Redevelopment Policies Research Articles

Privatizing public housing redevelopment: Grassroots resistance, co-operation and devastation in three Dublin neighbourhoods

This article examines variations in residents' responses to proposals to redevelop three public housing neighbourhoods in Dublin using Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and the outcomes their resistance achieved. It investigates the important role that structures of participation and representation and local social cohesion play in developing effective resident resistance to displacement and gentrification through regeneration. In two of these neighbourhoods community representative structures were strong and although one community co-operated with the PPP plans and the other opposed them, both were broadly successful in achieving their campaign objectives. Community structures in the third neighbourhood were weak however and the imposition of PPP redevelopment devastated this community which is now almost entirely vacant. This article provides some important insights for the literature on grassroots resistance to urban redevelopment, welfare state restructuring and public housing redevelopment. It reveals that, despite their lack of power, residents' resistance can significantly influence public housing redevelopment strategies particularly where community representative structures are strong. However for vulnerable communities, where representative structures are weak, the over emphasis on poverty de-concentration and refurbishing the built environment in public housing redevelopment policy can have devastating consequences. Thus, it concludes that the rationale for grass roots resistance to redevelopment is centred upon a strong place attachment, but also opposition to the privatization of public housing and the desire for poverty to be addressed in an holistic manner.

인천내항의 재개발정책 분석에 관한 연구

인천내항의 재개발정책 분석에 관한 연구

Community Practice in the Bulldozer’s Shadow: The History and Legacy of Social Work in Urban Renewal

Social work has a long history of involvement in urban development policy, dating to the settlement house movement. This article explores a neglected part of this history by analyzing the role of social work in urban renewal programs. The functions of social work in urban renewal—including relocating families displaced by slum clearance and community organizing to foster resident input in planning—reflect enduring tensions in practice between social justice and social control. Implications for current practice are explored as the profession continues to define its part in urban redevelopment policies.

Blueprints: Invisible Man and the Housing Act of 1949

IShortly after Ralph Ellison's protagonist arrives in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a man in Charlie Chaplin pants, pushing a cart piled high with rolls of blue paper1 and singing a blues song that reminds protagonist of home. Often read as a carrier of blues and vernacular traditions within novel, Wheatstraw is also a literal carrier of plans. When protagonist asks him what is in his cart, Wheatstraw responds they are blueprints for everything. Cities, towns, country clubs. Some just buildings and houses. Every once in a while they have to throw 'em out to make place for new plans.2 In Wheatstraw's description of dizzying array of plans that aim to remake city in its entirety, we hear echoes of preeminent modernist architect, Le Corbusier, who proclaimed that the plan is generator and tradition of modern planning that culminated in ascendancy of Robert Moses in New York City under aegis of federal Housing Act of 1949.3 And in Wheatstraw's job hauling and disposing their plans, plans entirely not of his making, Ellison also provides us with a glimpse of racial dynamics underpinning this planning regime. In this article, I argue not only that emergence of postwar modern planning within a framework of urban renewal is an important though often overlooked context of Invisible Man but also that postwar planning generates and structures novel's form. From college president Dr. A. Herbert Bledsoe's plan, which he outlines in his letter, to keep [the invisible man] running,4 to those of white philanthropist Mr. Norton, to those of industrialist's son Mr. Emerson, and to those of Brotherhood, Invisible Man is structured around, and generated by, endless propagation of plans that serve to dispossess and repossess strikingly naive protagonist.The ascendancy of urban renewal in postwar period marked an aboutface in approaches to urban problems. Whereas earlier perspectives on slums and tenements treated them as social problems affecting inhabitants, in postwar period, slums became an economic problem producing an impact on downtown business interests and economic life of city more broadly. As a result of this reconceptualization, meaning and purpose of slum clearance also shifted. Before World War II, slum clearance was tied to construction of public housing with goal of creating better homes for slum residents. With postwar emergence of urban renewal, slum clearance became a social good in and of itself and a necessary prerequisite to stop blight that was understood to be threatening older industrial cities' downtown cores. The Housing Act of 1949 was centerpiece of postwar urban redevelopment policies that aimed to modernize and rebuild cities suffering from problem of urban blight.5 Robert Moses, then chairman of New York City's Slum Clearance Committee, saw in act potential to transform New York in same way that Napoleon III's urban planner avant la lettre Georges-Eugene Haussmann before him had, in words of David Harvey, bludgeoned [Paris] into modernity.6 He was not alone. As Samuel Zipp explains, 1949 Housing Act was no mere set of policies; it was part of a Cold War vision that sought to establish Manhattan as a symbol of American power . . . quite literally, capital of international modernity.7Race was central to this project. Throughout 1950s, Soviet Union pointed to endemic segregation, violence, and inequality that marked Jim Crow in South and slums in North as evidence of United States' (and, by extension, capitalism's) inability to assume global power. The US administration under Harry S. Truman quickly realized that it would need to demonstrate its ability to close its racial divides at home if it was to gain legitimacy as a global hegemon and demonstrate that US-led global capitalism was able to, in words of Jodi Melamed, lead a new world postcolonial order. …

