Urban Renaissance Research Articles

New Downtowns: Towards a New Form of Centrality and Urbanity in a World Society

The paper introduces the term and concept of “New Downtowns” into the literature. We argue that a new spatial category in urban research is necessary in order to specify the recent phenomenon of newly created inner city areas within urban renaissance projects. The Hamburg HafenCity exemplifies this global trend in urban planning and politics. The HafenCity is a new inner city and an urban renaissance project, located in the former harbour of Hamburg, and in close proximity to the historic city centre. This development project has allowed the inner city area of Hamburg to roughly double its spatial extension in size. The main argument of the paper is that in contemporary world society, centrality becomes a negotiable good - through which urbanity changes its form. Based on this argument, four characteristics can be outlined to constitute a New Downtown. Firstly, New Downtowns are an expression of urban politics, understood as globally oriented district politics. Secondly, its architecture creates urban stages for distinct forms of performances. Thirdly, the urbanity of the New Downtown is consequently a performative urbanity. And finally, the New Downtown is the result of a new centrality of the world society, i.e. the imperative to establish new centres artificially.

Population change in England since 1981: Is an ‘urban renaissance’ really underway?

It is almost 10 years since the UK government published Towards an Urban Renaissance. This paper assesses the extent to which a turnaround in the fortunes of English cities has occurred in recent years, using population estimates for 1981-2006. Population change rates are compared over time for 56 cities defined on the principle of built-up urban area and for a 10-fold classification of England based on settlement size and regional location. In aggregate, urban England is found to have achieved a steady acceleration in growth over the 25-year period, but since the early 1990s this has merely been tracking the national trend with no diminution in the growth-rate gap with the faster growing towns and rural areas. Also, a major contrast exists between London and the principal regional centres.

Contesting the urban renaissance: journalism and the post-industrial city

ABSTRACTThis article considers national press representations of urban regeneration in UK cities, drawing on specific examples of urban regeneration in the 1990s. It examines the way in which much journalistic discourse tends to contest the notion of ‘urban renaissance’. However, in doing so, it argues that this critique is fettered by the constraints facing journalists writing about such complex processes and the contexts both within which they work and within which their work is presented. It goes on to recognise journalistic narratives as a rare example of a popular contestation of myths of the post-industrial city. The article suggests that the general messages about the significant role of the media in constructing urban narratives continues to be applicable to the situation in the early 2000s, and it argues for the inclusion of journalistic narratives in studies of the post-industrial city.

Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?

Nearly 30 years ago now, Holcomb and Beauregard were critical of the way that it was assumed that the benefits of gentrification would 'trickle down' to the lower classes in a manner similar to that hypothesised in the housing market. Nevertheless, despite fierce academic debate about whether or not gentrification leads to displacement, segregation and social polarisation, it is increasingly promoted in policy circles both in Europe and North America on the assumption that it will lead to less segregated and more sustainable communities. Yet there is a poor evidence base for this policy of 'positive gentrification'-for, as the gentrification literature tells us, despite the new middle classes' desire for diversity and difference they tend to self-segregate and, far from being tolerant, gentrification is part of an aggressive, revanchist ideology designed to retake the inner city for the middle classes. In light of this, it is argued that these new policies of social mixing require critical attention with regard to their ability to produce an inclusive urban renaissance and the potentially detrimental gentrifying effects they may inflict on the communities they intend to help.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS

Reurbanisierung?

The paper deals with the subject of urban and spatial development from the perspective of discourse analysis. It aims at reconstructing the manifold discoursive ways in which urban decline and regeneration are being interpreted. In so doing, it looks at the current issue of „urban renaissance”, which is considered by some observers as an indication of a substantial trend towards „reurbanization”. The particular statement of the paper is that related assessments are not supported by significant evidence yet. Rather, they appear as an outcome of urban discourses. Such discourses are considered a specific way of constructing the city. In this context, the paper pleas for a more theory led interpretation and cautious assessments of contemporary urban change.

Birmingham: whose urban renaissance? Regeneration as a response to economic restructuring

This paper draws together two traditionally distinct discourses that have dominated debates over urban policy responses to economic restructuring, deindustrialisation, major plant closures and the rise of the service and knowledge-based economy over the past 20 years. It investigates the case of Birmingham, where the policy drive of city centre regeneration, flagship development and the re-making of central urban space for new economic activities has been accompanied by much acclaim and ‘boosterist’ hype. At the same time, the socio-spatial impact of economic restructuring and the resulting policy response has been extremely uneven. The economic difficulties and wider disadvantage experienced by much of the city's population and many of its neighbourhoods, especially those inner city areas with large ethnic minority populations, have endured and even deepened since the early 1990s despite the efforts of numerous area-based regeneration programmes funded by central government. The paper reflects upon this dual narrative by asking the question whose urban renaissance? From this study it clear that the dominance of the ‘boosterist’ discourse is significantly tempered by the uneven and enduring socio-economic divides within the city and the partial nature of the city's overall recovery, particularly in terms of providing employment for its residents. In this sense, significant policy challenges remain despite the clear achievements of the past 20 years. The paper concludes by considering new spatial policy approaches that could bind together the dual imperatives of creating new economic opportunities, and addressing aspects of acute need among the local population.

