Urban Competition Research Articles

Sustainability of heritage buildings reuse between competition and integration case study (Fuwwah and Rosetta)

AbstractUrban development in historic cities frequently faces the dilemma of balancing preserving cultural heritage with meeting economic competition and modernization requirements. This study investigates the long-term viability of repurposing heritage buildings in the urban areas of Fuwwah and Rosetta, Egypt. It specifically examines the intricate relationship between competition and integration in achieving sustainability. This study examines the present condition of heritage conservation in these cities by analyzing the factors that impact the sustainability of repurposing buildings and evaluating the effectiveness of strategies that balance the pressures of urban competition with the need to incorporate heritage into the changing urban environment. The research examines the practices and difficulties associated with repurposing heritage buildings in Fuwwah and Rosetta. Examine the economic, social, and environmental factors that impact the long-term viability of heritage preservation. Assess the equilibrium between urban development influenced by competition and the inclusive methods of repurposing heritage buildings. The research methodology comprises two approaches: the first involves conducting a literature review on heritage building reuse, sustainability in heritage conservation, and competition and integration in urban development. The analysis approach focuses on assessing heritage conservation in case studies by examining competition and integrating investment in heritage buildings. The ultimate goal is to draw conclusions and determine the results of these assessments.

Metaphor, Materialism, Metropolis

Cities are physical, material concentrations of people and structures, but they are also ongoing conversations of intergenerational negotiation, communication, competition, conflict, and cooperation. Recently, Emma Colven, Renee Tapp, Delik Hudalah, Dallas Rogers, and Christopher Silver have offered valuable critical contributions to this dialogue in urban research, evaluating the utility and limitations of a new metaphor, Dracula Urbanism, for understanding the inequalities of today's transnational real-estate growth machines. In this essay, we pursue an extended meditation inspired by some of the most valuable insights offered by Colven, Tapp, Hudalah, Rogers, and Silver. Dracula Urbanism is a fascinating yet fearful story of technologically accelerated reproduction of inequality and urban competition. Uneven yet insistently transnationalizing real estate states rely on, and reproduce, recombinant legitimations of diaspora and nativism, capital and consciousness, property and personhood, ancestry and amortization.

Kampung Jamu: Pilar Peningkatan Kemampuan Bersaing Kota Semarang

Enhancing a city's competitiveness in the era of globalization requires harnessing local potential, particularly traditional health remedies. These remedies encapsulate unique knowledge of natural ingredients and healing techniques proven effective over centuries. Promoting the utilization and development of traditional health recipes not only enriches local culture but also improves the quality of life for communities. Cities can leverage their cultural and natural heritage by creating new economic opportunities through industries based on traditional health remedies, such as herbal products and natural medicines. In the long run, this contributes to the city's economic growth and competitiveness across various sectors. Empowering local potential through traditional health recipes is a sustainable strategy for winning the urban competition, enriching local culture, and promoting sustainable economic development by blending local wisdom with modern innovation.

Beauty-driven urban design evolution for waterfront areas

The design of waterfront areas has already established many basic consensuses, but there are still many regrets in actual construction. Today, beauty has become a key factor in urban competition. Driven by high beauty value, many urban planning and design logics are changing, allowing waterfront area design to evolve accordingly. This article will discuss the future trends of waterfront area design pursuit and methods, as well as the underlying reasons behind supporting changes, based on urban design practices primarily in Shenzhen.

DIY Music and Contemporary Art Spaces: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Transmission and the Art-Music Nexus in Glasgow

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between contemporary art spaces and ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) music in Glasgow. It demonstrates the continuity and interconnectedness of DIY music and art practices by considering the transition of galleries from ‘white cubes’ to music venues and spaces for social interaction. Following a brief overview of Glasgow’s urban renewal and cultural regeneration, it traces the emergence of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) and Transmission and provides an outline of their organisational structure and policies. It then explores ethnographically how they have facilitated the cross-pollination between DIY music and contemporary art after the 2008 financial crisis. Approaching art galleries as social spaces that provide a platform for DIY musicians invites a holistic understanding of the reciprocal relationship between DIY music and contemporary art institutions in Glasgow. Therefore, the article considers in turn how these spaces were influenced by the ethics of DIY music. The malleability of contemporary art spaces and their relationship to the DIY ethos demonstrate that cultural policies should aim to strengthen the existing grassroots communities that form the bedrock of the city’s cultural scenes. This necessitates a move beyond the labels ‘post-industrial’ and ‘creative city’, thus decoupling cultural activities from the discourse of urban competition and Glasgow’s economic goals.

