Urban Government and Governance

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Thanks to decentralisation processes, city governments have acquired greater political influence and policy-making capacity, undermining the pre-eminence of the nation-state (Le Galès, 2002; Kazepov, 2005, 2010). Therefore, cities – in Europe and beyond – have carved out a niche of autonomy that allows them to develop tailor-made policies and regulative solutions to the complex and problems affecting their localities. Recently, local political élites have sought to open their decision-making process by engaging residents in the co-production of services (Borraz and Le Galès, 2010). Nonetheless, when top-down solutions fail to meet residents’ demands, contentious relationships between political elites and residents may arise. Recent urban movements in many European cities – as elsewhere – have united activists around right-to-city claims, demanding their right to live in decent conditions and a fairer access to basic services (Uitermark et al., 2012). These requests, rooted in anti-global, ecologist and feminist discourses, are challenging institutional logics and practices, offering alternatives from the ground-up. By conceptualising cities as political actors, we will examine the “limits and discontinuities [or continuities] of government and governance” (Borraz and Le Galès, 2010: 138, 145), which characterise the trajectories of city governments in Europe and beyond. We will thus identify and evaluate the “instrumentation of public action” deployed by urban policy-makers (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004: 12), their embeddedness in multilevel structures, as well as the ongoing and latent political conflicts in the urban space between the power-holders and the powerless.