On 1 April 2019 in the town hall of the Dutch municipality Zwolle the second Van Poelje lecture (named after the founder of Dutch Public Administration, Gerrit van Poelje) was held. The lecture is organized by the Department of Public Administration of the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS) of the University of Twente, in close cooperation with BMC advice, the municipality of Zwolle and the province of Overijssel (of which Zwolle is the capital). The subject of this second lecture was ‘Regional development: task-oriented operating and cooperating ’. The keynote speech of the lecture was delivered by the minister of Home Affairs Kajsa Ollongren. The coreferents were Andries Heidema (the King’s Commissioner in the province of Overijssel) and Bas Denters (professor of Public Administration at the University of Twente). Marcel Boogers (the new chief editor of this magazine, Bestuurswetenschappen) acted as chair of the day and as moderator of the discussion between the attendees and the speakers. In his opinion a clearly different wind is blowing from the Home Office, with more attention for regional differences, which demands more tailor-made work from municipalities and provinces. The minister’s main message was that, because not all provinces have the same position and the problems also differ per province, the tasks must be the guiding principle and the scale must be adjusted accordingly. Therefore, administrative culture and style must be central in the present discussion in her opinion, and not so much the administrative structure.

This essay is written on the occasion of the appearance of the Dutch translation of Richard Sennett’s new book Building and dwelling. Ethics for the city. For more than half a century Sennett has been occupied with the position of man in the changing society in general and with the life of people in the city in particular. Apparently he doesn’t stop thinking and writing about it. His central thesis is that in the past decades, we have worked from the vision of the ‘closed city’, a city that was conceived and designed by professionals in advance, while for the future there is a need for an ‘open city’, a city where not everything is carefully planned in advance, but where there is room for unpredictability and coincidences. That sounds and is very abstract indeed, but it is a signal that is being delivered in the direction of a city nowadays controlled by state and capital, that should make room for a city that is more inspired by civil initiatives and civil involvement. A statement that is, moreover, largely at odds with the current practice of urban design and spatial planning in the present era. Does this mean that Richard Sennett’s central message has actually been said in advance against ‘deaf ears’? Is the chance that ‘his mission’ ends up in the right place already gone in advance? When we talk about the city Sennett distinguishes between two (and inseparable) dimensions: the city as a physical space (‘ville’) and the city as a whole of people of flesh and blood (‘cité’). It is a fascinating quest for the phenomenon of city: an ‘academic pilgrimage’ to an uncertain urban site, an ‘open city’, undergoing the purification of talking with the great figures in the history of (urban) sociology and urban planning.

This essay is about the Dutch PhD-thesis New forms of decentralization by Joris in ’t Veld from 1929. He was not only a competent and efficient social-democratic administrator, but he was also an early administrative scientist. Like the other early (local) administrative scientists, he mainly worked from the legal discipline. During this period however, we also see an increasing input from other disciplines, such as urban planning, economic geography, business administration and statistics. The subject of his dissertation does not come out of the blue. Like many, In ’t Veld felt strongly attracted to the problems of urban and regional development, but the various problems were not yet ripe for a final solution. An important part of his book is therefore devoted to the various solutions that have been found abroad for similar problems. In his thesis, In ’t Veld discusses various forms of governance. First of all, he looks at the way in which the arrangement of cooperation between municipalities can be improved. Where this (voluntary and forced) cooperation falls short of its nature, the institutes of the port authority and of the regional plan come into the picture. In both cases it concerns decentralization through target corporations. A solution is also conceivable through further territorial decentralization: the insertion of a new regional corporation between the province and the municipality in the form of the region (the urban region or the rural region). The urban region needs a necessary supplement in the form of a system of tax equalization to adequately do justice to the interests of the whole and of the parts. An alternative to the urban region is the unity municipality with local decentralization. His integral vision on the organization of domestic government in 1929 is also instructive for the present time.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Maar liefst drie onderzoekscommissies brachten een rapport uit over de vermeende politieke beïnvloeding en sturing van onderzoek op het WODC van het ministerie van Justitie en Veiligheid. Maar uit het rapport van de commissie-Hertogh, die de kwestie in een breder perspectief moest plaatsen, komt geen eenduidig beeld naar voren van de ernst, omvang en oorzaken van de problematiek. Deze commissie verzuimt om een grondige analyse te maken van de achtergronden van de kwestie. Ook de methodologie van het onderzoek van de commissie-Hertogh rammelt, op zijn zachtst gezegd. En de aanbevelingen van deze commissie gaan voorbij aan het belang van interactie tussen beleidsmakers en onderzoekers. Het rapport voldoet niet aan de kwaliteitseisen die je aan beleidsonderzoek kunt stellen. Dat is spijtig: de WODC-affaire had beter onderzoek verdiend.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

Reflection and debate initiates academically inspired discussions on issues that are on the current policy agenda.

On January 9 2015, Job Cohen held his inaugural speech at the University of Leiden as extraordinary professor at the prestigious Thorbecke chair. His study field was the theory of the municipality as an administrative, political and legal system. The title of his inaugural speech was ‘The fourth D’, in which the first three Ds stand for three different decentralizations of tasks to Dutch municipalities and the fourth D for democracy. In his speech Job Cohen advocated a deliberative form of democracy, because it doesn’t emphasize differences and the exaggeration of differences, but emphasizes what the members of a community have in common. This essay contains the farewell lecture that he held on November 30 2018. In it Cohen says that we are still in the transition of a gigantic operation, the three decentralizations of youth care, social services and labor participation. In many areas, therefore, cooperation at a higher level than the original municipalities is necessary and indeed established. Due to the increased regional cooperation, the House of Thorbecke no longer has such a strong foundation, which has long been the case. It is therefore inevitable, according to Cohen, that the House of Thorbecke receives more than just a new coat of paint. In his farewell lecture he furthermore discusses two kinds of citizen participation. The first kind concerns policy-influencing participation, the second involves self-reliant participation, or do-democracy or civil administration, in which the Right to Challenge is currently in the center of attention. This requires a delicate coordination between those who have and exercise government powers and citizens who want to exert influence on it.