Transformative spatial governance New avenues for comprehensive planning in fragmented urban development

Urban development is fragmenting: Entrepreneurial planning strategies involving a wide range of actors have been replacing managerial public sector-led approaches. While scholars lament the dissolution of social and spatial interventions, disconnected property-driven projects, as well as multifaceted social initiatives, are mushrooming in cities. This dissertation seeks a new approach to create forms of comprehensiveness amidst the complex spatial governance practices underpinning fragmented urban development. It stipulates the need for a new conception of comprehensiveness based on the creation of possibilities for linkages between fragmented city-building endeavours. Furthermore, it argues that transformative spatial governance structures are pivotal to allow city-building endeavours to flourish and simultaneously place them into firm but flexible and adaptive frameworks to avoid fragmentation’s negative effects and externalities. Spatial governance is considered transformative when its institutional patterns change on the basis of concrete, area-based city-building endeavours. To this end, the dissertation identifies and engages with a recent body of literature that centres around transformation and structural change in planning and governance. A systematic review of existing literature reveals the neglect of private sector actors as elements in instigating scholars’ desired structural changes. Therefore, this dissertation distinctly considers property-driven development formations as instigators of structural change and explores their linkages to micro-scale social efforts. Toronto in Canada and Amsterdam in the Netherlands serve as research settings. The analysis suggests that public sector planners can crucially influence urban development, not in the traditional sense by being in command but by creating possibilities for linkages between fragmented actions in spatial governance.