Large-scale Development Projects Research Articles

Dubaification in practice: an inter-scalar analysis of Belgrade Waterfront

ABSTRACT Large-scale real estate development projects are increasingly often facilitated by transnational flows of capital investment and development expertise. While such projects clearly contain elements that closely correspond to classic notions of urban entrepreneurialism, the drivers and strategies behind them are rather different due to the close involvement of national level state actors, real estate developers and capital investors respectively. Against this backdrop, this paper discusses the case of Belgrade Waterfront, a large-scale mixed-use real estate development project in Serbia, developed by a company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is illustrated how the foreign developer and the Serbian government are realizing the project by selectively applying a number of “Dubai-principles” to urban development. Based on extensive qualitative research, including interviews in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Belgrade, it is argued that the experimental purposes of this transnational project are best understood through a combined lens of geopolitical and geoeconomic processes.

City Government Capacity and Patterns in Urban Development Project Governance

This article explores the mutual influence between a city government’s jurisdictional capacity (its ability to plan and implement policy) and its interactions with other governance actors. It does so by quantifying, categorizing, and analyzing the composition of governance actors at various levels (national, regional, local) and of various types (public, private, civic) that are active in large-scale urban development projects in three cities: Hamburg, Manchester, Pittsburgh. Considering these findings in the context of national governance infrastructures, the article argues that divergent arrays of jurisdictional capacity (linked to multilevel distributions of state power) influence how city governments engage with other governance actors and influence which governance actors they engage with. This not only impacts project outcomes but also ultimately reinforces the kinds of governance strategies in which cities engage.

Examining the Impacts of Large-Scale Development Projects on Urban Planning: Case Studies of the Histories of Urban Planning in the Minato-Mirai Area in Nishi Ward and the Shin-Honmoku Area in Naka Ward of Yokohama City

Examining the Impacts of Large-Scale Development Projects on Urban Planning: Case Studies of the Histories of Urban Planning in the Minato-Mirai Area in Nishi Ward and the Shin-Honmoku Area in Naka Ward of Yokohama City

The Implementation of Large-Scale Urban Development Projects in Brazilian Cities—Case Study: Rio de Janeiro/RJ

The Implementation of Large-Scale Urban Development Projects in Brazilian Cities—Case Study: Rio de Janeiro/RJ

Interrelation of Large-Scale Property Development Project and the Local Real Estate Market. Evidence from Hungary

The Hungarian real estate market has gone through a widely fluctuating phase in the new millennium, which has not missed periods of surge, crisis-driven gloom and recovery. Amidst these conditions, an international developer engaged in a large-scale, long-timeframe residential property building project (Sasad Liget Residential Complex) in District XI of the Hungarian capital. The article examines the exposures and impacts of the development project to the external factors. The deployed quantitative statistical methods reveal that despite the considerable weight of the project, the in-market performance of SLRC has been the function of the general swings of the sector. Further, although the project generated higher demand than the bulk of other properties in the vicinity, its weight has not been enough to impact the property market of District XI at a statistically significant degree.
 JEL Classification: E31, R31

State rescaling and large-scale urban development projects in China: The case of Lingang New Town, Shanghai

Large-scale urban development projects have become the main vehicle by which targeted interventions for place- and scale-specific state initiatives unfold, triggering a series of processes that are associated with the rescaling of state space. This study aims to understand the place-specific conditions, pathways and strategies whereby states’ spatial and scalar restructuring takes place in urban development projects (UDPs) within China’s political economic contexts, and in turn how UDPs act as critical lenses for viewing the changing nature of state spatial strategy in China, through a case study of the Lingang New Town in Shanghai. The major findings are: UDPs in China function as tools not just for land value extraction but also for scale-making to cater to the state’s pursuits of place-specific competitiveness in the global economy; the restructuring of the state apparatus and regulatory frameworks is driven by place-specific tensions and crises triggered by earlier rounds of state rescaling; the state chose state-agents rather than market-agents to reinforce its power, and thus the state space expands through development of UDPs; through developing UDPs, China’s spatial strategies have explicitly and officially engaged with the discourse of globalisation while implicitly engaging with geographically variegated practices of neoliberalisation. At the theoretical level, this article facilitates an investigation of how China’s state spatial strategy, characterised by geographically and chronologically variegated engagement with neoliberalism, is actualised through UDPs. It also demonstrates how, despite being a socialist polity, pragmatic market measures and downscaling are taken as transient measures in times of need.

