An Institutional Approach to Autonomous and Connected Cities: Ostrom's Distributed Metropolitan Governance

Global cities are the economic and cultural centres in the world. They compete with each other for a number one status on various lists. International accessibility is essential for a city’s ranking and for its ‘supply’ of people, goods and resources, putting a city’s position in the international network of airports and harbours and in the international economy high on the political agendas of national and local governments.

Cities are constantly searching to improve their performance. Specialized planning models support city governments to deliver the various public goods and public services that are expected from them. More integrated models, such as the airport region and urban metabolism models, emphasize the tensions between international connectivity and local liveability. The extent to which current institutions are capable of managing these tensions is questioned by stakeholders. They search for institutional structures supporting the delivery of the public goods promised, with a prominent position for questions of scale. Technological developments have made these questions more urgent. The fast developments in the field of renewable energy technology, smart grids and electric vehicles call for redefinitions of rules and roles of consumers, producers, citizens, local, provincial and national authorities and of the public goods delivered to them.

In this paper, we address the search for institutions that match today’s challenges by using the theoretical framework of distributed metropolitan governance as developed by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. With this institutional approach, we explore current urban governance challenges in the Netherlands. To sustain their competitive position in the global network, Dutch cities strive to become resilient, self-organising and self-governing. We will explore how institutional mechanisms as consociationalism and pillarization, as identified by Lijphart, which have proven to be able to bridge conflicting values, are still relevant for a renewed conception of distributed metropolitan governance.