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Green Infrastructure: from benefits to planning
No full textThe increase of urban land use and in general human activities lead to disruptive effects on ecological functionality, environmental services, land naturalness and landscape quality, especially evident in peri-urban areas. Territorial planning and management have to aim at a better coordination among settlement and transport development policies, biodiversity and landscape protection, hydrogeological structure, land use for agricultural and forestry purposes. In this new planning scenario Green Infrastructure (GI) can play a strategic role. The MaGICLandscapes project, to which the Metropolitan City of Turin (CMTo) is taking part, focuses on how to identify, protect and enhance GI for the benefit of the environment and society at transnational, regional and localnlevel. Collaborating with stakeholders, the project aims at providing land-managers, policy makers and communities with tools that help to assess and increase GI functionality. CMTo is testing the methodologies provided by the project in its case study area - Po Hills around Chieri - in order to assess GI functionality, to develop a Public Benefit Assessment Tool that takes over local specific needs and to provide the decision makers with an Action Plan in order to support them to maximize benefits provided from GI within their spatial planning and management process.publishedVersio
Housing deficit and housing opportunities: implementing collective ownership in the centre of São Paulo, Brazil. The case of FICA fund
No full textIn the centre of São Paulo, numerous people are excluded from the legal formal housing market, because of too high rent prices in proportion to average salaries. In fact, the speculation on housing prices is widespread, determining unsustainable rent prices for poor and lower-middle classes, who often must live in peripheries while working in the centre, and suffer from long daily commuting. Exclusion from housing market firstly regards the lowest income people, but they need comprehensive social support, and not just an adjustment of the proportion salary/rent, to improve their living conditions. Nevertheless, it is possible to invert this trend thanks to non-profit initiatives of collective ownership. In fact, in 2015, in São Paulo a citizens’ formal association created the Community Real Estate Fund for rent. It is legally able to collect donations in cash and in real estate, buy and refurbish an apartment, and rent it to people at risk of exclusion. Throughout further donations and an economically sustainable, but equal financial management, the Fund will be able to buy other apartments and rent them to other people. Assuming a community-based approach to private property, private interests can be replaced by non-profit ownership, providing accessible houses to the members of the community. Rent prices can be defined with respect to the minimum salary, and so, not overcoming a critical threshold, including more people in the housing market.publishedVersio
Urban Public Space Design from the Perspective of Environmental Behavior - A Case Study of the round-citypark in Xi'an
No full textUrban public space provides the place and environment for leisure, entertainment and social intercourse for residents, and it is an essential part of urban composition. In the process of building public space, we should pay full attention to the use value of public space to people and people's perception of public space. Through the use of various dynamic elements in public space, the space environment can play a guiding role in human behavior, and create a city public space that corresponds to the behavior of communication activities. Based on the theory of environmental behavior, this paper deeply interprets the interaction between space environment and human behavior, and analyses the characteristics of human behavior in urban public space. It also elaborates the influence of environmental behavior on public space in combination with Xi'an Circle Park, and explores the ways of constructing urban public space with local historical and cultural characteristics, so as to improve the quality of urban public space.publishedVersio
Interdisciplinarity in Planning Education
No full textThe 14th AESOP Head of Schools meeting in 2019 will be hosted by University of Ljubljana (UL), jointly by the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering and Biotechnical Faculty. The date coincides with the 100th anniversary of the UL, and the topic of ‘Planning and the Disciplinarity Question’ was chosen to celebrate the contribution of planning disciplines to the challenges of transition of the academia towards ‘Xdisciplinarity’. The notions of single-, multi-, trans- and interdisciplinarity (jointly referred to as Xdisciplinarity) have been introduced over the past decades and has been addressed by AESOP at numerous occasions and various outlets. However, due to the changing nature of issues planning is facint, the topic continues to be relevant at various levels, including the input of applied knowledge into planning education. In practice, Xdisciplinarity requires both a good understanding of the planning discipline and of other disciplines it interacts with; and skills and competencies for collaborating with different professionals. These requirements are translated to planning programs. The question is what kind of Xdisciplinary knowledge makes students sufficiently equipped to tackle contemporary and upcoming urban challenges and what are the implications for the planning curricula. In addition, it is important to consider the roles of the planning practice, the market needs, and the academia in shaping these curricula. Therefore, this 14th meeting of the heads of AESOP institutional members is taking on the perennial theme of Xdisciplinarity with an intention to grasp the shifting meaning and scope of it for planning education. The program will include five sessions, two plenaries and three break-out session
