Bring Your Own Politics: Life Strategies and Mobilization in Response to Urban Redevelopment

This article contributes to social movement literature and theories of strategic action by making the case for an analytic distinction between habitual and intentional life strategies, namely the ways in which people pursue what they value in life. Housing strategies are one example of life strategies. The distinction helps explain how political players, including social movements, bring about social change (or preserve the status quo) by changing or reinforcing people’s minds and their preferred ways of action. They can achieve their goals by first recognizing these habitual strategies, and then prompting people to articulate or adjust them during interactive, group-level situations. My analysis relies on a qualitative study of Renovation, a controversial urban renewal project in Moscow. I examine how Muscovites revisited, articulated and sometimes revised their housing strategies in response to the surprising, and for some, shocking announcement of the relocation project.

Urban Redevelopment Planning and Social Work Practice

Urban neighborhood disinvestment in the United States resulted in deferred maintenance of buildings and common social problems experienced by residents. Strategies to redevelop neighborhoods include collaboration among many subsystems seeking to collectively invest in places and people. Contemporary federal initiatives focus on incentivizing coordinated investments between existing local community-based organizations, local and federal government, and private investors. Public–private partnerships include anchor institutions with commitments to the long-term success of place-based initiatives who invest their financial, intellectual, social, and political capital. Social workers are embedded in local community-based organizations and relationships with residents in neighborhoods experiencing redevelopment. Social workers can help guide top-down and bottom-up approaches to neighborhood revitalization toward more equitable and inclusive processes and outcomes. Resident engagement in redeveloping neighborhoods takes many forms and requires differing skill sets for social workers. Urban redevelopment is a global trend with common critiques regarding relying on gentrification and market-driven strategies with private investors.

The Global Greyfields Transition: Why Urban Redevelopment in Low-Density, Car-Based Middle Suburbs Needs a New Model

This chapter provides the framework and rationale for Greening the Greyfields and its two new models for greyfield precinct regeneration (GPR): place-activated and transit-activated GPR. They provide a basis for regenerative urban redevelopment in the middle-ring greyfield suburbs of fast-growing, low-density cities. Place-activated GPR advances a new development model for the ‘missing middle’ in cities: new medium-density housing at precinct scale. Transit-activated GPR extends new sustainable modes of mobility into car-dependent suburbs. Both processes are required for retrofitting suburbia to fix the shortcomings of mid- to late-twentieth-century urban planning and development.

The Solar Block Generator: an additive parametric method for solar driven urban block design

This paper addresses the limitations of existing Solar Envelope (SE) methods to explore the trade-offs of solar radiation and urban shading, and to simultaneously account for several different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It offers an alternative parametric workflow - the Solar Block Generator (SBG) - which is based on an additive voxelization method by which multiple solar-driven massing alternatives are generated and evaluated for a given site, corresponding to a set of user-defined environmental KPIs. This method is tested here on an urban redevelopment case study in the Mediterranean (Tel Aviv). The results help achieve a more holistic approach for solar driven urban design.

The Effect of Urban Redevelopment Induced Displacement and Resettlement on Social Capital in Ethiopia

City transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa by its nature require massive physical space to accommodate urban development. Accordingly, urban redevelopment program is taken place in many old inner-city settlements to increase the supply of land for commercial and residential development. To this end, these practice often lead to displacement of residents from their original location which in turn affects their livelihoods. The trend and situation of urban development program in Ethiopia and Gondar city is no exception. To this end, this paper assess the effects of urban redevelopment induced displacement and resettlement on social capital in Gondar city. To achieve the objective of the research, a questionnaire survey covering 147 displaced households with interview and field observation was carried out. The findings highlight that, though resettlement has positive effects to the people, the displaced households in Gondar city were lost their neighborhood ties and social networks such as Idir, Equb, Mahiber and Senbetie in their new location. In addition, they also endures several adverse impacts on their basic infrastructure facilities. Therefore, government should understand the social capital impacts in both pre and post relocation phases to improve and strength the displaced households social networks and relationships throughout the entire resettlement process.