Artificial Intelligence and Japan’s Fifth Generation

In 1982, Japan launched its Fifth Generation Computer Systems project (FGCS), designed to develop intelligent software that would run on novel computer hardware. As the first national, large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D) project to be free from military influence and corporate profit motives, the FGCS was open, international, and oriented around public goods. Although the FGCS did not plan any commercialized technologies, many American computer experts portrayed it as an economic threat to U.S. dominance in computing and the global economy—and policymakers around the developed world believed them and funded AI projects of their own. Later, however, the FGCS was remembered as a failure. Why? This article recasts the FGCS as an interstice in the shift from a state-funded regime of American science organization to the neoliberal privatized regime of R&D now ascendant around the world. By exploring how notions of economic competitiveness and national security shaped R&D, this article reveals AI to be a product of contingent choices by multiple actors—nation-states, government bureaucracies, corporations, and individuals—rather than the outcome of deterministic technological forces.

Implementation pathways of large-scale urban development projects (lsUDPs) in Western Europe: a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)

ABSTRACT As powerful landmarks to steer local and regional development, strategic projects are often linked with strategic spatial plans. However, the key question remains as to what extent strategic urban projects and plans can be regarded as aligned. By building on previous international comparative research, we identify five main conditions assumed to enable, in combination, the alignment between strategic projects and plans. By adopting a qualitative, multi-method empirical strategy (interviews, site visits, online questionnaire, additional literature) and by performing fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs-QCA), we compare 38 European large-scale urban development projects (lsUDPs) and assess which combinations of conditions support concordance of the projects with strategic spatial plans (SSPs). Our analysis shows that there are five pathways, factored out into two main patterns, enabling alignment. Substantial variation in our cases appears to be captured by: (i) considerable involvement of the national state combined with (inter)national private actors and (ii) a considerable involvement of private actors combined with international external events.

Partnership Model For Optimizing The Use of Village Funds

Since 2015, the Government has allocated village development funds in the form of Village Fund policies of IDR 20.7 trillion, then in 2016 it increased to IDR 46.9 trillion, and continues to increase in the following years. However, based on field research in a number of regions in Indonesia, it turns out that the use of Village Funds is not optimal, some of which have been proven wrongly targeted, not transparent in use, and not accountable in reporting. The aspect of planning activities and the quality of human resources implementing policies and coordination between parties that should play a role are still a major problem.
 The PPP (Public-Private Partnership) model is actually intended for the development of large-scale projects, such as the construction of highways or seaports and airports. But by taking the substance of cooperation from the parties that each have strengths, the PPP model (and its variants) may be applicable in the use of Village Funds. Using secondary data analysts, the following article discusses the theoretical aspects of the advantages of the PPP model. This model is juxtaposed with cases of success in building the economic self-reliance of rural communities with the help of private parties and academics. It is assumed that the partnership model can be an alternative solution to further optimize the use of Village Funds in order to reduce poverty in rural areas.

