The Business of Improving Neighborhoods. A Critical Overview of Neighborhood-Based Business Improvement Districts (NBIDs) in Sweden

This article offers an overview of neighbourhood-based BIDs (NBIDs) in Sweden. Swedish NBIDs tend to appear in stigmatized residential areas engaging with pressing sets of urban issues that have been longstanding concern of social policy. Their overarching goal is raising property values in neighborhoods on the edge between urban decline and (re)development potential. Emerging in a neoliberalizing institutional context, NBIDs present themselves as correctives to public-policy failures by promoting property-oriented solutions. The adaptation of the BID model in the Swedish ‘post-welfare’ landscape, however, exhibits, and arguably exacerbates, the shortcomings found in BID elsewhere. Their opaque institutional structure and lack of accountability contribute to curbing democratic influence over local development, thus reinforcing spatial inequalities. We argue that the growing political advocacy for the institutionalization of the BID model in Sweden presents a new milestone in the neoliberalization of urban governance, as private actors are promoted to legitimate co-creators of urban policy.

Current Trends in Urban Heritage Conservation: Medieval Historic Arab City Centers

Traditional conservation efforts did not improve the conditions in most historic urban centers of Arab cities. The internationally adopted shift in historic urban conservation grants better urban vitality and sustainability for these areas. This study investigates the existing trends and forthcoming changes in urban conservation and their implication on historical centers. Urban Heritage Conservation UHC trends were reviewed, conservation parameters were defined, and quality aspects of successful historic urban conservation were identified, and an assessment framework was developed to evaluate the resulting conserved urban heritage. Two case studies of Arab cities, Jeddah and Aman, were analyzed. The findings highlight the most common urban issues such as reusing historic buildings, traffic congestion, and lack of funds. The impact of urban management on historic areas’ quality was revealed. Moreover, the paper ends with recommendations for conservation authorities. These include engaging residents in the conservation efforts, adopting more innovative traffic solutions to ease congestions, turning the historic area into a pedestrian-friendly space, attracting visitors through arranging cultural events, creating new job opportunities through heritage, and improving the image of the areas through urban regulations. The paper’s findings would contribute to the knowledge related to Urban Heritage Conservation (UHC), and its recommendations would help practitioners and decision-makers.

Bottom-up Urban Regeneration and Vacant Buildings: A Framework to understand how Empty Properties can be Strategically Embedded in Bottom-up Projects

The bottom-up projects, in the years after the Great Crisis, have been considered as a popular measure to solve urban issues, overcoming the conditions of austerity faced by public actors. However, these initiatives not only seem confined to solve very specific issues but are often linked to a more comprehensive urban regeneration strategy, thus capable of addressing the economic, social and physical aspects of a wider part of the city. This article presents the first findings of wider research, which analyses the link between bottom-up practices and the concept of urban regeneration. In particular, this article focuses on an element that appears to be fundamental for the development of these bottom-up urban regeneration practices: the presence of vacant buildings available for the reuse. This article suggests the possibility to analyse how vacant buildings are embedded in these practices through three steps, called steps for the regeneration through the reuse of vacant buildings (SteRVs), namely Recognition, Appropriation and Design. The validity of the three phases is demonstrated through a multiple case study analysis, that considers two renowned bottom-up urban regeneration cases developed in Europe mainly after 2000: Farm Cultural Park, in Favara (Italy) and NDSM wharf, in Amsterdam.

Municipal Solid Waste Disposal Site Selection Using Remote Sensing Technology and AHP Process (Case Study: Khesht city, Fars Province, Iran)

The design and implementation of the municipal waste management system aim to solve the urban issues and ultimately contribute to the citizens' health and welfare. The first step in this system is to select a site for the safe disposal of wastes. This survey aimed to select the most suitable landfill site for municipal solid waste using the geographic information system (GIS) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model following the environmental, economic, and engineering criteria. Therefore, by reviewing the literature and backgrounds, the parameters required for locating the landfill site were extracted, and the most important ones (15 sub-criteria) were selected and divided into four groups. The results showed that the sub-criterion of distance to the river with the weight of 0.218 was identified as the most critical parameter, followed by groundwater depth. In this way, the flooding parameter with the weight of 0.010 was considered the least important variable. In addition, it was found that the moderate suitability class with 50% of the area had the highest area, and the very high suitability with 0.8% had the lowest area. The inconsistency rate was equal to 0.04, which illustrates the high consistency of matrices. Then, the overlaying was carried out, and three sites were determined as the best place for a landfill in Khesht county.

