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Abstract Book 5th World Planning Schools Congress 16th Asian Planning Schools Association Congress Bali, Indonesia - 29 Aug - 2 Sept 2022
No full textWith the theme “Planning A Global Village: Inclusion, Innovation, and Disruption”, the congress will bring together several relevant and important issues that challenge planning notions and practices. Recent trends, however, indicate the dramatic and significant shift from the traditional approach of seeing things for granted to ‘disruptive innovation.’ It splintered into many aspects of individuals and communities, including planning and design.publishedVersio
Dwelling Decay : Housing Crisis, Urban Institutionalism and its Understanding of the Qualitative Shortage past, present and Future of Chile's Urban Housing Policy for the Improvement of Quality and Social Integration (2006 -2021)
Get PDFSince 2006, Chilean housing policy has undergone a paradigm shift by focusing its attention on improving the quality of the urban housing stock. At that time, it was considered that the quantitative housing shortage had a certain degree of control from the state and institutions, with a sustained decrease compared to the Latin American context. However, since 2017, the housing shortage has shown a worrying increase, currently reaching its highest point since the return to democracy in the 1990s.
With a current housing shortage of 739,603 dwellings, representing almost 12% of the total national housing shortage and affecting almost 2.2 million people, 12% of the national population, there is talk of a new housing crisis in Chile.
Migratory and economic crises and the current COVID-19 pandemic add to the various factors that attempt to explain this increase in the housing shortage. However, this crisis is not only a housing shortage crisis, but also a crisis of quality and the persistence of housing and urban environment decay, which, despite an institutional policy to improve urban and housing quality that has been in existence for two decades, has not managed to reduce the gap. In this sense, the current housing shortage can be understood not only from the perspective of the quantity of missing housing, but also as a crisis exacerbated by the quality of the housing and urban stock built. In this sense, institutional factors have not been particularly highlighted as possible causes or aggravators of the housing conflict, in the sense of understanding how the institutional framework has perceived the urban decay and housing shortages.
This article seeks to analyse how the Chilean urban-housing institutional framework has been modelling, through plans and programmes, its Urban Housing Policy of Improving the Quality and Social Integration of Chile, in the period between 2006, the year of the paradigmatic shift from housing quantity to housing quality, and 2021, when the housing shortage crisis was declared, as a way of understanding from where the institutions have epistemologically positioned themselves to generate the response to the housing shortage, with special emphasis on the quality shortage.
It is hypothesised that Chilean urban and housing institutions, through their policy of quality improvement, have shifted the focus from subsidiarity to the understanding of housing deterioration, reflecting in interventions that, although they have a narrative in line with the search for quality, are based on proposals of extreme social targeting and lack of territorial relevance, the same principle under which the model of mass housing construction was developed in previous decades. Through documentary and bibliographic analysis, the history of Chile's Urban Housing Policy of Improving Quality and Social Integration is reconstructed, under which a series of programmes and plans have been organised to address the qualitative urban-housing shortage. This historiographic analysis allows us to understand where the Chilean institutional framework has been situated to address the quality shortage of its existing urban-housing stock, through various milestones of the national housing policy that reveal conflicts, rigidity, and institutional centralism, which in turn hinder the recognition of cultural and territorial diversity in the interventions.