Buenos Aires, capital of tango: tourism, redevelopment and the cultural politics of neoliberal urbanism

In this paper, I problematize the connections between global tourism, urban redevelopment and cultural policy in Buenos Aires. Market-oriented approaches to urban growth have continued after Argentina’s economic collapse of 2001–2002. Devaluation produced unprecedented international affordability, which triggered a tourism boom. City government capitalized on this through cultural initiatives. Yet tourist-oriented cultural entrepreneurialism promoted forms of disjointed redevelopment that exacerbate socio-spatial inequality and fragmentation. Moreover, Mayor Macri has been advancing a cultural politics of scale that recasts Buenos Aires as a world-class city, while mobilizing localist identities to oppose national efforts towards income redistribution and intercultural recognition. Particularly important have been the recent appropriations of tango as a cultural commodity. Deployed for city marketing and selective reinvestment, tango also emboldens Eurocentric narratives of cosmopolitan urbanity that legitimize racialized exclusion and geographical elitism. Concluding remarks suggest that socio-political uses of tango are not the exclusive domain of neoliberal urbanism, and research implications are discussed beyond Buenos Aires.

Daytime microclimatic impacts of the SOVALP project in summer: A case study in Geneva, Switzerland

The Société Simple de Valorisation de Terrains à Genève-La Praille (SOVALP) project was conceived as a means of providing adequate housing within redevelopment policies during the last decades in Geneva, Switzerland including, among other measures, ideas for recovering an old industrial site. The SOVALP project is aimed at the construction of a mixed-use urban center around a multimodal hub with a built area around 300,000 m2. The present study analyzes the daytime impacts on outdoor thermal comfort from such an intervention in the urban environment, based on microclimatic field measurements and computer simulations. The microclimatic variables were collected simultaneously at two monitoring points during daytime in August 2011, around the Praille Railway Station. From calculations of the outdoor comfort indices Physiological Equivalent Temperature Index (PET) and Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) derived from field measurements, it was found that the current situation in summer presents a high level of heat stress. By means of the ENVI-met software microclimate simulations, beneficial effects from the SOVALP project arose, pointing to reductions in air temperature as high as 2.2°C within the redeveloped area and of 1.2°C in the entire area evaluated. Changes in PET and UTCI point to a reduction in heat stress categories.

Anti-Semitism and Urban Development in France in the Second World War: The Case ofÎlot16 in Paris

AbstractExamining an ordinary town-planning decision made during an extraordinary period, this article highlights the interaction between the local urban redevelopment policy and the state policy of racial persecution in 1941. However, it argues that this interaction was far more complex than the implementation of an anti-Semitic ideology by two separate administrations to which it is usually reduced. Instead of trying to assess the ‘reality’ of the ‘representation’ of the housing area (îlot) as a ‘Jewish quarter’ the article takes as fact the notion that representations are realities, and vice versa, and attempts to understand if, and by what mechanisms, an ethno-religious characterisation of the îlot played a role in the redevelopment operations under consideration here.In 1921 a memo from the Seine prefecture had been presented to the city council, identifying seventeen insanitary îlots in Paris as having above-average mortality rates from tuberculosis. These îlots were to be razed to the ground and rebuilt. The sixteenth îlot on the list was located in the southern section of the fourth arrondissement. This ‘îlot 16’ was apparently known as an area where the majority of its inhabitants were foreign Jews. In October 1941, when the persecution of the Jews was at its height, the Seine prefecture began a massive redevelopment of this urban space. The issue of areas of bad housing had been nagging at officials since the beginning of the century: but how are the actions of the Seine prefecture to be explained from 1941 onwards? Why, during the Second World War, were city officials so determined to prioritise, indeed to focus exclusively on, îlot 16? Why was it that a Paris construction project of a scale not seen since Baron Haussmann's time was planned at this point, when the actors themselves described the economic and political situation as unfavourable?

