Exemplary urban practitioners' . Professionals who make the difference in urban renewal

In our research, a joint project with Tilburg University and commissioned by NICIS, a scientific knowledge centre for the Dutch cities, our aim was to investigate the qualities of selected practitioners in their working context, namely deprived urban districts. Our research will connect both in method (observation, interview and text analysis) as in chosen perspective (daily and intersubjective interactions in institutional settings) to two current and lively debates in mainly British and American research on urban policy. The first one deals with the emergence of new forms of institutional arrangements (governance) and neo-liberal strategies of urban policy. The second debate is on the use of a social constructionist paradigm in 'housing studies'. In this debate urban renewal is not seen as a neutral and value-free domain, but as an expression and result of political influence and power strategies. Professionals and residents working in community organizations (protoprofessionals) try to find ways to express their personal ambitions and qualities and to shape the space around them. In our paper we give a theoretical description of this \u91new (proto-) professional\u92 and illustrate this practice with empirical case studies of 3 of these (proto-) professionals working in deprived districts in The Hague, The Netherlands. What they have in common is their attention to everyday life (in deprived urban districts) and a holistic problem orientation. They take part in relevant governance processes of policy making, but are not detained by the systematic and logic of their organization or by bureaucratic rationality. In the actual policy of neighborhood renewal this \u91exemplary urban practitioner\u92 gets/takes a new, integrated task to solve complex problems bottom up, and finds challenges in the everyday life in urban communities