Regeneration Agenda Research Articles

The life and death of the ‘Baron mall’: The shifting politics of urban regeneration in Valparaiso

The waterfront regeneration of Valparaiso in Chile has been the expression of significant institutional efforts aimed at reaching the so-called urban renaissance of the port-city, seeking to overcome the sustained symptoms of urban decay and economic underperformance. Over the years, a locally born idea became a controversial proposal led by the central government: A privately developed commercial project, named Puerto Baron (Baron Port). This article explores spatialized political struggles both underpinning and undermining this project, from institutional and elite interests pushing its realization to social actions triggering its end. In Valparaiso political and economic forces coalesced across different scales in their attempt to materialize a project that transfers globalized spatial imaginaries with tangled territorialized politics that exceed the limits of the city. Although state-led entrepreneurialism sets the waterfront regeneration agenda, interdependencies with networks of elites and local government were key to sustaining the project. In opposition, social movement strategies of scale jumping help to contest and influence the project’s delay. The case highlights the fragile nature of governing coalitions in Valparaiso as a shift in municipal power, which brought an alignment towards grassroots actors, ended the rather flawed regeneration project of Baron Port. The paper shows how unbounded spatial politics become highly permeated by interests at different scales, though still dependent on national centralized actions and definitions.

Urban Regeneration and Touristification in the Sardinian Capital City of Cagliari, Italy

Regeneration agendas and inbound tourism flows have long been considered a remedy for economic crisis. In port cities, a prominent role in urban regeneration is played by the waterfronts, which have been undergoing radical makeovers worldwide since the 1960s. The city of Cagliari stuck to the same recipe, promoting a series of regeneration initiatives and implementing a series of policies to boost the tourism sector. This study combines the use of primary and secondary sources and the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data to create a useful picture of both current reality and historical development of the city. It demonstrated that development strategies promoted in Cagliari, rather than balancing tourism promotion and local community needs, contributed to the amplification and acceleration of the touristification process. Therefore, many of the challenges posed by overtourism, dread in the literature, are today faced by Cagliari and its inhabitants. In addition, the study also identifies in the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic a unique opportunity to reverse the touristification process and to achieve a sustainable manner of tourism development. Therefore, it offers some policy recommendations to define principled urban regeneration models, alternatives which are able to achieve urban revitalization while avoiding touristification.

Leveraging popular music heritage as sustainable cultural infrastructure in small cities

ABSTRACT Popular music and its heritage increasingly feature as a component of creative city strategies and urban regeneration agendas. However, local governments of small cities face challenges in replicating the cultural policies and strategies popularised by big cities. Focusing on two Australian small cities – Wollongong, New South Wales and Redcliffe, Queensland – this article draws on examples of popular music heritage activity including the Bee Gees Way and Steel City Sound. What emerges is a discussion of the different ways in which these small cities have leveraged their music histories as cultural infrastructure as well as the disparity of support between the two cases from respective local governments. The case studies demonstrate the need for local governments to adopt approaches that cut across the continuum of heritage practice – bringing together unauthorised, self-authorised and authorised discourses and activities that foster passion and support from a range of stakeholders of popular music’s past. The article highlights that capitalising on and sharing resources, expertise and networks, and a commitment to continued investment by local government and the wider community, is essential for creating sustainable cultural infrastructure in small cities.

Micro-regeneration in Shanghai and the public-isation of space

Representative of many developed cities in China, Shanghai is entering a new urban regeneration phase as the city adopts a more humanist approach to improve the quality of urban life. Micro-regeneration emerges in this context as a light method to tackle the spatial and social problems of the declining inner city through interventions on residual spaces in and around residential neighbourhoods. The present research approaches micro-regeneration through the lens of public space and publicness and seeks to explain how micro-regeneration represents the public-isation of community space and serves Shanghai's people-oriented urban regeneration agenda. By looking into the prototypical ‘Walking in Shanghai’ Community Public Space Micro-regeneration Scheme as the primary case study, the paper argues that micro-regeneration publicises community space in three interconnected ways, which are the public-isation of the design and planning processes, public-isation through eventification, and public-isation by cultivating civic consensus. These different public-isation mechanisms not only reflect the multi-layered nature of publicness but also manifest different ways micro-regeneration goes beyond local spatial transformation and contributes to Shanghai's people-oriented urban regeneration vision materially and symbolically.

