Local government in the face of crisis: changing public management of urban projects in Amsterdam

To profile a better physiognomy of contemporary technocratic logics of planning, this chapter explores the reform of the working processes and organisational structures of the public management bureaucracties in the Amsterdam municipality. It does so in order to reflect on the mechanisms through which technocratic thinking gets institutionalised within existing public government bodies, and to reveal the development of public planning expertise in contemporary urban governance. As in other chapters in this section, here we particularly question the changing role of public bureaucracies in the Netherlands, a country where public expertise still plays a central role in urban governance, but is progressively reformed to accommodate private actors