Gentrification, Urban Informality, and Displacement in Bangkok

Institutional innovations from state-dominated to market-oriented: Price premium differentials of urban redevelopment projects in Shenzhen, China

Nature-based solutions for urban landscapes under post-industrialization and globalization: Barcelona versus Shanghai

Urban informality remains a consistent challenge and matter of debate by planners and policymakers in the urbanising cities of sub-Saharan Africa. A common manifestation of urban informality in African cities is the sprawling informal settlements that constitute the only available housing option for the majority of the urban poor. The analysis of informal urban settlement’s environmental composition, physical modelling and socio-economic and policy analysis have been areas of recent study. However there is limited literature on how the urban poor communities in Zambia manipulate their social, spatial and economic environments to meet their needs. This article seeks to broaden the knowledge base on the way informal urban settlement communities manipulate their urban space. The built environment provides the setting for human interaction and the explanatory theory of Environment-Behaviour Relations provides a suitable analytical framework for the identification of useful parameters for developing future settlement interventions. The study employs a case study method of research to analyse the informal urban settlement settings. Ng’ombe, a peri-urban informal settlement in Lusaka, Zambia is the case study location for this research. Analysis of social, spatial and economic environment at neighbourhood level provides vital information about the informal urban settlement conditions. The study in particular addresses the question of how the social-spatial circumstances of the informal urban population in the developing world influence and defines their built environment. The study shows that systems of settings and system of activities in Ng’ombe offer a suitable analytical framework for studying the settlement characteristics that can guide in formulating strategies for settlement regularisation. Residents devise means of adapting and manipulating their informal urban space to suit their immediate needs and they also devise livelihood coping strategies in the midst of their informal settings. The paper likewise contributes to the growing body of knowledge in urban informality.

