Planning with the chaos of everyday life Exploring the governance regimes of mixed-use public spaces, taking urban street markets as a case study

Mixed-use public spaces are pivotal to urban life. They facilitate a variety of users in making a living, socialising, and roaming. The highly complex socio-spatial dynamics that these spaces ought to accommodate also make it extremely challenging to plan. In planning theory and practice, mixed-use public space represents a specific spatial type that challenges the debate on how urban planning can navigate the realm between order and chaos. This research positions urban planning within a broader context of governance. It uses urban street markets as a case to study the complexity of how to plan mixed-use public space using a governance approach. I propose ‘governance regime’ as the key analytical framework, which is defined as the network of organisations connected through formal and informal institutions at multiple governance layers, interacting with mixed-use public spaces. The main research question is: How do governance regimes accommodate the complexity of planning mixed-use public spaces? To answer this question, I conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, investigating the operation of street markets and their governance regimes in Amsterdam and Taipei on both street and organisational levels. My research findings reveal that spaces that seem well-ordered physically can be disorganized in governance processes. Those that seem visually chaotic may be organised by careful formal and informal stakeholder arrangements. To conclude, my research has illustrated that only when we understand the complexity of mixed-use public space and their socio-spatial dynamics, it becomes possible to develop systemic thinking about the extent to which urban planning should facilitate and coordinate spatial production beyond ordering chaos.