Urban Renewal Process Research Articles

Research on color harmony of building façades

AbstractIn this study, the 28 primary colors and 11 complementary colors suggested by Chang et al in their investigation on building colors in Wanhua District of Taipei City were taken as color samples. The two‐color combination mode was adopted to obtain 308 simulation photos, and two‐color harmony was discussed from the perspective of visual evaluation using psychophysical tests. This study explored building façade color harmony in the CIELAB color space, and the relationship between the color attributes (hue, lightness, and chroma) and the color harmony, and between the differences of the color attributes and color harmony. It found that a high lightness of a building's primary color is associated with a high level of building color harmony, while the color harmony is reduced when the color falls in the green or blue sector in the CIELAB color space; a greater lightness difference between building façade colors is associated with a higher level of building color harmony, while the colors are disharmonized when they tend to the blue sector in the CIELAB color space. The contribution of this study is to summarize the principles for the application of building color harmony in urban renewal, and proposed suggestions on building color harmony in the urban renewal process.

‘Wipe out the entire slum area’: university-led urban renewal in Columbia, South Carolina, 1950–1985

In this article, we examine the role of the University of South Carolina in the urban renewal of the city of Columbia, a medium sized southern city. Drawing on archives of official correspondence and oral histories of neighborhood residents, we chart the various ways by which the university administrators initiated and guided urban renewal and slum clearance in several largely African American neighborhoods adjacent to campus in tandem with the city of Columbia. We place a particular focus on the Wheeler Hill neighborhood to illustrate how university property acquisition occurred alongside the federal urban renewal process, and how the process slowly destabilized and ultimately unraveled the neighborhood. In doing so we contribute to the growing literature on universities and urban renewal and capture the methods and underlying racist intentions through which universities have reshaped the urban landscape. We argue that at a time when universities across the United States are beginning to grapple with their own racial histories, it is crucial to more fully acknowledge the ways in which university expansion has impacted, and indeed targeted, adjacent communities of color.

Transmedia Festivals and the Accelerated Cultural Sector

Over the past couple of decades, urban transmedia festivals have gained a distinct presence in the European cultural landscape, constituting an alternative to other, more dominant, conceptions of music festivals. This article introduces transmedia festivals as a new type of contemporary festival and situates them in wider urban processes. Transmedia festivals originated on the fringes of new urban scenes, in which media art was overlapping with electronic music and club culture. Based on multi-year field research, this article argues that these festivals have become part of urban renewal processes. The core focus of this article is therefore how transmedia festivals are part of processes such as eventization, culturalization, precarization, and gentrification. Local and EU-funding-policies, moreover, impose opportunities and dilemmas on urban festivals. The article is a contribution to the still small area of cultural and urban studies on such festivals in Europe, and situates transmedia festivals within urban cultural change.

A GIS-based decision support system for facilitating participatory urban renewal process

Renovation of Urban Blighted Areas (UBAs) plays a vital role in the improvement of Urban Quality of Life (UQL), notably in developing countries. Due to socio-economic and legal issues in UBAs, the renovation process cannot be sufficiently realized without the intervention of both public and private sectors. As active involvement of owners, investors and urban managers in urban renovation increases the success of renewal projects, more considerable attention has been paid to owner-investor participatory models in the last few decades. In order to promote participatory urban renewal processes, a Spatial (GIS-based) Decision Support System (SDSS) has been developed. The primary objective of proposed SDSS is to present a general framework for the involvement of owners, investors, and urban managers in UBA processes. Through the integration of Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), the proposed SDSS provides an appropriate tool for the facilitation of participatory renewal procedures in UBAs. In addition to entering, storing, manipulating, analyzing and representing spatial data related to UBAs, the system provides further features for stakeholders including spatial negotiation, weighting, prioritization, validation, monitoring, and decision rule capabilities. The SDSS has been implemented in Tehran, and its quality has been validated from the perspective of developers, experts, and end users (owners and investors) in accordance with the ISO/IEC_9126 standard. Based on three group’s opinion, the system is relatively acceptable in terms of functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability in facilitating the urban renewal process.

