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Residents are often excluded from contractual negotiations, which limits their influence over development projects. In this article, I explored four cases in Hamburg and New York in which residents succeeded in negotiating agreements on developments in their neighborhoods. The aim of this study was to understand how residents can harness agreements to bend development processes toward their goals. In each case, various types of agreements were used. The agreements differed in terms of neighborhood benefits, planning, monitoring, flexibility and enforceability aspects. The benefits of each project to the respective neighborhood were first assessed by an organization that represents residents or involves individual residents. Next, each project was monitored through oversight committees or by providing reports to representatives of the neighborhood. The agreements in three of the four cases were relatively rigid. Lastly, the contracts were designed by the parties involved to include penalties or mitigation processes if parties failed to perform their obligations. This research project contributes to the body of literature on contractual governance and participatory democracy by showing how agreements are designed when residents are involved in negotiation processes. This study shows that contracts can be used as accountability mechanisms and enhance residents’ influence over development projects in their neighborhoods.

The use of contracts to achieve public goals has been gaining traction since the 1980s. In this article, I investigate the implications of the increased use of private law instruments for participatory democracy. This study starts with problematising the notion of contracts and proposes a conceptual model to study contractual relations in participatory processes. Next, through a detailed description of two case studies in Amsterdam and Hamburg, I show the consequences of contractual governance for participatory democracy in urban development. Namely, the interests of commercial parties and government agencies are incorporated in contracts, whereas the interests of residents are incorporated in non-legal agreements. This has four implications for our understanding of participatory democracy and urban politics. First, the arena of public decision making has shifted from public meetings to contractual negotiations. Second, contracts are not set in stone. Mobilisation by residents can influence, adjust and politicise agreements. However, third, residents need to be able to mobilise and negotiate. This creates new boundaries between residents who are able to make deals and those who are excluded. Lastly, investigating how contracts transform urban politics should take a broad view on how contractual relations are formed and focus on both non-legal and contractual agreements.