The construction of pedestrian network in urban blocks: A case study
No full textIn the past decades, the urbanization of China has developed faster. The pedestrian accessibility of large old residential areas with new village-style becomes worse due to the large scale and few entrances and exits for residents. Simultaneously, the closed communities seriously affect the development of urban areas induced by poor urban living atmosphere, incomplete pedestrian system and traditional public space node setting. The public spaces where walking is the mainly activity need optimization urgently. This paper took Anshan New Village as an example and applied spatial syntax to analyze spatial accessibility and integration based on the current investigation. The study demonstrated that the network system should be established to improve the pedestrian environment in large urban blocks and the measurements of construction of pedestrian network were also suggested. Dredging the pedestrian path and increasing public space nodes can better build the urban pedestrian network and realize the balance between privacy, publicity and security. The conclusion of this paper can provide reference for building a good pedestrian environment in the process of urban renewal in Shanghai.This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51578383).publishedVersio
City as a transformational tool. The infinity cities of Ivan Leonidov
No full textDuring late ‘20s and early 30’s, the debate on the masterplan of Moscow, on its architecture as the capital of the Workers’ Promised Land and, by extension, on the form of the new Socialist City (Soc-gorod) transformed this metropolis into the largest urban laboratory of the 20th century. Two were the main positions: "urbanists", such as Sabsovič, who still believe to achieve the formal control of the urban entity implementing industrialization, territorial planning and the engineering of individual existences; and "disurbanists", such as Okhitovič, who at the contrary conceived city as a superstructure of the bourgeois-capitalist modes of production, made obsolete by the Bolshevik revolution and that, as such, should be overturned. For "disurbanists", the collapse of the city inherited by Czarism should have been implemented by dissolving the city in a new territorial form, using to this purpose the new infrastructural network planned (or better dreamed…) by Soviet Power (cars, trains, airplanes, airships, spacecraft!). The city would no longer have a form but would have to be reduced into pure process, directly derived from the Kuzmin’s "daily life program", defined by the distances for commuting to the production sites, designed by the sinusoidal diagrams of the circadian rhythms of workers and by the “industrialization” of their sleep-rest-works periods. The Socialist City is founded on a brand new dimension: its scale is related to the continental extension of the Soviet Union, to the horizon of the steppes, to the industrial compounds strategically dispersed all over the U.S.S.R territory. During the years 1928-30, Ivan Leonidov (1902-1959) conceived an idea of city sprawled across the entire Soviet Union: an infinite urban structure, innervated by industrial zones, residential compounds, public buildings, ready to colonize the whole nation. The goal was a city nature hybrid, unlimited but endowed by the measure given by an orthogonal ribbon grid conceived as a geographical dimension rather than a geometrical form of urban planning. A centuriatio that potentially went from Moscow to the Urals, a linear disarticulation of the American Jeffersonian grid, an "all program and no form" plan - as Rem Koolhaas would say - that was tested in the competition design for the new industrial town of Magnitogorsk. Or, in an alternative version, Leonidov’s city becomes a network: its nodes are institutional buildings whose distances are calculated on the basis of the power of the radio signals that connect them (project for the Social Club of a “new type” versions A and B)
Interrelation between inclusivity of public spaces and social cohesion: Metamorphosis of a historical park in Ankara, Turkey
No full textPublic spaces with different degrees of inclusiveness and exclusiveness are critical in both attaining and sustaining social cohesion between diverse groups, thus achieving coherent community life from neighborhood to city scale. This paper aims to examine the notion of social cohesion through the lens of the inclusivity of public spaces. Providing a model for the qualitative assessment of the inclusivity/exclusivity of public spaces, this research assesses the largest historic park in Ankara, Gençlik Park. It studies the metamorphosis of this park from its heyday to 2018 regarding the four dimensions of access in relation with design, management, control and use processes, as well as the contextual aspect of the inclusivity-exclusivity continuum of public-private spaces. It argues that the inclusive nature of public spaces evolves over time along with the local and global contexts within which the public space is set and bounded. Revealing multiple, site-specific and interrelated driving forces behind the inclusivity of the public space, it shows how the original design of the park has been modified, and how this affected the inclusivity of the park, and the social cohesion in the city.publishedVersio