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Central to this research lays the concept of private sector-led urban development projects (Heurkens, 2010). Such projects involve project developers taking a leading role and local authorities adopting a facilitating role, in managing the development of an urban area, based on a clear public-private role division. Such a development strategy is quite common in Anglo-Saxon urban development practices, but is less known in Continental European practices. Nonetheless, since the beginning of the millennium such a development strategy also occurred in the Netherlands in the form of ‘concessions’. However, remarkably little empirical knowledge is available about how public and private actors collaborate on and manage private sector-led urban development projects. Moreover, it remains unclear what the effects of such projects are. This dissertation provides an understanding of the various characteristics of private sector-led urban development projects by conducting empirical case study research in the institutional contexts of the Netherlands and the UK. The research provides an answer to the following research question: What can we learn from private sector-led urban development projects in the Netherlands and UK in terms of the collaborative and managerial roles of public and private actors, and the effects of their (inter)actions? Indications for a market-oriented Dutch urban development practice Urban development practice in the Netherlands has been subject to changes pointing towards more private sector involvement in the built environment in the past decades. Although the current economic recession might indicate otherwise, there are several motives that indicate a continuation of private sector involvement and a private leadership role in Dutch urban development projects in the future. First, a shift towards more market-oriented development practice is the result of an evolutionary process of increased ‘neoliberalization’ and the adoption of Anglo-Saxon principles in Dutch society. Despite its Rhineland roots with a focus on welfare provision, in the Netherlands several neoliberal principles (privatization, decentralization, deregulation) have been adopted by government and incorporated in the management of organizations (Bakker et al., 2005). Hence, market institutionalization on the one hand, and rising civic emancipation on the other, in current Western societies prevents a return towards hierarchical governance. Second, the result of such changes is the emergence of a market-oriented type of planning practice based on the concept of ‘development planning’. Public-Private Partnerships and the ‘forward integration’ of market parties (De Zeeuw, 2007) enforce the role of market actors. In historical perspective, Boelens et al. (2006) argue that Dutch spatial planning always has been characterized by public-private collaborations in which governments facilitated private and civic entrepreneurship. Therefore, post-war public-led spatial planning with necessary government intervention was a ‘temporary hiccup’, an exception to the rule. Third, the European Commission expresses concerns about the hybrid role of public actors in Dutch institutionalized PPP joint ventures. EU legislation opts for formal public-private role divisions in realizing urban projects based on Anglo-Saxon law that comply with the legislative tendering principles of competition, transparency, equality, and public legitimacy. Fourth, experiences with joint ventures in the Netherlands are less positive as often is advocated. Such institutionalized public-private entities have seldom generated the assumed added value, caused by misconceptions about the objectives of both partners grounded in incompatible value systems. This results in contra-productive levels of distrust, time-consuming partnership formations, lack of transparency, and compromising decision-making processes (Teisman & Klijn, 2002), providing a need for other forms of collaboration. Finally, current financial retrenchments in the public sector and debates about the possible abundance of Dutch active land development policies point towards a lean and mean government that moves away from risk-bearing participation and investment in urban projects and leaves this to the market. Importantly, Van der Krabben (2011b) argues that the Dutch active public land development policies can be considered as an international exception, and advocates for facilitating land development policies. In this light, it becomes highly relevant to study private sector-led urban development as a future Dutch urban development strategy. Integrative urban management approach This research is rooted in the research school of Urban Area Development within the Department of Real Estate and Housing at the Faculty of Architecture (Delft University of Technology). It is a relatively young academic domain which views urban development most profoundly as a complex management assignment (Bruil et al., 2004; Franzen et al., 2011). This academic school uses an integrative perspective with a strong practice-orientation and carries out solution-oriented design research. Here, the integration involves bridging various actor interests, spatial functions, spatial scales, academic domains, knowledge and skills, development goals, and links process with content aspects. Such a perspective does justice to complex societal processes. Therefore it provides a fruitful ground for studying urban development aimed at developing conceptual knowledge and product for science and practice. Such integrative perspective and practice-orientation forms the basis of this research and has been applied in the following manner. In order to create an understanding of the roles of public and private actors in private sector-led urban development, this research takes a management perspective based on an integrative management approach. This involves viewing management more broadly as ‘any type of direct influencing’ urban development projects, and therefore aims at bridging often separated management theories (Osborne, 2000a). Hence, an integrative management approach assists in both understanding urban development practices and projects and constructing useful conceptual tools for practitioners and academics. Integrative approaches attempt to combine a number of different elements into a more holistic management approach (Black & Porter, 2000). Importantly, it does not view the management of projects in isolation but in its entire complexity and dynamics. Therefore, our management approach combines two integrative management theories; the open systems theory (De Leeuw, 2002) and contingency theory. The former provides opportunities to study the management of a project in a structured manner. The latter emphasizes that there is no universally effective way of managing and recognizes the importance of contextual circumstances. Hence, an integrative management approach favors incorporating theories from multiple academic domains such as political science, economics, law, business administration, and organizational and management concepts. Hence, it moves away from the classical academic division between planning theory and property theory, and organization and management theories. It positions itself in between such academic domains, and aims at bridging theoretical viewpoints by following the concept of planning ánd markets (Alexander, 2001) rather than concepts such as ‘planning versus markets’, public versus private sector, and organization versus management. Also, such an integrative view values the complexity and dynamics of empirical urban development practices. More specifically, this research studies urban development projects as object, as urban areas are the focus point of spatial intervention and public-private interaction (Daamen, 2010), and thus collaboration and management. Here, public planning processes and private development processes merge with each other. Thus, our research continues to build upon the importance of studying and reflecting on empirical practices and projects (e.g. Healey, 2006). In addition to these authors, this research does so by using meaningful integrative concepts that reflect empirical realities of urban projects. Thereby, this research serves to bridge management sciences with management practices (Van Aken, 2004; Mintzberg, 2010) through iterative processes of reflecting on science and practice. Moreover, the integrative management approach applied in this research assists in filling an academic gap, namely the lack of management knowledge about public-private interaction in urban development projects. Despite the vast amount of literature on the governance of planning practices (e.g. DiGaetano & Strom, 2003), and Public-Private Partnerships (e.g. Osborne, 2000b), remarkable little knowledge exists about what shifting public-private relationships mean for day-to-day management by public and private actors in development projects. Hence, here we follow the main argument made by public administration scholar Klijn (2008) who claims that it is such direct actor influence that brings about the most significant change to the built environment. An integrative urban management model (see Figure 2.3) based on the open systems approach has been constructed which forms a conceptual representation of empirical private sectorled urban development projects. This model serves as an analytical tool to comprehend the complexity of managing such projects. In this research, several theoretical insights about publicprivate relations and roles are used to understand different contextual and organizational factors that affect the management of private sector-led urban development projects. Hence, a project context exists

Urbanisation is an international phenomenon and intrinsically linked with the development of a country. For successful and sustainable urban redevelopment planning and implementation, participation of the local community needs to be strategically planned, as its members have an existing usage pattern of the infrastructure and surrounding areas and can be categorised as an important group of stakeholders. Urban road projects traverse a larger area and affect diverse and multiple groups in the community. In India, the practice of community participation for urban redevelopment projects is still at a nascent stage. Research discussed in this paper adopts a case study approach to understand the dynamics of effective community participation for road redevelopment projects in an Indian context. The paper discusses global research in this area and adoption of community participation in case studies of two urban road redevelopment projects in India. The findings show that the structure of public consultation and the parameters to be considered are different for urban road projects planned for core urbanised areas and peri-urban areas. After due consideration of these parameters, community participation should be strategically planned and implemented by the promoters of these projects.

Introduction

Informality is a common urban experience among cities in the Global South. Given the thin social welfare and weak regulations, the urban subaltern has therefore had to improvise housing and employment in order to survive. Urban informality is hence conceived as a negotiation process through which spatial value is produced. However, under the current wave of urban entrepreneurialisation, informality is often deemed to be inefficient and unproductive in the new economy that the local governments are trying to build. Many of the informal settlements have been subject to demolition in order to make room for new urban development projects. With the cases of waterfront regeneration projects in Taipei, this paper argues that entrepreneurialism and informality are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, through their co-evolution, urban informality actually contributes to the variegation of urban entrepreneurialism. This paper demonstrates how the urban squatters have managed to re-engage informality and urban development by actively participating in the shaping of the entrepreneurial discourses, reinventing their informal settlements as a key feature that contributes to the city’s economic development. However, although this entwining of entrepreneurialism and informality has brought new opportunities to the informal settlements, it has at the same time presented new threats to their current way of life. By focusing on the entrepreneurialising of urban informality, this paper offers a grounded perspective on the ways in which the urban subaltern has reacted to the unfolding urban entrepreneurialism in Taiwan.