Urban Renewal Strategies for Application of the Agreement Co-Construction Approach

Currently, Taiwan leads urban renewal via public participation style with the government playing the role of critical decision-maker. The problem of urban aging is a common phenomenon faced by the global cities. According to the Ministry of the Interior statistics in 2018, old houses more than 30 years in Taiwan are more than 4.27 million; 0.77 million old houses in New Taipei City, accounting for 18%; and 0.69 million old houses in Taipei, accounting for 16.2%. However, the current progress of urban renewal is slowly stagnating. From 2006 to 2018, the approved urban renewal case was only 449 cases, approximately 35 cases per year, only nearly 2,000 households. Although the government strongly promotes the urban renewal policy, it is limited by the policy implied that it cannot be implemented and promoted. In addition, excessive emphasis on the sound of living justice, the lengthy review process, and the inability to implement various supporting measures have made urban renewal more difficult. In particular, the adoption of the “Agreement Co-Construction Approaches” method for urban renewal is even more difficult. Base on this, this study uses empirical case studies and content analysis methods to analyze the challenges of urban renewal through the “Agreement Co-Construction Approaches”, and further proposes specific countermeasures and recommendations, to enable Taiwan to accelerate the urban renewal process, and provide developing and developed countries specific reference for urban renewal planning and promotion strategy in the future.

Building morphometric analysis as a tool for urban renewal: Identifying post-Second World War mass public housing development potential

The focus of this study is on the ability of morphometrics and building pattern recognition to improve top-down urban renewal processes by identifying post-Second World War mass housing suitable for urban renewal. We used two conceptual frameworks: the first from the field of urban design and architecture and the second from the field of multi-parametric analysis and geographic information system. A survey of a sample of typical post-Second World War mass housing units based on historical blueprints was developed to identify geometric indicators. The geometric indicators were transformed into a geographic information system parametric model for the identification of post-Second World War mass housing units and sites in current urban plans on a city scale. The model was implemented in the city of Haifa, Israel, as a case study. The analysis results indicate 1288 buildings in 283 urban sites suitable for urban renewal, 10% of the present city’s housing stock.

¿Normativa urbana para quién? El caso del nuevo barrio Parque Donado Holmberg, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

El barrio Parque Donado Holmberg es el nuevo emprendimiento inmobiliario público-privado impulsado en la zona norte de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (Argentina), específicamente en la traza nunca concretada de la ex Autopista 3, diseñada por la última dictadura militar. El proyecto promovido por el gobierno local prevé “recuperar” urbanísticamente la traza con el fin de acondicionar el barrio y vender inmuebles de dominio público. El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el impacto que la modificación a la normativa urbana y la reestructuración territorial introducida por la Ley Nº 3396/09 tuvo en el proceso de renovación urbana desplegado en el sector V del barrio. La hipótesis principal señala que en dichas modificaciones subyace una política que promueve procesos de renovación urbana con consecuencias gentrificadoras en el barrio. Por último, la estrategia metodológica adoptada es cualitativa, basada en la observación no participante en el barrio, realización de entrevistas en profundidad a informantes claves, y en la revisión de fuentes secundarias provenientes de organismos públicos y privados.

Impacts of urban renewal on neighborhood housing prices: predicting response to psychological effects

As housing prices are largely affected by location characteristics, the failure to consider the spatial dependence of housing prices may result in overvaluation. In view of this issue, the first objective of this study was to combine the difference-in-difference and spatial econometrics methods to estimate the impact of urban renewal on neighborhood housing prices. The second objective of this study was to estimate and compare the impact of urban renewal on neighborhood housing prices by dividing the urban renewal process into two phases, with the aim of observing whether expectations prior to the completion of urban renewal can have an impact on housing prices. The empirical results indicated that the influence of urban renewal was found to have already caused a continuous response in terms of neighborhood housing prices even prior to the completion of reconstruction.

'Re-thinking Squatter Houses with Wacquant; Social and Spatial Transformation in the Spaces of Hope

