Large-scale Development Projects Research Articles

Planning behind Closed Doors: Unlocking Large-Scale Urban Development Projects Using the Stakeholder Approach on Tenerife, Spain

Santa Cruz Verde 2030 is an inner-city megaproject that will transform the local oil refinery into an urban neighborhood in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain. The project is expected to reconfigure Santa Cruz’s tourism model significantly, while applying rather undemocratic planning practices. This paper explores Santa Cruz Verde 2030, focusing on the perception of local stakeholders. My research builds on 18 qualitative interviews with planning authorities, the city’s mayor, political parties, experts from the real estate sector and residents. I identify a large perception gap among the interviewees. While the project’s initiators praise the participatory process, other stakeholders feel neither informed nor integrated. In particular, the “behind closed doors” planning approach has provoked resentment among citizens. In contrast, the possible impact on tourism of the project has given rise to less discussion. This contributes to the “stealthy” touristification strategy that has already transformed large areas of Santa Cruz’s waterfront in past decades. Hence, this paper adds to the ongoing discussion on how to design megaprojects in a more sustainable way, for example, by ensuring political consensus and learning from former megaprojects.

Corruption and legal action in large-scale development projects

대규모 개발사업에서의 부패는 공직자등이 지위나 금전적·사적 이득을 추구하기 위하여 법령을 위반하는 모든 행위를 말한다. 최근 대장동 대규모 개발사업에서의 부패행위에 대한 사회적 이슈가 되고 있다. 대장동 대규모 개발사업은 도시개발법에 의한 공공과 민간 혼합개발방식을 국내 최초로 도입한 방식이며, 민간사업시행자에 대한 개발이익에 관한 제한제도를 도시개발법에서 명문으로 두지 아니하여 지분권이 1%에 불과한 ㈜대천화유자산관리가 막대한 불로소득적 이윤을 얻는 부패행위가 발생하고 있다. 대규모 택지 및 도시 개발사업에서 나타난 부패행위가 끊임없이 발생하고 또한 대규모개발사업의 부패의 특성상 부패행위를 규명하기 어려운데도 이에 대한 논의가 미흡한 상태이다. 따라서 대규모 개발사업에서의 부패행위의 유형과 관련 제도를 검토하여 부패행위를 방지하는 법적조치방안의 마련을 할 필요가 있다. 이 논문에서는 대규모 택지 및 도시개발사업에서 발생한 공공기관등의 대규모 개발사업에서 발생한 부패행위를 분석하여 유형화하고, 대규모개발사업에 대한 부패방지를 위한 합리적 규제방향, 대규모 개발사업에서 부패방지를 위한 모니터링과 법적조치, 공공과 민간 혼합개발방식과 부패행위에 대한 법적 조치 방향을 제시한다. 첫째, 대규모개발사업에서 공공과 민간이 혼합개발하는 경우 도시개발법을 개정하여 공공의 투자지분 50% 이상, 민간 50% 미만, 이윤률 총사업비의 10%로 제한하는 명문규정을 둠으로써 도시개발의 공공성과 효율성을 제고할 뿐만 아니라, 국토계획법에 의한 사전협상에서 우선 협상자 선정기준과 절차 등을 명확히 법령에서 규정하여야 한다. 둘째, 대규모개발 사업시행자 선정 또는 사전우선협상자를 선정하는 절차에서 주민 또는 시민단체가 부정부패행위가 없도록 참여할 수 있는 방안을 제도화하여야 하고, 개발사업시행자가 선정된 이후에도 지방자치단체가 관리감독권할 수 있도록 하여야 한다. 셋째, 도시개발법 등 관계법령 위반 시 엄격한 억제 및 제재를 강화하고, 사전협상시 청렴혀약을 체결하여 이를 위반시 징계책임, 손해배상 등을 통하여 공직자등의 청렴성을 강화하는 방안을 마련하여야 한다. 넷째, 프로젝트 자금조달 및 대규모 개발 설계단계부터 구현 및 유지관리하는 단계에 이르기까지 투명성이 확보되도록 모니터링하고, 그 결과를 인터넷 홈페이지에 게시되도록 하여야 한다. 다섯째, 공공과 민간에 의한 대규모 개발사업의 경우에는 도시개발 프로젝트에 대하여 공공에 의하여 책임성이 담보되도록 하여야 한다.

