Urban Development Corporations Research Articles

Ownership and organisation of urban development corporations in Danish towns and cities: a cooperative governance approach

ABSTRACT Rooted in Pestoff’s third-sector organisation and undergirded by extensive empirical research, this paper considers how different public, private and civic actors interact and cogovern urban development projects. Public actors do not necessarily forego on value generation and capture despite public, private and civic partnerships frequently being analysed in terms of a rise in private values at the expense of public values. In fact, the article finds that differences in goals and priorities among public, private and civic actors may lead to differences in ownership and organisational roles without infringing on the public actors’ ability to generate and capture value.

A Study on Establishment of Value Added Tax Management Model for Real Estate Trust Companies - Focusing on VAT on urban maintenance projects-

초기 도시정비법은 조합만을 시행 주체로 하였으나, 조합임원의 전문성 부족 및 각종 비리 등으로 인해 사업은 장기화되었다. 정부는 이러한 문제점을 해소하기 위해 2016년 개정된 도시 및 주거환경정비법 및 2018년 제정된 빈집 및 소규모주택 정비에 관한 특별법의 제정하였으며, 부동산개발에 전문지식을 갖춘 신탁사의 도시정비사업 참여를 가능하게 하였다. 이러한 시장의 요구와 수익원천의 다변화를 필요로 하는 신탁사는 도시정비사업을 블루오션으로 인식하여 공격적인 영업활동을 전개하고 있다. 신탁세제의 선진화 방안으로 개정된 부가가치세법은 신탁사가 지정 개발자(시행자) 방식으로 도시정비사업에 참여할 경우, 신탁사를 납세의무자로 하였다. 이러한 신탁사의 도시정비시장은 확대되는 반면, 부가가치세법에 개정에 따른 조세 관리를 위한 신탁사의 준비는 상당히 미흡한 실정이다. 이러한 점을 고려하여 부동산 신탁 구조의 정비사업과 관련 개정 부가가치세법을 분석하고 도시정비에 참여하는 신탁사의 부가가치세 관리 모델을 구축함으로써 도시정비사업을 투명하게 관리하고, 업무에 대한 효율성을 증대시키고자 하였다.In the early days, the Urban Maintenance Act was implemented only by the urban development corporations, but the project was prolonged due to the lack of professionalism and various irregularities of urban development corporations executives. In order to solve these problems, the government enacted the Urban and Residential Environment Improvement Act 2016 and the Special Act on the Improvement of Empty and Small-Sized Houses in 2018, enabling real estate trust company with expertise in real estate development to participate in urban improvement projects. Trust company that require diversification of market demands and revenue sources are actively engaged in business activities by recognizing urban maintenance projects as blue ocean. The Value-added Tax Act, which was revised to advance the trust tax system, made the trust company a tax obligation when the trust company participates in urban maintenance projects through designated developers (executors). While these trusts urban refurbishment markets are expanding, the trusts preparations for tax management under the revised VAT Act are quite inadequate. In consideration of this, it was intended to transparently manage urban maintenance projects and increase efficiency of work by analyzing the real estate trust structure and the revised VAT Act and establishing a VAT management model for trusts participating in urban maintenance.

부채가 효율성에 미치는 비선형 효과에 관한 연구: 도시개발공사를 중심으로

부채가 효율성에 미치는 비선형 효과에 관한 연구: 도시개발공사를 중심으로

Urban investment and development corporations, new town development and China’s local state restructuring – the case of Songjiang new town, Shanghai

ABSTRACTThis article seeks to understand China’s new urban space production and associated state space rescaling through a microscopic investigation of urban investment and development corporations (UIDCs), based on a case study of Shanghai’s Songjiang New Town Development Corporation (SNTDC). It argues that the introduction of UIDCs as both developers and managers of designated urban regions is a creation of institutional reformation to accomplish customized place- and scale-specific spatial projects under the state strategy of new urban spatial development, playing an essential part in the rescaling of state space. UIDCs are economically independent of other social groups, politically bonded with the local government, and assume entrepreneurial and administrative functions within designated areas, acting as intermediary agents to enable local states greater capacity in governing new urban space production, engineering social change, and propelling economic development.

