Extraordinary Mediocrity. Metropolitan Governance, Housing Decommodification, and the Politics of the Ordinary in European Cities

Tommaso Prof Vitale
Additional contact information
Tommaso Prof Vitale: Sciences Po

No mk3s5_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: In large European metropolitan regions, governance is structurally incomplete and discontinuous: not a pathological exception but a stable condition, as documented comparatively by Le Galès and Vitale (2015). Drawing on research conducted at the Urban School of Sciences Po across seven cities (Naples, Paris, Bologna, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Grenoble, and Milan), with Rome as an analytical case-limit, this article argues that metropolitan governance discontinuity does not authorise cosmetic urban interventions but demands a systemic gaze over the entire metropolitan region. Metropolitan change advances through configurations of four levers: local voluntarism capable of building coalitions, inter-metropolitan learning, supranational incentives, and conflict management through stable arenas, not through global reforms or singular exceptional gestures. Housing decommodification constitutes the most severe test of governing capacity: where structural policies are absent, agglomeration economies produce displacement and reversed redistribution. The cases of Paris, Vienna, and Barcelona demonstrate that an accessible social housing circuit is buildable through ordinary instruments (land governance, short-term rental regulation, non-profit operators, anti-speculative constraints) rather than exceptional announcements. Drawing on Hirschmanian possibilism, the article proposes the notion of extraordinary redistributive mediocrity: the primacy of daily redistributive work (maintenance, effective proximity of services, public space as common service) over the flagship project as a governance simulacrum. In European metropolitan regions marked by institutional fragmentation, mobilising ordinary instruments well and guaranteeing universal rights through incremental processes of redistribution toward the least privileged is not a fallback: it is the most demanding and most equitable form of public action.

Date: 2026-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-uep
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/69becb4fdfddf8b4d33aa6f7/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:mk3s5_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/mk3s5_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().