Urban governance within the Big Cities Policy - Ideals and practice in Den Haag, the Netherlands

The Big Cities Policy is currently the major urban policy in the Netherlands. Prepared unhurriedly in 1994, it picked up steam at the end of the 1990s when the new Minister for Big Cities Policy asked the cities to prepare their plans to spend the money made available for this policy. Now it is in full swing and the first results, both positive and negative, can already be seen. This paper reports an evaluation of the implementation of the Big Cities Policy in Den Haag, the third largest city in the Netherlands. The focus of the evaluation is urban governance, a key term in urban policies in Europe. We will first focus on certain urban governance issues that have been raised with respect to urban policies in Europe in general. Then an introduction to the background and aims of the Dutch Big Cities Policy is given. A brief introduction to Den Haag precedes the main part of the paper, the evaluation. We concentrate specifically on governance aspects. The paper concludes with some general lessons derived from the evaluation(1). (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.