Beyond variegation: The territorialisation of states, communities and developers in large-scale developments in Johannesburg, Shanghai and London

Large-scale urban development projects are a significant format of urban expansion and renewal across the globe. As generators of governance innovation and indicators of the future city in each urban context, large-scale development projects have been interpreted within frameworks of ‘variegations’ of wider circulating processes, such as neoliberalisation or financialisation. However, such projects often entail significant state support and investment, are strongly linked to a wide variety of transnational investors and developers and are frequently highly contested in their local environments. Thus, each project comes to fruition in a distinctive regulatory context, often as an exception to the norm, and each emerges through complex interactions over a long period of time amongst an array of actors. We therefore seek to broaden the discussion from an analytical focus on variegated globalised processes to consider three large-scale urban development projects (in Shanghai, Johannesburg and London) as distinctive (transcalar) territorialisations. Using an innovative comparative approach, we outline the grounds for a systematic analytical conversation across mega-urban development projects in very different contexts. Initially, comparability rests on the shared features of large-scale developments – that they are multi-jurisdictional, involve long time scales and bring significant financing challenges. Comparing three development projects, we are able to interrogate, rather than take for granted, how a range of wider processes, circulating practices, transcalar actors and territorial regulatory formations composed specific urban outcomes in each case. Thinking across these diverse cases provides grounds for rebuilding understandings of urban development politics.

Extinction in transition: coca, coal, and the production of enmity in Colombia's post-peace accords environment

At the Paris Climate Summit in 2015, then Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos proposed constructing a multi-national biodiversity corridor that would extend from the Andes to the Brazilian Atlantic coast. Santos highlighted increased militarization of the territory as one advantage of the corridor. In this model, ecological conservation becomes a matter of national/natural security, in the form of counterinsurgency to counter illegal economies. Climate change and ecological disaster mean the forest needs the military power of the State to save it from destruction. We argue that such conservation entails a form of necropolitics lying in wait; because to conserve one part is to condemn the other – framed as the enemy – to certain destruction, as land is simultaneously designated for large-scale development projects. Conservation, in effect, becomes tied to a form of extinction. Our article examines two increasingly militarized frontiers that work through conservation in Colombia. The first is where the Andes meets the Amazon rainforest, an area that has seen an increase in deforestation following the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC. Deforestation is often attributed to the cultivation of coca (used to produce cocaine), and the solution posited by the government is to eradicate the plant. We argue that eradication of illicit crops is a form of enforced extinction that militarizes the forest, targeting both human and non-human inhabitants. The second frontier concerns coal mining on the Caribbean coast, where mass environmental devastation induced by the industry has led to a forced reorganization of life in the region. The military guards the sites of extraction and those who oppose coal mining become targets for elimination. We bring these two cases – coal and coca – into dialogue, to trace the extinction-driven expansion of extractive economies, a process intertwined with armed conflict, narcotrafficking, and now with transitional politics.

Regenerative Green Infrastructure Governance in Weak, Rebounding, and Wealthy Land Markets

Too often scholars valorize green infrastructure without critically examining the dynamic and multi-faceted ways that greening impacts urban environments. Cities are complex, evolving forces of their own, which grow and shrink according to time and place. Governance strategies in different economic conditions powerfully shape the impacts of specific green infrastructure installations. They determine the value, quality, quantity, and spatial arrangement of green infrastructure. However, most scholarship focuses on the psychological, social, economic, and environmental benefits of urban greening. Green infrastructure is overwhelmingly studied as apart from historical urban governance trajectories, and it largely fails to consider the role of greening within the process of urban regeneration. This disconnect constitutes a significant gap that constrains understanding of green infrastructure for regenerative cities, and it limits our ability to strategically deploy it in beneficial rather than harmful or irrelevant ways. In this article, I argue that green infrastructure lays fundamentally different roles in poor and wealthy parts of cities, and that these roles change as the overall rank and status of the cities change over time. These changing meanings cause city governments to treat green infrastructure as fundamentally different targets of management. These conclusions are based on an ethnography of the public policy processes surrounding urban greening in three cities with different land markets. In the strong land market, the emphasis is placed firmly on revenue-generating projects, and the major players are private firms in conjunction with city departments. Greening is conceived as a byproduct of large-scale development projects, and rarely apart from them. In the weak land market city, in contrast, the environmental and civic organizations play major roles, and they conceive of green infrastructure apart from development projects. Weak land markets seem to create the possibility for increased political participation of environmental actors and for the installation of green infrastructure for the primary purpose of community health and well-being. However, the increased strength of environmental civic coalitions appears negatively correlated with the city's economic capacity to fund greening projects without support from the business community. These dynamics suggest a counter-cyclical relationship between the political will for urban greening and the investment capacity to pay for it. The analysis of green infrastructure in different land markets demonstrates that green infrastructure is deeply embedded in the historical and geographical legacies of cities.

