Urban commons is presented as a challenge of collaborative governance. This study delivers a normative perspective to analyse and evaluate processes and outcomes of the governance of urban commons. It demonstrates the development and application of the perspective in action research on Amsterdam’s Zero Waste Lab case, as a way to better understand successful and failing institutions in a concrete practice and to design interventions for improvement. Consequently, the (im)plausibility of collective action in urban communities and the participation of public actors present dilemmas for urban commons. The study specifically synthesises urban commons and collaborative governance scholarship and relates also in general to the transition towards co-creation in governing the city, e.g. in public administration or planning.
Information and communications technologies (ICT) can be very important to provide access to urban cultural heritage collections. Urban archives contain a lot of (historical) information about people, places, events, objects, trade and artefacts. Its worthwhile to make this information accessible for a bigger public. The core challenge nowadays is to explore the role and meaning of ICT in disseminating this historical knowledge in public spaces. In this paper, we will research the theoretical background of the information value chain in archival science and of the use and context of new media technologies in public spaces. Our research method was a combination of desk research and a case study, in which new interactive media technologies were used to reconstruct historical images of Amsterdam in public spaces. The case study blended digital historical content with physical interactions to provide a user experience of urban history by using innovative storytelling techniques. The resulting prototype made it possible to disseminate historical information from Amsterdam urban archives.
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In many European cities, urban experimentation is increasingly preferred as a method for testing and disseminating innovations that might ignite a transformation toward more sustainable cities. By both academics and practitioners, these experiments tend to be approached as relatively neutral initiatives through which plural urban stakeholders willfully collaborate, while their success is seen as above all dependent on effective management. For this reason, the political nature of urban experiments, in the sense that they entangle different and often contending stakeholders in their innovation processes, remains relatively unarticulated in both practice and the academic literature. Building on the urban experimentation literature and political theory, this conceptual paper argues that the depoliticization of experimental initiatives is especially problematic for unleashing their transformative potential, which requires revealing the existing power-relations and biases keeping the status-quo in place and negotiability of radical alternatives. From this perspective, the paper sketches out four ideal-typical trajectories for experiments as related to their (de)politicization; optimization, blind leap, antagonistic conflict and transformation. Bringing insights from political theory to bear on the urban experimentation literature, we proceed to hypothesize the implications of our ideal-types for urban experiments’ transformative capacities. The paper closes by presenting a future research and policy agenda.
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