This article, as part of an ongoing doctoral research, hopes to be a contribution to the critical review of the policy of qualitative housing shortage, given that Chile has been a reference at the international level with its subsidised policy of access to social housing in previous times and that today, in the context of a new global housing crisis, the institutional responses address the crisis not only as a matter of quantity, but also in a comprehensive manner
Facilitating the Smooth Transition of Second-Year XJTLU Students into Planning Programmes at the University Of Liverpool: Results and Reflections from an Ongoing Series of Interventions
Get PDFTransactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Vol. 5 No. 2 (2021): Changing Contexts for Planning Education; 113-130Increasingly internationalised student cohorts within planning schools offer opportunities to enhance existent student learning, but may also present potential issues, such as language difficulties, cultural disorientation, and the need to assimilate learning styles, internationalise curricula, and varying pedagogic teaching styles, all of which can impact staffing and costs. In 2016 the Department of Planning and Geography at the University of Liverpool obtained a Learning & Teaching (T&L) Award to develop projects examining the potential for a more meaningful learning experience for undergraduate students transitioning to Liverpool from XJTLU – the university’s sister institution in Suzhou, China. This intervention primarily sought to promote complementary understanding of British and Chinese planning at XJTLU and UoL to facilitate improved academic attainment for XJTLU students completing their studies in Liverpool. Evaluating those aspects of the intervention focused on additional contact and one-to-one guidance for students, this paper reflects on this project and develops recommendations on managing the process of student transfer as well as ensuring that the planning discipline integrates “soft skills” more effectively in its teaching
Higher Education Futures? Reflections on Covid-19, Digitalization, and Gen Z Expectations
Get PDFTransactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Vol. 5 No. 2 (2021): Changing Contexts for Planning Education; page 85-94Predicting the future is a difficult and inexact business and, generally, humans are more prone to focus on immediate problems and short-term problem-solving rather than long-range planning. In fact, long-range forecasts are tricky and often rendered wrong due to catalytic events. The dramatic changes in teaching, learning, and conducting research that have seemingly catapulted Higher Education (HE) institutions into a new modus operandi over the past 24 months are a case in point. Who would have predicted that higher education would be conducted by a great many institutions almost entirely virtually and over sustained amounts of time? That academics would teach from their homes lecturing to a screen of black boxes and images? That students would do fieldwork virtually via video, embedded questions and tasks, and that the practice of research teams discussing progress and findings in person would practically vanish
The circular economy in urban projects: A case study analysis of current practices and tools
No full textTransactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Volume 5 / Issue 1 / June 2021; page 71-83Over the last decade, the concept of the circular economy (CE) has gained momentum among practitioners, politicians, and scholars because of its promise of achieving sustainability goals. However, there is still a need to demonstrate and assess the positive environmental impacts of the CE. With respect to the building sector, the CE is still a relatively new topic. To date, research has tended to focus primarily on the macro-scale (cities or eco-parks) and the micro-scale (manufactured products or construction materials). Nevertheless, the often-neglected built environment is also expected to play a crucial role in the transition towards a CE due to its high contribution to various environmental burdens. This paper contributes to this growing area of research by reviewing four cases of ‘circular neighbourhood’ projects in Europe. First, a conceptual framework analysis is defined and applied to the cases. Second, CE initiatives and actions are identified and classified using interviews and document analysis. Third, the use of assessment tools within these CE projects is investigated. The results demonstrate a diverse representation of the CE paradigm and the growing role played by the assessment tools
Retrofitting, repurposing and re-placing A multi-media exploration of occupation in Cape Town, South Africa
No full textplaNext-Next Generation Planning Vol. 11 (2021) : Planning Theories from the Global South 144-165The vast majority of city planning literature on informal occupations has focused on how residents occupy vacant and peripheral land, developing informal structures to address their basic needs. A smaller body of work, but one with much purchase in South Africa, explores the informal occupation of existing formal structures and how residents infuse these emergent places with social and political meaning. Across this work, occupations represent a dominant mode of city-building in the Global South. Contributing to this debate on city-making and occupations, this paper departs from an unusual case of South African occupation. We explore how displaced people have occupied a multi-storey vacant hospital building situated close to Cape Town’s city centre. Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’. We show that, through processes of repairing, repurposing, and renovating, dwellers have retrofit an institutional building, previously designed by the state for a very different use, to meet their needs and desires. As cities become more densely built and vacant land more peripheral or scarce, the retrofit of underutilised buildings, particularly through bottom-up actions such as occupation, will become an increasingly important mode of urban development. Not only are the practices of material transformation useful to understand, so too are the ways in which occupations reflect significantly more than simply survivalist strategies, but also care and meaning-making