An Island in Transition – A Review on Recent Development Geographies of Jeju –

본 논문은 제주도의 개발 지리를 검토하면서, 최근 대규모 개발 사업의 계획과 실행에서 개발 행위자들이 구조적으로 개입된 방식을 분석하는 데에 목적을 두었다. 이에 본 논문에서는 우선 제주도 개발에 영향을 미친 법률적 규제를 포괄적으로 조사했고, 중앙정부의 지역 개발 전략이 국가 주도의 통제 정책에서 지방정부로의 권력 이양으로 전환되고 있음을 제시했다. 다음으로 2000년대 이후 제주도 개발 관련 특별법이 제정된 배경, 과정 및 내용을 검토하면서, 중앙정부와 지방정부 간의 파트너십이 어떻게 국제화, 자유화, 규제완화 등의 신자유주의적 개발 정책을 정당화했는지 검토했다. 둘째, 최근 제주도의 개발 지리 변동의 중요 행위자인 제주국제자유도시개발센터의 개발 전략을 분석하면서, 최근의 개발 과정이 급격한 부동산의 교환가치 증식을 야기하였음을 문제점으로 지적했다. 마지막으로 제주도의 최근 개발 지리 변동이 긍정적 기회를 가져오는 것처럼 보이지만, 실제 개발 과정에서 불확실성과 상당한 비용을 대가로 하기 때문에 제주도의 회복력을 위험에 빠뜨릴 수 있음을 지적하였다.The purpose of this paper is to trace out recent development geographies of Jeju Island, and to investigate the ways in which a series of large-scale development projects have been planned and implemented structurally in conjunction with key development actors. First, it examined comprehensive legal regulations that impacted on Jeju’s development. It investigated the key development schemes of Jeju implemented by the South Korean national government, and distinguished their political characteristics into dirigisme and devolution. Subsequently, it analyzed the national-local governmental partnership and its development discourse presented in a series of special acts on Jeju in the 2000s. Second, it analyzed the structural framework of the Jeju Free International City Development Corporation (JDC) with particularly focusing on its internationalization, liberalization, and deregulation policies. The JDC acts as a powerful neoliberal development actor dedicated to increasing the exchange values of local properties. Finally, the paper reviewed JDC’s several development projects and examined whether they brought in positive opportunities for Jeju, or generated uncertainties and costs that could endanger Jeju’s resilient capacity.

Socio-economic Consequences of Displacement and Resettlement: A Case on the Planned Oil-refinery-development Project in the Albertine Region of Uganda

AbstractMillions of people are every year forcefully displaced from their places of residence and alienated from access to livelihood assets through large-scale development projects. This article examines different socio-economic consequences of displacement and resettlement caused by the planned oil-refinery site in Uganda. Household survey and interviews were employed to elicit the necessary data, analysed through descriptive statistics, logistic-regression and content analysis. Although the resettlement process exposed households to some benefits, most households were exposed to substantial risks. Over 81 per cent of households experiencing displacement lost their land and experienced reduced resource access. The results also showed significant relationships between consequences and socio-economic characteristics of respondents in that both male and female respondents had access to more and productive assets; and larger land sizes and incomes were reported to have been more affected. Also vulnerable groups including females and those with low or no education levels were more risk-prone than before the resettlement. In future development projects, the government should take into consideration the effect of the displacement and resettlement on asset access.

Assessing voluntary resilience standards and impacts of flood risk information

ABSTRACTVoluntary resilience standards are an emerging tool for cities to incentivize developers to incorporate climate change adaptation strategies. Urban planners and researchers, however, are still assessing their relative impacts on the design of recent large-scale development projects. This paper answers the question of whether, and at what scale, anticipated changes to mapped flood risk are associated with mitigation actions to accommodate climate change. A case study of the Climate Change Preparedness and Resiliency Checklist in Boston, Massachusetts presents a database of 171 unique survey responses from 104 proposed projects. Comparing developments with documentation to an internal subset of 54 projects in the Boston Planning and Development Agency’s projected Sea Level Rise – Flood Hazard Area (SLR-FHA), this paper finds projects impacted by updated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) are associated with different building uses, higher sea level rise assumptions and greater abilities to endure inundation. There are also neighbourhood-level differences in climate expertise and the projects’ ability to withstand utility disruption. Both of these observed impacts may have important implications for the formulation and application of voluntary resilience standards in other coastal cities.

