Urban Spatial Transformation Research Articles

Urban governance and spatial transformation ambitions in Johannesburg

ABSTRACTUrban governance has been thrust into the spotlight in the wake of the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in September 2015. A number of the 17 goals assume strong urban governments with the requisite powers and financial capacities to restructure the functioning of regional economies so as to establish transition pathways toward more sustainable societies. South Africa, and Johannesburg’s metropolitan government in particular, represents an instructive case study of precisely this kind of local government. South Africa adopted one of the most far-reaching systems of decentralization with the advent of democracy in the mid-1990s and enshrined local government autonomy within the constitution of 1996 along with the provision for integrated metropolitan governments. Significantly, these authorities have the powers and fiscal resources to confront conflictual and irresolvable differences in the city, which are inevitable outcomes from decades of oppressive racial government. The article explores the history of democratic decentralization reforms in South Africa and Johannesburg with an eye on analyzing the significance of the Corridors of Freedom flagship initiative of the Johannesburg metropolitan government. This exercise affords a critical perspective on the latest generation of strategic planning and prioritization in metropolitan South Africa.

Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home by Anne-Maria Makhulu

Reviewed by: Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home by Anne-Maria Makhulu Lené Le Roux Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home Anne-Maria Makhulu. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2015. 273pp.; maps, photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $23.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0-8223-5966-1) Anne-Maria Makhulu has written a book about 'the geography of freedom' (Makhulu, 2015: 43). She affirms the inseparability of geography and democracy as she tells a story of practical politics of those who have been disenfranchised and marginalised in South Africa. A parallel is drawn between the necessity for daily home-making in a world that wishes to dehumanise the lives of shack-dwellers and their struggle for freedom–the struggle of the forgotten ones. Throughout her book Makhulu weaves in global and local economic shifts, complexities of social reproduction, as well as racialized and gendered politics to frame the study. It is a thoughtful, sobering and provocative read for anyone interested in the recent history of South Africa's urban development on a highly political landscape. In this book Makhulu is able to map what she refers to as a 'geography of freedom'. Making freedom is an ethnographic study that traces the precarious lives and steadily insurgent life-making of shack dwellers in Crossroads, Cape Town, from 1970 to the mid-2000s. By 1970 the country's Apartheid government regime was maturing into its third decade of existence. The Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents Act 67 of 1952, commonly referred to as 'the pass law', determined whether black Africans could legally reside within the city, close to work. It laid the foundation for the illegal rural to urban migration of millions of black Africans who were forced to reside in homelands, despite the necessity and desire to socially reproduce in cities. With the shortage of public housing in townships and the prohibition for Africans to own land in urban areas designated for white people, and the sheer lack of affordable housing for the poor, of which the majority were African, meant that newcomers had to occupy land on the urban periphery, adjacent to formal townships, illegally. They built their own homes, using any material available. These came to be known as 'shacks'. With a panoramic and multi-scalar view of the political and economic affairs across the eras, Makhulu (2015) walks [End Page 388] us through the demise of the National Party (NP), that instituted the apartheid regime, to the rise of the African National Party (ANC), that transitioned the country into democracy. She draws from Bayat's (1997) notion of 'quiet encroachment' to show the role that women, especially black squatter women, played in changing the political landscape of South Africa through home-making and livelihood strategies. She invokes the powerful position of 'protest politics based on singular motivations over and above higher-order imperatives' which has been and is largely dismissed by the local patrilineal and mainstream national politics that seek to centralise the 'symbolic and ideological politics of men' (Makhulu, 2015: 89). Makhulu cleverly and methodically works through the structural economic shift toward neoliberalism and the impact of this on the provision of basic human rights, such as housing, water and electricity. The pressure on the ANC to ensure reparations materialise for previously disadvantaged South Africans, whilst structural adjustment policies insisted on fiscal austerity, have resulted in failed urban spatial transformation, record-breaking service delivery protests and deepening levels inequality. She draws attention to particular actors that continue to control and benefit from the neoliberal economy, and articulates the relevant mechanisms (e.g. state sanctioned programs) that allow them to do so. Finally, Makhulu fleshes out what the 'trickle-down effect' of the free market system looks like in a postcolonial, new democracy that has been deindustrialised and open to the expansion of the financial sector. She uses Arendt and Foucault's theorisations around biopolitics to situate the precarious lives of marginalised masses that are forced to survive off-the-grid with skyrocketing utility prices and the absence of waged labour. She unpacks the self-austerity and entrepreneurial practices of the poor, using rapidly expanding informal market...