Özellikle ikinci dünya savaşı sonrasında neredeyse bütün dünyada yapısal, ekonomik ve politik değişimler neticesinde adı ve niteliği ülkeden ülkeye değişen, kentsel mekânın en alt hiyerarşisinde kalan mahalleler ortaya çıkmıştır. Türkiye’de gecekondular; bir dizi yapısal dönüşüm neticesinde sürecin zorunlu bir sonucu olarak kentlerdeki önlenemez yükselişini günümüze kadar taşımıştır. Bu çalışma, Loic Wacquant’ın araştırmalarıyla bağlantılı olarak “Gecekonduların” bir konumlandırmasını içermektedir. Çalışmanın amacı; kent yoksulluğunun oluşum süreçlerini ve temel dinamiklerini politik ve ekonomik dönüşümler ışığında anlamaya çalışmaktır. Bu doğrultuda yapılan araştırma ile; göçmenlerin kırdan kente göç süreci, umut mekânı olarak gecekonduların inşası, sınıfsal pozisyonları, göçmenlerin toplumsal, mekânsal ve kültürel dönüşümleri gecekondulular gözünden ele alınmıştır. Nitel araştırma tekniğinin kullanıldığı çalışmada, 30 kişi ile derinlemesine görüşmeler yapılmıştır. Veriler MAXQDA 11 programı aracılığı ile analiz edilmiştir. Elde edilen sonuçlara göre; tarihsel, toplumsal ve politik şartlara bağlı olarak kentin “marjinalleri” yoksulluk ortak paydasında buluşsa da ülkeden ülkeye önemli farklar göstermektedir. Türkiye’de gecekondular göçmen açısından kente tutunmanın mekânsal tezahürü olmuştur. Dayanışma ağları ve hemşerilik kente tutunmanın ilk adımı olan gecekonduların inşasında ve kentte var olabilmelerini sağlayan ekonomik girişimlerde en önemli etken olmuştur. Gecekondulular için apartmanlarda yaşama en önemli hedeftir. Kentsel dönüşüm süreçleri neticesinde hedeflerine ulaşan gecekondulular bir yandan kentin orta sınıfları haline gelirken bir yandan beklemedikleri ve arzu etmedikleri kültürel ve toplumsal sonuçlarla yüzleşmek durumunda kalmışlardır.

Cashing in on the sky: financialization and urban air rights in the Taipei Metropolitan Area

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on urban air rights, property rights for the ownership, development and trading of the airspace above land parcels. A three-fold contribution is made to the study of urban financialization. First, urban air rights are explicated as a new empirical terrain for research into urban financialization. Second, air rights are conceptualized as ‘market devices’ that enable market-making processes and are deployed by an activist state to facilitate regulatory and socio-technical conditions for urban financialization. Third, case studies of urban Taipei show air rights take subtly different forms across financialized processes of infrastructure provision and urban renewal.

Domicide: displacement and dispossessions in Uppsala, Sweden

ABSTRACT This article investigates the lived experiences of tenants staying put in two neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal processes and increased rent levels in Uppsala, Sweden. The article is drawing on a place sensitive analysis to escape a ‘Euclidean prison’ that we contend underpin many displacement studies; studies that reduce the notion of displacement to only signify out-migration. Such studies often miss both the scope of displacement, and the grievances experienced by tenants following changes in place and space under various urban transformation processes. Through phenomenologically inspired interviews with tenants, we contend that place cannot, as it often is in practices of urban development, simply be understood as coordinates on a map, but has to be understood relationally. Adhering to such a place-sensitive understanding of space our study asks what changes to place and to ‘home’ is experienced by tenants staying put in neighborhoods under increasing displacement pressures. What surfaces is a series of displacements that can be categorized as spatial dispossessions; thematized under subcategories ‘contraction of home’ and ‘withering entitlements’, and temporal dispossessions; categorized under ‘life on hold’ and ‘erasure of history’. These displacements are suffered by tenants who despite displacement pressures have remained throughout the renewal process.

Active travel for active ageing in China: The role of built environment

China has been witnessing prominent demographic ageing because of its sustained low fertility (one-child policy) and mortality rates. In 2017, nearly one in four elderly adults in the world live in China. The rapid increase of the elderly population is supposed to dramatically influence the urban and transportation system. Active travel plays an important role for the ageing Chinese population to sustain their mobility and wellbeing. To provide suitable policy implications for age-friendly travel environments in China, this study investigates how the built environment affects active travel behavior. Particularly, we explore the influences of built environment on daily active travel frequency and time expenditure while taking into account travel attitudes. A zero-inflated ordered probit model and a Cox proportional hazards model are respectively estimated based on the Nanjing Travel Survey data. Results show that the social and cultural contexts exert pronounced impacts on the travel pattern of Chinese older people. Specifically, it is found that the living pattern of co-residence, and the proximity to market, park/square, and chess/card room are influential in shaping active travel patterns. In addition, the built environment shows larger effects on the active travel behavior of older adults than on that of young people. Attitudes towards active travel are not significant in explaining the senior's travel behavior, indicating limited self-selection effects. The findings will offer insights to establish effective and appropriate land use strategies and public facility distribution for the elderly during the Chinese urban renewal process.

