Governing cities, imperfectly: Patrick Le Galès

This post was written by Tuna Taşan-Kok.

On a crisp spring afternoon in Amsterdam, UGoveRN and the Urban Planning (UP) Group welcomed Professor Patrick Le Galès (Sciences Po, Paris) to deliver a keynote as part of our ongoing UP Dialogues Series. A founding Dean of Sciences Po’s Urban School and a comparative sociologist of international renown, Professor Le Galès is best known for his work on urban governance, the transformation of the state, and territorial politics across Europe and the Global South. His keynote offered a rare combination of conceptual clarity, empirical depth, and theoretical humility, delivered with the wit and reflection of someone who has studied cities long enough to know their contradictions.

Framed as a work in progress emerging from his long-running “jazzy” project (a comparative research agenda on “what is governed and not governed” in large metropolises such as Paris, São Paulo, London, and Mexico City), the lecture moved through three interlocking analytical layers.

A long view on urban governance: From agency to contradiction

Professor Le Galès began by critically revisiting three decades of urban studies, particularly the shift from viewing cities as passive outcomes of capitalist urbanization (inspired by thinkers like David Harvey and Neil Brenner) to recognizing cities as active sites of governance, decision-making, and institutional experimentation. Drawing on his early work in European cities during the 1990s, he showed how processes of democratization, decentralization, and welfare expansion gave urban governments new political and fiscal capacities, particularly in medium-sized cities with embedded institutions. Cities were not simply containers of globalization, he argued, but sites of collective action and public policy, sometimes capable of producing their own rules of the game.

However, Professor Le Galès was not nostalgic or romantic about this trajectory. He warned that the earlier models of integrated, strategic urban governance, particularly those nurtured in Western European welfare states, no longer fit the realities of today’s fragmented, unequal, and often crisis-prone metropolises.

Urban governance as fragmented, uneven, and relational

The core of the talk introduced a reconceptualization of urban governance not as a coherent system, but as a patchwork of partial governing arrangements marked by discontinuities, uneven intensities, and selective inclusion. Some people and places are deeply governed, through policing, planning, or data infrastructures, while others remain ungoverned or governed by entirely different logics, including mafias, informal networks, or private interest coalitions. Importantly, governance is not synonymous with state capacity or rational coordination. It is also about veto powers, organised anarchy, and contingent alliances.

Using examples from his recent studies of Paris, Professor Le Galès showed that conflict is constitutive of urban politics, not an exception, but a structuring force. Whether over social housing, healthcare, or transport, governance unfolds through contestation. He emphasized several types of urban conflict identified in Paris over the past 50 years, ranging from classic public service struggles to intra-left battles over ecology, gender, and race.

Rather than reducing governance to technocratic management or assuming the rise of universal “neoliberal” templates, Le Galès insisted on grounding the analysis in empirical variation: who governs, who is governed, and how? And crucially: what is not governed, and why?

Beyond the buzzwords: critiques of urban theory and method

The final part of the talk was a critical intervention into dominant strands of urban scholarship. Professor Le Galès expressed skepticism toward overly celebratory accounts of policy mobility, smart city discourse, and top-down models of “good governance.” He questioned assumptions behind popular narratives of “ungovernable cities,” pointing out that many supposedly chaotic contexts are in fact tightly managed, albeit by informal, extractive, or opaque coalitions. Informality, in his view, often serves to make cities governable in the absence of formal capacity, rather than marking their failure.

He also took aim at rational choice accounts of urban behavior and at critiques that dismiss urban governance as inherently fragmented and dysfunctional. Fragmentation, he argued, is not a failure of governance, it is governance. Rather than searching for ideal types, he urged researchers to adopt a more sociological and geographically grounded approach to studying how governance actually unfolds, with all its contradictions, ambiguities, and institutional bricolage.

A final reflection on organised anarchy

In closing, Le Galès offered a powerful framework for researching metropolitan governance that remains open-ended and empirically anchored. Governance, he reminded us, is not always about heroic leadership or policy clarity, it is often about piecing together contingent alliances, managing conflict, and making do with partial control over complex urban systems. Rather than endorsing sweeping theories of neoliberal convergence or assuming coherent urban regimes, Professor Le Galès advocated for a more empirical, historically grounded, and conflict-sensitive approach. His view of governance is relational and partial: cities are spaces where coalitions form, veto players block, and fragmented institutions sometimes, imperfectly, coordinate action. He referred to the concept of “organised anarchy” based on a recent publication (see here) as not a resignation to disorder but a lens for understanding how governance occurs in practice: opportunistically, unevenly, and often indirectly.

His talk, drawing from sociology, public policy, and critical urban theory, struck a chord with many researchers grappling with the limits and potential of planning in the face of inequality, fragmentation, and crisis. As cities increasingly become central arenas of political struggle and experimentation, Patrick Le Galès’s reflections offer both a conceptual compass and a call for realism.

We thank him for sharing this evolving body of work with us, and for reminding us that understanding urban governance requires a deep engagement with failure, friction, and the long durée of political life.