Exploring Participatory Placemaking in Malaysia Using Embedded Ethnographies with Practitioners Approach

The transition to a place-based approach in urban regeneration has heightened the significance of increasing inclusion and capability for participatory governance, collaborative planning, and implementation of projects. Within place branding and global city competitions, smaller placemaking efforts have become an increasingly popular approach in urban regeneration, especially in the historic urban centres worldwide, including George Town, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. However, placemaking is a complex and ambiguous concept that may operate within the formal planning structure, or grow organically from the grassroots or appear in protests to a particular development due to emotional connection to particular places. Internal factors such as social-cultural, economic, political, and governance characteristics inside places were claimed to affect the ambiguity of placemaking, as were external variables such as global connections and market trends. This paper discusses the ethnography of case studies methodology adopted to understand the interaction between government-market-civil society nexus that shaped distinctive models of placemaking within the urban regeneration agenda in the historic cities mentioned above. Overt participant observation and semi-structured interviews were used in this research to gather real-life data on participatory placemaking from a constructivist and interpretivism epistemological stance. This paper provides a detailed description of the steps and processes of ethnographic research in the built environment, which may encourage other researchers who believe that ‘urban centres are constructed by the multiple realities of their context, which requires an emphatic understanding of human action’ to adopt a similar methodology.

Exploring implicit and explicit cultural policy dimensions through major-event and neoliberal rhetoric

This paper is conceptually positions the emergence of the neoliberal city in the context of transitions to late-capitalism. The aim of this study is to understand intersections between explicit and implicit cultural policy dimensions focusing on the Rijeka2020 programme as intended and how it was restructured as a response to COVID-19. Through cultural policy analysis, this ex-ante qualitative case study of the Rijeka2020 programme illuminates overlapping explicit and implicit policy priorities of the ECoC—offering a unique insight into what could potentially be the future of the European cultural policy. Rijeka2020 can be seen as a changing point amidst different rhetoric, analysed around three themes (regeneration, legacy, and participation). Results examine how Rijeka's culture-led urban regeneration agenda was shy on creative industry oriented programming, yet reinforced through capital cultural infrastructural projects. Through attempts to avoid event-led spectacle, officials planned to engage more at the neighbourhood-scale using participatory art practices that concentrated on capacity building. Important take-away points address shifts from culture-oriented regeneration to local participatory art practices is a step towards reconstructing the cultural sector upstream (based on production) and downstream (through reception). • Rijeka2020 rhetoric offers unique insight into what could potentially be future European major-event cultural policy. • Rijeka2020 culture-led urban regeneration was shy on the creative industry, yet reinforced through cultural infrastructural. • Neighbourhood-scale participatory art was impactful, upskilling the workforce and developing audiences. • Through COVID-19, Rijeka focused on the reconstruction of cultural sector activities and active citizen participation.

The Social Experiences and Uses of Post-War Modernist Urban Heritage Conservation and Regeneration: London’s Southbank Centre

Since the 1960s, post-war modernist heritage has been largely criticised and victimised by the public opinion because of its material failures and elitist social projects. Despite these critiques, post-war modernist heritage is being reassessed, revalued and in some places successfully rehabilitated. There is a growing recognition that most of the critiques have often been the result of subjective and biased value and taste judgments or incomplete assessments that neither considered the urban design nor the users’ experiences. This paper aims to contribute to these reassessments of post-war modernist urban heritage legacies. To do so, it places the user’s social experiences and uses, and the urban design at the centre of the analysis, by using a combination of ethnographic methods and urban design analysis and focusing on the public spaces of Southbank Centre in London, the UK’s largest and most iconic and contested post-war modernist ensemble with a long history of conservation and regeneration projects. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the importance of including the users’ social experiences and uses in the conservation and regeneration agendas if we want to achieve more objective and inclusive assessments.

Visions of the Urban Green

The article investigates urban gardening in Turin with ethnography, historical analysis and photography, using both the authors’ photography and sources from social media and private archives. The authors collaborate to analyse ‘community’ gardening through a critical anthropological perspective which centres on the hegemonic power of aesthetic assumptions about the urban green. As a post-industrial, multicultural city, Turin illuminates the dialectic of gentrification vis-à-vis socioeconomic and cultural diversity, which is a crucial dynamic of many urban renewal trends towards ‘green cities’. We highlight the homogeneity of an aesthetic regime vis-à-vis the diversity of ‘skilled visions’ of social actors and its restraining effects on participatory governance. We contribute to ongoing debates in urban anthropology and visual studies, concerned with urban regeneration agendas in the de-industrializing cities of the Global North.

Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller. Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018

Migrants and City-Making builds upon Ayşe Çağlar and Nina Glick Schiller’s voluminous contributions to migration studies and urban theory through a long-term study of urban transformation and migrant emplacement in three economically marginalized cities: Manchester, New Hampshire, in the United States; Halle (Saale) in Germany; and Mardin in southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border. In contrast with scholarship in migration and urban studies that has foregrounded the study of ethnic or neighborhood communities, hometown associations, or “ethnic entrepreneurs” in global cities (Eckstein and Nguyen 2011; Rath 2011; Watson 2009), the authors ask how regeneration agendas have been implemented in what they call “disempowered” cities and explore the place of migrants in both narratives of urban revival and policies of urban regeneration. Text in English DOI: 10.25285/2078-1938-2020-12-1-203-207

Eventful futures and triple bottom line impacts: BRICS, image regeneration and competitiveness

Purpose There are many ways of viewing, interpreting and even conceptualizing Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) growth. This paper considers image regeneration and how this helps enhance place competitiveness. A focus on events and the spectacle they create also challenges to think about sustainable futures. This paper aims to supplement this focus on image regeneration and competitiveness, it is important to discuss and outline triple bottom line impacts as a framework to consider going forward. Design/methodology/approach Looking at the BRICS, the growing events, tourism and leisure industries transcend private and public business practices and can help align with more contemporary sustainable development practices and regeneration agendas. Such agendas can, in turn, help enhance destination competitiveness and image. While the authors need (and should) continue to assess and address economic impacts and development, it is just as important to consider environmental impacts and social impacts on a destination and its residents when considering competitiveness. Findings This conceptual paper frames insight from the literature to reflect on and consider research directions linked to triple bottom line impacts. The paper puts emphasis on the need to consider the social and environmental impacts of events. Originality/value This paper links conceptual discussions of image regeneration and competitiveness with triple bottom line impacts to look at directions for BRICS nations. It is useful for policymakers and planners who look at the “big picture” of event hosting and argues the need for more sustainable policy and planning agendas.

Sustainability of urban regeneration in Turkey: Assessing the performance of the North Ankara Urban Regeneration Project

The increasing environmental footprints of cities necessitated the integration sustainability principles into urban planning and development frameworks. The growing attention on urban sustainability also influenced the policy and the practice of urban regeneration. The quest for new methods for regenerating existing urban quarters in sustainable manners resulted in the concept of sustainable urban regeneration. The concept aims to develop urban regeneration projects in line with the three key pillars of sustainable development.Since the turn of the new millennium, urban regeneration initiatives in Turkish cities have gained a new momentum, mainly due to the increasing interest by public and private sectors. As expected, squatters constituted one of the main focuses of the recent initiatives for urban regeneration. Nevertheless, the Turkish experience of urban regeneration differs from the international experiences in terms of the motivation behind and the scope of the projects. Despite the growing link between sustainability and urban regeneration in international practices, sustainability has not yet been a major motivation for urban regeneration practices in Turkey.This research assesses the sustainability performance of one of the most prominent examples of squatter regeneration in Turkey, namely the North Ankara Urban Regeneration Project (NAURP). The project has been evaluated by means of an indicator-based methodology. The research indicates that the project's contribution to urban sustainability has been minimal and thus, further efforts are required to improve the sustainability performance of urban regeneration projects in Turkey. In the light of this finding, policy implications have been made to push sustainable urban regeneration agenda in Turkey.

Climate Change and Economic Resilience through Urban and Cultural Heritage: The Case of Emerging Small Island Developing States Economies

While the topic of climate change is of global importance and has global consequences, the context is far more dangerous for emerging economies, including small island developing states (SIDS) and their coastal cities. The literature supports the need for robustness in infrastructural dimensions of such economies. However, the preparatory economic aspects have been overlooked in favour of post-impact disaster management studies by many countries. The latter studies have also focused upon the need for heavy financial investments without investigating solutions for economic strengthening of those economies including climate change mitigation and affordability. As such, emerging SIDS economies have struggled to meet these obligations from their internal finances that draw predominantly from tax revenue sources and foreign aid thereby often leading to increased debts contributing to economic austerity and decreasing liveability levels when repayment commitments fail. Public-private partnerships (PPP), another sought-after loan strategy, which often attracts foreign direct investment (FDI), can work if PPPs are carefully designed within strict public monitoring criteria. However, their applicability needs to be expanded to include the wider social strata of a city to ensure inclusivity and cohesiveness, and formulated to contribute to a wider urban regeneration agenda. This paper proposes a more inclusive framework bridging governance with drivers for sustainable development, using urban heritage and culture as a strategic thread for debt repayment and economic empowerment through PPP. This paper seeks to inform policymakers on sustainable pathways as it relates to SIDS cultural heritage conservation policies and practices towards better economic resilience in the wake of climate change.