Counter-reporting sustainability from the bottom up: the case of the construction company WeBuild and dam-related conflicts

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (ir)responsibility (CSIR) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of WeBuild (formerly known as Salini Impregilo), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes built by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals.

The Need for Inter/Subdisciplinary Thinking in Critical Conceptualizations of Displacement

Displacement occupies an ambiguous position in contemporary geographical thought. Displacement through gentrification and regeneration has gained prominence in critical urban geography, even as critical migration, border, and citizenship studies have simultaneously produced a robust literature on transnational displacement and internally displaced persons. In response to emerging crises of global and urban order, this article adds to a consideration of displacement—as concept and methodology—through an urging of attention to three drivers common to urban, subnational, and transnational scales of displacement. Our key argument is to suggest an urgent research agenda addressing the different scales and roles of value, choice, and infrastructure, both as drivers in processes of displacement and as points of learning between subdisciplines. Collectively, our work on migration and urban restructuring shows that large-scale development and resettlement projects, labor markets, and extraordinary measures of crisis management generate new ways in which value is extracted from displaced bodies and depeopled places. Against a tendency to index displacement (in both policy and research methodology) as either voluntary or nonvoluntary, we advance a critique of the choice structure of displacement. We further call attention to the infrastructures and technologies through which displacement is moved from a temporary state of exception to an ongoing state of normality. In doing so, we call for the need to rethink the epistemology of displacement and identify the significance of cross-subdisciplinary conversations for this project.

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

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.

Possibility of Urban Heat Island Formation by Lifting Green Belts: Focusing on the Cases of Busan Metropolitan City, Korea

We analyzed the temperature changes in cities and regions due to the lifting of the green belt in Busan Metropolitan City. The difference between the average temperature change in the summer surface due to the lifting of the green belt was analyzed in Local Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis (LISA) for the two points in 2000, when the green belt was fully preserved, and in 2018, when the recent record heatwave was recorded. Consequently, approximately 28.14% of the areas where the green belt was lifted from the cluster map became a hotspot. In Busan Metropolitan City, the changes in the soil quality, resulting from the development of new towns, creation of industrial complexes, reduction of green areas, and an increase in impervious areas due to largescale housing development projects following the lifting of the green belt, lead to the temperature rise in the city, thereby causing urban heat island phenomenon. This study contributes to the field by revealing that the urban heat island phenomenon can be affected in the long term depending on the urban development project involved in the lifting of the green belt. In addition to its original function of preserving the environment and preventing urban sprawl, the green belt can be a major urban planning tool for mitigating the rising urban heat island phenomenon caused by climate change, which demonstrates its policy implications.

Exploring the professional identity and agency of student teachers in multilingual classrooms

ABSTRACT While there is now a considerable body of work on teacher identity in the area of language education, much less attention has been given to the question of the extent to which student teachers are enabled to construct identities that are consonant with the opportunities and challenges of current multilingual classrooms. Drawing on a recent large-scale research and development project, this article explores how the student teachers in our study: understood their responsibilities towards pupils for whom English is an Additional Language; perceived their development needs, preparedness and confidence to support EAL pupils; the constraints they encountered; and the opportunities that they utilized to be and act responsively within multilingual classrooms. Findings are contextualized within the policy framework concerning language and the variegated landscape of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England; and framed against apposite perspectives on identity and agency, with a central place being given to socio-cultural theories of identity formation which focus on discourse and practice. Building on the findings, the Discussion points up some of the elements that need to be in place if student teachers are to develop a professional identity that is truly inclusive and responsive to linguistic and cultural difference.

A Stakeholder Analysis of the Development of a Large-Scale Professional Development Program

Abstract The development of a large-scale professional development project for Swedish mathematics teachers is retrospectively examined. By referring to documentation produced by stakeholders in the development process, the stakeholder’s design recommendations and underlying assumptions on teacher development are described. Seeing the development as a co-determination process explains how research-based principles appearing early in the process gradually change to become something different in the end, without the reasons for this shift ever being explicitly discussed in stakeholders’ documentations. It is discussed whether the distributed way of constructing the program might cause difficulties in sticking to an explicit theory of change. The impact sheet to this article can be accessed at 10.6084/m9.figshare.16610113.