An Empirical Analysis of External Environmental Factors Influencing the Financial Performance of Local Public Enterprises in Korea ：Focusing on Urban Development Corporations

An Empirical Analysis of External Environmental Factors Influencing the Financial Performance of Local Public Enterprises in Korea ：Focusing on Urban Development Corporations

Beyond Neoliberal Imposition: State–Local Cooperation and the Blending of Social and Economic Objectives in French Urban Development Corporations

For more than 15 years, the French central State created Etablissements publics d'aménagement in a series of major cities. These EPAs are in charge of large urban development projects mixing infrastructure, office development and housing projects and have been given formal authority over land use regulation. The similarities between French EPAs and British Urban Development Corporations created in the 1980s are striking. In many ways, the case of the EPA fits with the neoliberalization framework provided by radical geographers. Nevertheless, this case also shows limits to the generalization of this theoretical framework. Firstly, the distinction between two clearly distinct periods characterized by different agendas, policy instruments and systems of relations between actors and levels is far from convincing in the French case. Secondly, evolutions that could be attributed to neoliberal urbanism are rather the result of processes of rationalization within organizations or professions which may have little to do with neoliberalism, or the result of a transformation of the welfare State and the reassessment of ways of producing social justice. On this basis, we argue for theoretical frameworks that put neoliberalization at its right place and allow its articulation with other trends of change such as rationalization and the refinement of Welfare mechanisms.

Urban regeneration companies and their institutional setting: Prevailing instabilities within the West Midlands, England

Urban regeneration companies were adopted by the UK government during the 2000s as a property-orientated economic development initiative. Compared to earlier urban development corporations, urban regeneration companies lacked dedicated funding and depended upon the planning and regeneration capabilities of partner agencies. Evaluative perspectives on urban regeneration companies have often been favourable, though the depth and breadth of analysis has been limited, particularly beyond three core city pilots. Outstanding institutionalist questions remain about the diverse settings within which urban regeneration companies operated and their relationship with local authorities. Drawing on interviews this paper investigates the reasons for and operation of three West Midlands-based urban regeneration companies, all within the de-industrialising Black Country sub-region. Rather than early support for government steering towards partnership working, attention is drawn to evidence of pragmatism, resistance and compromise. The potential for local institutional dynamics to influence the stability of regeneration initiatives is then acknowledged as illustrated by officer level tensions associated with existing projects, experiential learning and ground level outcomes. Compared to prevailing urban regeneration company perspectives, the Black Country urban regeneration companies lost momentum prior to national austerity. Future questions remain about appropriate forms of regeneration within smaller settlements with problematic industrial legacies and the capacity of local authorities to advance collaborative forms of regeneration.

Social Innovation and New Roles of Public Institution as a Regional Development Agency: The Preliminary Study with the Case of Urban Development Corporations

Social Innovation and New Roles of Public Institution as a Regional Development Agency: The Preliminary Study with the Case of Urban Development Corporations

Developers in the public interest? The role of urban development corporations in the Anglophone Caribbean

Urban centres in the Caribbean face a wide variety of infrastructural and planning challenges. One of the key strategies that has been adopted by national governments to address these challenges is the formation of urban development corporations. These are governmental agencies with powers to facilitate urban regeneration in specific areas. This paper examines the history, role and function of urban development corporations in Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Trinidad and Tobago. The Urban Development Corporation (UDC) was formed in Jamaica in 1968, the St John's Development Company (SJDC) in Antigua and Barbuda was created in 1986, and the Urban Development Corporation of Trinidad and Tobago (UDeCOTT) was established in 1994. These bodies share the characteristic of having far‐reaching planning and development powers within specific areas. For example, the SJDC is able ‘to acquire, manage, or dispose of lands and to lay out, construct, and maintain roads, buildings, public parks, piers, car parks, and other public amenities’ within specified designated areas, whilst Jamaica's UDC is empowered ‘to carry out and/or secure the laying out and development of “designated areas”. These three urban development corporations can be seen to act as developers in the public interest, as agents of modernisation, and as responses to neoliberalisation. However, whilst they have succeeded in effecting large‐scale transformations to the urban landscape, this has often been achieved through a top‐down development process with exemption from planning regulations and little accountability to the residents of the cities.

