On May 16th and 17th, 2023, the first annual UGoveRN International Networking Event took place in Amsterdam with Prof. Dr. Mike Raco (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL) as an international guest. The event was initiated on Tuesday with the Annual UGoveRN Keynote Lecture at the University of Amsterdam and continued Wednesday with an excursion in Amsterdam Noord and ended later that day with a brainstorming activity.
On Tuesday, 16th of May, Mike was invited to speak in front of an extended audience at the University of Amsterdam within the Urban Planning Group (GPIO), initiating the 2-day event with the Annual UGoveRN Keynote Lecture. The lecture was centred around the topic of ‘Who Governs the City?’, and granted insights contextualised within Mike’s expertise; ‘the London Model – the Privatised City’, largely based on the book published in 2022 together with Frances Brill.
Topics included:
- The rise of the ‘parastate’, a system beyond public-private partnership (i.e., ‘the suite of agencies that govern alongside, on behalf of, or in place of state institutions’); a “multifaceted assemblage of private actors and experts involved directly and indirectly in the governance of development planning”, engaging in a “more structural set of interactions in which some of the separations between the public and private sectors have effectively dissolved away” (Raco & Brill, 2022, p. 52).
- An increasing lack of affordable housing due to profit-focused, market-oriented, and costly residential development (e.g., build-to-rent) by the ‘elite’, supported through the regulatory framework (e.g., tax benefits, shifts in the spatial policy).
- Governance through contract; infrastructure as a global industry and investment opportunity and the emergence of new contractual spaces produced through growth-led development strategies.
- Questions such as who has the ‘right to regulate’? And what new challenges arise for planners through these developments?
