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The urban design review in the process of urban renewal: a case study of Zhongshan road historic block
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Historical districts are important components of urban image and urban quality carrying the core content and significant material of urban history and culture. As the policy Chinese Economic Reform: Reform and Opening-up is implemented for more than 30 years, accompanying with the blossom of national economy, the national government are attaching more attention to revitalising the urban cultural heritage, as evidenced by the continuous policy and fund support devoted to the protection and regeneration of historic blocks. However, in the process of concrete implementation, there are emerging some negative phenomena damaging urban image and cultural heritage such as excessive similarity in urban form and construction of fake relics, due to the deviations in the understanding of historical and cultural heritage protection, extreme market-oriented thinking and mechanised mode of operation and many other factors, resulting in the frustrating reconstruction of the historic railway stations in Qingdao and Jinan, which rebuilt the sites imitating the original architecture after the reasonless demolition. As a consequence, during the period of urban renewal, the historical characteristics of the neighbourhood should be taken into consideration, the precise analysis on the historical background and development pattern of the blocks is worth deliberating, and accurate orientation of historic districts are of vital importance as well, so that the development of the traditional historic districts will be in better integration with the development path of modern city, for the sake of promoting the sustainable development of the city.Published versio
Resilience assessment tool for public space regeneration
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The reacting capacity of a territorial system to multiple stresses can be described as its “resilience”. It expresses the ability of a system to absorb, recover from and successfully adapt to stressing circumstances. To make cities more resilient to natural disaster risks, international initiatives, such as the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030), recommend the application of risk management measures and procedures, and stress the importance of preserving and safeguarding cultural heritage as a key element of safe, inclusive, sustainable and resilient cities. Urban planning and regeneration can be opportunity to design safe and resilient public spaces according to risk management, enhancing the overall city resilience to natural disaster risks. In this work, we develop a methodology to assess resilience to natural disaster risk in cities and public spaces, allowing the integration of risk management into ordinary planning tools. We identify which are the drivers that make cities and public spaces resilient to natural disaster risks, adopting a systemic approach that interprets cities as complex, dynamic, self-organizing systems, continuously changing under the pressure of perturbing factors caused by internal processes or external factors. A set of drivers (4), driver descriptors (15) and sub-drivers (36) were identified. A single sub-driver was associated to one or more phases of disaster risk management and to one or more goals of resilience. The method allows to overcome the sectorial approaches of territorial management through an integrated decision support tool for resilience-oriented planning. Particular attention was posed to the role of cultural heritage because it enhances the sense of belonging to the place and thus can enhance the response of citizens to adverse natural events. The territory of the Ischia Island, in Southern Italy, was identified as a suitable case study for future testing of the methodology. In Ischia, the presence of natural and cultural heritage coupled with the exposure to many natural hazards (seismic, volcanic, landslide, coastal erosion and marine inundation), and the intensive urbanization, could favor the validation of the methodology here proposed.Published versio
From informal to formal public space: the organization and institutional transformation of tactical urbanism movement in San
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Tactical Urbanism (TU) has become a force in urban design which cannot be ignored. Its representative is a new approach in requesting new types of public space which have changed the traditionally top-down, long-term planning process to bottom-up, action-oriented experiments to improve the public realm. TU is implemented by different sectors with different motives, but the ultimate goal of TU is the same: trying to improve the built environment with some low cost, fast, flexible installations to test the outcomes of the intervention. There are growing attention on the social media and the internet about the transformation of the unutilized streets or spaces, such as the too wide sidewalks or vacuum parking lot. Through the simple intervention such as putting some tables and chairs for the public to rest, landscaping the parking lot to be an attractive site of the neighbourhood, etc. The collective name of these activities called “Tactical Urbanism.” These small activities can enhance the people’s quality of life and well-being. Its impact on urban design is increasing, and thus more and more people pay attention to this movement. Although the outcome of the TU is obvious (e.g. better public realm), few people know the mechanism of it and its background. TU is not a sudden occurrence but an outcome of some movements in the U.S. (e.g. Play Street, Open Street, Guerilla Gardening, Pop-up Retail, Pop-up Cafe). It has many different forms in different cities, but the spirit of it remains the same.Published versio
If neoliberalism is everything, maybe is it nothing? Questioning neoliberal ideology in spatial policies and projects