The Hinge Areas for Urban Regeneration in Seaside Cities: The High Line in Manhattan, NYC

Aim of this paper is to reflect on how cities, which are growing on the coast and are rediscovering their waterfront, can represent a privileged laboratory to wonder about the destiny of the modern metropolis, through the identification of innovative models of development, through the assumption of the sea as a full of opportunities horizon, a sort of epicenter of a new movement going from the coast to the inner part of the city. That means carrying out regeneration processes in which cities, starting from their maritime culture, realize complete and shared urban transformations. Thus, in continuation of cities’ maritime tradition, integrated transformations aimed at environmental, economic and social development have been carried out by involving several actors and resources, with consequences on the whole urban environment and not only on the narrow coastline.Therefore, the work should be done not only on the narrow line of waterfront, but in a way to involve also the remaining part of the city by redesigning the hinge areas which represent a connection between waterfront and city with its community. In this paper it is showed the case study of the requalification, demanded from the local community, of the High Line in New York, an elevated Railroad placed in residual spaces between sea and city. It represents one of the best practices of regeneration of hinge areas integrated in the waterfronts redevelopment policy and regeneration of the city reached with participation of the urban community.

Class Monopoly Rent and the Contemporary Neoliberal City

AbstractThe objective of this essay is to rejuvenate interest in Marxian rent theory in urban political economy by identifying and deepening discussion of an important aspect of the contemporary neoliberal city: class monopoly rent. First introduced by David Harvey, the concept of class monopoly rent has curiously evaded in‐depth scholarly inquiry and has never been substantively elaborated or examined. But the conditions through which class monopoly rents are extracted from property have since evolved. Yet, we know little about the relation between this standard institutional practice and contemporary urban landscapes, modes of governance, and processes of urban restructuring. The essay first reviews and identifies the concept of class monopoly rent as an important aspect of the urban process and discusses its limited scholarly engagement over the past four decades. It then discusses the implications of class monopoly rent in the context of current urban redevelopment policies and practices in Chicago, Illinois. It is suggested that a deeper examination of this concept could build a more robust and intricate understanding of the contemporary neoliberal city, particularly in the context of the post‐2007 economic recession.

Evolution of Slum Redevelopment Policy

Slums have been part of the urban landscape since the Victorian Era, and, over the years, policies such as public housing, slum upgrading, tenure security, city wide slum removal and other measures were adopted to improve the quality of life of the slum dwellers. In this paper, the evolution of those policies is explored and evaluated, and key policy strategies that need to be adopted at the donor and recipient levels in order to achieve measurable change in slum improvement across the world are suggested.

Informality and the Development and Demolition of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-urban Area

The fate of Chinese urban villages ( chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban–rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment of chengzhongcun is an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods.