Design-led Regeneration? Evaluating the Design Outcomes of Cardiff Bay and their Implications for Future Regeneration and Design

Design-led regeneration has been promoted in the UK since 1999 with varying degrees of success, and it is an increasingly important tool in the drive for greater urban competitiveness, at least in local government rhetoric. This paper focuses on experience in Cardiff, the Capital of Wales, and in particular the regeneration of Cardiff Bay over the last two decades. Unique among British Urban Development Corporations CBDC was charged with achieving high standards of design in regeneration, and this paper evaluates its efforts against its seven stated objectives. It explains how, and why, the Corporation, and subsequently the City Council, failed to achieve these objectives, and what the implications of these failures are for smaller cities, and particularly those in Wales. It identifies the mismatch between the development ambitions and market size and trends, and suggests that a much more inclusive, collaborative, focused and master-planned approach to brownfield development is required in future. This needs to be backed by a more interventionist and policy/guidance-based control process that raises the general quality of design, rather than a mega-project focused project approach that proceeds largely outside the planning process.

Reassessing the role of housing in community‐based urban development

In this article, we use a random sample of urban community development corporations (CDCs) to determine whether distinct types exist and, if so, to estimate their prevalence in the industry. The typical urban CDC has a diversified portfolio of economic and social development activities, including community organizing, and is likely to have a housing development program, although not necessarily a large one because relatively few are high producers. Large‐scale housing producers, defined in the study as having produced at least 500 units during the previous 10 years, comprise 18 percent of CDCs. A large organizational capacity, an affiliation with national intermediaries, the training of staff and the adoption of computers, the length of executive directors’ tenure, and the share of funding devoted to housing programs are the most important factors increasing the odds that a CDC will belong to the group of high producers.

CDCs and the Changing Context for Urban Community Development: A Review of the Field and the Environment

This review takes Rebuilding Communities as a starting point to survey the community development literature, the community development field, and external environmental factors, in order to examine what has happened over the past fifteen years to shape the context in which urban community development corporations (CDCs) now operate. This paper is both a bounded literature review and an environmental scan. We identify categories of changes and influences on the community development field. We find that in the last fifteen years, the community development field has grown increasingly professionalized. Policy initiatives have also shaped the field. New evaluations of community development have been conducted and published. We now know much more about the potential and limits of CDCs than we did when the Rebuilding Communities (RC) study was launched in the late 1980s. At the same time, significant gaps in our knowledge of the community development field remain. In particular, there has been insufficient study of how the changes in this context have affected the work that CDCs do.

The social turn and urban development corporations

Urban development corporations were icons of 1980s liberation management and free enterprise property development (Thornley, 1991). But the legacy of the development corporation is a contested one....

Partnerships and networks: The governance of urban regeneration in Britain

Urban regeneration in Britain has often been described as being 'market- led'. However, such a characterisation does justice neither to the complexity of urban policy over the past 25 years, nor to the changes that have taken place in the same period. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 1980s partnership with the private sector - however the concept has been understood - has been a vital ingredient of the regeneration process. What is striking is the way that the will to involve the private sector has had a profound impact on local governance. This paper outlines the evolution of urban regeneration in the context of evolving urban policy since 1979. It traces the approach adopted by the Conservative government in the 1980s, specifically through the use of Urban Development Corporations; it examines the change of heart in the early 1990s that preceded the coming into power of a Labour administration; and it looks at the experience of urban regeneration under the leadership of Tony Blair. It explores the changing role of key actors within the process, and the way in which urban local government has responded to the evo- lution of national policy. The case of Sheffield is used to illustrate the general theme of changing national policy.

A Step Change or a Step Back? The Thames Gateway and the Re-birth of the Urban Development Corporations

The delivery of the government's Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future proposals in the Thames Gateway area will be spearheaded by two new Urban Development Corporations (UDCs). During the 1980s and 1990s, UDCs were at the forefront of property-led regeneration in Britain and their impacts were extremely controversial. For some they represented a necessary institutional form that successfully facilitated and delivered regeneration to areas with chronic social and economic problems. For others they embodied a broader Thatcherite programme that marginalised local authorities and local communities from the heart of development planning. This paper examines their reintroduction and compares and contrasts the new agencies with those that existed in earlier decades. It argues that although the new UDCs will have broadly similar powers, the political contexts in which they are being established differ markedly. They are now expected to embed themselves into regional and national strategic development agendas and work in development partnerships with local authorities and local communities. The paper outlines the possible political and practical impacts that they will have and what their emergence tells us about the nature of Labour's broader modernisation agendas for local governance.

