Urban regimes and strategies

the long version

If a city based its planning decisions on the needs of an international bureaucracy rather than on the traditional needs of local residents and businesses, how would that city change? Alex G. Papadopoulos addresses this question with a detailed study of how the nineteenth-century quartiers of Leopold and Nord-Est in Brussels have been transformed materially and functionally since the European Communities decided to locate their administrative headquarters there in 1957. Drawing on game and rational-choice theories, spatial analysis, and urban morphology studies, Papadopoulos analyzes how the landscape of Brussels's center has evolved over the last three decades under the influence of successive coalitions of local and foreign elites. He describes how international real-estate developers form ephemeral, flexible, and specialized regimes of cooperation with governmental organizations at all levels and with special-interest lobbies to carry out major urban projects, while local neighborhood groups, conservationists, and political factions such as the Green Party oppose them with qualitatively similar regimes of resistance.