Multiple pathways to global city formation: A functional approach and review of recent evidence in China

Urban commercial complex is the product of social and economic development, as well as the inevitable trend of commercial development. The public space design of urban complex project is an important link in its development process, which is the link between the contact and the building, the city and the building, and the external image display of the complex. Therefore, choosing a suitable and excellent public space design scheme is of great significance to show the superiority of the complex project and improve the project satisfaction and the sustainable operation in the later stage. This paper first defines the concept of urban complex public space and focuses on the analysis of the urban complex public space from four aspects of constituent elements, functional classification, design theory, and principle. Then, the Delphi method is used to determine 26 evaluation indicators to evaluate the urban complex public space design scheme, and the relevant index data of 20 urban complex public space design schemes are collected. The grey correlation analysis method is used to analyze the correlation degree between each indicator and the scheme winning bid. The final evaluation system of urban complex public space design scheme is obtained after removing the 8 indicators with low correlation degree. Support vector mechanism was used to build the optimization model of urban complex public space design scheme, and its accuracy was verified, which provides a relatively simple and quantitative method for urban public space design in the future, helps to improve the city’s business structure, improves the business environment of the city, makes the commercial complex more effectively play its own characteristics and advantages, effectively stimulates the vitality of urban space, and creates more perfect architectural space and urban space for people.

Urban redevelopment projects are conducted in accordance with the Urban and Residential Environment Improvement Act. Although project implementers acquire their public legal status only after obtaining project approval, in practice, substantial implementation activities occur even before approval is granted. Various processes, such as land acquisition, administrative procedures, and the preparation of necessary permits—including architectural reviews—are undertaken during the pre-approval phase. Nevertheless, the current legal framework does not clearly regulate the activities of these “pre-approval project implementers” and fails to recognize their public legal status. In modern urban redevelopment projects, third-party developers, outside the designated redevelopment zone, often take the lead in negotiating land acquisitions, securing consent rates, conducting various assessments and reviews, and refining project plans during the pre-approval stage. However, owing to the lack of legal recognition, formal consultations with administrative authorities are difficult, and the predictability of their roles remain uncertain. Additionally, there exists a risk of reduced fairness and transparency in land acquisition and contract execution. These structural issues can cause project delays or even cancellations, often resulting in prolonged legal disputes that halt redevelopment projects for extended periods. This study examines the existence of pre-approval project implementers and proposes the following legal and institutional reforms to address related issues: First, the legal status of pre-approval project implementers should be explicitly defined, and their permissible activities should be systematically incorporated into the legal framework. Second, the involvement of public institutions should be expanded to ensure fairness and transparency from the early stages of redevelopment projects. Third, the responsibilities and obligations of pre-approval project implementers should be clarified, and regulatory measures should be established to prevent unfair contracts and project mismanagement. In particular, legal oversight must be strengthened to prevent the abuse of non-competitive contracts during the pre-approval phase. Urban redevelopment projects serve as crucial mechanisms for improving urban environments and revitalizing local economies, beyond merely constructing residential buildings. Therefore, institutional reforms reflecting the realities of project implementation are essential. Addressing the legal uncertainties surrounding pre-approval project implementation can help establish a more sustainable and equitable redevelopment framework.

Purpose: This paper explores urban spaces as performative environments where social interactions and temporal events serve as generative mechanisms continuously producing and transforming spatial meaning and experience. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study employs a critical analytical method, grounded in a literature review, theoretical exploration, and case study analysis. A purposive sampling technique was used to select Al-Orouba Street in Diwaniyah City as the main case study. Field observation checklists for documenting façade morphology and functional diversity. Photographic documentation for visual analysis. The data were analysed using a morphological and comparative analytical approach. Facade morphology was examined for diversity in materials, form, and function. Findings: The research finds that urban facades and spaces are not uniform or static. Instead, they evolve through diverse functions, technologies, and cultural expressions. Case studies reveal that spatial adaptability and multifunctionality are central to sustainable urban design. Research Limitation: The study is limited to selected case studies in Paris, New York, and Iraq. Broader comparative analyses across other global cities may be required for generalisation. Practical Implication: The findings suggest strategies for integrating multifunctionality, media facades, and event-based design in urban areas. Social Implication: The study highlights the need for socially responsive urban design. It emphasises the importance of spaces that reflect community needs and cultural diversity rather than imposed uniformity. Originality/Value: This research offers a novel theoretical framework to counter the myth of homogeneity. It integrates architectural, morphological, and cultural dimensions to propose a dynamic model of urban design.

An optimization model for managing stakeholder conflicts in urban redevelopment projects in China