Definition of Socio-Economic Impacts of Large-Scale Development Projects within Urban Development

Abstract

The article focuses on the socio-economic impacts of large-scale urban development projects in cities. Both in Czech cities and large cities around the world, there is increasing pressure on converting previously unused areas (“greenfields”) as well as the areas that no longer serve their original purpose and are inefficiently used (“brownfields”) to new use purposes. As a result, public administration representatives face a difficult decision on how to change the use of these areas to be consistent with the current zoning plan. The resulting decision has to be explained to the public in such a way that they feel they meet the public needs and interests. Decision-makers need valid and accurate inputs to make the right decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly define and describe the procedure for assessing the benefits of these important revitalization or regeneration projects for various segments of the public. Only a small part of the urban development project impacts is of a purely financial character. Therefore, the evaluation process uses modelling of socio-economic impacts, which are evaluated financially, so that the decision-makers are able to compare the most valid impacts to the initial investment costs necessary for converting the territory into the area with new functional use. The research sample consists of important urban development projects in the largest cities in the Czech Republic. Most of these projects consist have a territorial study, which was established as the main source of relevant information for the analyses. The outputs of the research described in the article build on the previous research of the authors, where they defined 3 basic variables - Incremental capacity of jobs, Incremental capacity of the population and Incremental capacity of visitors as the carriers of following project socio-economic impacts on the territory. The research article presents a list of socio-economic impacts defined on the basis of incremental capacities.