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Neoliberalism is held to be the dominant and pervasive economic policy agenda of our times, a powerful and expansive political rationality of class domination and exploitation, the manifestation of ‘capital resurgent’. Anderson describes it as ‘the most successful ideology in world history’ (Anderson 2000, 17). This paper tries to demonstrate how the new development project Milano Sesto in the metropolitan city of Milan, Italy – an ongoing large-scale development project of housing, retail, offices, and public services, symbolically built on former Falck steelwork industrial areas – can’t be understood as one of the embodiment of current pervasive neoliberal planning practice of the Western societies. Using this example, it is argued that contemporary transformation projects – and in particular large scale urban development projects – are the epitome of a set of contradictory processes, but cannot be understood as an example of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. North East Milan is a particularly complex spatial context, one of the former heartlands of western European Fordism which experienced a significant level of deindustrialization and a reconfiguration of production at the local scale, with the crisis of the Fordist mass production system. In the ‘90s, North East Milan was also subject to an intensive process of tertiarization, triggered by decline in the manufacturing sector and exacerbating some of the structural change processes already initiated in previous years. With a densely populated and infrastructure territory, North East Milan is currently facing a second round of economic restructuring following the economic shock caused by the global financial crisis in 2008.The paper reflects the change of an established sector of the urban region to grasp the socio spatial relation and dynamics that characterized the geography of North East Milan during three main, intertwined, phases of capitalist development: - the long phase of growth and urban expansion; - the season of the Fordist crisis and the subsequent economic restructuring; - the current cycle of economic and spatial shrinkage after the 2008 global crisis. The paper analyses the different construction processes and treatment of problems that define the space of public policies and private transformation projects, questioning if it can be identified as neoliberal planning project.Published versio
Тhe gated community in China: ethics and the pattern of settlement
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Recognized as a global phenomenon, the gated community has provoked heated discussions from various perspectives, including social, political, economic, anthropological, and geographical ones. Particularly due to the obvious spatial demarcation and social segregation embodied by the fortress-like forms, the socialspatial aftermath of gated community, has become the major focus of those multidisciplinary debates. Moreover in the practical world, despite the fact that the gated communities, have embraced unprecedented levels of prevalence, pervasion and variety, notably in China where such patterns have become the standard form of contemporary residential development and widely welcomed by all social classes and groups, it has been gradually noticed that the predominant gated communities in China have raised other public issues than social and spatial segregation, such as the greatly reduced land-use efficiency, the restricted transportation network and the negative impact on the well-being of public spaces (Huang and Feng, 2008; Wang, 2010; Wang, 2014). Under such circumstances, Chinese government has officially announced the reforms of the current urban residential wards in China by gradually removing the gates of the contemporary gated communities and “danwei” (work-unit compounds), which has inevitably provoked a variety of controversies (Liu, 2016).Published versio
Chinese experience in delta cities: to what extent does Guangzhou city`s spatial planning system facilitate the initiatives in resolving flood risk?
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Spatial planning is supposed to denote innovations in resolving flood risk. However, taking spatial action is never an easy task. This study aims to explicate the reasons for this difficulty by illustrating why the urban flood risk mitigation is struggling to be tackled of locally despite the growing flood risk in delta cities. It does so by investigating the recognition of flood risk in the spatial planning system. Specifically, Guangzhou, a city located in the Pearl River Delta and vulnerable to fluvial, pluvial and coastal flooding, is taken as an example in this research. By using the method framing analysis, the paper finds that the road to face the flood risk in Guangzhou is still at an emerging process from informal activities to formal legislation. With a pace changing from a dedicated to an integral issue, there is an appeal for a combination between nature-based options and engineering options. In spit of these progress, there is still a mismatch between this policy intent and real practitioners. Due to the weak sense of identity in flood-proof initiatives among practitioners, the road toward a more resilient city is challenging.Published versio
Governing urban regeneration: planning and regulatory tools in the UK