The Pedestrian's Office Building

<p>According to urban theorist Jan Gehl (2004), Wellington’s central business district (CBD) lacks pedestrian vibrancy. Gehl identifies impermeability, caused by many large footprint commercial buildings with closed street frontages and privatised ground floors, as the main weakness in the city’s urban fabric . This thesis seeks to address Gehl’s findings that commercial buildings create a sterile pedestrian environment because of their disengaged street frontages, lack of programmatic diversity and negative impact on the connectivity of the pedestrian network. A current lack of high end commercial office buildings in Wellington’s CBD creates an architectural opportunity to reconsider the way in which office buildings are integrated into the urban environment. In this thesis the office building is used as a tool to realistically investigate how these new buildings can address the urban issues raised by Gehl, and enhance the pedestrian experience. This research uses the design principles in Nan Ellin’s Integral Urbanism to find a solution for the urban problems identified by Gehl. Three architectural and urban principles are used as devices to integrate the vertical office tower into the horizontal streetscape; hybridity, porosity and connectivity. This design proposition investigates an office building on the corner of Jervois Quay and Willeston Street in the Wellington CBD. This site is identified as a particularly weak area of the urban fabric challenged by a disconnection from the nearby waterfront; by the six lane highway, Jervois Quay. The site-specific problem combined with the challenges of the market driven Wellington office typology is explored through an iterative design process to create a commercially feasible, site-specific design solution. Ultimately this research found that through applying urban design principles, office towers can better integrate into the urban environment to create a more pedestrian orientated city.</p>

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>

The Pedestrian's Office Building

<p>According to urban theorist Jan Gehl (2004), Wellington’s central business district (CBD) lacks pedestrian vibrancy. Gehl identifies impermeability, caused by many large footprint commercial buildings with closed street frontages and privatised ground floors, as the main weakness in the city’s urban fabric . This thesis seeks to address Gehl’s findings that commercial buildings create a sterile pedestrian environment because of their disengaged street frontages, lack of programmatic diversity and negative impact on the connectivity of the pedestrian network. A current lack of high end commercial office buildings in Wellington’s CBD creates an architectural opportunity to reconsider the way in which office buildings are integrated into the urban environment. In this thesis the office building is used as a tool to realistically investigate how these new buildings can address the urban issues raised by Gehl, and enhance the pedestrian experience. This research uses the design principles in Nan Ellin’s Integral Urbanism to find a solution for the urban problems identified by Gehl. Three architectural and urban principles are used as devices to integrate the vertical office tower into the horizontal streetscape; hybridity, porosity and connectivity. This design proposition investigates an office building on the corner of Jervois Quay and Willeston Street in the Wellington CBD. This site is identified as a particularly weak area of the urban fabric challenged by a disconnection from the nearby waterfront; by the six lane highway, Jervois Quay. The site-specific problem combined with the challenges of the market driven Wellington office typology is explored through an iterative design process to create a commercially feasible, site-specific design solution. Ultimately this research found that through applying urban design principles, office towers can better integrate into the urban environment to create a more pedestrian orientated city.</p>

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>

Integrated Planning: Towards a Mutually Inclusive Approach to Infrastructure Planning and Design

Increasingly independent fields of specialization, civil engineering, and urban design find themselves practicing in isolation on the same urban issues. The result surfaces on the relative qualities of public spaces: projects that are functionally successful but spatially poor, and vice versa This is critical in the global south, where infrastructure is prioritized, and politicized, as the key driver of change but often heedless of spatial consequences. The present study explores the dynamics of integration between logics arising from technical and spatial fields, and the planning processes under which such integration is feasible. An urban design/infrastructural project in Argentina, stalled for more than two decades under regulatory policies, was selected as a case study. An overview and background of the adopted planning/design methodologies are followed by a structural/spatial analysis, focusing on type, logistics, and construction on the one hand, and on indicators of successful public spaces on the other: access, uses, comfort and image. Aspects that a priori appeared as inevitable compromises found a common, but the critically logical ground in which urban and structural thinking complemented each other. More than a functional asset, infrastructure presents an opportunity to re-think the future of the built environment as a typology that could be conceived, designed and evaluated, on the same terms as successful public spaces.

Investigation of the Participatory Approach to Decision Making for Urban Regeneration Intervention

Public participation in the decision-making process in Urban Interventions is the key to the success of the project for improving the quality of life of its citizens. The citizen has the democratic right to express his needs and aspiration; he is the final user who experiences the outcomes of the policy decisions. Non involvement of the citizens in the planning process can bring about the misinterpretation of the intention of political leadership and lead to opposition and protest. The inadequate understanding of citizens of the urban context makes public participation ineffective. In this context, the decision-makers are often faced with the challenges of the level of confidence of the citizens about their ideas and responses being incorporated in the project and the confidence of the citizens in the local urban authority in its ability to carry out the project. However, the decision-makers base their decision on the assumption that the citizens have a general understanding of the urban issues. This research work investigates the basis of this assumption. 1. Do the citizens have confidence that the local urban authority considers their choices and responses in the course of decision making 2. Do the citizens have the confidence that the local urban authority can undertake the Urban Regeneration project 3. Whether in the decision-making process of urban regeneration intervention, citizen's responses are backed by a general understanding of urban issues. The case study taken up is of Hassan city. Five areas of crucial importance have been selected based on the development plan report of the city. The integrated approach aims to find the most appropriate area for proposing the Urban Regeneration project. The framework adopted includes 1. Questionnaire survey: to collect citizens&rsquo; responses 2. Analysis of variance (ANNOVA) for analysis of the data collected.