The Central Business District of Melbourne and the Dispersal and Reconcentration of Capital

1986 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 1447-1461 ◽  
Author(s):  
S T Moser ◽  
N P Low

This paper is a discussion of the complex spatial dynamic at work in the second largest state capital in Australia. What is happening to the central business district, it is argued, has to be seen in the context of the interaction between the state government and private capital. The evolving sociospatial structure of Melbourne will continue to be conditioned by the changing balance between the opportunities for capital which arise in the course of suburbanisation and the need for the state government and large-scale property interests to maintain a higher rate of investment in the central area.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kohei Kawai ◽  
Masatomo Suzuki ◽  
Chihiro Shimizu

Although metropolises continue to grow worldwide, they face the risk of shrinkage. This study seeks to capture and contextualize the “shrinkage” of the office market in Tokyo, a city that is one of the largest in the world but whose labor force has been shrinking since 1995. Employing unique property-level data on office building performance and use, this study quantifies the geographical distribution of office supply over time and shows that the geographical area of office supply is shrinking from the fringes, in line with the large-scale redevelopment of the central area since the collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s. As a result, analyses of changes in the vacancy rate and rent premium (from hedonic regressions) suggest that old office properties in the suburbs have recently faced more vacancies and lower rent premiums, even during the upturn peak of around 2007. This evidence suggests that (i) the concept of shrinking cities is also applicable in a spatial context, even for service sector workplaces in a nation’s central metropolis, and that (ii) allowing large-scale redevelopment in the central area while the economy remains powerful can transform the metropolis into a more compact form, which may be desirable in the long run.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Filion ◽  
Trudi E. Bunting

This article which covers thirty years of central-area change in the City of Kitchener, Ontario focuses on the initial impetus that led to the preparation of large-scale plans, on the down-scaling and partial implementation of those plans, and on the current decision-making environment that allows for more public participation than existed in the past. The local political scene was dominated by a well-organized coalition of interest groups promoting urban renewal in the central business district, yet this coalition was unable to achieve its objectives. The situation is attributed to suburbanization and related shifts in political and economic power at the municipal level; the vulnerability of municipal administrations to senior governments' priority changes; tensions within the coalition itself; and the growing empowerment of other local groups unsympathetic to the coalition's goals. Generally, the emphasis is on limitations to the capacity of locally-powerful actors to implement large-scale and long-term policies in a consistent fashion.


2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 180-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trudie Coker

The contradictory goals of state capital accumulation and redistribution eventually led to the demise of corporatism in Venezuela and probably in much of Latin America. When the Venezuelan state was at its zenith of intervention in the economy, it globalized accumulation via foreign debt. Rather than emphasize accumulation and redistribution as it had during the 1960s and 1970s, accumulation to service the debt became the state's central goal by the 1980s. Declining oil prices by the early 1980s highlighted the weakness of a state caught in the grips of antithetical demands from labor and an increasingly impoverished population, on the one hand, and private capital demanding debt repayment, on the other hand. By definition, corporatism creates a dependency between the state and organized labor. Historically, labor depended on the state for economic subsidies, and the state relied on labor to maintain legitimacy. By the late 1990s, lack of labor autonomy literally dragged labor down with a state drowning in debt and incapacitated by lack of legitimacy. While corporatism is more a relic of things past, the positive implications of increasing labor autonomy are dismal as organized labor has been disarticulated and the democratic state is all but a skeleton.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.25) ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Muhammad Muktar ◽  
Abdulaziz S. Ahmed

There have been major concerns in the planning of both public and private spaces in Kano central area. Consequently, the entire urban fabric have been restructured due to uncontrolled developmental growth, population density, high cost of land value, unavailability of business location and poor accessibility to road network. These situations have brought about a physical and social shift in the position of Kano Central Business District (CBD) area, of which not prevented will continue to cause major urban cohesion and sustainability issue. Thus, this paper took a preemptive step to evaluate the existing problems and identify the major sustainability issues and where urban cohesion failed. A qualitative method was employed that does not only consider the study of morphological factors of the public space network in Kano CBD, but also the social, environmental and economic dynamics they generate. Thus, the data were collected through fieldwork (favoring direct contact with the territory), and analyzed using four key dimensions namely ‘Form and legibility’, ‘Access and Connections’, ‘Uses and Activities’, then ‘Sociability and Identification’. The findings revealed that the neighborhoods that make up the CBD have lot of abandoned buildings, insufficient access routes, poor drainage system, high volume of traffic that cause lot of pollution and proliferation of solid waste that makes road network impermeable, and an aesthetic eyesore. In view of these, the study recommends a set of urban intervention strategy capable of guiding the planning and redesign of public spaces in Kano CBD in order to promote urban cohesion and a sustainable environment. 