Evaluation of Digital Transformation to Support Carbon Neutralization and Green Sustainable Development Based on the Vision of “Channel Computing Resources from the East to the West”

The long-term dependence on fossil fuels has led to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Global warming poses a huge risk to the sustainable development of the world, and even threatens human survival. The arrival of the carbon neutral era means that urban development is facing serious restrictions on carbon emissions. Digitization has brought profound changes to the economic and social development model, and would also change the pattern of urban competition. The goal of carbon neutrality is to change the low-carbon development model and structure, supplement it with negative carbon emissions, and comprehensively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, achieving the goal of carbon neutrality still faces many challenges and problems. For this reason, this paper analyzed the significance of carbon neutralization and the challenges faced by sustainable development to study the advantages of carbon neutralization under Digital Transformation (abbreviated as DT), and finally proposed the implementation path of carbon neutralization and sustainable development based on the channel of computing resources from the east to the west. The carbon emission effect before DT increased with time, while the carbon emission effect after DT decreased with time, in which the carbon emission effect after DT decreased by 47.9% compared with that before DT. The post-DT industry digitalization degree and the carbon trading system perfection degree were better than those before DT. The post-DT industry digitalization degree was 10.4% higher than that before DT, and the carbon trading system perfection degree was 9.5% higher than that before DT. In a word, DT and channeling computing resources from the east to the west can promote the realization of carbon neutrality and sustainable development.

Research on the Generating Mechanism of Urban Talent Competitiveness Based QCA Method: A Configurational Analysis of 24 Chinese Cities

Talent competition is the core of urban competition; urban development needs strong talent competitiveness. This study applies configuration thinking and the QCA method through the integration of six influencing conditions, namely talent scale, talent structure, talent innovation, talent development, talent efficiency and talent living, it selects 24 Chinese cities as research cases, explores the generation mechanism of urban talent competitiveness. The results demonstrate that: (1) Talent scale, talent innovation, talent development and talent living are the key conditions for generating urban talent competitiveness; (2) The quality improvement mode, innovation leading mode and resource competitive mode are the main modes of generating urban talent competitiveness; the resource competitive mode is the most common combination of strategies for generating urban talent competitiveness; (3) Talent development and talent living have a substitution relationship in the process of generating urban talent competitiveness; (4) The configuration that hinders the generation of competitiveness and promotes the generation of competitiveness is asymmetric.

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

Top Graduate Zhang Xie: The Earliest Extant Chinese Southern Play

YIMBY: The Latest Frontier of Gentrification

AbstractThe growth of ‘Yes In My Back Yard’ (YIMBY) activism seems at first a simple story of a new social movement led by a new generation frustrated with the housing supply shortages created by decades of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) conservative spatial privilege and exclusion. Yet YIMBY/NIMBY dialectics reflect more fundamental transformations of intergenerational inequalities between past and present amidst today's multiple scales of intensifying competition in urban life. YIMBY movements, therefore, must be understood as part of the long history of gentrification and the current, accelerating co‐evolution of socio‐cultural change and the circulation of capital. YIMBY activism reflects a complex hybrid of a previous century's axioms of trickle‐down filtering theory and contemporary progressive moral‐ethical discourses of dynamic, diversifying lived experiences of intersectionality at the scales of individuals, families, communities, nations, and cultures. As intensified urban competition co‐evolves with diverse, recombinant axes of Western/non‐Western and colonial/decolonial relations of space and time, localized economic rent gaps become transnational, transhistorical moral rent gaps constituted through competing claims for inclusion into the inherent exclusivity of capitalizable property rights. YIMBY activism reveals the evolutionary frontiers of escalating competition legitimating itself on a gentrifying urban planet.