Active surfaces selection method for building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) in renovation projects based on self-consumption and self-sufficiency

In light of the Paris Agreement's objectives and the related European and Swiss goals of decarbonising the built environment, the importance, relevance, and potential benefits of integrating Building-Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) within building renovation processes are acknowledged. Functioning both as envelope material and on-site electricity generator, BIPV can simultaneously reduce the use of fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions. Motivated by the current barriers and misconceptions that withhold a widespread integration of BIPV, particularly regarding financial implications and solar exposure levels that are believed to be unfavourable, this paper aims at bringing new knowledge and a rigorous and adaptable method to inform decision-making and promote the use of BIPV in urban renewal processes. Focusing on the architectural design, we here present a methodology to select active (BIPV) surfaces during the retrofitting process based on a trade-off between the self-consumption (SC) and self-sufficiency (SS) of a building. The approach consists in iteratively identifying surfaces that achieve a varying annual irradiation value (threshold). It also includes the evaluation of the effect of electricity storage systems. The methodology and the results of its application are presented through the comparison of two case studies in Neuchâtel (Switzerland). The outcomes of this new approach for addressing building renovation projects in the urban context can help architects, designers and engineers to better size the installation and the repartition of active surfaces in the renovated thermal envelope. Results show that it is important to take into account a larger range of irradiation levels to choose the active surfaces, especially in high-rise buildings with a greater proportion of façade than roof. In such cases, the irradiation threshold can vary between 600 and 800 kWh/m2·year depending on the strategy adopted in terms of Heating, Ventilation and Air-conditioning (HVAC) system improvement or storage system implementation. Such findings demonstrate the need for context-specific methods towards a proper evaluation and better valorisation of BIPV potential.

Value capture in industrial land renewal under the public leasehold system: A policy comparison in China

Value capture in urban renewal is a controversial issue. The equality and efficiency of value capture in urban renewal is influenced not only by the percentage of value capture but also by transaction costs. A framework analyzing the transaction costs of value capture in the urban renewal process helps us understand how value capture mechanisms influence the outcomes of industrial land renewal. Our study found a new type of value capture mechanism in addition to active value capture under a public leasehold system: the value constraint mechanism. In the policy innovation of industrial land renewal in China, the government has used diversified active value capture tools in self-renewal to replace land-banking mechanism and have greatly reduced negotiation costs, but they have also increased the costs of maintaining the government’s legitimacy. As a result, the government introduced value constraint mechanisms to reduce legitimacy costs by putting constraints on land user, planning conditions and transactions to limit the land holders’ profit space and ensure industrial renewal generates the expected outcomes (for example, upgrading industry, stimulating technology R&D, providing jobs and taxation). However, these constraint mechanisms may once again increase information and enforcement costs and become the new main hindrance to renewal. A comparison of the policies of Shanghai and Shenzhen illustrate the government’s tradeoff between maintaining political legitimacy and reducing other transaction costs through combining different value capture mechanisms in industrial land renewal policies.

The Social Construction of a Neighbour-Hood Identity

The urban renewal process in neighbourhoods with well-rooted communities often reveals the ties between people and spaces, and highlights the inextricable links between social and physical structures. The residents of three neighbour-hoods in the city of Barcelona–Trinitat Nova, Plus Ultra and Vallcarca–have endured and fought against the threat of radical urban renewals planned by the municipal authorities for decades, and their efforts have only recently been rewarded with the acceptance of their demands by local administrations. In this period, residents organized themselves to defend their vision of the place against official plans, a vision which was a collective construction of personal memories and historical evidences. In the PROHABIT research project, we have undertaken an interdisciplinary study, involving architects-planners and social and environmental psychologists, to understand the process of construction of a sense of community and place identity in three neighbourhoods. The study has highlighted the need to overcome the divisions between social sciences and design disciplines, between the real world of experience and the abstract world of design thinking. In this regard, the work conducted in this project offers some insights into the need to create a holistic understanding of today's urban environment, and how architects and planners need to develop skills and methods to enable them to form part of the open and participatory planning systems which our contemporary urban environments demand.

