EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - The machinery of the city, city governance in idea and practice, Netherlands and Amsterdam 1900-1940

The machinery of the city, city governance in idea and practice, Netherlands and Amsterdam 1900-1940

Introduction

Couperus’s study deals with the question of how ideas and practices of urban governance altered during the first decades of the 20th century in the Netherlands. Both the conception, as well as the practice, of urban governance underwent fundamental changes from the late 19th century onwards. At the same time its constitutional and juridical framework remained fundamentally unaltered throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Against a background of emerging theories of public administration, organisation and management, a strong sense of international orientation, and criticism concerning the working of mass parliamentary democracy and state bureaucracy, urban governance was at the core of debate and experiment in the Netherlands during the first half of the 20th century.

Description

This complex amalgam of ideas and ideals provoked a dynamic reciprocity of theory and practice in the process of urban governance in Amsterdam. Outside the limelight of the city council and the public manifestations of the inter-war period, the relations within urban governance were continuously contested and adjusted. Urban governance was increasingly displaced from the exclusive arenas of political decision making to new spheres of interaction between groups of civil society, experts, civil servants and elected administrators. The unlimited possibilities of the new (the development of ideas and governance practices) ultimately became restricted by the limitations of the old (the persistence of the legal framework).

The aim of the PhD-project is to connect the development of local democracy and local government to the growing complexity of the urban question and its solutions. This project will be concerned with the tension between democracy and the quest for solutions to the urban question, using as a starting point the case study in local democracy and in local decision making of the Amsterdam municipality in the interwar years. The quest for solutions to the urban problems in Amsterdam will be analysed within the context of international orientation towards the urban question. Many municipal policies or administrative solutions can be traced down to a source of internationally moulded knowledge and inspiration. Amsterdam both benefited and contributed to this network often referred to as the urban internationale . The process of trial and error which accompanied local decision making caused an almost continuous reflection on the organisation and boundaries of local democracy and bureaucracy. On the one hand municipal directors, highly educated civil servants and meddling scientists carried out an idea of rational and technological progress. On the other hand political propagandists, administrators, councilors and aldermen propagated the primacy of democratic progress. Both technocrats and democrats were practically and mentally bounded to the inflexible legislative framework in the Netherlands . The separation and rapprochement of local bureaucracy and local democracy in Amsterdam in the interwar years is a point of particular interest in this research.

Project start date

01/05/2009

Links

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Document type

case

Themes

Urban Policy

Keywords

Institutional characteristics
Academic/Research