Cities and regions have long captured the imagination of sociologists, economists, and urbanists. From Alfred Marshall to Robert Park and Jane Jacobs, cities have been seen as cauldrons of diversity and difference and as fonts for creativity and innovation. Yet until recently, social scientists concerned with regional growth and development have focused mainly on the role of firms in cities, and particularly on how these firms make location decisions and to what extent they concentrate together in agglomerations or clusters. This short article summarizes recent advances in our thinking about cities and communities, and does so particularly in light of themes advanced in my recently published book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which focuses on diversity and creativity as basic drivers of innovation and regional and national growth. This line of work further suggests the need for some conceptual refocusing and broadening to account for the location decisions of people as opposed to those of firms as sources of regional and national economic growth. In doing so, this article hopes to spur wider commentary and debate on the critical functions of cities and regions in 21st century creative capitalism.

Dutch housing policy has been reformed dramatically over the last fifteen years. The reforms were preceded by an equally dramatic policy crisis during the 1970s and 1980s. This article attempts to explain the development of both the crisis and the subsequent reforms. An important explanatory variable is the logic of provision, relating to the fact that housing comes in the shape of stock and capital. However, the institutional logic of Dutch housing policy, notably the fact that most social housing providers are traditionally private nonprofits, has also proved of vital significance in determining the outcome of the reform process. Distinguishing the effects of the logic of provision and the institutional logic enables an analysis of how policy feedback, the inheritance from previous policies, may cause both policy crisis and policy reform.

This article examines government communication on two large-scale Belgian governmental reforms: the Federal Administration and the police forces. Using Lees-Marshment's typology of marketing processes, we identify the marketing of the changes by the Federal Administration as sales-oriented: a finished product or an expert-developed administrative reform project to be sold to the public. Declining enthusiasm for communication and growing product disagreement gradually forced this reform to disappear from the market. The police reform followed a market-oriented marketing process. It responded to public outrage. The Government merely reacted to external information. This explains why it failed to deal with a changed market situation. A content analysis of articles in both popular and quality newspapers examines the representation of both reforms in the media and seems to confirm our observations. This article shows that marketing reforms are extremely difficult when there is no shared understanding of the product to be marketed.

In managing new cleavages between conflicting values (such as materialism and post-materialism), we cannot simply fall back on a classical approach to cleavage management. The segments surrounding the new cleavage are clearly more fluid than those surrounding the religious or socio-economic cleavages from consociationalism and neo-corporatism, such as is rightly emphasised in the network approach. In the conflict between the materialist and post-materialist value pattern, representation logic is not a given certainty. Not only the facts, but also the negotiating players and the decision-making arenas are the subject of negotiation and strategic action. This is reflected in the new forms of consultation politics. Similarly, consensus formation cannot make do with the (party) political integration of the segments because, given the conditions of post-materialism, this integration can only be partial. It seems important in the new cleavage management to devote attention to the existence of several arenas in which political interests are weighed up. For the players involved in a particular policy issue, this means the lure of strategic forum shopping and thus complication of the conflict-resolving ability of each of the forums.

It is generally assumed that unsafety is typically urban, as the urban environment offers opportunities for criminality and contains in addition a lot of illegality and marginality. However, empirically grounded understanding of the relation between criminality and the social and physical characteristics of the urban environment is limited. Therefore this contribution explores the (spatial) connection between the social and physical environment and different forms of criminality. In this respect some common assumptions exist, such as the idea that the residential composition of neighbourhoods is strongly related to criminality; especially when residents are poor or immigrants. In addition, anonymous and massive urban environments would ask for criminality due to a lack of social control. Far less often does one point to the relation between criminality and the presence of a visiting population, as in city centres. Our analysis supports this relation: criminality in cities is connected with the opportunities offered in city centres. This insight is important for the organisation of police work.