A performance-based framework to prioritise underutilised historical buildings for adaptive reuse interventions in New Zealand

While the efficacy of salvaging underutilised historical buildings to promote sustainable and resilient provincial urban areas in New Zealand has been identified from past studies, there is still an absence of a performance-based framework to rank optimal historical building alternatives for adaptive reuse interventions. This paper focuses on evaluating a performance-based Multiple Criteria Decision Assessment (MCDA) methodology to prioritise underutilised historical buildings for adaptive reuse intervention in a major provincial area in New Zealand, towards achieving a resilient town-centre regeneration for the area.A focus group workshop was conducted with relevant stakeholders involved in an existing town centre regeneration agenda for Whanganui, to explore and balance their opinions for optimal selection of a vacant historical building for adaptive reuse intervention from a group of proposed buildings. The participant mix comprised a combination of building professionals, historical building owners/developers/users, legal, heritage, and council/community representatives.The findings establish the usefulness of the validated framework in balancing the diverse interests of all stakeholders in the adaptive reuse decision-making process. Hence, this paper provides a significant contribution to the development of a methodology that integrates adaptive reuse stakeholders’ diversified interests, for the selection of optimal case study building alternatives. The consensus of the multidisciplinary stakeholder group was found to be consistent and insensitive to reasonable changes in weighting. Also, the validated framework enabled the decision-makers to achieve a logical result, and support the visualisation of the impact of different priority aspects and criteria on adaptive reuse interventions in New Zealand.

Efficacy of adaptive reuse for the redevelopment of underutilised historical buildings

PurposeMost provincial town centres in New Zealand typically feature old and vacant historical buildings, the majority of which possess heritage values. The growing perception that it is cheaper to repurpose vacant historical buildings rather than demolishing and rebuilding them is one of the factors that have made the adaptive reuse approach so popular. However, will this also be the case for provincial town centres in New Zealand? The purpose of this paper is to identify and explore the key factors that could influence the efficacy of adaptive reuse, and check for significant differences in the effect that each perceived factor would have on the adaptive reuse efficacy as a justifiable resilient and sustainable approach towards the regeneration of a major provincial town centre in New Zealand that is currently experiencing inner-city shrinkage.Design/methodology/approachA focus group workshop was conducted with 22 stakeholders involved in an existing town centre regeneration agenda for Whanganui. Closed-ended questionnaires were administered to the workshop participants to measure their opinions regarding the efficacy of the adaptive reuse approach for the regeneration of Whanganui’s town centre. The participant mix comprised a combination of structural engineers, quantity surveyors, architects, estate valuers, building owners/developers, legal representatives, heritage representatives and local government council representatives.FindingsThe study reported a high proportion of respondents that strongly agreed to the positive impacts of adaptive reuse with regards to the discussed priority aspects, hence, justifying the efficacy of the approach, towards delivering a vibrant town centre for Whanganui. Also, the Friedman’s analysis suggests that no significant differences existed among all perceived adaptive reuse efficacy criteria by the workshop participants, therefore justifying the approach.Originality/valueThis paper’s originality pertains to the practicality of changing the use of vacant historical buildings in Whanganui, which is one of New Zealand’s major provincial town centres, to renegotiate resilience and sustainable urban regeneration for the area.

A Museum Cruise in Foul Waters: An Empirical Analysis of the Debate Triggered by the Proposal to Move the Norwegian Viking Ships from Bygdøy to Bjørvika

This article analyzes the debate that ensued from a suggestion to relocate three Norwegian Viking ships from Bygdøy to Bjørvika. People do not only debate the ships’ material vulnerability but they also express different views of what a modern museum is and should be. Some want to upgrade and preserve the existing museum, while others want to relocate the ships and integrate them in a wider culture-led urban regeneration agenda. The ships are torn between local, regional, and national political interests, and people have different opinions about the histories in which they should be inscribed. The empirical corpus is primarily made up of newspaper articles from the last 20 years, and the different arguments are systemized and presented thematically. In the closing remark, the article suggests that the Viking Ship Museum would benefit from a more clearly defined long-term agenda.

