“Urban interventionism” in welfare and planning: National typologies and “local cultures” in Europe

ABSTRACT

Comparative research on welfare and planning has traditionally been based on broadly defined typologies of national welfare state and planning systems, thereby neglecting the role of local “cultures” that help sustain and redevelop underlying institutions and practices. Drawing on a European-wide survey of city mayors, we explore how well the established typologies are reproduced in local welfare and planning cultures, as reflected in mayoral attitudes, and whether there are systematic variations of welfare and planning cultures even within the same country. The findings suggest that nationally based categories of welfare regimes and planning systems do not necessarily correspond with mayors’ preferences for “urban intervention” in service delivery, housing provision, or planning. Local specificities, including permeability to the influence of European institutions and policies, may in fact have a significant impact on mayors’ attitudes in these fields, possibly creating new local understandings as well as pressures for reforming national welfare and planning systems. These conclusions strengthen the argument that “local cultures” are presenting a challenge to national typologies of planning and welfare, and are important elements to take into account when exploring the evolution of urban policies at the local level.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the Norma Transitória [DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0076 (Patrícia Pereira)]; and the Swiss National Science Foundation [100012M_170240].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The survey covered mayors in over 2,600 cities, from the following countries: Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, and UK (England). The survey also included Cyprus, Ireland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Romania, but only countries with more than 20 responses each were included in the comparative analysis, with the exception of Iceland, where the survey attained a response rate of 83.3%.

2. Indeed, national programs of the EU Cohesion Fund for the period 2014–2020 often emphasize the role of cross-sectoral integration in large infrastructure projects, see: http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/atlas/programmes?search=1&keywords=integrated&periodId=3&countryCode=ALL&regionId=ALL&objectiveId=16&tObjectiveId=ALL: Accessed 22 October 2019.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliet Carpenter

Juliet Carpenter is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University. She works at the interface of different disciplines, including human geography, urban planning, political science and urban sociology, with extensive research interests related to urban policy, regeneration and social inequality. She is currently working on an international comparison of neighborhood governance in Canada and the UK, examining the extent to which urban planning and policy decisions can contribute to more just and equitable neighborhoods and cities, in particular through arts-based methods, to give voice in marginalized communities.

Patrícia Pereira

Patrícia Pereira is a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Sciences (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa). She conducts research in Urban Sociology/Urban Studies, mainly taking a qualitative approach, and her main research interests are urban inequalities, gentrification and displacement, public spaces and urban everyday life. She is co-coordinator of the Urban Sociology Research Network of the European Sociological Association (ESA RN37) and of the Urban Ethnography Network-ETNO.URB.

Oliver Dlabac

Oliver Dlabac is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau. He leads the research group on local democracy and teaches on decentralization. He is interested in local and regional democracy in Switzerland and in a comparative perspective, including problems for recruiting local honorary politicians (voluntary citizens), political leadership, urban planning, metropolitan governance and state rescaling. He is currently engaged in empirical research on spatial justice and the “just city,” thereby exploring the institutional and political foundations for related housing, land use and school policies.

Roman Zwicky

Roman Zwicky is a PhD candidate at University of Zurich’s Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau. He studied political science, Islamic studies and photography at the University of Zurich and graduated with a master’s degree in social sciences. He has predominantly been working in interdisciplinary projects investigating the representation of linguistic groups in the multilingual Swiss federal administration. At present, he is investigating governance in the policy field of housing as part of an international project on the just city and the question of voting rights for foreigners in Swiss municipalities.