Interpreting non-conforming urban expansion from the perspective of stakeholders’ decision-making behavior

Non-conformances between outcomes and plans are widely considered inevitable. However, interpretation of non-conformances is still deficient. Since non-conforming urban development is a direct result of land-use decision-making, this study seeks to explain non-conforming urban expansion by exploring stakeholders’ decision-making behavior. We develop an interpreting framework that combines state and market forces, and use it to investigate the drivers of non-conforming decisions. The results of a Chinese case study indicate that local governments played multiple roles in non-conforming urban expansion, through which they increased financial revenue, sited large-scale development projects, and provided public goods. Manufacturing investors mainly based location decisions on development conditions and policies, rather than on zoning maps. Their influence on land supply decision-making was positively correlated with their investment scale, whereas commercial and housing developers had more limited influence. Most collective land owners supported land expropriation and some carried out informal development to generate economic returns. We suggest that non-conformances resulted from both government-led and bottom-up urbanization, and that the local government played a key role based on the market mechanism.

Negotiating coastal infrastructures: An evolutionary governance theory (EGT) approach to Chinese high-modernist development along the Indian Ocean

What is known today as the Maritime Silk Road Initiative (MSRI) was first proposed in fall 2013 by China’s President Xi Jinping in a keynote speech to the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta and has since drawn immense geopolitical and economic attention. The stated goal of the large-scale initiative is to strengthen maritime connectivity between China, Asia, Africa and Europe by infrastructural development, particularly of ports, oil transshipment terminals and Special Economic Zones. Based on the initial review of policy documents and widely published strategic visions of the Maritime Silk Road, the paper aims to explore, on the one hand, the conceptual foundations and policy mechanisms behind China’s large-scale development projects in coastal areas along the Indian Ocean. On the other, the paper by drawing on an empirical example from Sri Lanka seeks to take an evolutionary governance theory (EGT) perspective towards on-the-ground implementation of these policies. By doing so, the study highlights the impact of interconnected formal and informal institutions and discourses, in transforming Chinese engagement. The contribution therefore seeks to reflect upon particular Chinese patterns of high-modernist developmental governance in coastal places and their local social and political negotiation and materialisation.

Monte Carlo simulation in a financial strategy for urban development using land value capture

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) could have enhanced understanding of the risks involved in the financial strategy for revitalization of Rio de Janeiro’s central city based on the capture of value generated by government interventions.Design/methodology/approachThe study first describes the process involved in developing the financial strategy and model without MCS. Then, it shows how the MCS could have been integrated into this process and evaluates its potential impacts on the quality of risk analysis.FindingsIf MCS is fully integrated into the decision-making process, it can serve as a heuristic tool that helps team members to better understand risks by generating forecasts of land value and other variables as a probability distributions. By showing the variance of the forecasted variable, MCS integrates elements of modern risk analysis into financial model development in a cost-effective manner.Research limitations/implicationsMCS covers only the risks associated with the variables in the financial model. Events that seem extremely unlikely (i.e. “black swans”) can occur and must be assessed separately.Practical implicationsMCS can help analysts to understand the financial risks of large-scale development projects involving value capture, even in the prefeasibility stage.Social implicationsBy facilitating value capture, MCS could help close the financing gap for sustainable urban development and subsidies for lower income families.Originality/valueThe study “retrofits” MCS on a successfully completed financial prefeasibility study to assess its usefulness as a heuristic tool.

The Impact of Rapid Urbanization and Public Housing Development on Urban Form and Density in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Urban development is occurring in many Sub-Saharan Africa cities and rapid urbanization is underway in the East African city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In an effort to address urban poverty and increase homeownership opportunities for low and middle-income residents, the City Administration of Addis Ababa initiated a large-scale housing development project in 2005. The project has resulted in the completion of 175,000 units within the city with 132,000 more under construction. To understand the impacts of both rapid growth and the housing program’s impact on the city’s urban form, we compared the type and distribution of land uses in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, between 2006 with 2016 using hand-digitized, ortho-rectified satellite images in Geographic Information Systems (GISs). While residential density has increased, overall density has decreased from 109 people/ha to 98 people/ha. We found that between 2006 and 2016, land occupied by residential housing increased from 33% to 39% and the proportion of informal housing decreased from 57% to 38%. Reflecting the country’s economic prosperity, there was a dramatic increase in the presence of single family housing, particularly on the city’s western side. In 2006, only 1% of residential areas were occupied by high-rise condominiums (4 floors or greater) and this increased to 11% by 2016. The majority of the new, higher density residential developments are located near the eastern edges of the city and this outlying location has significant implications for residents, infrastructure construction, and future development.

