ABSTRACT
The central hypothesis of this book is that under certain circumstances and through certain efforts a complementarity of urban leadership and community involvement can be achieved, making a substantial contribution to ‘good’ urban governance.1 The innovative potential of this hypothesis is the combination of two strands of argumentation popular in current urban research and comparative local government: one stressing the (novelty of a) need for effective leadership in cities and the other focussing on the need to involve citizens and corporate actors in urban policy making and implementation. In this chapter, we give a theoretical account of (i) how this complementarity of urban leadership and community involvement may be understood in terms of legitimacy and (ii) its significance in the development of urban policies.
