Abstract Summary
Recently, minister Hugo de Jonge presented a sketch for the new spatial planning act in the Netherlands. The underlying idea ‘Netherlands as a whole’ implies developments should not primarily take place in the lower clay soils of the Randstad but also in the peripheral regions of the Netherlands. According to Joks Janssen, this narrative offers opportunities for strengthening the Zandstad, referring to the agglomeration of cities on the higher sand-soils in the east and south. In the last years, various visions for the Netherlands already hinted in this direction. Interestingly, there’s already a steady flow of people moving to the east. This is primarily explained as the expansion of the Randstad itself, but there is also a slow and steady number of people moving to the ‘far east’–the peripheral regions de Jonge is referring to, on the sandy soils. This steady flow of people already presents regional and local governments with a dilemma. To strengthen the liveability, they welcome (modest) growth. But they also want to maintain the regional and local identity – which might come under pressure. We conceptualize this identity issue as a multi-scale phenomenon resulting from both the spatial distribution of cities, towns, and villages and the impact this has on the motivation and behaviour of its inhabitants. We do so from the perspective of complexity theories of cities (CTC) and by using the concept of urban regulatory focus. The latter is a recently developed concept of urban complexity and dynamics that links city size to humans’ motivational behaviour. According to regulatory focus theory, a person’s goal-directed behaviour is regulated by a certain combination of two motivational systems, promotion and prevention. Individuals who are more promotion-oriented focus on winning and tend to take risks, whereas those driven by prevention goals tend to focus on not losing and try to avoid risk. According to urban regulatory focus, one’s personal regulatory focus is both dependent on one’s chronic regulatory focus and on the urban environment in which one lives. Bigger, fast-paced cities polarize both motivation and behaviours, while smaller, slow-paced cities encourage more moderate and less polarized behavioural responses. In the paper we explore the question of what happens if this shift from core to periphery in The Netherlands becomes more substantial. We do so by playing City Games as a new methodology: participants from the Randstad and Zandstad with differences in personal regulatory focus interact to create scenarios for accommodating growth in the east. By playing these games and analysing the outcomes we aim to answer the question on how the shift from Randstad to Zandstad might impact the regional and local identity – supporting decision-makers now and in the future.
