Exclusion in Area-based Urban Policy Programmes

Area-based urban regeneration programmes such as the New Deal for Communities in the UK, the German Soziale Stadt and the Danish Kvarterloft are based on a participatory approach emphasizing active citizen participation and the involvement of local stakeholders. The article argues that these initiatives are not as open and inclusive as they strive to be, and in this article, we explore the different types of exclusion that can take place when such programmes are implemented. Based on the theoretical literature and on empirical data from the Danish Kvarterloft project, we identify three types of exclusion—structural, discursive and deliberate exclusion—and offer a theoretical analysis and an empirical account of these exclusions. The article concludes that practitioners as well as politicians need to reflect critically on different types of exclusion in order to create transparent and inclusive democratic processes.     

Searching for a Balance Between Community Needs and Conservation Policies in Historic Neighbourhoods of Istanbul

Despite the recent rising interest in sustainability and community-related issues among urban regeneration policy-makers, it is still questionable how far the recent regeneration efforts in historic housing areas achieve a balance between the community needs and conservation policies. To answer this question, this article explores the interplay between conservation, community needs and sustainability in the context of Turkey, focusing on Istanbul. It premises on the assumption that finding the balance between the needs, aspirations and concerns of local communities and the conservation of the built environments will lead to more equitable and sustainable solutions to the problems Istanbul historic quarters are facing. The article explains the interrelation between sustainability, community needs and conservation, investigates whether these notions have been integrated into the urban conservation policy agenda of Turkey or not and then examines the assumption above by focusing on the recent regeneration story of Fener and Balat (F&B), a declining neighbourhood in the historic peninsula of Istanbul. Debating on the strengths and weaknesses of the recent conservation-led regeneration programme, the article gives clues for future regeneration initiatives to achieve a sustainable balance between the conservation and community needs policies in historic neighbourhoods of Istanbul.     

Cultural production in peripheral urban spaces: lessons from Barriera,Turin (Italy)

Practices of cultural production within a peripheral urban neighbourhood can contribute to foster the sense of place, community belonging and local collective action. Starting from a critical perspective on the interconnections between cultural practices and urban regeneration, and developing on the concept of place-making, the paper has two main purposes: to investigate the nature of embeddedness of these practices and explore the ways of self-organization of cultural actors and their relationships with public policies. The case study concerns ‘Barriera di Milano’, a large peripheral area in Turin (Italy), formerly one of the most industrialized zones of the city. Over the past few years, and particularly after the real-estate bubble burst of 2007–2008, in Barriera a lively concentration of initiatives of culture has been taking place, redefining the urban and social space. These initiatives seem to be innovative for many reasons: firstly, while demonstrating a peculiar but significant embeddedness in the neighbourhood, they are mostly self-generated; secondly, the institutional assets, the economic self-sufficiency and the low degree of connection among initiatives support new forms of citizenship and place-making based on a ‘not-for-profit entrepreneurship’.     

Power to the people: when culture works as a social catalyst in urban regeneration processes (and when it does not)

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.     

城市系统中的竞争与协同机制研究

本文在剖析城市自组织系统耗散结构特征的基础上,重点从区域尺度和城市尺度两种空间尺度解析城市系统自组织演化的驱动力:竞争与协同。研究表明竞争与协同两种力量共同决定城市系统的发展演化,协同性竞争(良性的竞争)有利于城市系统的发展,推进城市可持续发展;反之,过度竞争或竞争乏力则会导致产生无序状态的产生,阻碍城市的发展。     

Urban experimentation & sustainability transitions

ABSTRACT

This special issue deals with various research questions regarding the impact of urban experimentation on transitions towards sustainability in different industries and sectors. Cities have been identified to play a vital role for sustainability transitions. Not only are they places with an increased urgency for change, but they also bring about many current sustainability initiatives and interventions. This special issue focuses on investigating the relationship between urban experimentation and institutional change. The articles shed light on various characteristics of urban environments that influence experimentation and potentially lead to institutional change and thus elaborate on some of the distinct mechanisms through which urban experimentation can lead to broader systemic changes.     

Situated Payments for Ecosystem Services: Local Agencies in the Implementation of the Sloping Land Conversion Programme in Southwest China

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is an innovative initiative to use market instruments for conservation that has spread across the world since the late 1990s. In assessing the efficiency and effectiveness of PES initiatives, global scholarship has focused on an outcome-oriented approach. This has led to debate on PES programmes’ contributions to, and the trade-offs between, conservation and development. Taking the Sloping Land Conversion Programme (SLCP) in China as an example, this article uses a process-oriented analytical approach to provide novel understandings of PES as a specific type of development practice. The article shows how notions of equity and justice, local knowledge and local institutions have played a role in shaping the processes and outcomes of the SLCP. The actions of local stakeholders in an interplay with the state created a space for negotiating, adapting and adjusting PES implementation, which eventually contributed to a local development pathway for meeting both national conservation interests and local economic development needs. This indicates that attention to situated agency can help illuminate how PES can be smoothly implemented and effectively negotiated in developing countries.     