Leisure, luxury and urban specialization in the eighteenth century

ABSTRACTThis article forms a contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of an English urban renaissance. We draw on Schwarz's designation of residential leisure towns to explore the spread of leisure and luxury through a broad range of towns. Our analysis reveals that leisure facilities and luxury service and retail provision were widespread, but that residential leisure towns appear as qualitatively different places, the status of which was contingent upon social profile and cultural-economy, rather than demographic, political or socio-economic make up. We conclude by arguing that urban typologies based on specialization should be tempered with older-established and more subjective categorizations based on the status of the town.

Citizens, Soldiers and Urban Culture in Restoration England

The article unpacks the circumstances surrounding a riot in York Minster in February 1686, exploring the social and political dynamics of the violence and emphasising the communal affiliations and loyalties of those involved. It contextualises the riot in terms of the relationship between citizens and freemen of York on the one hand and soldiers garrisoned in the city on the other, suggesting that these sources of social identity served as a palimpsest for other tensions. In so doing it demonstrates that while historians are fully aware of the religious and partisan basis of urban (and national) conflict in the later seventeenth century, they are less attuned to its corporate dimensions and, in particular, the manner in which militarism continued to insinuate itself in the everyday lives of urban inhabitants. The article shows that civic militarism as embodied in the civic militia was an entrenched feature of corporate citizenship. While this militarism was given full expression in the latter 1640s and 1650s, it was severely curtailed after 1660, when the citizenry lost control of the keys and walls of the city and had both military companies and the gentry-dominated county lieutenancy imposed upon them. In unpacking this largely unheralded aspect of urban society the article pays close attention to the politics of space and memory that gave rise to the riot, the fractured state of authority within the city, and the manner in which elites and subordinates could be united by communal animosities. It also demonstrates how the new social relationships associated with the ‘urban renaissance’ were redolent with England's corporate and revolutionary past.

League Tables, Love Them or Hate Them

Medicine does not entirely ignore qualitative research but is, understandably, happier with objective measurements and with numbers to which well-established techniques of summary statistics and more sophisticated analysis can be applied. Lately, several countries, including the UK, have been trying to devise numerical performance indicators for services such as health and education, the idea being to find the equivalent of the balance sheet in the commercial sector so that hospitals and schools can be run more like businesses. The results are published, often as league tables. Forum for the Future, a UK-based charity, has recently carried out a similar ranking exercise for British cities.1 All over the urban world there is competition to be (or be perceived to be) “green,” however that is defined, and the UK is no exception. One city aims to be the greenest in Britain by 2010, another wishes to be seen as “the green capital,” while yet another has the bold ambition to be “the most sustainable city in the world.” Forum for the Future is seeking to provide some objectivity to back up aspirations like these and so “create healthy competition between cities to encourage sustainable urbanization” in a country where 90% of the population now lives in a town or city. The ranking will be an annual one so cities will move up and down just as schools and hospitals do in their yearly league tables. The urban exercise has its weaknesses, the most obvious perhaps being that there appears to be no adjustment for socioeconomic class structure. Brighton and Hove, which comes out on top in the overall ranking (and for two of the three data subsets), is a coastal city in the south–east and can fairly, if not uniformly, be described as affluent. Liverpool, in the north–west and with a port and industrial heritage, was bottom and pockets of affluence are harder to find. Indeed, the report itself concedes that “affluence helps.” The top score was 166.9 points and the bottom 76.7. The report uses 13 criteria in 3 packages called environmental impact, quality of life, and future proofing, and the criteria selected are ones where assessments are available from sources such as the UK's Environment Agency. Six examples of the criteria, two from each package, are: air quality (which can affect quality of life) and waste collected per head of population, healthy life expectancy at age 65 and attained educational level, and local authority commitment to action on climate change and the number of “green” businesses in its area. Local people, local authority staff, elected councilors, and research scientists could give different weightings to the criteria and may be tempted to play around with the figures to get different outcomes. Also, some criteria are fairly reliable measurements whereas others are a bit woollier. Forum for the Future says that there is a “long way to go” and it is critical of previous exercises in urban renaissance, labeling them “iconic trophy-collecting.” In other words, winning an architectural prize for some inner-city shopping mall and recreational development does not make a more sustainable city. So, Liverpool can take some consolation from its winning of the Forum's wooden spoon. In 2008, this city is the European City of Culture.

