scholarly journals Plans and situated actions in urban renewal projects: The role of governance devices in realizing projects

2020 ◽  
pp. 239965442094185
Author(s):  
Sara Brorström ◽  
Alexander Styhre

Municipalities and city administrations have the jurisdiction to determine the use of land and real estate, but must collaborate with various actors, including real estate developers, construction companies, and financial institutions, to realize stated goals. When implementing initiatives such as urban renewal projects, plans and situated actions may be loosely coupled during the early stages, when visions of the future are being articulated; over time, however, the information needed to calculate whether illiquid assets are attractive investment objects must be introduced. As such information is generated, the gap between plans and situated actions closes, having material effects under favourable conditions. This article presents an empirical study of an urban renewal project in a metropolitan area that initially gained external recognition via a prize awarded for visionary planning work. The project eventually encountered considerable difficulties, as a shortage of accurate information hampered production activities. The study underlines the importance of robust governance practices and accompanying governance devices in effectively transforming illiquid assets into, for example, housing.

Author(s):  
Justin T. Clark

By the 1830s, the urban renewal project discussed in the previous chapter only further revealed the intractable messiness of the urban landscape. A decade of gentrification exacerbated anxiety about whether the city’s sites and edifices could compete with surrounding topographical and human congestion. The champions of improvement sought to ease their doubts by commissioning images that abstracted, obscured, or shrank into insignificance the disorder surrounding urban landmarks. Yet even as these ideal representations of the city proliferated, Bostonians questioned whether their fellow spectators saw moral landmarks as intended. A middle-class culture of novels, guidebooks, periodicals, plays, and other sources introduced a new typology of spectators—the connoisseur and the poseur, the vista seeker and the speculator, the libertine and the sentimentalist—who revealed their true characters through their divergent reactions to the city’s monuments, parks, galleries, paintings, and sculptures.


Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (84) ◽  
pp. 47-61
Author(s):  
Cansu Civelek

In 2012, an urban renewal project in Eskişehir, Turkey, was initiated with claims of “festive renewal,” challenging the theories of critical urban studies that emphasize the disruptive effects of such projects. Built on a discussion about hegemony, which deploys consent and dissent in its organization, this article ethnographically investigates the tactics and strategies of the renewal machine that mobilized and co-opted parts of the locals into the project while invoking layers of dissent, distrust, and discomfort. The article discusses how historically built political, socioeconomic, and gender inequalities were efficiently detected, reconstituted, and put into the service of the renewal machine while revealing tension and dynamism behind the “festive renewal.” It shows a fragility of hegemony that is neither a given nor a completed template.


Energies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2745
Author(s):  
Tzu-Ling Huang ◽  
Chien-Yuan Kuo ◽  
Chun-Ta Tzeng ◽  
Chi-Ming Lai

The pedestrian wind environment in a street canyon is affected by a multitude of factors, including the height and geometric shape of the surrounding buildings, the street width, the wind direction, and speed. Wind-tunnel tests were performed to determine the effects of constructing high buildings in an urban renewal project in New Taipei City, Taiwan on the pedestrian wind environments in the surrounding street canyons. The results show that replacing the original low-rise buildings with high-rise buildings could decrease the wind speed and natural ventilation potential in certain surrounding street canyons. The flow fields generated by approaching winds in various street canyons are highly complex in this practical case study. Thus, the pedestrian wind patterns in the street canyons cannot be interpreted in terms of channeling and shielding effects alone, as is typically reported in the literature.


2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (9) ◽  
pp. 811-817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roshanak Mehdipanah ◽  
Maica Rodríguez-Sanz ◽  
Davide Malmusi ◽  
Carles Muntaner ◽  
Elia Díez ◽  
...  

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