城市社区与流动人口聚落的生态关系及其调控——以北京市为例

随着我国城市化进程的加快,流动人口向城市不断集聚,逐渐在城区或城市边缘地带形成一些以地方特色为主的流动人口聚落,学术上称之为异质社区。它们不仅具有各自不同的发生、发展过程,而且在外来流动人口与当地市民之间、异质社区和主流社会之间发生着各种各样的生态关系。本文以北京市部分异质社区为例,对其现状特征、发展趋势和管理措施等方面进行了调查研究,对于协调异质社区与主流社区之间的关系、有效发挥社区的自组织功能、以及城市社区一体化发展有指导意义。     

Assessing community participation in local economic development — lessons for the new urban policy

Urban policy in Britain has long been characterised by circumscribed and fluctuating institutional structures of community involvement. From the Community Development Programmes of the early 1970s to the assertive neo-liberalism of the 1980s and back to the partnership based politics of the 1990s, community involvement in the construction and delivery of urban policy has been a critical theme. The new administration, with its emphasis on the ‘stakeholder’ society seems set to continue the trends of the 1990s by promoting the concept of partnership as something of a panacea for the difficulties and exclusionary politics that have dogged urban policy programmes. Consequently, a vital area of study into the next century concerns the form that local democratic structures will take and the relative levels and distribution of risk and reward that regeneration schemes create for different sections of local communities.Drawing on material from Cardiff, this paper examines the construction of local political relations in the new urban governance and addresses the issue of community involvement in the politics of local economic regeneration. In particular, it focuses on a small business association which emerged in the wake of the major regeneration programmes being undertaken by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation (CBDC), a powerful quango established by central government in the late 1980s. The study demonstrates how the association, which consisted of local businesses, tried to influence the local regeneration programmes and how its ‘pro-growth’ stance was actively used by the CBDC to legitimate its own policies in the face of wider criticisms from local residential groups. The paper looks at the difficulties of constructing local community participation and concludes that voluntarist, top-down partnership structures in existing policy may only serve to legitimate and implement policy decisions taken by powerful non locally-accountable regeneration agencies.     

Informal institutional change in De Achterhoek region: from citizen initiatives to participatory governance

As in other European countries, the formal planning task of Dutch governments is subjected to devolution and austerity measures. Not only did these developments lead to outsourcing planning tasks to lower-level governments, also citizens are increasingly ‘invited’ to take responsibility for providing public facilities and services. In De Achterhoek, a Dutch region, these shifts are amplified due to population change and traditional active citizenship, and led to institutional change. Since a decade local governments stimulate citizen initiatives, under the umbrella of participatory governance. This process of institutional change did not alter formal institutions, but was the result of an informal and dialectic process between local governments and citizen organizations. In this paper, we will demonstrate the process of change and how it affected planning practices in De Achterhoek, building on theories of informal institutional change and its driving forces. The empirical part of this paper draws on the results of three focus group meetings, in which a diverse set of local stakeholders discussed the effects of change they observed and how it shaped planning practices. In the final section, we reflect on the degree of institutionalization, by examining the robustness and resilience of the observed change.     

Mussels,Tourism and Community Development: A Case Study of Place Branding Through Food Festivals in Rural North Jutland,Denmark

Abstract

Rural areas are facing prospects of marginalization and peripherality in an age of globalization where the attention of governments and media focuses increasingly on the (lack of) competitiveness of urban and metropolitan regions in Europe. Many rural areas have, therefore, searched for ways to improve their position vis-à-vis other localities by mobilizing local resources and employing policy tools that are believed to foster indigenous social and economic development, including place branding. Unsurprisingly, using food as a means to profile rural localities has become widespread, with branding efforts revolving around local food festivals that commodify local cultural resources. The article attempts to illuminate the challenges faced by branding processes in rural areas through a case study of Løgstør, a small rural town in North Jutland, Denmark, which builds its branding efforts around an annual mussel festival. The analysis focuses on the relationship between stakeholders and branding strategies, and in particular aims to uncover the role of the food festival in aggravating or alleviating inherent tensions between different stakeholders and target groups. It is argued that in the case of Løgstør making a food festival pivotal, a signature event for the place branding efforts has been created, which appeals to both external and internal audiences, and that this may hold wider lessons for place-branding initiatives in other small towns across Europe.     

