Abstract
Over the past two decades, research has emphasised a shift from city government to urban gov- ernance. Such a shift brings about its very own challenges, namely governance gaps, uncertain configurations in governance and a limited capacity to act. In this paper, we argue that the concur- rent rise of strategy documents in city administration addresses these challenges. Our central claim is that strategy documents can be understood as a distinct discursive device through which local governments enact aspired governance configurations. We illustrate our argument empiri- cally using two prominent examples that, while showing similar features and characteristics, are anchored in different administrative traditions and institutional frameworks: the city administra- tions of Sydney, Australia, and Vienna, Austria. The contribution of the paper is to show how strategy documents enact governance configurations along four core dimensions: the setting in space and time, the definition of the public, the framing of the res publica and legitimacy issues. Moreover, our comparative analysis of Sydney and Vienna gives evidence of differences in govern- ance configurations enacted through strategy documents.