City-county consolidation and the (re)conceptualisation of urban-rural planning: A comparative study of Taichung city and Tainan city, Taiwan
Get PDFTransactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Volume 5 / Issue 1 / June 2021; page 23-39The Taiwanese central government views city-county consolidations as an effective method to strengthen national competitiveness and to balance regional development. But for local governments, consolidation presents a series of planning challenges, especially in relation to the reconstruction of planning concepts and discourses in their new territories. Aiming to understand the process, this study first proposes a typology of regional planning concepts as a conceptual tool to explore whether and how the consolidated governments (re)construct their urban-rural planning concepts, and then it examines the factors that may influence (re)conceptualisation through a comparative study of Taichung City and Tainan City. The research results show that overemphasis on using the concept of competitive city regionalism to balance regional development at the national level may lead to a widening of rural-urban disparities at regional and local levels
Housing systems in the Global South : The relevance of the ‘social housing’ approach in meeting housing needs
Get PDFplaNext-Next Generation Planning Vol. 11 (2021) : Planning Theories from the Global South 166-183This paper addresses the problem of accessing decent and affordable housing in the Global South, where the housing need is, in general, more problematic than in the Global North. The paper first identifies five distinctive characteristics of housing systems in the Global South as compared to those in the Global North. These include: (a) the diverse facets of global financialization; (b) the role of the developmentalist state; (c) the importance of informality; (d) the decisive role of the family; and (e) the rudimentary welfare systems. Given these features, the paper reflects on the concept and practices of social housing, particularly their appropriateness to deal with the housing problem in the Global South. The paper then addresses the question of whether the social housing approach is relevant for solving the contemporary housing needs in the Global South. It argues that social housing, redefined to better encompass the distinctive characteristics of housing systems in the Global South, is indeed a useful policy approach and can play a decisive role in satisfying unmet housing needs. Such an approach needs to take into account the great role of informality and family support systems and develop appropriate funding instruments and modes of institutionalization protecting housing rights and the quality of life
Imagining the City of Tomorrow Through Foresight and Innovative Design: Towards the Regeneration of Urban Planning Routines?
Get PDFTransactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning; Volume 5 / Issue 1 / June 2021; page 40-54Ecological and digital transitions alongside concerns over social inequalities have signalled the advent of complex new challenges for contemporary cities. These challenges raise issues pertaining to the dynamic capability of urban planners: more specifically, their ability to revise their tools and planning routines in urban projects. New paradigms of collective action for the transition towards innovative cities have been developed in large organisations. European companies, especially in public transportation, have developed such tools based on innovative design theories. One of these methodological tools, the Definition-Knowledge-Concept-Proposition (DKCP) process, was used to generate a new range of planning options for an urban district in Montreal, Canada. For many municipal organisations, the formulation of innovative ideas only concerns one stage of the process, represented by the ‘P’ phase. However, innovative routines should rather include the earlier phases of identifying the scope of possible innovations, the search for intriguing knowledge and disruptive design activities. The desire to tackle the complex challenges of 21st century cities has led to a new professional identity: the ‘innovative urban planner’
Gentrifying the Brazilian city? Convergences and divergences in urban studies
Get PDFplaNext-Next Generation Planning Vol. 11 (2021) : Planning Theories from the Global South 184-192There is a growing number of processes in Brazilian cities that have been identified as gentrification. However, the classic definition of gentrification as a process of transformation of existing urban housing stocks by new homeowners with a higher socio-economic profile poses challenges to understand recent empirical data coming from Brazil and the Global South more generally. Instead of dismissing them as deviant cases, this paper challenges the Northern empirical foundations of gentrification theory and calls for a new methodological approach to both classic and new cases that take into consideration its contextualization. This new framework for gentrification research is based on necessary dimensions that identify the production of gentrifiable space as the initial condition to the process of socioeconomic change with displacement in which built-environment upgrades constitute one of its most visible feature. These dimensions are present in each and every case, bounding the concept and operationalizing research, while local mediating forces make gentrification context-specific. Therefore, urban studies on gentrification. Should understand and explore the nature of these differences, in a return to in-depth studies and empirical research, opening spaces for de-centering positions and building theory from multiple positionalities