Global crisis and the systems of spatial governance: varying patterns of urban democracy

Inadequate regulation of urban markets is at the origin of the current global crisis and increases, in years of crisis, the unequal distribution of global wealth. The importance of the related risks draws attention to the systems of spatial governance, through which States regulate the urban markets. In Europe, one can observe that the countries most affected by the crisis have systems of spatial governance that are based on the preventive assignation of rights for land use and for spatial development through the urban plan. The systems of the European States that are less affected by the crisis establish rather that new rights for land use and for spatial development are assigned only after the public control of development projects and their distributional effects. More generally, the fact that the former model is still widely prevalent in the world may help to explain the global dimension and the duration of the crisis. Despite the evidence that some models can operate better than others, the improvement of spatial governance systems is however limited by their complex nature of “institutional technologies”. In such a context, planners are especially responsible for the increase of public awareness concerning the role of spatial governance for economic and social life.