Building Reconstruction After Large-Scale Disasters A Case Study of Ishinomaki City After the Great East Japan Earthquake

In large-scale disasters and the subsequent recovery process, land usage and urban spatial forms change. It is therefore important to use this process as an opportunity to create a more sustainable spatial structure. This study considers the urban spatial transformations that took place after the Great East Japan Earthquake, their causes, and accompanying issues by investigating building construction in the recovery process. The authors discovered that individual rebuilding is primarily concentrated in vacant lots within the city’s existing urbanized areas. This is likely due to the spatial impact of the urban planning and agricultural land use planning system, the area division of urbanization promotion areas, and the urbanization restricted areas, all of which were in place prior to the disaster and which have guided development. On the other hand, there are areas severely damaged by tsunami in which there has been little reconstruction of housing that was completely destroyed. The authors concluded that building reconstruction in Ishinomaki City resulted in both the formation of a high-density compact city and also very low-density urban areas.

Incorporating GIS data into an agent-based model to support planning policy making for the development of creative industries

This paper presents an extension to the agent-based model “Creative Industries Development–Urban Spatial Structure Transformation” by incorporating GIS data. Three agent classes, creative firms, creative workers and urban government, are considered in the model, and the spatial environment represents a set of GIS data layers (i.e. road network, key housing areas, land use). With the goal to facilitate urban policy makers to draw up policies locally and optimise the land use assignment in order to support the development of creative industries, the improved model exhibited its capacity to assist the policy makers conducting experiments and simulating different policy scenarios to see the corresponding dynamics of the spatial distributions of creative firms and creative workers across time within a city/district. The spatiotemporal graphs and maps record the simulation results and can be used as a reference by the policy makers to adjust land use plans adaptively at different stages of the creative industries’ development process.

Land Use Change after Large Scale Disasters a Case Study of Urban Area of Ishinomaki City after the Great East Japan Earthquake

The recovery process from the large-scale disaster causes the diversion of land use on a large scale. It is, therefore, important to consider whether or not these changes are connected to sustainable spatial forms. This paper aims to clarify the post-Great East Japan Earthquake urban spatial transformations by investigating the diversion of agricultural land in the recovery process. The authors found that in the urban area of Ishinomaki city, land use diversion from agricultural use to urban-type was carried out mainly either in urbanization promotion areas or in urbanization restricted area collectively and orderly adjacent to UPAs. The former especially contribute to the formation of high-densely efficient urban land use. They also concluded the disorganized expansion of the urban area caused by relocation of the affected people was suppressed thanks to the both urban and agricultural land use regulation i.e. land development and land diversion regulation in URAs, established before the disaster.

La grande vitesse ferroviaire et la transformation spatiale urbaine : le cas de Saragosse (Espagne)

Le projet d'implantation de la grande vitesse ferroviaire à Saragosse a coïncidé dans le temps avec la rédaction de divers documents de planification stratégique et territoriale. Le train à grande vitesse était présenté dans ces documents comme un instrument clé dans la transformation urbanistique et fonctionnelle de la ville. Cet article présente la gestation des plans et des projets qui dessinaient le futur de la zone métropolitaine pour le XXIe siècle et le rôle que le nouveau train allait jouer dans ce contexte. L'arrivée de la crise économique a remis en cause un bon nombre des ambitieux projets associés à l'implantation de la grande vitesse ferroviaire.

