Institutional Dilemmas of Urban Resetting: Politics, Functions and Symbols Willem Salet Professor of Urban and Regional Planning Urban Planning, University of Amsterdam [w.g.m.salet@uva.nl] Abstract PM Keywords: urban transformation, urban peripheries, urban governance, institutional innovation, Introduction The intensifying levels of economic and social globalization of open societies are widely considered as the ubiquitous drivers of change in the metamorphosis of contemporary western cities (Scott 2001, Soja 2000). Non-place bounded, social and economic relations permeate and reconfigure territorially nested urban systems and the consequent rescaling and decentralization of urban activities is internationally observed since the early 1990s in urban spaces (Brenner 2004). However, the transformation of cities differs highly from city to city and the actual processes of change cannot immediately and adequately be explained solely by the influence of the changing external social and economic parameters. Cities also follow their own intrinsic logic (Berking & Löw 2008, Löw 2008b). It was Martina Löw and her colleagues in Darmstadt who alarmed urban sociology to explicitly take notice of the intrinsic logic of cities. If we want to understand the differentiation of urban change, we should make study of the intrinsic characteristics that are underlying more or less autonomous ways of thinking and acting at urban level. Löw took a radical position with this regards and rejected the prevailing approaches in urban sociology that consider the fate of cities and their changes as puppets of the macro- economic and social strings of globalization (Löw 2008a). She took the reversed position in assuming an underlying metaphysical structure of own urban logic at the micro level of cities (Eigenlogik der Städte). Personally, I am not so sure about the supposed autonomous logic of intrinsic metaphysical characteristics of cities: the fixed autonomy of isolated logic, the depersonalized characteristics of urban identity and the sole metaphysical underpinning seem to weaken Löws conceptualized urban structures. Urban activities are employed in open interaction with