Parents are worried about the safety of their youngsters in public space, although they do not define all public space as dangerous for their children. This article discusses empirical research of the views of parents of fourteen and fifteen year olds on the safety in different environments. Parents in cities, suburbia and the countryside in the Dutch province of Groningen all worry about the safety of their children. Nevertheless, differences exist in the ways in which they reproduce images of 'the city as a jungle' and the 'rural idyll.' These dominant images influence the parental concerns and the way parents protect their youngsters. At the same time, parents hold alternative and sometimes contradictory views about the appropriateness of their residential environment. Furthermore, parents' opinions on safety are not exclusively based on the places their children visit. Besides local experiences, national and international news frame the parents' views. This is of considerable importance for local safety policies.

Blokland and Soenen use ethnographic research of tramcars in Antwerp to discuss how incidental contacts in public transport relate to safety and trust in the public space. They argue that anonymity, although often blamed, is not the culprit. Blaming certain categorically labeled groups as 'problematic' is not a fruitful approach either. Through an analysis of social realms (public, private and parochial, as in Lofland) that customers create in interaction with each other, the authors show that public transport incorporates potentials both for 'thin community' and for conflict and anxiety. Whether people experience one or the other depends on the social trust. The key to understand how such trust can grow and decrease cannot be found in crime statistics, individual attitudes or categories of 'problematic groups', but in the constructions of the social realms through which people opt out of the public realm or, in groups, appropriate the public space at the expense of others. Describing the various services of 'Lijnspotters', drivers and controllers, the authors discuss what types of social control in public transport is most likely to enhance social trust.

This article discusses the changes in the safety policy in the Netherlands over about the last fifteen years. These changes are analysed as reactions to the problems that the police and other criminal justice agencies face and which result from the shift from a modern to a late modern society. Five main changes are distinguished: in the organisational and managerial arrangements of the police; in the relation between the state (police) and other (both public and private) agencies; the rise of extra-judicial instruments and the growing attention for the position of victims; the increasing use of technological instruments for surveillance and crime prevention; and a harsher and more punitive policy. These changes create new fundamental questions for a future safety policy.

The creation of quasi-autonomous organizations has spread throughout the western world. Flanders and the Netherlands both have a longstanding tradition of putting policy execution at arms' length, thereby creating so-called voi's and zbo's respectively. This raises the question whether there are comparable trajectories, forms, developments and political considerations. By comparing the developments in both countries the authors seek an answer to this question.

The establishment of quangos was very popular until the mid 1990s. However, in both countries a countermovement can be seen. The creation of quangos is believed to lead to problems for political control. Both governments have taken several measures to solve these issues.

The comparison shows that there are indeed many similarities, but also reveals interesting differences. There is no comprehensive convergence between the two neighbours. These differences are the result of differences in the politico-administrative system and the institutional culture.

In the discussion about the introduction of a directly elected mayor in the Netherlands the issue of election procedures is largely ignored. Election procedures, however, are not neutral. Five different elections procedures that can be used to elect a mayor (simple majority, two round system, alternative vote, Cooms rule and the adjusted Copeland rule) are analyzed using seven different criteria (selecting majority winners, selecting condorcet winners, not selecting condorcet losers, monotonicity, strategy proofness, simplicity and costs). With respect to most of the criteria used, the adjusted Copeland score rule outperforms the other procedures mentioned.

Although 'integration with retention of "own" culture' has ceased to be the dominant policy principle in Dutch minority policies for quite some time now, there are still remarkably many ethnically specific policy arrangements in the Netherlands. To explain this contradiction this paper introduces an administrative mechanism: the logic of making policy categories conflicts with the logic of policy implementation. The use of 'avoidant categories' – a particular type of policy category discussed in this paper – creates an administrative opportunity structure that unintendedly promotes ethnic fragmentation instead of integration in policy implementation. We illustrate the working of this mechanism in a comparative perspective; the Netherlands is not unique in this respect and experience in other countries is instructive.