Enhancing Urban Brownfield Regeneration to Pursue Sustainable Community Outcomes through Dynamic Performance Governance

This paper discusses the case of Puerto Madero (Buenos Aires, Argentina) to illustrate how the “Dynamic Performance Governance” framework is able to support policy networks to pursue sustainable community outcomes in urban brownfield regeneration. The case is an example of successful implementation of urban renewal carried out through a significant involvement of the private sector. It portrays a “financially-driven” governance mode which entails balancing the advantage of cash flow reinvestment for public services and infrastructure capacity development, with potential shortcomings in terms of social inclusion. Findings reveal two main trade-offs associated with policy design and implementation. A first trade-off is between pursuing a fast and intensive renovation pace in the short run, and the possibility to earn future capital gains that might be enabled by a high local area attractiveness. Another trade-off is related to the allocation of space. Even though an intensive business presence may contribute to increase the attractiveness of the place, a too high growth in the number of companies located in the area may saturate urban space, which would reduce the attractiveness for further business investments. Through the analyzed case, the paper illustrates how Dynamic Performance Governance may enables a policy network to assess the outcomes of designed and implemented strategies aimed at generating public value. This is possible by bridging three fields of research and practice that have been traditionally kept separated: performance management, governance, and system dynamics. The use of systems approaches in outcome-based performance management improves the quality of performance reports, accountability, governance, and policy design.