Spatial transformations in a “loosening state”: South Africa in a comparative perspective

This study explores the spatial transformation of urban South Africa since the ending of Apartheid rule two decades ago. It places this experience within the context of countries which have also gone through a “loosening” of political control and of related controls over spatial arrangements. The paper provides a discussion of South Africa’s spatial trends between 1996 and 2011, focusing on urbanisation; urban form; and socio-spatial segregation, and exploring the extent to which changes identified are shaped by the state, private sector investment, and the everyday actions of households and individuals. It shows that South Africa’s urban spatial transformation, post-Apartheid, is both idiosyncratic and comparable. The consequences of spatial controls, and of their loosening, have been diverse across countries, but also within countries. Loosening has led to differing relationships between state, citizenry and private enterprise, and to complex new crossing points between these groupings, affecting spatial change. In South Africa, significant trends have been: movement to the major cities where employment growth is stronger; levels of racial desegregation; and densification of parts of cities and towns, along with peripheral growth and employment decentralisation. Many of the changes however are differentiated across space and between settlements. While proactive state policies have had some impact (not necessarily in the direction of desired spatial transformation), and there are complex interrelationships, our empirical studies suggest that the major weight of evidence is towards the roles of private enterprise and people in shaping spatial change, enabled in part by forms of state loosening.

City profile: Chengdu

Chengdu, located at the western edge of the Sichuan Basin, is the provincial capital of Sichuan Province. The fertile and well-watered basin has given the city a long and splendid history, which has left significant and lasting imprints on its urban form, landscape and cultural life. In the planned economy period, Chengdu serviced as the economic, cultural, logistical and technological center for southwest China, and built a competitive and broad industrial base which now helps the city maintain its leading position in the region. In 2007, Chengdu was assigned as one of two pioneer cities in coordinating urban–rural development. This paper introduces the urban development of Chengdu as a historical city, summarizes the city’s economic growth, urban spatial transformation and infrastructure construction as a major city in western China, and discusses its recent efforts in coordinating urban–rural development as a pioneering city in China.

Intra-metropolitan location of foreign direct investment in Wuhan, China: Institution, urban structure, and accessibility

Coastal cities have been at the forefront of China's economic reform and open-door policy. However, regional differences in cost and income have prompted the government to encourage interior development since the late 1990s. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is one of the most mobile forms of capital and is a key agent of urban spatial transformation in China. This paper examines intra-metropolitan location of FDI location in interior China through a study of Wuhan, the largest metropolitan area in central China and the gateway to China's north-south and east-west linkages. We find that FDI in Wuhan has become more concentrated over time and is centralized on the Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone, a national development zone. Combining the logistic model with geographically weighted regression, we examine the effects of institution and urban structure, in addition to the orthodox location factors (accessibility) on the FDI location. We find that FDI in Wuhan is a result of interaction among institution, urban structure, and accessibility. Also, easy access to road and the central business districts (CBDs) has positive impacts on the FDI location. Last, the importance of urban spatial structure is identified through the significance of the traditional auto industrial base, Hanyang, in the FDI location.

The Marshlands Degradation and the Urban Spatial Transformation: A Case Study of “Town” and “Market” in Jingzhou City

The Marshland was one kind of the most important living environments for the ancient Chinese people, but is greatly eroded nowadays by the rapid urbanization. By studying in Jingzhou city, the Chinese city with a history of 2000 years, it was proved that the Chinese traditional Town –Market mode was effective in harmonizing the human and the marshlands and availed in balancing the urban economical and cultural functions. So a framework of essential action for urban planners is claimed to propose a rational way of urban spatial constructions adapted to the Chinese context.

Urban transformation of a metropolis and its environmental impacts

The aim of this paper is to understand the sustainability of urban spatial transformation in the process of rapid urbanization, and calls for future research on the demographic and economic dimensions of climate change. Shanghai towards its transformation to a metropolis has experienced vast socioeconomic and ecological change and calls for future research on the impacts of demographic and economic dimensions on climate change. We look at the major questions (1) to explore economic and demographic growth, land use and land-cover changes in the context of rapid economic and city growth, and (2) to analyze how the demography and economic growth have been associated with the local air temperature and vegetation. We examine urban growth, land use and land-cover changes in the context of rapid economic development and urbanization. We assess the impact of urban expansion on local air temperature and vegetation. The analysis is based on time series data of land use, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and meteorological, demographic and economic data. The results indicate that urban growth has been driven by mass immigration; as a consequence of economic growth and urban expansion, a large amount of farmland has been converted to paved road and residential buildings. Furthermore, the difference between air temperature in urban and exurban areas has increased rapidly. The decrease of high mean annual NDVI has mainly occurred around the dense urban areas.