“De-Risking” East London: Olympic Regeneration Planning 2000–2012

The concept of legacy has emerged in the twenty-first century as a dominant narrative within mega-event projects. Accordingly, event hosts now engage in detailed legacy planning. This often means creating new agencies and new plans; something that has important implications for wider urban governance and planning. This paper focuses on initiatives attached to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. One of the main aims of staging the Games was regenerating East London; and the pre-event planning (2000–2012) associated with this legacy promise is the focus here. Using evidence collected from primary and secondary research, the paper records how the governance and planning arrangements evolved over 2000–2012. These were designed to achieve regeneration effects at different scales; in the Olympic Park, the fringes of the Park and in the wider sub-region. The paper acknowledges the pioneering work undertaken in London, but also identifies the key issues, challenges and dilemmas involved. The paper concludes that Olympic regeneration planning has rescaled regeneration governance in London, privileging city-wide and national stakeholders. It also suggests that, rather than a process driven by corporate interests and public–private partnerships, London 2012 regeneration planning is best understood as government intervention that de-risked East London for private-sector investors.     

Assessing stakeholders’ perspectives towards the conservation of the built heritage of Suakin,Sudan

The conservation of built heritage is recognized as a vehicle for sustaining local identity and a powerful instrument for urban regeneration. The problem of how to engage local culture in this process, however, has received comparatively little attention, despite the recognition of ‘stakeholders’ and the importance of their involvement. This research examines how collaboration between stakeholders might be established to conserve and thus help regenerate the historic and largely abandoned port town of Suakin. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of Suakin’s stakeholder groups and supported through archival analysis and observational studies. The intention was to explore the stakeholders’ views of the ‘conservation drivers’, ‘conservation practice’, and ‘conservation challenges and enablers’ affecting Suakin. The stakeholders’ response provides a preliminary status to the various perspectives concerning the conservation of Suakin’s built heritage. The findings identify a number of major issues impacting Suakin’s conservation and reveal a potential for implementing a comprehensive and inclusive conservation approach. The research establishes the case for further research to determine best methods to enable stakeholders to collaboratively address the issues impacting Suakin’s conservation. This approach to stakeholder involvement represents a new step towards the conservation of Suakin and a new contribution towards the conservation process.     

Involving small landlords as a regeneration strategy under shrinkage: evidence from two East German cases

In light of ongoing shrinkage processes affecting a number of cities and regions in Europe and around the world, the planning literature has suggested a need for new planning concepts and strategies, or even a new planning paradigm. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the adaptation of the process of urban regeneration to shrinkage. Urban regeneration is a common policy in cities facing population and economic decline. However, particularly for inner-city neighbourhoods, it has not been sufficiently documented how urban regeneration responds to challenges related to shrinkage. Looking first at the evolving national policy framework and then at two local case studies, this paper identifies conditions leading to the emergence of new practices of urban regeneration in inner-city neighbourhoods in Eastern Germany. These practices are characterized by the moderate usage of public subsidies combined with ‘soft’ measures like cooperation with individual property owners and potential investors as well as place marketing.     

Paradigm Shift or Business as Usual? Workers’ Views on Multi-stakeholder Initiatives in Bangladesh

The scale of the tragedy at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,000 garment factory workers died when the building collapsed in April 2013, galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action to prevent future disasters and to acknowledge that business as usual was not an option. Prominent in these efforts were the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (hereafter the Accord) and the Alliance for Bangladesh Workers’ Safety (hereafter the Alliance), two multi-stakeholder agreements that brought global buyers together in a coordinated effort to improve health and safety conditions in the ready-made garment industry. These agreements represented a move away from the buyer-driven, compliance-based model, which hitherto dominated corporate social responsibility initiatives, to a new cooperation-based approach. The Accord in particular, which included global union federations and their local union partners as signatories and held global firms legally accountable, was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ with the potential to improve industrial democracy in Bangladesh. This article is concerned with the experiences and perceptions of workers in the Bangladesh garment industry regarding these new initiatives. It uses a purposively designed survey to explore the extent to which these initiatives brought about improvements in wages and working conditions in the garment industry, to identify where change was slowest or absent and to ask whether the initiatives did indeed represent a paradigm shift in efforts to enforce the rights of workers.     

