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When activism meets radical politics – landscape planning as a catalyst for transformative change
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Planning for radical change has been conceptualized in different ways. A number of strong manifestos for change have been drawn up – for reconsidering the absolute faith in economic growth (Mishan, 1967; Hamilton, 2004), for living inter-culturally (Landry, 2000; Sandercock, 1998, 2003), for creating a more sustainable society (Sachs and Esteva, 2003), for social mobilization (Friedmann 1987), for an urban political ecology (Heynen et al., 2005), for recapturing democracy (Purcell, 2008) and for a more radical planning (Albrechts, 2013, 2015). In the vast literature that has been produced on approaches, forms and contents of radical planning, to our knowledge, there are no examples that discuss planning experiences developed by regional governments inspired by program guidelines explicitly aimed at countering neoliberalism (see also Purcell, 2009 on resisting neoliberalization).Published versio
Тhe praxis of creating leitbilder (guiding visions) for spatial planning projects in metropolitan Zurich
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017When we think about the future, we automatically conjure up images in our minds. These images can and will shape our future actions. Visions of the future are closely linked to the particular ideals held by each individual and must be seen as closely linked to the associated current technological possibilities (Foraita 2013). Visions of the future also arise with respect to the spatial development of regions and cities. Since the 1950s, visions of how cities and regions should further evolve have increasingly been defined by public-sector experts on architecture and spatial planning, and then documented in so-called Leitbilder (Giesel 2007).publishedVersio
Impacts of the new urban lease law and the nonregular resident tax regime on housing affordability and urban regeneration in Lisbon’s historic centre
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The adoption of the euro accelerated the dependent financialisation of the Portuguese economy, which remained structurally backward despite its integration into global finance. The flow of foreign credit towards the real estate, infrastructure, and construction sectors since the mid-nineties fueled the suburban expansion of Lisbon and the abandonment of its historic centre until the crisis of 2008. After the collapse of that model of urban development, Lisbon's historic centre became a space of opportunity for global real estate investment offering high profitabilities in the international short-term-rental and premium markets. With thousands of abandoned dwellings and tenants paying very low rents, the rent gap of the historic centre was enormous. Since many residents of that territory were tenants paying controlled rents, it became necessary to change the lease regime in order to rapidly and easily evict them and let investors engage in the transformation of the area. The new urban lease regime liberalised the rental market and triggered the actualisation of rents above the capacity of many tenants in a context of rising demand for rental housing and strong austerity policies ―and evictions multiplied. The non-regular resident tax regime was implemented by the Portuguese government to attract foreign high-skilled professionals and pensioners. Under this special regime, foreign citizens benefit from a reduced flat personal income tax rate of 20% and any pension income generated abroad is totally tax exempt ―even when not taxed in the country of origin. As a corollary, housing supply for conventional use has dropped significantly and prices have increased dramatically in the historic centre as tourist apartments proliferate and foreign investors multiply. Urban regeneration fuelled by tourism and international investment has not stopped the loss of residents in this area, while the impossibility for many locals to find affordable housing there constitutes a worrying outcome of Lisbon's commodification. Keywords: gentrification, commodification, touristification, austerity, public policy, PortugalPublished versio
Dealing with opposition in partnership development processes
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017This article reflects findings from action research approached PhD case study, that highlights the need for legitimate planning and leadership functions to succeed in partnership development processes. The study focuses on a particular case of partnership development among actors from the public, private, and volunteer sectors. This case initially concerned a 9-year-longitudinal process of developing a community arts center in a rural region of Western Norway. One of the main findings of this research identifies the political oppositional challenges such a process faces through its different stages, actual challenges that threaten the vital legitimacy of planning and leadership functions all the way. The paper contributes important knowledge, insights and awareness to those dealing with related partnership development processes.Published versio
Global south planning: from war to wars
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Not because of the various number of armed conflicts that are happening in Brazil related to land distribution, indigenous rights, social justice or many others issues, nor because European refugees, financial and democratic crisis nor because USA intervention on Middle East and north American racial struggles that created the Black Lives Matters Movement nor because another similar issues in countries around the world, nor even because protests in city streets in Cairo, Athens, Madrid, etc. since 2008 financial crisis; war is the politics that became the paradigm of internal and external relations by nation states around the globe because war is a modus operandi that always has been used as a politic since the beginning of the foundations of these very own nations and states. Disguised and/or underestimated by media and even theoretical and political thought as just “conflicts”, what is visible is that a war keeps continuing as the exercise of politics. And when this concept of war and politics is thought in an urban planning context, it serves to maintain the political dimension of everyday life impenetrable to disruptive and constitutional forces.Published versio
Local planning instruments - if only we knew how to play
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017We know little about how the implementation of planning instruments are communicated to the members of the community by the planning profession in terms of complexity of language and process, power relationships and how this impacts upon an individual’s ability to engage as an active citizen in the development assessment process. In order to create more value for community engagement in the development assessment process, we need to better understand how local planning instruments are perceived by members of a community in terms of ease of navigation, interpretation and application to development proposals. It is particularly in the role of community as submitters to a development application that these perceptions may be best explored as it is an opportunity for non-planners to interact with planning instruments perhaps for the first time. This paper will discuss the type and nature of submissions made by non-planners to development applications within two case studies and identify barriers to non-planners effectively participating in planning discussions and decision-making about development applications. The research will undertake data collection and content analysis of six (6) submissions from each case against development proposals within a regional city context. The content analysis will aim to match the de-identified public submissions with what the planning profession considers valid urban and regional planning grounds expressed in local statutory planning instruments. This will help to ascertain the submitters’ effectiveness in understanding and applying the local planning instrument to the site specific issue that has ignited the active citizenship response. The paper will seek to answer questions about what is the engagement framework within which submitters can participate in planning, how are planning schemes navigated, applied and interpreted by non-planners lodging submissions to proposed development and what knowledge and skills do community members need to participate in the development assessment process as submitters ? challenges in cooperation process between different stakeholders involved in urban regeneration.Published versio
