In a recently written chapter featuring earlier empirical research on architecture Urban Commons of Culture member Robert Kloosterman brought together research on cultural industries, urban agglomeration, and the commons. The Urban Commons and Cultural Industries. An Exploration of the Institutional Embeddedness of Architectural Design in the Netherlands was published in The Routledge Handbook of Institutions and Planning in Action (2018).
[…] “What, then, are the key conditions for liveable, sustainable and prosperous cities? And, more practically, which forms of governance can contribute to reaching these goals? The limits of allocation through markets, which was promoted as part of the neoliberal drive after 1980, have become much more manifest in the wake of the credit crisis of 2008 notably in the realm of social equity and climate change (Klein, 2014 ; Mason, 2015 , Milanovic, 2016 ). A return to more statist approaches as in post- war Western Europe (Judt, 2005 ), it seems, is also not very feasible due the fundamental Hayekian problem of lack of knowledge which, arguably, has become even more serious with the increasing complexity and fragmentation of post- Fordist urban societies, and also because of the more mundane problem of lack of financial resources which many public actors face. There is, consequently, a quest for governance options which may counteract the obvious shortcomings of market allocation while avoiding some of the problems inherent in more statist approaches. There are many ways to look at urban governance – from the highly abstract to the detailed concrete and from the explicit normative to the descriptive and analytical empirical. There is, consequently, a quest for governance options which may counteract the obvious shortcomings of market allocation while avoiding some of the problems inherent in more statist approaches. There are many ways to look at urban governance – from the highly abstract to the detailed concrete and from the explicit normative to the descriptive and analytical empirical.Below, I will use a rather modest window to analyse a specific case of the functioning of the so- called urban commons, the pool of resources in cities for which property rights are hard or even impossible to establish and therefore require forms of collective action. I will look briefly at how forms of collective action underpin a successful Dutch cultural industry, namely architectural design. The focus is on architectural design as an economic activity which can be seen as emblematic of advanced urban economies. Looking at architectural design may thus give us an understanding of how the urban commons function in relation to a wider set of economic activities.” [read more…]