Scriptural Impressionism: The Use of the Bible in Katherine Sonderegger's Systematic Theology, volume 1

This paper focuses on urban air rights, property rights for the ownership, development and trading of the airspace above land parcels. A three-fold contribution is made to the study of urban financialization. First, urban air rights are explicated as a new empirical terrain for research into urban financialization. Second, air rights are conceptualized as ‘market devices’ that enable market-making processes and are deployed by an activist state to facilitate regulatory and socio-technical conditions for urban financialization. Third, case studies of urban Taipei show air rights take subtly different forms across financialized processes of infrastructure provision and urban renewal.

Planning Tools and Policies under Neoliberal Politics for Urban Renewal

This paper provides a literature review on planning tools and policies available for urban transformation in cities from the Global South – ‘other stories’ – with common economic contexts that suited neoliberal regeneration strategies. It calls for a perspective on comparative urbanism since it is essential to look for case studies focused outside the Anglophone core in order to contribute for a postcolonial agenda. The method used for case studies choices was based on scientific platforms research using relevant keywords to produce a critical review. The results point out that the urban renewal processes analyzed have generated similar outcomes on urban and social realms such as displacement, social inequalities, deprivation of rights and physical changes of the urban environment as they are part of city’s reclaim for business, middle-class and market forces based on state-led and policy-driven approaches.

Two versions of heterotopia: The role of art practices in participative urban renewal processes

The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.

Characterizing the spatial pattern of annual urban growth by using time series Landsat imagery

Previous studies of urbanization have largely focused on the irreversible urban growth process and the conversion of non-urban lands into impervious surfaces, but less on the conversion from impervious surfaces to green space, also referred to as deurbanization. However, urbanization and deurbanization are both typical urban renewal process, which may happen simultaneously during the urban renewal. In this study, we proposed a new method to retrieve and map annual impervious surface percentage (ISP) and to characterize urban growth patterns using time series medium- resolution images. The method is implemented by employing the Cubist tree model for annual ISP inversion (AoCubist), optimizing multi-temporal Landsat composite images to minimize the impact of phenology and inter-year climate variation, and developing the C5.0 decision tree algorithm with temporal-spatial filtering rules to improve the space-time continuity and separability of patterns derived by unsupervised K-means classification. The method was applied to investigate the urban renewal in Guangzhou, China, between 2000 and 2010. The results demonstrate that the use of ISP slope series can capture the spatial variations and temporal trends of urban growth. Validation by fieldwork and comparing with Google Earth imagery indicates that our classification yielded a reasonable overall accuracy, ranging from 88.32% to 90.85%. Annual urban expansion rate remained between 4% and 10%, while annual deurbanization rate varied from 1% to 5%. In addition, the total pixels of rapid deurbanization surpassed that of rapid urban expansion. This finding suggests that various change directions occurred in the urban renewal process and that deurbanization was a way to counter-balance the rapid urbanization. This study provides a solid methodology for ISP change detection and fresh insight into the characteristics of urban growth in terms of timing, duration, and magnitude.

Old and New Residential Neighbour- hoods as Creative Hubs in Budapest

The theory of creative cities already entered the scientific arena in the second half of the 1970s, but its heyday took place around the turn of the new millennium and the subsequent decade when neoliberal policies dominated global and national economies. Urban development concepts appeared across Europe, in which cities tried to define themselves as creative cities and they started to rethink and develop their local economies accordingly. Around this time, top-down and bottom-up urban renewal processes were launched in Budapest, which are the focus of our study, and which are probably the most successful examples not only in Budapest but in Hungary overall.In the first part of our study we give a brief overview of the concept of creative cities and economy. The second part of the study provides a statistical analysis of development and current trends in the creative economy in Hungary and the Budapest agglomeration. The main part of the article provides the results of critical analyses of two residential neighbourhoods with special emphasis on creative dimensions. This includes the regulations affecting the two residential areas in question and how these affected the creative economy. The first example is the historical Jewish quarter of Pest, which is perhaps the most important tourist and commercial centre and nowadays functions as a party area, and the second is the Corvin Promenade project, which is currently one of the most successful urban development projects in Hungary. In our study, we try to show how old and new neighbourhoods can contribute to urban renewal processes and the politics, policiesand challenges, which affect their development.