An award-winning parking structure becomes an architectural beacon for Oklahoma City’s urban renaissance

The new totally precast concrete Center City Parking Facility in Oklahoma City, Okla., was constructed in the heart of the business district on a site occupied by two old and functionally obsolete parking structures. The owner, Central Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority (COTPA), wanted to add an additional 1000 parking spaces while maintaining parking operations during construction.

密集市街地再生におけるUR都市機構の取組み

密集市街地再生におけるUR都市機構の取組み

'City living' and sustainable development: The experience of a UK regional city

'City living' has the potential to contribute towards sustainable development as well as to urban renaissance: medium to high density, mixed-use property development on brownfield, central sites provides accommodation for people in city centre employment, reduces the need for travel and adds to urban vitality and viability. But city living developments, driven by demand from buy-to-let investors, have not fulfilled all their potential in terms of environmental, social and economic sustainability. The paper argues that the structure of incentives and lack of adequate controls have created a phenomenon that is economically precarious, socially elitist and environmentally ambiguous. The argument draws on an in-depth case study of Leeds in the north of England.

Introduction to the special issue : The vital city

The theme of this special issue is the vital city. Being vital and having vitality are not mere descriptions, but highly desirable attributes. Although 'vital' can simply mean critical and indispensable, its richer associations are with life and living. In such a context, it is remarkable how many discussions of cities are replete with biological, natural or organic analogies and metaphors. At one level, vitality involves that state of simply being alive and able to survive that distinguishes the living from the non-living. At another, it refers to a higher state of living, to the distinction between animal and plant life, and to the capacity not just to survive but to grow and develop. And at yet a third level, vitality refers to a certain physical or intellectual energy or vigour. This is the vital force or life force, the elan vital - that mysterious, immaterial power that variously generates life, enables survival, produces growth, and gives health, energy and vigour. Consideration of vitality and cities thus raises a set of interrelated research questions, which include: What do we mean by vitality in an urban context? Which spatial arrangements and governance arrangements are most likely to foster urban vitality? In this issue, we present five papers each offering a valuable perspective on urban vitality. The papers were originally given at the September 2007 European Urban Research Association conference held at the University of Glasgow, with the overarching theme of 'the vital city'. The first paper, by Moa Tunstrom, examines the urban renaissance discourse with particular reference to Sweden. Two themes are prominent in this discourse - historical concepts of the traditional city, and the essence of the city being its core. Wendy Tan and Ina Klaasen's paper is an exploratory study of the phenomenon of 24/7 environments. Asking why such environments are more strongly evident in some cities than in others, the authors identify different types of 24/7 environments and outline the socio-cultural, economic and spatial conditions influencing their existence or non-existence. Rachael Unsworth presents a detailed study of residential development and citycentre living in a major English city. Arguing that city-centre living could contribute significantly to urban vitality, she recounts how city living developments, largely driven by demand from buy-to-let investors, have failed to fulfil this potential. Unsworth concludes that inadequate controls combined with developers' incentive structures have produced an outcome that is economically precarious, socially elitist and environmentally ambiguous. Examining the growing urban research agenda around the small city and the nature of innovative institutional sub-municipal governance in securing vitality at the local level, Greg Lloyd and Deborah Peel relate the concept of elan vital to changes in the governance of Inverness, Scotland. Arguing that both philosophical and empirical approaches are needed, they advocate more focus on the softer, intrinsic and more spiritual dimensions of understanding change. In the fifth and final paper, Ivan Tosics moves up a geographical and governmental scale to explore the contribution of cityregions to the sustainability, competitiveness and vitality of urban areas. Activity, space and governance A key challenge for practitioners and researchers of the 'vital city' is that of definition. As Tunstrom explains, since vitality is socially constructed, the way in which its concepts are labelled and named, and its examples or references selected, directs the search for solutions to particular urban problems. Thus, dominant discourses effectively define what is understood as vital. Furthermore, policies themselves are shaped and framed by wider discourses. It thus becomes essential to understand the extent to which such discourses can be mobilised to the advantage of powerful interests. Concepts such as urban vitality, citycentre living and 24/7 environments have both positive and negative aspects. …