Gentrification and Community-led design: Renegotiation and limitation of the rent gap in the UK
No full textSocio-spatial issues are a consequence of underlying social relations - in the case of gentrification delineated by the rent gap theory. Community-led initiatives work to renegotiate and limit the impact of this relation, making understanding the capacity of these initiatives to provide alternative models of development crucial when austerity weakens government’s ability to intervene. This paper offers the Fountainbridge Canalside Initiative (FCI) as an example case, gathering data as an interview with a steering group member and capturing the socio-spatial context, the participant’s theories, and any actions they have taken. FCI attempt to enable their community to tackle gentrification in three senses; through the renegotiation of the socio-spatial relations that facilitate gentrification, through limitation of the socio-spatial issues associated with it, and through symbolic acts of design activism. These findings may demonstrate the generalisable capabilities of community-led practise to tackle problems around land value and cuts to services, potentially informing best practise and approaches to planning, placing an emphasis on not only planning environments but infrastructuring the socio-spatial relationships that produce them.publishedVersio
Rethinking Partnerships for Affordable Housing: Planning Policy + Design Nexus
No full textA growing affordability problem in Canadian cities has prompted a renewed commitment of the federal government, complemented with provincial and municipal programs, to increase the supply of affordable rental housing. Consensus has been building across Canada that an effective response requires multi-sectoral partnerships to meet growing local needs within limited resources and capacity. Recently large Canadian cities have joined their efforts with non-profit and private organisations to provide affordable rental housing in mixed-income experimental projects. In this context, the research addresses a significant gap in the evaluation of partnerships, focusing on the nature of multi-agency collaborations in the provision process (design, build, finance, operate). Partnerships capitalise on the effective role of the public sector in the mobilization of resources, the efficiencies of private agencies in the development process (design, build) and the hybridity of the non-profit institutions (management, service delivery). The research develops a conceptual framework, based on the political market model to explain adoption of planning and housing policies by municipalities. The alignment of policy instruments—regulatory, fiscal and financial—is an important determinant of the ability of partnerships to deliver adequate, affordable and sustainable housing. The framework presents a typology of affordable housing partnerships using highlights from case studies in the large Canadian cities—Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. The methodology is based on review of the literature and analysis of innovative developments of mixed-income affordable rental housing projects. Findings suggest that economies of scale and sustained funding are critical for efficient partnerships (design, build and operate). However, their effectiveness often depends on institutional capacity, coalition building/inclusive governance and neighbourhood integration. We argue that a shift from the traditional ‘public-private’ model to multi-sectoral partnerships is required to address the housing crisis in Canadian cities.publishedVersio
Examining the Regional Spatial Spillover Effect of Housing Price in Taiwan –An application of Housing Panel Data
No full textFollowing the economic booming in Taiwan since 1950’s, the housing prices increase in a fast pace, especially in the capital city area (Taipei) in northern region of Taiwan. However, there is an immense difference of rising degree by regions from north to south. The heterogeneity of regional spatial development forms the differences of housing environment attributes and results in different housing price distribution for local regions. In this study, we select three metropolitan municipalities regions in Taiwan, including Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung as the empirical areas to construct the so-called the Regional Housing Price Model (RHPM). The RHPM will be constructed empirically in Taiwan area to take into account of the spatial heterogeneity, spatial spillover effects, local environment attributes by metropolitan municipalities regions, and the Taiwan macro-economic factors as well. We investigate how national and regional elements impact on regional housing market by using spatial panel data model. Different from the past studies, this paper considers both spatial heterogeneity and dependency simultaneously. We found that the spatial spillover effect is positive in the northern region, negative in the central region, but insignificant in the southern region of Taiwan. It also shows that the three regions were in distinct stage of development, causing the characteristic of regional housing market to present differently.publishedVersio