‘It just didn't really happen’: The lived space of entrepreneurial urbanism in Ørestad, Copenhagen

This paper explores the lived space of entrepreneurial urbanism in Ørestad, a 1990s mega-project still under development on the edge of Copenhagen. Drawing upon in-depth interviews, interactive map-making and critical discourse analysis, it shows that imaginaries of urban competition, place branding and cosmopolitanism have only superficially been internalized by residents as part of their lived space in Ørestad, even revealing contradictory everyday practices and experiences. Rather than the cosmopolitan metropole and connected city space it was conceived to become, the district is experienced as a disconnected housing satellite without much street life, as a stepping stone to something better by reducing home to exchange value, and as an area with a community based in opposition. A sense of place identity and place attachment does exist for many Ørestaders but it is born out of ‘do-it-yourself mentality’ and reaction to a sense of ephemerality. The lived space of entrepreneurial urbanism in Ørestad can only partly be understood by what the district is, but much more by what it is not – i.e. by what it lacks from the perspective of its residents.

Estimating the Impact of Urban Space Competition on Flood Risk: Case Study of the Lanzhou Reaches of Yellow River, China

AbstractAs a result of global urbanization, urban areas are being replaced by single developed areas and urban water space is also inevitably occupied. Disruption of the balance between land for co...

Deflecting national ideologies: Exploring identity management trajectories of medium-sized cities

This paper focuses on the agency exhibited by municipal governments in modifying or resisting neoliberal policies, by investigating their efforts to manufacture favorable competitive urban identities. In particular, this paper emphasizes how national ideologies are (re)articulated at a local level by medium-sized cities placed within different national contexts and, thus, exposed to different orientations toward neoliberal principles. By performing historical urban research in Leicester (UK) and Reims (France), this study identifies different expressions of local agency through which cities present their identities on a global scenario, by responding to similar pressure of deindustrialization and urban competition from mid-1970s. If the discursive strategies of both cities reproduce signs of respective national ideologies, findings highlight two trajectories whereby cities negotiate and rework the main narratives underpinning those national ideologies. The concepts of active and passive deflection are offered in order to capture the role of local agency and conceptualize how national ideologies are appropriated locally by medium-sized cities in the attempt to engage with perceived increasing world-level forces.

Intelligent Data Mining of Computer-Aided Extension Residential Building Design Based on Algorithm Library

In recent years, with the development of construction industry, more scientific, systematic, fast, and intelligent calculation methods are needed to coordinate urban development and fierce market competition, and mathematical algorithm library plays an important role in artificial intelligence. Therefore, the author uses computer mathematical algorithm and extension theory to study and analyze the residential building design and intelligent data mining. It is found that the research of the computer-aided expression method of extension building planning is mainly the expression of the input and output system of extension building planning. It includes knowledge representation, system outline design, system flow, and interface expression based on the mathematical database.

Contested grounds; the regeneration of Liverpool waterfront

ABSTRACT This paper explores the process by which the regeneration of Liverpool waterfront took place over the past few decades. It adopts a case study method to identify different trends and patterns and to examine their impact on the emerging urban landscape. The research identified three successive eras of post-industrial waterfront regeneration in Liverpool that aimed to tackle different issues and respond to challenges and opportunities. The study argues that although the future of regeneration will be predominantly led by the private sector within a context of weakened public role and extreme urban competition, it is important to uphold the role of the public sector to actively lead the process of regeneration through a shared and comprehensive regeneration strategy. The strategy should be based on urban design and heritage agenda to guarantee the qualities of the urban landscape will not be compromised and new interventions will result in a coherent whole.

Arts and creativity: A business and branding strategy for Lodz as a neoliberal city

This article builds on the current critique of urban neoliberal strategies for global competition that make instrumental use of arts and creativity. This paper moves the debate forward by providing a more holistic overview of why cities exploit arts and creativity as a business development strategy. It translates the arguments often used in the literature on corporate investment in arts to consider how investment in arts and creativity at an urban level aim to affect not only promotion and marketing, but also influence public relations and corporate social responsibility, prompt new production and research and innovation and boost local human resources for the local economy. Cities invest in cultural development, arts, creative industries, festivals and other events to develop a range of opportunities and as an overall strategy to engage in global urban competition, behaving like companies who try to differentiate themselves in the market by investing in creativity and sponsoring arts events. To illustrate the similarity between urban policies and business strategies we use the case study of Łódź, a Polish post-industrial city, where creative industries have recently become leading urban development drivers.

Do factors contributing to appearance and success of conservation referenda in the West differ from those found in other regions of the United States?

