geografie luoghi spazi città

In 2013, this boundary-work activity provoked an easing of the sectorial legislation. A revision of
the Water Sector Law allowed corporatized utilities to co-finance by mean of water tariffs privatelyand
municipally-owned projects designed to cope with surface water in roads, water courses and recreational
areas.
To conclude, the clear-cut boundaries between water infrastructure and the urban fabric designed
by the water sector reforms were difficult to maintain in the light of urban junctions such as the
flooding of Skt. Kjelds neighborhood. This enforced the place-making assemblage and the emergent
livability agenda spreading across Danish municipalities. Nevertheless, national authorities are still today
striving to maintain a strict separation between investments related to the responsibilities of the
corporatized utilities and the political priorities of cities.
6. CONCLUSIONS. — Our study indicates that a particular transformative potential pertaining to
urban contexts resides in the inherent ambivalence between system boundaries and system functions
that characterize urban governance, due to its place sensitive nature. Urban governance thus plays out
in the contexts of micro-political negotiations and controversies among system framings promoted by
actor constellations with different spatial orientations. This indicates that a governance challenge is to
cope with organizational and institutional tensions between place-specific activities and system-specific
arrangements promoted at various other scales.
Our analytical approach offers a perspective on the urban governance of socio-technical transitions
which highlights the fluidity of relations among systems boundaries and place specific dynamics, proper
of urban development processes. Such fluidity allows urban contexts to maintain emergent properties of
path creation rather than path-dependent lock-ins. This dialectic characteristic of urban contexts makes
them particularly productive arenas for studying, supporting and driving sustainability transitions.
On the base of these reflections, we recommend both researcher and policy makers to engage
more closely with contingent urban dynamics. Rather than trying to contain the creative potentials of
place-specific dynamics in discrete and sectorial framings, it is necessary to design policies which are
able to empower distributed and path-creating agency capable of developing a variety of sometimes
competing and sometimes aligning place-specific framings. Sectorial framings might appear sustainable
and productive in the short term, because they facilitate linear analysis and centralized management
practices, but on the long run may prevent incumbent actors from engaging in inclusive and dialectic
processes with those actors having the capacities of showing the way to novel pathways for sustainability
transition journeys.
BIBLIOGRAFIA
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