Community Informatics and the New Urbanism: Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies into Planning Integrated Urban Communities

The growing development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has influenced the use of urban spaces. People tend to depreciate physical place, while they extend structures of associational life beyond geographic limitation and focus on a place-less, networked form of human relationship as community. On the other hand, urban spaces are strategically designed and developed with the help of technological innovation to boost local tourism, draw global investment, and effectively control the public. This study deals with this technology-driven, bifurcated, urban spatial transformation. First, we discuss what drives such change and how the use of ICTs affects the way people use urban spaces. Based on this assessment, we address a normative use of ICTs for community-based urban planning. For this, we provide the concept, Community Informatics-Supported New Urbanism (CI-NU), which basically suggests ways of collaboration between community informatics practitioners and new urbanists to accomplish their shared goals of integrated community development.

Beyond the Inner City

In this study the job accessibility of low-income job seekers was compared with that of the affluent majority in a polycentric urban structure. Kain's spatial mismatch hypothesis was extended not only to examine where and why low-income job seekers have lower job accessibility than high-income job seekers but also to compare changes from 1990 to 2000 in the Los Angeles, California, metropolitan area. The job accessibility measure applied in this research captured travel impedance and both job supply and demand. The results suggested that spatial mismatch still existed and that it continued to increase over time. However, the spatial pattern of mismatch had changed. Low-income job seekers were more disadvantaged in the inner-ring suburbs, mainly because of the lag in the residential suburbanization of low-income job seekers. This research contributed to the understanding of the extent and consequences of urban spatial transformation and suggested that social equity problems be addressed from a broader spatial perspective.

Sprawl Without Growth in Eastern Germany

This article examines sprawl without growth in former East Germany at a number of different metropolitan scales using a dataset from the Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung (Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning). Specific political, social, and economic circumstances in eastern Germany following reunification distinguish it not only from other declining regions, but also from some of its post-socialist neighbors that underwent similar urban spatial transformations after the fall of communism. Explanations for this phenomenon include: increasing incomes and latent demand for housing, which remained suppressed under communism; specific policies adopted after reunification that subsidized greenfield development at the metropolitan fringe; a lack of planning at the local, regional, and state levels in the immediate aftermath of reunification; and changing demographic patterns. Although a number of the factors exacerbating sprawl in the post-reunification period have disappeared, overall demographic decline in eastern Germany continues.

Trading Trash in the Transition: Economic Restructuring, Urban Spatial Transformation, and the Boom and Bust of Hanoi's Informal Waste Trade

In this paper I explore how one particular segment of the informal waste-recovery trade, waste intermediaries, is impacted by Hanoi's rapid urban economic and spatial change. Using survey and interview data I demonstrate: (1) waste intermediaries simultaneously gain and lose as a result of Hanoi's urban transition; and (2) the underlying forces of urban spatial change in different areas of the city are quite distinct, which will have a unique impact on the future of informal waste-recovery in Hanoi.

Influence of Urban Form on Travel Behaviour in Four Neighbourhoods of Shanghai

Since the 1980s, much of the new urban development in China has departed significantly from the traditional pedestrian and bicycle-oriented urban form. This study examines the effects of the urban spatial transformation on travel, based on a travel survey of 1709 individuals from four selected neighbourhoods of Shanghai. Although pedestrian/ cyclist-friendly urban form may not avert the general trend of motorisation growth induced by rising income, it does help to slow down the pace of growth and reduces the need for high levels of motor vehicle ownership. In the pedestrian/cyclist-friendly neighbourhoods, residents travel shorter distances than in other neighbourhoods even though the same modes of travel are used. Pedestrian/cyclist-friendly urban form makes the non-motorised modes feasible options, which is essential to limit automobile dependence. These findings suggest that land use planning and urban design can effectively influence people's mobility demand and travel behaviour towards achieving `green transport' in urban China.

