Extraordinary Mediocrity. Metropolitan Governance, Housing Decommodification, and the Politics of the Ordinary in European Cities

In large European metropolitan regions, governance is structurally incomplete and discontinuous: not a pathological exception but a stable condition, as documented comparatively by Le Galès and Vitale (2015). Drawing on research conducted at the Urban School of Sciences Po across seven cities (Naples, Paris, Bologna, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Grenoble, and Milan), with Rome as an analytical case-limit, this article argues that metropolitan governance discontinuity does not authorise cosmetic urban interventions but demands a systemic gaze over the entire metropolitan region. Metropolitan change advances through configurations of four levers: local voluntarism capable of building coalitions, inter-metropolitan learning, supranational incentives, and conflict management through stable arenas, not through global reforms or singular exceptional gestures. Housing decommodification constitutes the most severe test of governing capacity: where structural policies are absent, agglomeration economies produce displacement and reversed redistribution. The cases of Paris, Vienna, and Barcelona demonstrate that an accessible social housing circuit is buildable through ordinary instruments (land governance, short-term rental regulation, non-profit operators, anti-speculative constraints) rather than exceptional announcements. Drawing on Hirschmanian possibilism, the article proposes the notion of extraordinary redistributive mediocrity: the primacy of daily redistributive work (maintenance, effective proximity of services, public space as common service) over the flagship project as a governance simulacrum. In European metropolitan regions marked by institutional fragmentation, mobilising ordinary instruments well and guaranteeing universal rights through incremental processes of redistribution toward the least privileged is not a fallback: it is the most demanding and most equitable form of public action.