Has the post-war managerial approach to urban governance in the Netherlands and Flanders been replaced by more entrepreneurial and financialized forms? In this paper, we study the transformation of urban governance in the Low Countries through city case studies of Apeldoorn (Netherlands) and Antwerp (Belgium). We show how Dutch urban governance financialized by connecting local public finance with financialized real estate markets, through municipal land banks. However, intermunicipal financial solidarity and ring-fencing municipalities from financial markets create specific, continental European processes of financialization. Flemish municipalities, in contrast, have shifted from a model of laissez-faire urban development (embedded in a system of large municipal autonomy) towards entrepreneurial urban growth regimes, in which technocratic public and private actors have increased access to public financial resources, used to create large urban renewal projects. In Belgium, autonomous municipal real estate corporations are a crucial instrument for connecting municipal finance to the real estate market.

Since the early 1990s the governance of urban development in Europe has changed considerably: the managerial mode of urban governance is progressively being displaced by an entrepreneurial mode (Hall and Hubbard, 1996; Harvey, 1989; Lauermann, 2016). Whereas cities during the Fordism era focused on providing and managing broadly accessible urban services that are redistributive and support the economic productivity of the population, states now increasingly “bet on their strong horses” by trying to channel investments towards those urban areas that seem to have the most prosperous future, a phenomenon referred to as urban neoliberalization (Aalbers, 2013; Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Crouch and Le Gales, 2012).