An awful mark: symbolic violence and urban renewal in reform‐era China

This article investigates the relationship between forms of public writing and power, physical violence and symbolic violence in the context of urban spatial transformation in China. Specifically, it examines the widespread phenomenon in China of painting a big character (chai, meaning ‘to demolish’) on the walls of old buildings that are designated to be demolished. Even though this sign carries a definite semantic meaning, its power is more significantly derived from the form and context of its presentation, and it acts upon, rather than simply communicates to, its intended audience. Inspired by John Austin's concept of speech acts, the author calls this and other similar forms of powerful writing ‘text acts’. He argues that the chai phenomenon exemplifies the ways in which authorities resort to forms of powerful writing to effect desired perceptions, to interpellate certain kinds of subjects and to exact accommodating behaviour from these subjects in reform‐era China. His case study focuses on the destruction of old courtyard‐house neighbourhoods in central Beijing.

Scale, state and the city: Urban transformation in post-reform China

Globalization has resulted in the change of scalar relations of the state and the city in the contemporary world. The scale theory is developed mainly in the context of capitalist societies. As a general socio-spatial theory, this paper argues that the general principle of scale theory is also relevant to transitional socialist economies where scalar configuration has been rearticulated by liberalization and globalization. It is adopted to describe the profound transformations of the state and the city in China. Multi-scalar in perspective, this paper examines the urban spatial transformation and reconfiguration as rescaling and territorialization processes.

Empowered Culture? New York City’s Empowerment Zone and the Selling of El Barrio

This article explores the implementation of empowerment zone (EZ) legislation in East Harlem, or what some describe as El Barrio in New York City. The EZ is used as a case study for a critique of tourism as an urban development strategy. El Barrio is difficult to market within a framework of tourism defined by EZ standards, especially the heightened conflicts that ensue as minority communities attempt to reconstitute their cultures for tourist aims. Ultimately, this article shows a growing contradiction between the disavowal of ethnicity and race as grounds for equity and empowerment and the fact that ethnicity and race are the bases on which urban spatial transformations are taking place. Furthermore, the case study suggests that the politicization (and mobilization) of race and ethnicity are not the greatest perils to intra-Latino and interracial alliances in U.S. cities or to people’s aspirations regarding urban space at the local level. Rather, the ascendancy of neoliberal tenets presents obstacles to multiethnic and multiracial coalitions on behalf of livable and enjoyable communities for all people.

The De-Mediterraneanisation of the Mediterranean?

This paper uses the issue of tourism development in the Mediterranean as a prism through which to look at more general questions of socio-cultural, politico-economic, and environmental processes in the region. The paper is underpinned by a concern with space and spatial transformations (at various levels including those of the town, the countryside, and of the wider area inhabited by both). The starting point is the acceleration of coastal development, engendered, as much of this has been, by tourism. Tourism related shifts of economic gravity to coasts, particularly obvious in the case of islands, has been accompanied by the deepening and extension of more purely capitalist relations of production in the region. Ethnographic signs of this have taken a variety of forms. One has been the urban demographic and spatial transformations which have lead to a continuing rise of urban individuation and the associated further erosion of historic Mediterranean patterns of relationships within and between different sorts of urban collectivities. Another has been the continuing de-coupling of spatial and kinship boundaries. Movements of populations, particularly of young people, to the coast have increased the autonomy of individual members of kinship structures while decreasing the moral authority of elders and other representatives of kin groups as wholes. Interior landscapes have witnessed a continuing decline in the polyculture characteristic of the historic Mediterranean. Such landscapes are themselves influenced by the rise of the coastal monocrop of tourism. One of the most striking manifestations of this is the growing disrepair and degradation of terraces and dry stone walls. Finally, there is the broadening disjunction between, on the one hand, tourist imagery built on rhetorical references to the traditional Mediterranean, to be found in post-cards (of peasant farming and fishing, for example) or internet advertisements (of second homes in 'unspoilt' island bolt holes, for example) and the daily facts of the overuse and the running down of natural resources. Holding in mind aspects of the historical Mediterranean as they come to be measured against contemporary developments in the region, we are left with the question of whether the Mediterranean is being, to coin a term, de-Mediterraneanised.