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The PARCOUR (Public Accountability to Residents in Contractual Urban Redevelopment)1 project involves a comparative analysis of urban development (of previously used land) led by public-private partnerships and includes nine case studies (three per country) of regeneration projects in Brazil, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK). This paper draws on the initial work of the project and investigates the forms of governance arrangements that have developed in the UK case studies (Bristol, Gloucester and Taunton). The paper discusses the planning and regulatory instruments that are used as part of the public-private urban development partnerships. The research is designed to explore the form(s) of governance that exist, the associated ‘planning instruments’ developed and whether these arrangements are able to deliver outcomes that are in the ‘public interest’. In particular we focus on how the governance forms created when contractual arrangements are made between the public and private sector parties structure/influence the aims and delivery of urban regeneration. This relates to what van der Veen and Korthals Altes (2011) have termed as ‘government by contract’ and Raco (2012 and 2013) has described as ‘planning by contract’ and ‘governance through detail’.Published versio
Climate adaptation in regional planning in Germany
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The legal basis of the German spatial planning system is the Federal Planning Act (Raumordnungsgesetz des Bundes, ROG), which defines the core task of spatial planning to be the “anticipatory, comprehensive, supra-local and cross-sectoral organisation of the spatial and settlement structure for the medium and long term” (ARL, 2005, p. 965). Within the German planning system, regional planning is the intermediate level of comprehensive planning, bridging the (political) frameworks of the national level, sectoral planning and the (practical) implementation at the local level. It concretises the aims and guiding principles of comprehensive spatial planning of the national and federal-state level for all planning regions and prepares regional plans in accordance with § 8 (1) no. 2 ROG. Due to regional planning’s comprehensive, supra-local and yet spatially-specific character, it is qualified for addressing impacts of climate change. This becomes especially valuable in the light of absence of a separate sectoral planning division responsible for considering climatic changes (ARL, 2013; BMVBS, 2009; Federal Government, 2008).Published versio
Tourism invasion? Study on the functional transformation of dwellings and population loss of local residents in Venice historic center
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Venice is the capital city of the Veneto region of northeastern Italy, with its main island isolated from the Adriatic Sea and surrounded by a vast shallow water area called the lagoon. In 1987, the main island of Venice and its lagoon area as a whole was assessed the world's natural and cultural heritage by UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). What makes Venice unique is that it is not only a living city built on water with the ancient medieval urban layout, but it also remains plenty of well-preserved gorgeous palaces, brilliant churches as well as a huge number of architecture in different times and different styles. Unique tourism experience on water has brought high reputation to the historic city of Venice, while problems related to the excessive tourism population have occurred at the same time. With the prosperity of the tourism industry, social problems like the inflation of prices, gentrification, depopulation, high rate of vacant dwellings has greatly threatened the living condition for aboriginals and the conservation of historic dwellings in the main island of Venice. What’s worse, these problems could even interact each other to form a vicious circle. During the fifteen years from 1991 to 2005, the industries of Venice were shrinking in all sectors except for construction, hotels, banking and insurance, and academic research, which are all served for the tourism industry more or less Da Mosto, 2009. In this context, the employment rate of local residents has been continuously declining and thus their incomes are not enough to support the purchase of dwellings. As of 2011, the number of residents living in the historic center (main island) has been dropped to less than 60,000 people, nearly One-third of the population of the 1950sPublished versio
Collaboration in planning: the geodesign approach
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Planning literature proposes different paradigms (Khakee, 1998) for interpreting the concept of public participation in spatial planning, ranging from early advocacy planning approaches (Davidoff, 1965) to more recent communicative ones (Innes, 1995). Different approaches highlight different perspectives on participation, including expression of pluralist community views, preferences, and values, creation of better knowledge, better transparency, and more consensus in decision making. While the Arnstein’s Ladder (1969) can be still considered a reliable model to describe different degree of participation, ranging from none to full citizen control, most recent studies propose its revised application to the realm of current digital practices in spatial planning (Kingston, 1998; Carver, 2001). As shown in figure 1, Kingston (1998) and Carver (2001) argue that the highest levels of participation are achieved when citizens are actively involved in designing possible alternatives and in making decisions. However, the latter models did not contribute much to clarifying how public participation intervenes within the different phases of a planning process. Indeed, the contribution of the local community, or the people of the place (Steinitz, 2012) can affect different stages and tasks of the process: local knowledge can be collected to integrate with expert surveys, aimed at the description of the current state of the environment and of the ongoing territorial dynamics; the interests and needs of the citizens can be encoded in risk and/or suitability analyses aimed at guiding the design of future alternatives; or members of the local community can collaborate to propose changes, to assess their impacts and eventually take part to decision-making. Having a clear framework in mind can help everyone to better understand these facets and possibly to better understand the opportunities and functioning of public participation in spatial planning, design, and decision-making.Published versio