Municipal Policing Meets the New Deal

In urban centres across the UK and elsewhere, one encounters an ever-increasing array of uniformed agencies. Often explicitly aligned with efforts for an urban renaissance, these patrols not only give advice and information to users of urban public spaces but, more significantly, are instrumental in securing these spaces and their populations. Drawing on empirical research in the British city of Glasgow, this article argues that, far from being merely designed to minimize risk, such new policing initiatives work hard to establish a new moral order of acceptable activities for revitalized urban spaces. This happens through renewed involvement of the local authorities as municipal policing. There is, however, one element in the debates of an urban renaissance or the entrepreneurial city that tends to get sidelined easily: that of the actual labour and work lying at the heart of such renaissance. Here, the warden project under discussion, in its design as an intermediate labour market programme, forcefully illustrates the meanings of `securing' and `policing' as it reconnects the moral ordering of contemporary labour market policies with the patrolling of new urban spaces.

Tourism, Urban Governance and Public Space

This paper considers the relationship between tourism development, urban governance and urban public space. It focuses on the way that ‘new urban governance’ mediates the activities and interests of mobile capital and consumption on the one hand, and the spaces of everyday life on the other which are increasingly subject to ‘urban renaissance’ strategies and spectacularizations as tourist attractions. By drawing on research undertaken in York, England, the paper illustrates the socio‐spatial issues at stake for urban centres that have used tourism and culture as major drivers of economic development. Finally, it challenges the axiomatic status of the local/tourist dualism in various tourism management discourses as being inadequate for understanding how tourism articulates with socio‐spatial mobility generally, and how this raises difficult issues in relation to urban citizenship and the governance of urban public space.

Securing Sustainable Communities

During the 2000s spatial and urban policy in the UK has become increasingly concerned with the creation of sustainable communities. The urban renaissance's focus on security through design has been replaced by new, more holistic discourses which emphasize `community safety' and the ways in which the planning process can be reformed in order to achieve this. The new emphasis is on the responsibilization of neighbourhood communities with the police becoming more `citizen-focused' in the design and implementation of their strategies. This article examines the shift towards sustainable community building and assesses its implications for the policing and securitization of places. It argues that a paradox lies at the heart of the government's new agendas. On the one hand, they promote community balance, mix and diversity as a vehicle for the creation of more functional and less crime-ridden places. On the other hand, they simultaneously identify diversity as a threat to community safety. Security policy, the article argues, has therefore become focused on the deployment of new types of relational citizenship, based on top-down conceptions of whose presence or absence is required to make a community sustainable. In this context `sustainability' is being used as a discursive cover for a series of potentially repressive and counter-productive policy measures. Rather than increasing a sense of security within newly built and regenerated places, the new focus of policy may encourage the formation of new governmentalities of insecurity and fear.

A Study of the Requirement and this supporting Method for establishing the Company for Promoting Urban Renaissance

A Study of the Requirement and this supporting Method for establishing the Company for Promoting Urban Renaissance

Greening Port Misery: Marketing the Green Face of Waterfront Redevelopment in Port Adelaide, South Australia

Port Adelaide is on the cusp of an urban renaissance. Once a thriving industrial centre, economic restructuring has left the Port in a vulnerable position. Suffering from the ills of economic and environmental decline, collaborative efforts between the South Australian State Government and private sector property developers have aimed to transform the Port to a cosmopolitan and progressive landscape. While much urban regeneration literature has focused on the social and economic issues associated with such large-scale redevelopments, the environmental improvements purported by these developments are largely unexplored. A significant aspect of Port Adelaide's transformation is the deliberate mobilisation of an environmental discourse in marketing materials. These materials are key texts serving to both promote and legitimise the redevelopment. Data presented in this article problematises the purported environmental benefits associated with the marketing of Port Adelaide's redevelopment, revealing it as a rhetorical form of ‘greenwashing’.

Visual and cultural sustainability: The impact of tall buildings on London

Urban sustainability has been equated in Towards an Urban Renaissance (1999), with the need for compact, dense, vibrant urban cores. To this end, tall buildings are regarded by the Mayor of London as an integral part of the Greater London Authority's sustainable vision for the capital, and The London Plan (2004) provides Greater London with a spatial development strategy in which tall buildings will make a highly visible contribution. This paper considers the impact of tall buildings on the visual and cultural sustainability of London, particularly the impact of tall buildings on the protected views of London (as defined in RPG3A). It compares definitions of sustainable urban design through national policy (PPG1 and PPS1) and policy provided to preserve the settings of historic buildings and conservation areas (PPG15) with the proposed management of these views. In this context, it charts the emergence of Townscape as the official means to composing and assessing the visual character and quality of new buildings in relation to old. It also sets out the divergent contributions made to the UK planning process by English Heritage and CABE and their opposing notions as to what constitutes a well-balanced sustainable urban environment visually and culturally.