Author(s):  
Haixiao Wang ◽  
Fang Liu ◽  
Jinjun Tang

Using taxi GPS trajectories data is of very importance to explore Spatio-temporal features of human mobility in transportation designing and planning. The data were collected from taxi GPS devices in Harbin city during a week. The taxi trips are extracted from GPS data, and travel distance and time in occupied and vacant states are firstly used to investigate the human mobility. Then, the urban area is divided into 400 grids. Furthermore, travelling network corresponding to taxi trips are designed to further examine the dynamics of mobility, in which the grid are considered as nodes and edge weights are defined as total number of trips among nodes. We observe some basic statistical features of network: degree, edge weights, clustering coefficients and network structure entropy. We also use the correlation between strength and degree to analyze the significance of nodes. Based on network analysis, we select two grids, a central business district and a residential district with high degree and strength, to study the spatial and temporal properties of trips that start from and end at these two grids. Finally, the correlation between trip volume and operation efficiency is explored and we find that hourly trip volume express negative correlation with operation efficiency.


Author(s):  
Priyanka Shah ◽  
Mohammad Aslam Ansari

Vegetable cultivation offers a unique opportunity for hill farmers of Uttarakhand due to the favourable climatic conditions. Consequently, vegetable cultivation in Uttarakhand hills, even in off-season, has picked up on quite a large scale. Although it has become quite remunerative but farmers are reportedly facing lots of marketing and production constraints. The present study was conducted in Kumaon region of Uttarakhand to study the production and marketing constraints faced by the vegetable growers. Study sample comprised of 200 farmers selected purposively from eight villages spread across four blocks and two districts in Kumaon division of Uttarakhand. The data was collected using a pre-tested structured interview schedule. The study findings revealed that major marketing constraints reported by vegetable growers were: long chain of intermediaries, inadequate transportation facilities, high transportation charges, inadequate storage facilities, low price / lack of remunerative price and non-availability of market information. Further, some production related constraints reported by the respondents were high cost of seeds/ fertilizers, lack of information about planting material/ production inputs, lack of knowledge about grading and standardization of vegetable, non-availability of farm labour and lack of packaging material. These findings will be helpful to the State government for developing a policy framework and relevant guidelines for promoting vegetable production in the state.


1998 ◽  
Vol 1644 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luc A. Frechette ◽  
Ata M. Khan

A Bayesian regression approach is used to develop equations for predicting travel time on central area streets with contributory variables that are intuitive and for which data are readily available in most transportation agencies. In development of multivariate regression models, two disparate sources of information are used: ( a) a priori (what is known before an experiment), and ( b) experimental data (information derived from an experiment). Output of traffic simulation obtained from NETSIM was used as the source of a priori information, whereas the experimental data were obtained from video recordings of traffic operations on selected central business district streets. Bayesian regression software was used in a systematic framework for predictive model development. The developed equations were assessed and results were interpreted from a Bayesian perspective in relation to the various model iterations attempted. The final models provide reasonable predictions of actual travel times that drivers would experience during peak traffic periods in medium to large central business districts.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7183
Author(s):  
Piotr Lorens ◽  
Łukasz Bugalski

The Gdańsk Shipyard—the birthplace of the Solidarity movement—is host to a unique example of a multi-layered brownfield redevelopment project, an area that is burdened by a complex history, overlapping heritage, and multiple memories. These circumstances require an integrated yet differentiated approach to the site’s heritage and make the creation of one homogeneous narration of its future impossible. At the same time, the size of the area, as well as its location within Gdańsk city centre, has meant that its future has been the subject of numerous discussions and speculations conducted over the last 20 years—starting from the creation of a large-scale open-air museum and continuing to the localization of the new Central Business District of the city. Consequently, that broad discussion carried out regarding the scope of redevelopment projects has been rooted in the possible introduction of diverse models of adaptive reuse. This variety of possible approaches also includes discussion on the mode of integrating heritage in the redevelopment processes. The goal of this paper—written just before the initiation of the final stage of the conceptual part of the project—is to present the complexity of approaches to issues related to redevelopment and heritage preservation.


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