Transnational urban design firms and local implications for planning
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017International architects and urban designers are considered to be crucial for creating new urban projects and more generally for growth. Indeed, transnational firms tend, to provide complex packages of services that reassure investors and politicians, often by elaborating positive narratives such as sustainability or the smart city. By following strategies for being highly distinctive (star architects) or highly reliable (corporate-like) in the global market, design firms are now widely used by developers and investors to package and legitimize their projects. This may occur without any specific reference to local planning processes. Design firms have grown into multinationals with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of employees and they work in multiple cities sharing the same (standardized) knowledge, technologies and, most importantly, similar planning solutions that are ostensibly replicable. Public opinion and the media seem more interested in the narrative (or the technologies, or the esthetics, or the persona) than the actual urban project. In this way solutions are more and more often depicted as merely technical matters, depoliticized and privatized by developers or ad hoc local planning agencies. By investigating two critical examples of firms working on multiple continents (i.e. one star-firm Foster+Partners and one less famous, Broadway Malyan), this chapter will show that these transnational firms can operate in the absence of local planning powers (e.g. in emerging Asian countries or the Middle East), eventually be out of touch with the local physical and functional context and instrumentally use the specificities of given urban places. In the end this serves pro-growth local players. It seems important to understand these strategies and their implications for local planning, since the work of transnational design firms is becoming more and more relevant for many global and second tier cities in Asia and the Americas, as well as in Europe.Published versio
Planning theory, a ‘deconstructionist-turn’: Аre we there yet?
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017Deconstruction’ is the attractive Derridean project, which he describes as ‘the opening of the future itself…’. Deconstruction destabilizes inherited concepts and traditions, towards ‘…what remains to be thought …[that]… cannot be thought within the present’. Interestingly, it has established an ‘awkward’ interaction with the city design and planning through architecture theory and practice. It has simultaneously flirted with planning theory in reflection to the institution: ‘dark side’ of practice and the design-process: the planning model (see Allmendigerand Gunder 2005). However, it remained on the periphery of the developed debate.Published versio
The right to the city in times of biopolitics – tactical urbanism in a transition program
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The city is the greatest field of action of capitalism, but also the most possible field of resistance to it. Capitalism and urbanization feedback in a process where the former is always expanding, producing and concentrating geographically and socially its surplus in the city. Harvey (2014) points out that to think of an alternative form of urbanization, it is necessary to build possibilities for an anti-capitalist turn, thus pointing to the urgency of recognizing the common and its potency. And it suggests that this route of escape must start from a convergence between the microcosm of the body and the macro space of globalization, two important topics of the current neoliberal phase of capitalism. This convergence can be achieved in the affirmation of human and individual rights, a perspective that reinforces the importance of the concept of the right to the city, developed in the 1960s by Lefebvre (2016). A more collective right than individual, which encompasses all other human rights, claiming the participation of all in the construction and use of space and urban life. Thinking about the global world has made it possible to recognize a common world with which to worry, to produce, to appropriate, and which is shared by all. For Hardt & Negri (2016), the idea of 'common' was also potentialized with the understanding of the concept of biopolitics, whose subjectivities will always be produced by apparatus of power, whether of the sovereignty of the Empire or the resistance of the multitude. Thus, the 'right to the city' is considered as a strategy of transition from the current urban situation of the cities towards a situation of justice, of full realization of the common well-being. For the institutional redesign, necessary for this transition, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2003) argues that, besides state and formal law, the forms of informal and unofficial law that he attributes to 'subaltern cosmopolitan legality' must also be considered. And to avoid wasting social experiences that seek to declare and exercise the rights that matter to them.Published versio
Articulating nature, culture and urbanization: an experience of metropolitan planning in Belo Horizonte
No full textBook of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017The Trama Verde e Azul, blue and green network, or simply TVA, is one of the main territorial structuring dimensions of regional/metropolitan planning adopted for the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Region - RMBH, Southeast Brazil. Developed as a result of a bottom up participatory planning process and inspired by international as well as local green infrastructure and river restoration programs, the TVA proposal seeks to articulate nature, culture and urbanization, through the combination of a series conservation units, open spaces, community facilities and other environmental and cultural assets, all connected by a water system of rivers, streams and lakes, and focusing on planning strategies for land use control, organic and family agriculture, ecologic tourism and ecosystem service delivery programs, among others. This paper discusses the extent to which these metropolitan planning strategies may lead to social and environment transformation towards justice, focusing on TVA implementation, highlighting zoning categories, design criteria and other planning and community involvement programs being collectively built through a rich but very contentious combination of statutory instruments and negotiation strategies involving stakeholders, public officials, planners and policy makers.Published versio