Neoliberalism, Race and the Redefining of Urban Redevelopment

AbstractNeoliberal urban redevelopment is often represented as consensual, socially‐neutral ‘local economic development’ with a positive effect on both a city's overall economy and its level of racial and ethnic diversity. The purpose of this article is to focus specifically on the key ideological premises of color‐blind racial discourses that help facilitate and provide necessary legitimacy (and ideological cover) for neoliberal urban redevelopment in a mid‐sized US city. Color‐blind racial discourses facilitate the agenda and mandates behind tax abatements, enterprise zones, public–private partnerships and new forms of urban consumption. Despite efforts to the contrary, neoliberal urbanism does not retreat from race — rather, racial dynamics are reconstituted to accommodate processes of capital accumulation and uneven urban development in poor and minority cities. Drawing on the case of Chester, Pennsylvania, this article focuses on how color‐blind racial discourses influence exclusionary urban redevelopment policies and practices, facilitate their implementation and legitimize their outcomes.RésuméOn présente souvent le réaménagement urbain néolibéral comme un ‘développement économique local’ consensuel et socialement neutre, dont bénéficient à la fois l'économie générale et le degré de diversité raciale et ethnique de la ville. Cet article s'intéresse en particulier aux grands principes idéologiques des discours racialisés de type color‐blind (littéralement, aveugle aux couleurs) qui contribuent au réaménagement urbain néolibéral d'une ville américaine moyenne et fournissent la légitimité (et la caution idéologique) au projet. Ces discours facilitent les objectifs et missions que soutiennent crédits d'impôt, aides à l'installation dans certaines zones d'activité, partenariats public‐privé et nouvelles formes de consommation urbaine. En dépit d'efforts contraires, l'urbanisme néolibéral ne renonce pas à la dimension raciale. Plus précisément, les dynamiques raciales sont reconstituées pour s'adapter aux processus d'accumulation du capital et d'aménagement urbain inégal des villes aux populations pauvres ou minoritaires. À partir du cas de Chester (Pennsylvanie), ce travail montre comment les discours raciaux color‐blind influencent des politiques et pratiques d'exclusion au sein du réaménagement urbain, facilitant leur mise en place et légitimant leurs résultats.

The Nested Global City-Region: Intermunicipal Income Stratification in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region, 1980-2007

This study investigates whether or not income stratification by place has widened within the Tokyo Metropolitan Region (TMR) over the past 30 years. Its analysis shows that although income stratification among the TMR's 228 municipalities has expanded noticeably since 1980, it has remained far less severe than that in America's three largest metropolitan regions, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Declining regional industrial employment, expanding national income inequality, falling land prices in the region's core, and the entrepreneurial waterfront redevelopment policies of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) were some of the catalysts that propelled this rise in stratification in the TMR. Conversely, the region's unique racial-ethnic context and the municipal merger policies of Japanese Government were two of the factors keeping its level of income inequality far below that of America's largest urban regions. These findings support the position of Nested City theorists, who claim that embedded forces remain the most decisive determinants of growth trajectories in the TMR.

The Land-Use Diversity in Urban Villages in Shenzhen

China's dynamic urbanisation since 1978 has led to the proliferation of so-called ‘urban villages’ in many cities. Their development, via a self-help approach by indigenous villagers, delivers low-cost housing and various other social and economic activities. Consequently, urban villages are characterised by growing numbers of buildings and a mix of functions, including residential, industrial, commercial, and public services. These uses enable different activities in urban villages, assimilating migrants into the city by providing an alternative niche for working and living. Variations in land-use diversity in Shenzhen's 318 urban villages were analysed using 2009 data, for more than 333 000 buildings. Four statistical models, including three based on a spatial regimes analysis, are used to explain their land-use diversity. The results reveal that an urban village's land-use pattern is linked to its location in the urban fabric, its phase of development, and the development level of its environs. Different patterns are apparent inside and outside the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, suggesting that the current uniform redevelopment policy for urban villages may not be appropriate.

Reassessing Residential Preferences for Redevelopment

While scholars argue that redevelopment and gentrification result in large part from the unique preferences of middle–class residents moving to neighborhoods after decades of flight, almost all of this evidence is extrapolated from the behavior of residents already living in redeveloped neighborhoods. I argue that understanding the consequences of redevelopment, particularly urban policies advocating redevelopment, requires measuring the preferences for redeveloped neighborhoods among the broader metropolitan population. Using data from a representative sample of Chicago metropolitan area adults, I find that homeowners and renters differ in their patterns of preferences for redeveloped neighborhoods: city or suburban residence is more important for homeowners while race is a much stronger factor among renters. This reassessment of preference patterns highlights the potential for redevelopment policies to fall short of intended goals to attract investment and alleviate racial segregation.

