Balancing regional developments in order to improve the overall quality in urban regions: the case of the North Wing tragedy of the offices

Metropolitan regions embody arrays of spatial externalities operating on multiple spatial scales. Actions of all players have some inescapable consequences for others in the region and intra-regional competition might harm the extra-regional competitive performance of a region as a result of these externalities problems. The failure to provide adequate incentives to generate positive externalities or mitigate negative ones decreases the overall quality of the urban region. In order to improve the competitive performance this quality should be improved. Here some measured form of collective response is thus called for although within urban regions the relevant collectivity may not be easily mobilized or even identified. What kind of regional coordination models might be used to overcome the collective action problem? In this paper will be dealt with four coordination models to
arrive at more balanced and less competitive regional development with respect to the ‘office problem’ in the North Wing of the Randstad in the Netherlands. In the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area the rate of office oversupply is quite unhealthy at the moment, due to intraregional competition. To what extent would it be possible to organize a collective response for this problem, taking into account the difficulty of integrating actions with the divers players in a region as the interests are very different, which hardens fine-tuning?