Abstract
A city visitation is an independent assessment of a city’s performance and the quality of its primary processes, products, and services. It is performed by a temporary, external expert visitation committee, aiming to promote public accountability and learning and improvement. This chapter discusses the city visitations that were made to the Flemish regional capitals in 2011 as instruments of urban network learning. These 2011 city visitations were introduced by the Flemish government to evaluate the policy agreement it had signed with the Flemish regional capitals in order to manage the City Fund, an important element of Flemish urban policy. The visitation procedure involved self-assessment papers and a preparatory meeting with local stakeholders in each city, followed by on-site visits in which the visitation committee met with the city’s political and administrative officers. These visits addressed several topics of urban policy: overall performance and governance, both internally and externally in relation to local stakeholders, civil society, and other government levels; the planned social outcomes and strategic goals laid down in the policy agreements; contemporary social challenges, operationalised by two policy themes of choice; and the value of the City Fund in general. The visitation committee was chaired by academic experts and comprised a group of local government consultants and thematic experts chosen per city. The city visitations proved to be useful instruments to foster urban network learning at three levels. At the micro-level, cities learned about their own internal and external governance through the exchange of views, best practices, and policy recommendations in the visitation reports. At the meso-level, the visitations painted a picture of contemporary urban governance and its challenges in Flanders, whilst the regional capitals learned how to address important policy issues collectively. At the macro-level, finally, the procedure provided valuable insights into the way in which the different government levels interact.
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Notes
- 1.
The cities are, listed in alphabetical order (based on their Dutch name): Aalst, Antwerpen, Brugge, Genk, Gent, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Leuven, Mechelen, Oostende, Roeselare, Sint-Niklaas, and Turnhout.
- 2.
In Belgium, local social policy is design by the local government and the public centre for social services. The latter has been integrated into the local government from 2019 onwards in Flanders.
- 3.
For a complementary approach to the city visitation procedure, see Schaap and van den Dool (2015).
- 4.
This condition is also fulfilled in the previous phase by the very essence of the on-site visit which includes feedback from different peers and experts in an open dialogue with the members of the organisation.
- 5.
Such external checks are often absent when the visitation procedure places much trust in the experts involved, in the visitation committee, or in the quality of their reports.
- 6.
Usually, a supervisory authority is not included in the visitation procedure. However, supervision of the recommended improvements might also take place in an indirect way, e.g. via serial visitations.
- 7.
According to Kuhlman and Jäkel (in Cruz and Marques 2014, p. 166), vertically co-ordinated management refers to local government performance assessments in which the central state “cooperates with local authorities to develop the assessment model, gather data, and report and act upon the results”.
- 8.
In 2003, the City Fund amounted to € 99,907,001. Increasing with 3.5% annually, the fund added up to € 132,266,000 in 2011. The City Fund is divided as follows: ten per cent of the total fund goes to the VGC; the remaining part is divided between the large cities of Ghent and Antwerp (seventy-five per cent), on the one hand, and the other eleven regional capitals (twenty-five per cent), on the other, on the basis of the total number of inhabitants.
- 9.
The final visitation report was written by the visitation committee’s consultancy partner.
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Reynaert, H., Korsten, A., Verhelst, T. (2020). City Visitations as Instruments of Urban Network Learning: The Case of the 2011 Flemish City Visitations. In: van den Dool, L. (eds) Strategies for Urban Network Learning. Palgrave Studies in Sub-National Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36048-1_10
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