid. By leaving the urban structure of the island undefined, however, the public government is losing its grip on important objectives including density, moderate housing prices and social mix (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2014). The challenge lies then in not simply deconstructing ideas of urbanity to host changing claims, but rethinking it according to collectively defined principles.
Critiques of self-organization in planning and urban development Today, politicians, designers and planners borrow concepts from complexity theory, information sciences and biology to propose new approaches to urban development. Selforganization is a politically malleable term and is often used to problematize the capacity of public authorities to steer urban development. While these concepts may offer opportunities to reflect on the active role of citizens in place making, they can also make room for neoliberal reform, deregulation and new exclusive forms of localism. However, while the concept has been frequently used to explain how socio-ecosystems work, its implications for policy and urban development have yet to be conceptualized. This article has revealed a fundamental paradox in any policy oriented to promote selforganization. On the one hand, self-organization appears to be a narrative used to deconstruct stable notions of space and time and to appreciate urban complexity in policy making. On the other hand, as argued in both theoretical and empirical terms, the very act of spatiotemporal deconstruction inevitably produces new forms of fixity that can be even more selective, thus limiting self-organization itself. Any form of collective intervention expresses a selective and stable spatio-temporal configuration. In spatial planning these primarily take the form of spatial boundaries, both material and immaterial, and temporal programmes. Cities are self-organizing complex systems, but planning continues to establish spatial and
temporal frames of action to reduce complexity and establish possible horizons of urban change. Intervening in the complexity of cities results in an irresolvable tension between an ontology of self-organizing urban systems and an epistemology of spatial intervention. Advocates of deregulation stress that the way to address this fundamental discrepancy is, in fact, to reduce the role that spatial planning plays in urban society and to provide space for self-managed projects. Yet, the who (or what) of this ‘self’ still remains undefined, and is therefore prone to be instrumentally associated with the market. This article shows that such an understanding of urban development conveys a disaggregated conception of city-regional spaces and a deconstructed notion of urbanity. These two problems require a critical discussion of the notion of self-organization in urban and regional research. A governability critique is perhaps the most obvious, and urgent, of these issues. Policies of deregulation and state rescaling are today inspired by an understanding of cities as unpredictable complex systems, but are surprisingly quiet when it comes to the problematics that a liberal individualistic perspective on cities may bring. Discourses on self-organization appear instead to be built on non-ideological forms of do-ityourself liberalism and might undermine the legitimacy of state planning itself. The frequent use of rhetoric inspired by liberal individualism seems to reflect a deep change in the way state power and its responsibilities are organized vis-à-vis citizens. Self-organization is, in fact, geared to dissolving the very distinction between these two entities. A close look at the case of IJburg has shown that current policies aim to redefine (or even erode) the established public practice of city-regional policy making and urban design. With the aim of inviting citizen self-managed projects, IJburg is undergoing a detachment from the city-regional perspective on housing production, on which former housing policies were based. The principles of urban design in the area have also been deconstructed to accommodate local, yet selective, demands for dwellings and facilities. Secondly, it is important to critically challenge concepts borrowed from physical sciences from a relational-geography perspective. Policies might propose a looser practice of city-regional coordination and a less regulated form of urban design in order to favour unexpected, innovative and creative initiatives. Yet, in this way the distinction between subjects and objects in planning is poised for rethinking, making reflections on (public) interest, the state and democracy highly problematic. Paradoxically, while self-organization originally emphasized that cities are systems made of connections between infinite parts (at least in its systemic understanding), it leads instead to disaggregation and fragmentation when applied in policy making. In Amsterdam, this view is currently leading to a deconstruction of the multi-scalar integration of spatial policies, and has problematic consequences for the coordination of urban development within the city-region. The deconstruction of spatio-temporal codes of urbanity aimed at promoting self-organized interventions by local groups or new entrepreneurs likewise undermines the principle that the urban fabric should guarantee standards of social mix, accessibility and affordability. The third critique, and perhaps most socially relevant, is from the standpoint of political economy. Some might argue that self-organization contains the seeds of an emancipated urban society where citizens govern themselves. This article has instead shown that the concept is used today to convey a different attitude to urban change. As shown in Amsterdam, policies aimed at decreasing public planning call for serendipity and spontaneity, and appeal to specific kinds of urban use including temporary creative activities, low-density development, and exclusive laboratoria for housing innovation. Self-building, temporary use, self-managed work–living spaces are just a few examples of things that are particularly appealing to risk-taking households. Moreover, they do not appear to be framed within a view of urban democracy. In sum, making urban projects self-standing units within the space of a city-region and deregulating urban design can provide opportunities for new powers to exert
their needs and values over others. This article has shown that, while self-organization calls for rigid boundaries around individual action to be deconstructed, it paradoxically reproduces selective forms of urban living, which are potentially more exclusive. If planning is selective, non-planning can be even more selective. In this sense, self-organized planning is far from being in any sense inclusive or participatory. Inclusive, participatory planning has, instead, to be well organized. This article has aimed to provide a conceptual lens for addressing these three critical dimensions of the use of self-organization in policy making. It refrains, however, from generalizing, as the effects reported in Amsterdam might not be common in other contexts, especially those with a different tradition of public-led planning. Still, existing observations of socio-political trends in Amsterdam as well as current critiques of new localisms do show that localism may erode the ability of important public institutions to avoid opportunistic and predatory markets, rather than providing opportunities for social inclusion and activism. This is a call for more in-depth research and comparative case studies. Federico Savini, Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, Amsterdam 1018 VZ, Netherlands,
[email protected]
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The author would like to deeply thank colleagues who have commented on earlier drafts of this article. In particular, I am grateful to Jonathan Metzger, Patsy Healey and Miriam Meissner for their constructive views on my arguments. I also thank Willem Salet and Luca Bertolini for their long-lasting support. I finally thank the editor Maria Kaika and the three IJURR reviewers for their constructive comments. 1. All the methodological information and empirical data in the case are collected in the two reports published online at http://aissr.uva.nl/research/externally-fundedprojects/sites/content13/aprilab/about.html 2. This was the title of ‘Plan Day 2012’, the yearly meeting of the Dutch Association of Urbanists and Planners (BSNP) and the Flemish Foundation for Space and Planning (VRP). 3. The number of journals and discussion platforms addressing the changing role of citizens as ‘city makers’ (i.e. stadsmaker) a term coined by the Pakhuis de Zwijger, a platform for public discussion in Amsterdam that also issued a monthly journal called NewAmsterdam: City in Transition) has increased rapidly over the last 10 years in Amsterdam. 4. All these requests have been organized by neighbourhood associations and websites, like for example IJburgDroomt-IJburgDoet. 5. The document, all published by the city of Amsterdam, are the 1995 Startnota IJburg: buitenwonen in the stad and Structuurplan uitwerking IJburg, the 1996 Nota van uitganspunten 1996 and the 2000 Stedebouwkundigplan Haveneiland West 6. In 2007 an overview of inhabitants per subsector was provided: a total of 22,618 people were expected to live in IJburg 1 by 2010 (25,126 by 2030) and a total of 14,175 in IJburg 2 by 2015.
7. Interview with Duco Stadig, June 2013 8. A large proportion of these proposals were handed in by the children of IJburg schools and the degree of success of this participation is debatable. 9. The initiative is coordinated by the City Architectural Center, ARCA, under the name of ‘Stad in Zicht’ [City in sight].