A study in Modern(ist) urbanism: planning Vancouver, 1945–1965

ABSTRACT:The implementation of Modern Movement town planning is still regarded as both rapid and relatively unproblematic in the aftermath of World War II. A more complex narrative emerges from an examination of the urban redevelopment policy and practice at Vancouver, British Columbia, during the immediate World War II decades. The analysis focuses on the civic and professional discourse of redevelopment. It illuminates the diverse interests and processes by which Modernist planning theory and practice were introduced, modified and resisted. New concepts and values are shown to have been subject to internal no less than external forces of revision.

Redevelopment Planning and Distributive Justice in the American Metropolis

The paper examines the forces shaping American redevelopment policy and its outcomes. Its central argument is that nearly sixty years of programs have involved significant changes in administrative form, funding, scale, justifications, content, public participation, and the composition of redevelopment coalitions. At the same time, however, the separation of physical and social components of redevelopment efforts has changed little and the distribution of benefits has largely favored developers and business interests regardless of the alleged aims of the program. Consequently while redevelopment programs have contributed to revival of previously declining cities, they have rarely acted as agencies for producing greater justice within metropolitan areas. I briefly trace the history of government-sponsored redevelopment programs in the United States since the Housing Act of 1949. That history is periodized according to each phase’s general thrust, with the recognition that there was always local variation. The causal factors underlying the shifts delimiting each period are delineated. These factors, which are numerous and interactive, include political pressures and changes in national and urban regimes; economic restructuring; changing demographics; and ideological currents. The paper concludes with an argument concerning the relationship between spatial and social justice, indicating the general principles – equity, democracy, and diversity – that should govern urban redevelopment policy, and specifying particular types of policies that would embody those principles.

Selling City Futures: The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy

abstractThis article examines the specific mechanisms that have allowed global financial markets to penetrate deeply into the activities of U.S. cities. A flood of yield-seeking capital poured into municipal debt instruments in the late 1990s, but not all cities or instruments were equally successful in attracting it. Capital gravitated toward those local governments that could readily convert the income streams of public assets into new financial instruments and that could minimize the risk of nonpayment due to the actions of nonfinancial claimants. This article follows the case of Chicago from 1996 through 2007 as the city government subsidized development projects with borrowed money using a once-obscure instrument called Tax Increment Financing (TIF). TIF allows municipalities to bundle and sell off the rights to future property tax revenues from designated parts of the city. The City of Chicago improved the appearance of these speculative instruments by segmenting and sequencing TIF debt instruments in ways that made them look less idiosyncratic and by exerting strong political control over the processes of development and property tax assessment. In doing so, Chicago not only attracted billions of dollars in global capital but also contributed to a dangerous oversupply of commercial real estate.

The birth of ‘land use planning’ in American urban planning

Although the concept of ‘land use planning’ is now firmly enmeshed in American urban planning, its meaning still remains vague. This paper aims to clarify the meaning by examining the historical development of land use planning in the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, city planners viewed a city as an organic unit of public facilities. While city planning thereafter provided potential elements of land use planning, such as zoning, zoning surveys and land use classification systems, the idea of land use planning itself was actually derived from rural county planning and was initially utilized in urban county planning as a guide for zoning in the 1930s. After bringing about a change in the way cities were viewed, that is, as a pattern of land use and population density, land use planning was further employed as a guide for urban redevelopment policies in the 1940s, and finally reaching full integration into city planning in the 1950s and 1960s.

Residential Redevelopment and the Entrepreneurial Local State: The Implications of Beijing’s Shifting Emphasis on Urban Redevelopment Policies

The entrepreneurial nature of local government activities has significantly influenced socioeconomic and spatial changes in urban China. It is against this backdrop that property-led redevelopment projects were implemented in Beijing after 1990, guided by a programme whose very success depended on the participation of real estate capital for financial contributions. In 2000, however, a new policy was put in practice, which aimed at supplying affordable housing on government-provided land to increase the rehousing rate. This paper analyses the implications of this shifting emphasis on Beijing’s redevelopment policy and examines whether the local government has become less entrepreneurial and more socially inclusive in its redevelopment approach. Based on the case study of two redevelopment projects, the paper argues that the local state’s entrepreneurial nature has persisted and that this is largely due to its power to dispose of urban land use rights, effectively making local governments de facto landlords.