Chinese investment in East Africa: History, status, and impacts

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the development trajectory of Chinese investments in two East African countries and their implications for technology transfer. It traces the transformation of Chinese economic engagements with Africa since the early independence era. Most Chinese investments were established in the past decade, except for a few aid-driven investments created in the 1970s and those made by the first wave of Chinese expatriate entrepreneurs to East Africa in the 1990s. These recent investments have concentrated in construction-related industries, export-oriented garments industry, plastic recycling and reprocessing, and agro-business. In terms of technology transfer, there are local training efforts and signs for intra-industry spillovers. Large-scale Chinese investments or development projects have established formal training programs with explicit localization targets and are more likely to collaborate with government agencies or vocational training institutes. Moreover, horizontal and vertical spillovers have also taken the form of the development of sub-contracting, local supply, distribution networks, and imitation by local firms. Nevertheless, those industry-level spillovers are less systematic due to the limitations of local investors’ financial and technological capacity.

When the Complexity of the Large-Scale Development Project Becomes a Roadblock to Access to Justice

On 23 July 2018, when the villagers gathered around the porch to wrap up the day with a good chat, one of the five auxiliary dams of the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower dam in Attapeu province, the southeastern state of Laos, collapsed. Four days before the collapse, reports of cracks and subsidence started to come through. It should have been enough to prompt evacuation warning issuance by the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy Power Co. Ltd (PNPC), a consortium of South Korean companies SK Engineering and Construction (SK E&C) and Korea Western Power Company (KOWEPO), Thailand-based RATCH Group, and Lao Holding State Enterprise (LHSE). PNPC has a Concession Agreement with the Laos government ‘to plan, design, finance, construct, own, operate and maintain’ the Xe-Pian Xe-Namnoy hydropower dam. The warning was issued, but it came too late.

(Re)mapping Akikodjiwan: Spatial Logics of Dispossession in the Settler-Colonial City

This article examines the socio-spatial reproduction of settler-colonial urbanism at a contested site of urban development in Canada’s capital city. Akikodjiwan is an Algonquin sacred site on the Ottawa River (Kichi Sibi) and the location of a large-scale private real estate development project. Using the Access to Information Act, this article demonstrates how the Canadian government—led by the National Capital Commission—orchestrated a land transfer to the developers amid long-standing calls by the Algonquins to have the land returned. This article contributes to understandings of the positioning of the settler city at the center of the spatial logic of coloniality in Canada, as a site of the deployment of socio-spatial strategies of settler-colonial governance and property relations, but also as a site of Indigenous resistance. Transpiring in a purported climate of reconciliation, the remapping of Akikodjiwan demonstrates the ongoing spatial implications and role of place making in settler-colonial city making, where racialized logics and regimes of private property are mobilized in an attempt to dispossess and exclude Indigenous peoples from their lands, alongside the simultaneous transfer of thousands of settlers onto an Algonquin sacred site.

The unruly complexity of conservation arrangements with Mexican rural communities: Who really funds the game?

The influence of private financing on ecological conservation has grown in recent years, but little is known about the actual links between large-scale development projects, public-private contractual arrangements, and community-based conservation. We analyze the political economy of such links by considering a conservation area under management by a rural community involved in wind energy projects receiving environmental compensation. Our study was carried out in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, the most significant wind corridor in Latin America, where the Voluntary Conservation Areas (VCA) strategy was originated. We investigated the role of public-private conservation financing in developing wind energy projects in the area, with a critical approach to the neo-institutional theory of natural resources management. Our mixed field research methods combined ethnography, in-depth structured interviews, surveys, participant observation, and social cartography. We found that: 1) The neoliberal Mexican government has actively oriented community conservation towards a market compensation mechanism; 2) since this mechanism can be easily corrupted, it results in a mix of formal and informal rules that allegedly provides “sustainable and socially responsible” cooperation, but exploits and deepens the market and state failures to which rural poor are exposed; 3) the mechanism provides malicious incentives that allow transnational energy companies to continue to profit from degrading the environment, by combining this degradation with low-cost low-effective conservation of mountain and forest areas owned by rural and indigenous peoples.

