Spatial Governance Landscapes: Regulation, Property, and Planning

Crucially, the book challenges a common hesitation in critical planning and urban studies to engage real estate for fear of 'capitulating' to market logics. Instead, it advances a relational approach that makes visible the fundamental interactions between public regulators and private investors, and demonstrates why understanding these relations is indispensable to explaining, and shaping, urban development dynamics. Amsterdam may be a small city, but it is a revealing laboratory: its distinctive planning traditions, acute housing pressures, and concentrated investment flows render broader patterns legible.

Built on extensive interviews, original databases on property transactions, and planning regulations, the book moves from conceptual framing to empirically rich chapters on Amsterdam’s regulatory infrastructures and evolving investment ecologies, concluding with a synthetic answer to the enduring question of state–market relations in urbanization. The result is a theory-driven, evidence-based account, and a new integrative model that synthesizes market and regulatory findings, offering a transferable framework and research agenda for analyzing and governing where regulation and property meet.