‘Capital of Culture—you must be having a laugh!’ Challenging the official rhetoric of Liverpool as the 2008 European cultural capital

Major cultural events are increasingly seen by local stakeholders as important opportunities to stimulate urban regeneration, city branding and economic development. The European Capital of Culture programme is a prominent example. Since 1985 over thirty cities have hosted the title and today it remains a highly sought-after prize. This paper analyses competing interpretations of the success of Liverpool's hosting of the European Capital of Culture in 2008. It unpacks contrasting views of Liverpool08, from the official triumphant message of urban regeneration and economic renaissance to more critical analyses that problematise important elements of the event and its social and spatial impacts. In so doing, it challenges the hyperbole of culture-led transformation to reveal different geographies of culture, different cultural experiences and different socio-economic realities; it also offers an additional cultural reading of Liverpool in 2008. Through the example of Liverpool this paper shows how local culture is politicised, manipulated and sanitised in order to stimulate urban regeneration and construct a spatial re-branding of the city.     

The governance of urban indigenous spaces: Norwegian Sámi examples

How do different ways of governing urban indigenous social spaces facilitate or frustrate local indigenous self-government? A major challenge in Norway is the absence of actors that represent the entire local indigenous population. The main Norwegian Sámi NGO is a driving force in establishing and governing indigenous spaces, but is now one of several and often competing organizations due to specialization (new organizations form to promote specific subgroups' interests) and partisanization (organizations compete in elections to the Sámediggi representative organ). Social media facilitate communication across organizational divides, but do not produce any unified local indigenous “voice”. Private businesses and public cultural institutions take part in establishing and governing indigenous spaces – the former often in complete autonomy from Sámi NGOs, the latter more likely to seek cooperation or coordination. Local and regional state-based actors generally do not take initiatives to establish indigenous spaces, but involve themselves as co-organizers with Sámi leads and as sources of (often unstable) economic support. The state-based Sámediggi is increasingly proactive: financing, facilitating contact between actors, and occasionally participating directly in urban indigenous governance. The Sámediggi provides a unifying representative voice at the macro level that is missing at the local level.     

Local and territorial determinants in the realization of public–private–partnerships: an empirical analysis for Italian provinces

ABSTRACT

Relational networks and intangible factors are crucial elements for the competitiveness of a territory. Public–Private–Partnerships (PPPs), in particular, allow for the provision of goods and services that favour the exploitation of complementarities between public and private resources. They aim at promoting an increase in the overall efficiency of investment projects through a complex mechanism that distributes risk and revenues among stakeholders. This paper examines the local and territorial determinants of PPPs through an econometric analysis based upon Italian municipal data, grouped at the provincial level. Using a tobit model, we analyse the relationship between the realization of successful PPP initiatives and different sets of factors, including less analysed local and territorial determinants. We stress the role of the local management of infrastructure assets, the administrative efficiency of local authorities and the diffusion of previous local development initiatives. Local management and territorial context factors explain most of the occurrence of successful PPP initiatives in the pre-crisis period while usual determinants (infrastructure endowment and financial distress) display a weaker effect.     

Managing Conservation of the Built Heritage in Post‐socialist Budapest: Evidence from the Old Jewish Quarter

Like other Eastern European countries, Hungary has undergone processes of societal and economic restructuring since 1990. This has given rise to a changed cultural‐political context shaped by forces such as (re)privatisation, strengthening of local government and growth of civil movements. This has led to new opportunities as well as challenges for managing conservation of the built heritage. In Budapest, protection of the built heritage is achieved either through state protection of outstanding ‘monuments’ or through conservation objectives dictated by planning authorities within a two‐tiered local government system. These different levels of conservation authority can sometimes lead to conflicting approaches, as in the case of recent urban renewal in the Old Jewish Quarter. This paper examines the approach to urban conservation taken in Budapest at the various official levels, as well as organised initiatives by the voluntary sector in the light of post‐socialism and associated cultural change.     

‘A NEW SEASON FOR PLANNING’: URBAN GARDENING AS INFORMAL PLANNING IN ROME

This article investigates the relationship between urban gardening and planning by building upon the results of field research on gardening initiatives in the city of Rome, Italy. The work is aimed at suggesting that, while often associated in geography and planning literature with urban informality practices (e.g. accidental city or self‐made urbanism), urban gardening actually presents the character of a distinctive form of people's interaction with urban space, here defined as “informal planning”. This includes practices that are intentionally put forward by local dwellers with the intention of urban space planning and organizing public life in the absence of legal definition, guidance and funds provided by public authorities or the private sector. Urban gardening cases in Rome exemplify the emergence of informal planning and show how, by questioning the counterplanning tradition that understands urban gardening as an antagonist spatial practice opposing institutional planning, informal planning can open up collaborative possibilities. A new mode of interaction between citizens' agency and the formal planning initiatives of local administration can lead to creative solutions to address some of the problems associated with the neoliberal transformation of the city space, most notably the decrease in public space and its deterioration.