The Colonel Light Gardens Garden Suburb Commission: building a planned community

Colonel Light Gardens, about 6 km south of Adelaide, South Australia, is recognized as a national and international exemplar in the field of garden suburb planning. The first objective of the suburb's Development Plan seeks the conservation and reinforcement of its ‘original three dimensional garden suburb design’ and statements supporting other objectives detail its ‘essential’ urban design and land use elements. However, town planning is more than the design of urban places and spaces. It is also concerned with how these may be achieved effectively and how the services and facilities required by citizens are properly supplied and located. This crucial other side of the ‘town planning coin’ has been demonstrated in the Colonel Light Gardens' development. The Garden Suburb Act of 1919 established a Garden Suburb Commission with powers similar to what, in later years, would be known as urban development corporations. Hence, it was first in a line of such organizations in South Australia and stands with international exemplars such as the British garden cities and new towns.

The New Right and Neighbourhood Regeneration

This paper seeks to add to an understanding of the impact and significance of the New Right through an evaluation of neighbourhood regeneration policy in England during the 1980s and 1990s. This area of public policy has been seemingly been little researched being passed over for more high profile urban policy initiatives such as Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corporations. Such studies largely demonstrate a translation of broad New Right principles into practice. Recently, however, attention has begun to turn to less obvious approaches and a more sensitive and contradictory image has developed. Far from consistency and coherence, evidence of actual impact upon the ground is beginning to point to a more eclectic situation. While there may have been broad principles that could be identified with the Thatcher and Major Governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such abstract tenets allowed significant room for evolution and pragmatism, which may, in part, help explain the varied impact of many initiatives. Examination of neighbourhood regeneration policies throughout this period demonstrates an evolution of initiatives and ideas that were influenced by a number of factors. Two stand out in particular. First, a temporal dimension: policy and thinking evolved due to external influences (such as opposition from local authorities and tenants) and the impact of policy itself. Second, a spatial dimension: policy outcome varied in different places. The implications of this are that a more open and less reductionist perspective on the New Right needs to be taken and that studies of the period should highlight a more diverse and contextualised understanding.

British Urban Policy: An Evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations Second Edition, Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas (Eds.) 1999

British Urban Policy: An Evaluation of the Urban Development Corporations Second Edition, Rob Imrie and Huw Thomas (Eds.) 1999

Joining It Up Locally? Area Regeneration and Holistic Government in England

The problems of deprived neighbourhoods have been a concern for government for over 30 years. A plethora of approaches has been adopted: from central-local government partnerships (Urban Programme); to 'top down', market led solutions (Urban Development Corporations, Enterprise Zones); to the competitive 'challenge funding' (City Challenge, Single Regeneration Budget) approach. This article charts how governments have sought to address the multi-faceted challenge of area regeneration in England through management innovations during the 1990s, from the Conservative's challenge funding initiative to New Labour's emerging agenda for holistic or 'joined up' government at central and local levels.

The Distribution of SRB Challenge Fund Expenditure in Relation to Local-area Need in England

During the 1980s and the 1990s there were a number of policy initiatives designed to tackle the problems of the urban areas in the UK. By the early 1990s these initiatives represented the commitment of over £1 billion of public expenditure each year. The initiatives encompassed 'area'-based approaches like Enterprise Zones and Urban Development Corporations at one extreme through to more 'people'-orientated, project-led approaches as in the case of the Task Force Initiative. In 1994 the organisation of local-area regeneration policy was changed radically. Some 20 independently operated regeneration programmes were brought together into a Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) to be run by a single government department. A critical feature of the SRB approach to urban regeneration is its competitive nature whereby local partnerships bid for funds from government. Whatever the merits of such an approach in terms of local involvement and value for money turn out to be, there could be drawbacks from a competitive system since there is no automatic presumption that the allocation of regeneration resources will reflect the distribution of deprivation and thus the relative needs of local areas across England. The aim of the research has been to assess how well the allocation of regeneration funds under a competitive approach has, in practice, gone to meet relative needs and what the implications are for the evolution of local-area regeneration initiatives.