Ethnographic reflections on ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in two post-earthquake Italian cities

This article explores the politicisation of cultural heritage during the aftermath of the 1980 earthquake in Naples and the 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila. It begins by critically addressing the positions of Tomaso Montanari and Salvatore Settis, two prominent heritage intellectuals at the forefront of national campaigns to restore the damaged historic centre of L’Aquila. Both have been instrumental in shaping an ‘oppositional heritage discourse’ in Italy that underscores the civic virtues of the nation’s cultural patrimony while simultaneously railing against its marketisation. Reflecting upon observations in L’Aquila, where locals involved in protests at government inaction have been scolded by fellow inhabitants for their lack of obeisance to cultural heritage, and drawing on longstanding ethnographic research in Naples, where heritage campaigns against redevelopment in the historic centre in the 1980s were later incorporated into an ambitious regeneration agenda, the article argues that this oppositional heritage discourse is not only premised upon idealist notions of collective identity but also, as a result of its attempts to legislate the boundaries of heritage citizenship and its disavowal of philologically incorrect relationships with historic centres, it ultimately provides tacit support to the very same neoliberal urban processes against which it claims to take a stand.

Coping with shrinkage: Rebranding post-industrial Manchester

This paper investigates the role that flagship developments are having in the regeneration agenda of cities experiencing urban shrinkage. It focuses on Manchester, archetypical example of a post-industrial shrinking city that has been able to return to the growth paradigm. Using an exploratory case study methodology, this paper analyses the spillover effects of pro-growth approaches tackling urban shrinkage. It first compiles and critically assesses its multiple flagship developments, in order to study Manchester's decay process by opposing it to the initiatives that are coping with it. It will then go on to analyse the social consequences of those initiatives and to examine the factors that can burden the city's further development. The paper argues that even though Manchester has performed well in the political game, and cosmetically improved certain areas, its flagship developments have not been able to fix the economic or social problems derived from its decay.

ADVOKASI PERKUMPULAN NARASITA DALAM MEMPERJUANGKAN KETERWAKILAN PEREMPUAN PADA PEMILU LEGISLATIF 2014

This research aims to understand advocacy of NARASITA organization in striving woman representation in legislative election. This research uses descriptive qualitative research method. Research result shows that advocacy done by NARASITA in legislative election is more focused on efforts to improve quality and quantity of women in Parliament in order to achieve bigger goals in social transformation. Advocacy done is recruitment of potential women to sit on legislative, strengthening capacity, network and campaign. But action done is not yet paying attention on men’s involvement and institutionalizing issues to become political party’s regeneration agenda. Barriers faced by NARASITA in advocating is expensive political fund while potential cadre has limited financial capital, rooted patriarchal culture in political party and society, and too few staff numbers, only 8 people while advocacy area is broad. Kata Kunci : Advocacy, Women Representative, Legislative Election

Towards Post-political Consensus in Urban Policy? Localism and the Emerging Agenda for Regeneration Under the Cameron Government

The paper explores recent experience of urban policy in England and provides an assessment of its evolution and future prospects under the Cameron government. It explores the contention that urban policy has undergone a fundamental repositioning in which neo-liberal ideas, linked to the emerging localism agenda, have begun to exert a profound shift in the role of the state in formulating and delivering policy. The paper argues that neo-liberal thinking increasingly permeates contemporary policy, but that this exists alongside a residual (but diminishing) emphasis on socio-spatial dimensions of equity. This, the paper concludes, reflects the emergence of a degree of post-political consensus around the role for urban policy and the mechanisms for its delivery.

Defining and exploring public space: perspectives of young people from Regent Park, Toronto

Inner city public housing figures prominently on the urban regeneration agenda. Regent Park, Toronto, Canada's largest and oldest public housing development, is in the midst of a 15-year, billion dollar revitalisation plan involving extensive physical and social changes. This paper explores how Regent Park's young people define and value public space and compares this with the revitalisation plan. Findings reveal that contemporary principles guiding public housing renewal do not match how young people interpret public space. The qualities blamed for public housing failure, like physical and social isolation, are identified as valuable attributes of local public spaces.