As urban growth and competition for natural resources heighten, the attention to preserving such resources, including land, is also growing. As one example, the appearance and passage of conservation referenda represents a high-profile, grassroots political effort across the USA. In this study, factors influencing the appearance and passage of ballot initiatives in Colorado are compared to previous literature, identifying potential regional variation in such drivers. Results suggest that, while some place-based characteristics like total population and educational attainment have a consistent effect, the role of income and households with children does not. It appears support for conservation is much more broadly distributed across the population in the West and that residents view conservation as an ongoing activity, not a singular event. Likewise, there is some evidence that Western voters view agriculture and conservation as mutually exclusive. Although fundamental results do not change, accounting for spatial effects alters the magnitude and significance of factors affecting both appearance and passage of conservation referenda.

The development of urban mega-projects in China: A case study of Nantong’s metro project

Since there has been a huge amount of transport infrastructure projects being proposed, planned and constructed over the past decades in China, this article aims to reveal the substantial dynamics of China’s rapid development of urban mega-projects. It analyzes Nantong’s metro project to use it as a case study – how it was being justified, approved and implemented, and what were the key driving forces within the whole process through official justifications and key informant interview materials. The urban metro system is supposedly an approach to achieve urban development objectives, a tool for growth and a way to a better urban life. We find inter-city competition as an underlying driving force that initiates such urban mega-projects with certain weight given to economic indicators in project appraisals within a largely local government-led and public-invested process. Furthermore, domestic economic performance and changing policy interventions also exert significant influence on project approval and long-term project development. Our findings echo some Western literature on mega-projects development and urban competition, while revealing other features and emerging issues relating to project initiation, proposal examination and implementation specific to the Chinese context.

Reeling in Newcomers: Urban Competition around Migrant Reception in Brussels

AbstractThe management of ethnic diversity and its various forms of institutional articulation and implementation are increasingly taking place at the urban level. At the same time, urban scholars consider cities to be battlegrounds where competing groups contest the meaning and articulation of citizenship. In this article, I build on these insights to argue that competition over newcomer reception between different, linguistically divided political coalitions in the city of Brussels are mainly battles over establishing their own definition of citizenship and asserting their political influence. Building on an eighteen‐month ethnographic study in three reception offices (two Dutch‐speaking and one francophone) in Brussels, I analyse the different strategies these offices mobilize to recruit and retain newcomers. I argue that recruitment is a deliberate tool used to influence the political‐cultural demographics of the city and destabilize the linguistic power balance in Brussels. In this way, recruitment becomes a means to attract newcomers to the reception offices in the hope that they will develop a deep connection and loyalty to, and eventually identify politically with, the agency's respective political community. Theoretically, this article develops a perspective that regards the city as a field that becomes constituted in and through the contest between different urban institutions to ‘reel in’ newcomers. In this space, these institutions take up positions for and against each other and assemble strategies to influence the urban populations.

Decentralisation Versus Territorial Inequality: A Comparative Review of English City Region Policy Discourse

The most recent English attempts at decentralisation take the shape of the city region devolution policy agenda. Decentralisation claims to empower localities and address regional growth imbalances, while creating a variety of new temporary and selective fiscal and geographic arrangements in policy-making that have the potential to create the opposite effect. This paper focuses on the relationship between decentralisation and territorial inequalities through the analysis of strategic discourse of six ‘devolved authorities’. A quantitative, qualitative, and comparative approach to this question complements the traditional insights obtained from in-depth case study analysis using actors’ interviews. It focuses on city regions’ official discourse of self-conceptualisation and marketization, and thereby highlights the wider policy and regional theory context of their production to frame the structural factors impacting the rewriting of city regional space. By doing so, we find a number of issues with the current decentralisation approach in competing priorities between localities, an over-reliance on agglomeration economies and urban competition, potential mismatches in scales of policy decision-making and delivery, and challenges regarding inequalities in a post-Brexit England.

Der Wettbewerb für den Wiederaufbau Am Steintor in Goch am Niederrhein

Abstract In the reconstruction of German cities after the Second World War, public administrations attempted to find solutions for essential urban situations through targeted competitions. In the city of Goch on the Lower Rhine the area around the medieval Steintor (Stone Gate) had to be adapted to modern traffic requirements. In the course of the urban planning the private interests of the residents who were willing to build up clashed with the planned construction as a concern of the common good, which was represented by the district government of Düsseldorf. The solution was to be found through an urban design competition among selected experts, from whose proposals the City Planning Office drew up an alignment plan. The exemplary recapitulation of this urban planning process illustrates aspects of the history of planning, monument preservation and reconstruction competitions