This article investigates how decision-making processes relating to strategic urban projects are framed in order to achieve innovative urban developments. Three dimensions of framing are analysed: the cognitive framing, the framing of alliances in the metroplitan action space and the framing of the democratic process. The crux for success is in organising interconnectivity between the dimensions of framing in a multi-actor and multilevel context. The model's assumptions are tested by an application to four of Europe's largest urban projects under construction.

Planners use symbolic markers in order to frame processes of urban change and to mobilise actors. How can we explain the fact that in some cases the symbolisation of new urban spaces manages to enhance and enlarge the meaning of social change while in other cases the symbolic markers remain powerless and might even have a reverse effect? The authors doubt whether the sophistication of symbolic markers as such has much impact. The explanation for the success or failure of symbolic communication is sought within the framework of institutional embedding. This conceptual paper attempts to elaborate institutions' transformative potential through their use of symbols. To this end, it undertakes a reappraisal of institutional thought in order to conceptualise institutional transformation, the establishment of a conceptual linkage between the transformative potential of institutions and symbolic markers, and the design of an operational model of research for the institutional investigation of symbols in the planning of changing cities.

Strategies of territorial rescaling are investigated in face of the emergent metropolitan configuration of Randstad Holland. Recent governance practices are investigated at three levels of scale: the urban agglomeration around the major cities, the urban conurbations (the northern and southern parts of the Randstad), and the metropolitan level of the Randstad as a whole. The frame of analysis interconnects economic and social interaction, spatial trends and policies, and institutional conditions. The crucial question is how institutional strategies can respond to the changeable spatial context of economic and social interaction. New ways need to be found to create a “mutual fit” between territorially based governmental institutions and trans-scalar strategies of co-production.

The paradigm of adaptive governance is paramount in policy discourses on the mitigation and adaptation strategies of climate change. Adaptability, resilience, and cooperative approaches are promoted as the appropriate vehicles to meet the contemporary conditions of uncertainty and complexity. We claim that the legitimacy and effectiveness of these responsive strategies might be augmented via the use of legal perspectives. Rather than the instrumental use of command and control type of regulation, the legal perspectives should focus on establishing principal norms that enable the search for different solutions in different contexts. From these assumptions, the concept of legal obligation is explored as embodying the meaning of legality, and at the same time conditioning and committing the probing of different ways of purposeful action in different local circumstances. We explore the innovative potential of legal norms and demonstrate how responsive strategies to climate change can be guided by the contextualization of legal norms

(2015). Planning for the new European metropolis: functions, politics, and symbols/Metropolitan regions: functional relations between the core and the periphery/Business investment decisions and spatial planning policy/Metropolitan challenges, political responsibilities/Spatial imaginaries, urban dynamics and political community/Capacity-building in the city region: creating common spaces/Which challenges for today's European metropolitan spaces? Planning Theory & Practice: Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 251-275.