All over the world cities are searching for appropriate ways of governance in the context of far-reaching political, economic, social and institutional transformations affecting all levels of scale. These transformations are taking place with profound changes in networks and balances of power among stakeholders of the public, private and civil society sector. They trigger off the evolution of innovative strategies, procedures and instruments of how to coordinate, manage and govern urban development processes and stimulate the formation of new formal and informal actor networks. Both processes contribute to the concept of "New Urban Governance" which has to be analysed in its path-dependency and institutional embeddedness. In the context of a remarkable re-scaling of governance-arenas set off by manifold exogenous and endogenous processes like globalization, de-regulation, de-centralization and privatization as well as social, economic, and spatial polarization and fragmentation, metropolitan regions and urban districts are gaining even more importance in terms of levels of governance (see Andersen & van Kempen, 2001; Brenner, 2004; Herrschel & Newman, 2002; Pierre, 1998; Salet et al., 2002). On the micro-scale the variety of districts and projects extends from urban renewal in deprived neighbourhoods, to revitalization efforts in business improvement districts, to prestigious flagship projects.
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