Ontologies of live-work mix in Amsterdam, Brussels and Stockholm: an institutionalist approach drawing on path dependency

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the impact of institutional frameworks on ontologies of ‘live-work mix’, i.e. the renewed intertwining of residential and economic uses in urban developments. We aim to understand how local housing and planning regimes influence the nature of live-work mix by comparing three contrasting institutional frameworks (Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm), using an institutionalist approach to governance drawing on the concept of path dependency. We address two research questions: how have each city’s housing and planning regimes influenced current urban development strategies, and what ontologies of live-work mix do these regimes and strategies underlie. Based on a literature review, document analysis and exploratory interviews, we show that live-work goals are defined in instruments underpinned by different discourses and early planning directions, but in which housing supply is instrumental to economic growth. Market parties play an essential role in implementing these goals as a result of critical junctures and dependencies affecting the actors involved and their governance capacity. Overall, the local ontologies of live-work mix reflect broader city understandings and are either consistently oriented towards attractiveness or, on the contrary, overlapping between, sometimes, antagonistic agendas. Used sensitively, our analytical framework appears to be relevant to understanding the local mitigation of global developments.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing regime
• institutional framework
• live-work mix
• path dependency
• urban development

Acknowledgements

The first author would like to dedicate this article to the memory of Jeroen Van der Veer, AFWC (Amsterdamse Federatie van Woningcorporaties), who supported her during her research and sadly passed away in December 2020. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewer for highly valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Beunen, Van Assche, and Duineveld (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FNRS under a FRIA grant - Fonds pour la Formation à la Recherche dans l'Industrie et dans l'Agriculture [grant number FRIA 21033].