The Stigma Effects of High Voltage Power Lines on Surrounding Land Prices

The high voltage transmission line directly or indirectly damages the surrounding environment. This is an immediate problem for residents, business operators and the government. It causes a great social cost. In this study, the influence of the high voltage transmission line on the surrounding land is analyzed through case studies. This study investigated the survey and transaction cases in the relevant area. The results of the study are summarized as follows: First, the high voltage transmission line caused by the large-scale development project gives psychological anxiety and disgust to the residents. It is expressed and recognized as physical, visual, and noisy inconveniences. Second, it is rarely traded around high voltage transmission lines and there are very few transactions in the area affected by the lines. Third, in-depth investigation and analysis of repeated transactions showed about 5% stigma effect. The limitations and challenges of the research are as follows. It is necessary to analyze empirically as considering the fact that most of the existing high-voltage transmission line studies lacks a specific analysis when dealing with public land(house) prices or transactions. Various case studies are required to solve the current dispute related to the high-voltage transmission line. A reasonable alternative to social conflicts should be presented through continuous empirical research.

Socioeconomic determinants of pediatric asthma emergency department visits under regional economic development in western New York

Although the links between asthma in children and physical environmental factors have been well established, the role of community-level socioeconomic status remains inconclusive. Consequently, little attention has been paid to the dynamic changes in the associations between socioeconomic status and asthma outcomes due to structural changes in the community, such as an influx of financial resources. This study examined the relationship between community-level socioeconomic status indicators and asthma-related emergency department utilization for school-aged children in 2011 and 2015, assessing the early impact of a large-scale regional economic development project in western New York, United States. Our analyses controlled for other community-level health risk factors, such as environmental exposure, and spatial correlation of the emergency department usage data. Results indicated that both median household income and health insurance coverage were key socioeconomic predictors of the children's asthma-related emergency department utilization over the study period. We also found that the risk of emergency department utilization for asthma decreased significantly in the area in which regional economic development projects were completed during the initial stage of the project. Through a comparison study we demonstrated that the spatial correlation present in asthma-related ED utilization improved model fit and corrected biases in the estimates. Although our findings suggest that improving the socioeconomic status of communities contributes to a reduction in emergency department utilization for pediatric asthma, more empirical studies are warranted for evaluating the comprehensive effects of regional economic development on public health.

Failure Factors in the Control of Large-Scale Business Intelligence Systems Development Projects: Case Study of an Advanced Engineering Firm in Mexico

Failed automation systems engineering projects are difficult to study and there is a lack of case studies regarding these projects. The literature over-represents ERP projects in western countries and theories of antecedents of failure are derived from data collected on ERP projects in the West. Studies from Mexico are almost absent. Also, intelligent applications for businesses are now very topical but few cases focussing on failure factors in business intelligence (BI) projects have appeared. This is in spite of the importance of business intelligence applications for firms in less developed economies in an increasingly globalised economy. This paper presents a challenged project for a complex business intelligence solution in Mexico. It compares ranked failure factors based on academic literature to the Mexican case. Whilst the comparison reveals that similar factors are failure antecedents, their relative importance is different, opening possibilities for further investigations.

Intensive tourist-related urbanisation impacts on a mountain village: The case study of Veľká Lomnica in Slovakia

Abstrakt: A key feature of contemporary tourism is massive investment on the part of developers in tourism-related urbanisation, with this made most manifest in the construction of recreational apartment houses, and the expansion of ski slopes and golf courses. For obvious reasons, such activities are directed at traditional centres of tourism, which respond to the current trend towards hedonism present in society. However, major development activity has also taken place in municipalities in which tourism only began to play its more significant part once social and political transformation had already occurred. An example is the Slovak municipality of Veľká Lomnica, a village in which golf-course construction has initiated large-scale development projects. The aim of the work described in this paper was precisely to address this example in assessing the impact of tourism-related urbanisation on the municipality in question.