Assessing smallholder sustainable intensification in the Ethiopian highlands

CONTEXTSustainable intensification is one approach to increasing food production without undermining sustainability goals. In recent years new tools and indicators have been developed for broad-based assessment of sustainable intensification. However, most of these tools have been applied at field level and assessing individual technologies, while integrated assessments of multiple novel practices at farm-to-village level are lacking. OBJECTIVEIn this study we develop and apply a data collection, analysis, and interpretation approach that results in a replicable and rapid method for a multi-variate assessment of sustainable intensification. METHODSDrawing on a survey of 779 participant farmers, and using the Sustainable Intensification Assessment Framework, we quantified 27 indicators grouped into five domains: agricultural production, economics, environment, human welfare, and social. We applied an expert-led threshold setting exercise to re-scale indicators, permitting aggregated and dis-aggregated visualisation onto a common axis. We developed a graphic evaluation approach to communicate the multiple domain and indicator scores and applied this approach to quantify trade-offs and synergies related to agricultural productivity in four contrasting sites in Ethiopia. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSIn each site there was a notable and significant gradient of production intensity, although average crop and livestock productivity remained well below attainable levels. Higher levels of productivity were correlated with higher scores in the economic, social and agricultural domains, and in some sites they were also positively correlated with the human welfare and environmental domains. In no case was increased production intensity correlated with lower scores in any of the sustainability domains, indicating that in these relatively low-intensity systems increases in productivity will go hand-in-hand with improvements in most other sustainability domains. Synergies can overrule trade-offs in these smallholder systems in Ethiopia, if managed well. SIGNIFICANCEThis is one of very few studies of multiple sustainable intensification technologies implemented concurrently at the household to community level. Most studies focus on individual technologies or practices within specific niches of the farming system. The method could be developed further for efficient application to various large-scale development or intensification projects, and could potentially make use of existing smallholder information databases.

A relational lens to understand housing affordability in the 21st Century

Housing affordability in the 21st-century requires a new way of understanding the concept. The concept is currently framed around household spending on housing costs. In the 21stcentury, households' aspirations and housing outcomes of local residential environments are increasingly influenced by external labour and capital drivers at a range of scales (regional, national, global). Under such context, this paper suggests the concept of housing affordability should be advanced to understood with a relational view of the world. The relational view, underpinned by Giddens's Theory of Structuration, has the scope to capture how households' housing costs, linked to aspirations and housing outcomes across scales, making this more relevant to the 21stcentury. Empirical evidence to demonstrate this has been drawn from a large-scale housing development project in the West Midlands of England. Increasing understanding of the concept helps formulate policies and planning practices for improving mechanisms to deliver better housing outcomes in an affordable and sustainable manner.

Using an Analytical Hierarchy Process to Analyze the Development of the Green Energy Industry

With global climate change and resource scarcity becoming increasingly serious issues, the green energy economy is transforming on a global scale. There are an increasing number of large-scale green energy development projects. However, these are often beset with risks; thus, this study conducted an analysis of the renewable energy risks in Taiwan using the analytical hierarchy process technique. Accordingly, a comprehensive study focusing into the current energy situation and potential development is needed. Renewable energy status and the availability by its main types, including, wind, solar, thermal, and biomass energies, were critically reviewed and discussed in this study. The findings of this study include the top 10 key operating risks recognized by specific green energy companies, as well as an assessment of which risks have been addressed and which have caused losses.

‘Much better than earlier’: dam-building in Uganda and understanding development through the past

ABSTRACT This article illustrates that development discourses are historically constructed and contingent, demonstrating the value of adopting a discursive and historical approach to development projects. It juxtaposes recent and late-colonial Ugandan dam-building, using Owen Falls and Bujagali dams respectively, to bring the past and present into conversation. Focusing on history as the representation of past events shows how actors’ articulation of development tropes is intimately linked with historical associations and claims, and how actors use recent history to advance contemporary aims while discussing development. For example, critiques of contemporary situations are strengthened through unfavourable comparison with a romanticised past, and development planners justify their actions by presenting development projects as different from previous interventions. This historical lens identifies findings that an approach focused on the present might miss, including the ways the late-colonial government emphasised the small-scale nature of its projects and positive remembrances of Owen Falls in contemporary Uganda (in spite of the project not achieving its objectives); large-scale development projects should therefore not only be analysed from the perspective of their ostensible failure. This approach also illustrates how ideas of development are articulated differently in different historical contexts, including more individualised and divergent applications in the contemporary period.

Does Post Displacement Anxiety Affect Pupils’ Achievement? An Impact Assessment of Internally Displaced Persons’ Camps in Plateau State Nigeria

The growing trends of insecurity occasioned by Boko-haram, herdsmen attack, kidnappings, unknown gunmen, bandits and likes is point of concern to all stake holders in the education sector in Nigeria. This situation in Plateau state has been worrisome in the last two decades. Individuals are displaced all around the world because of several factors. Internal displacement is a phenomenon in which individuals are forced to leave their homes but remain within the borders of their own countries. Another element that distinguishes them from refugees, who are also involuntarily displaced but across internationally recognized state borders is that internally displaced persons stay at the border of their countries (World Bank, 2014). Displacement occurs in situations like armed conflict, persecution, situations of widespread violence, natural and human-made disasters and, more recently, large-scale development projects . Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are people that have been forced...