Fixing missing links in shopping routes: Reflections on intra-urban borders and city center redevelopment in Nijmegen, the Netherlands

Abstract

This paper analyses the fixing of missing links in shopping routes and puts redevelopment strategies for Dutch city centres in the theoretical context of entrepreneurial urbanism. The aim is to scrutinize and critically reflect upon how collaborating local authorities, property developers, architects and retailers’ organizations conceptualize intra-urban borders or missing links, and how they try to deal with their effects in order to boost the economic performance of city centres. To achieve this, literature on the competition between and commercialization of cities is combined with literature on international borders and borderlands. This combination results in a reinterpretation from an entrepreneurial perspective of Kevin Lynch’s famous elements of city images, which form the basis of the research approach for analysing city centre redevelopment plans and projects. The analysis reveals that redevelopment plans in Nijmegen – including those for the Mariënburg project – are substantiated through ‘thresholds of uncertainty’. They operate as intra-urban borders and are predominantly conceptualized as objective barriers that are both removed and installed to improve flows of consumption capital within and towards city centres. Rational economic reasoning as the basis for the ‘flow approach’ of studies on international borders can also be witnessed in city centre redevelopment plans in Nijmegen. Such reasoning implies ignorance of possibly diverging subjective interpretations of borders. This paper ends with critical reflections on the conceptualization of intra-urban borders in city centre redevelopment plans and projects, and includes a suggestion for more research on such borders with a ‘people approach’ in order to more comprehensively grasp the complexities of intra-urban borders.