Strategic Urban Governance: Theme introduction

The days of long-term predict-and-provide planning that saw its heydays in the post-war decades are long gone. As our late-modern time presents us with an evermore complex and contrasting view of the world, planning has become a much more fragmented and ambivalent affair. That a country or a city should be run like a private corporation has increasingly become common sense, and thus the competition among entities – be it countries, regions or cities – to a greater and greater extent defines success and the means to achieve it. What has been collected under the umbrella term Strategic Urban Governance is referred to as one of the ways to move forward and in this issue of Twentyfirst we take a closer look at this phenomenon, its preconditions, potentials and inherent contradictions.