Area-Based Urban Renewal Approach for Smart Cities Development in India: Challenges of Inclusion and Sustainability

Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area-based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case-study cities. The article examines the claims of the so-called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on-ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT-driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.

Sunny flats will replace…A congested slum block: Sydney’s post war housing improvement schemes

The present text traces the post war slum clearance program in Sydney, Australia, that saw the construction of modern blocks of flats drawn from international examples of rehousing schemes. This State-funded urban renewal program continued from the late 1940s until the 1980s. Many of the blocks of flats are slated for demolition, yet no overall assessment of their design quality or detailed discussion of the range of building forms or apartment layouts has been undertaken. There is a danger that these well-designed blocks will vanish rather than be retrofitted and that this unparalleled demonstration of modern housing progress by the State of New South Wales will be incomplete.

The Socialist Bratwurst: East German Urbanism and Its Reemergence in the Present

This article examines defining features of East German urban planning—primarily the housing complex and the city/settlement binary—and their relationship to Eisenhüttenstadt, a city founded in 1950 as Stalinstadt, an East German socialist utopia. Today Eisenhüttenstadt is home to a novel form of urban renewal in which architects and planners look to the socialist past for inspiration as they imagine a new urban future. I examine the history of socialist urbanism as it was implemented in Eisenhüttenstadt, as well as how residents and urban planners came to understand socialist urbanism in the years immediately following German reunification. I then examine an urban renewal program, started in 2014, that explicitly draws on the socialist past. In doing so, I aim to consider the socialist city not as an architectural form but as a set of practices, spatial imaginations, and ethical commitments that can be reanimated even in a capitalist sociopolitical context.

Federal Urban Renewal in Three Small Texas Cities: A Mixed Legacy

When it comes to the federal urban renewal program, Texas has often been dismissed as a conservative state since large cities like Dallas and Houston refused to participate. But a closer look at Texas shows that smaller cities such as Lubbock, Waco, and Grand Prairie did indeed embrace the program. Unlike northern cities which employed urban renewal to retard decline, these Texas cities embraced it to promote growth and to improve race relations. Because of segregation, blacks had few standard neighborhoods to reside in and civic leaders saw new opportunities to better black living conditions offered by urban renewal.

Newburgh’s “Last Chance”: The Elusive Promise of Urban Renewal in a Small and Divided City

This article is a case study of failure at the federal, state, and local levels. In 1956, Newburgh, New York, undertook an ambitious, arguably oversized, urban renewal program. Between 1962 and 1974, city officials successfully cleared roughly 120 acres of prime waterfront real estate for redevelopment, displacing a largely black population. But combined with economic recession and changing federal and state policies, conflict between and among white city officials and black residents prevented reconstruction. Newburgh's greatest assets were its scenic waterfront and historic architecture. Clearance of the former led to destruction of the latter. Newburgh's waterfront remains largely empty even today.

Urban Renewal and the Prospects of a Free and Open Society

Chapter 6 demonstrates the limitations of “black business activism” during the 1960s while focusing on urban renewal in Durham, North Carolina. Durham’s urban renewal program began in 1958, as a consequence of the Housing Act of 1954 and the state’s fledgling Research Triangle Park (RTP) initiative. The urban renewal program paved the way for an infrastructure that ultimately provided linkages in the physical landscape between RTP, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and North Carolina State University. Wheeler became the lone black member on the Durham Redevelopment Commission, the group responsible for administering the Bull City’s urban renewal program. I argue that, in part, Wheeler’s support for the federally funded urban redevelopment program fit within his own framework of how best to implement the gains already being won by the civil rights movement. The chapter also examines the “War on Poverty” in North Carolina in the context of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. It does so through trying to better understand Wheeler’s involvement with the North Carolina Fund (NC Fund), an antipoverty agency created by Governor Terry Sanford in 1963. The Fund became the model for President Johnson’s national reform agenda.

Salta (Argentina) como ciudad patrimonial y cosmopolita: la definición de un destino turístico “competitivo”

El presente trabajo aborda los procesos de transformación reciente de Salta (Argentina), ciudad que se ha definido en las últimas décadas como un importante destino turístico en el contexto nacional. En años recientes, desde el gobierno provincial (con colaboración de empresarios y expertos), se gestó un proyecto de renovación del área histórica orientado a estimular la llegada de turista que acentuó el carácter patrimonial de la ciudad pero también buscó definirla como una ciudad cosmopolita. Como parte de este proceso, el centro histórico se perfiló como un espacio de consumo turístico que también atrajo a ciertos sectores de la sociedad local. The paper deals with the recent processes that have transformed Salta into an important tourist destination in Argentina. In the last decades, provincial government (together with entrepreneurial actors and cultural and scientific experts) has launched an urban renewal program to revitalize the historic district and improve infrastructures to stimulate tourism. This reinforced the heritage aspects of Salta but also sought to show it as a cosmopolitan city. As part of this process historic district has become a space of consumption for tourist and privileged local society.

Building a Local Preservation Ethic in the Era of Urban Renewal: How Did Neighborhood Associations Shape Historic Preservation Practice in Lexington, Kentucky?

The federal urban renewal program had wide-ranging consequences for American cities of all sizes and locations. Among the most consequential was its catalyzing effect on the historic preservation movement nationwide. While preservation practice at the dawn of the urban renewal era emphasized historic monuments, by its end in the mid-1970s, preservationists were much more concerned with neighborhoods, districts, and larger swaths of urban fabric, thus, becoming relevant to all manner of future city shaping and revitalizing efforts. While this expansion took place nationwide, the paths taken by individual cities varied considerably. Because of its large number of historic downtown residential neighborhoods, and its long involvement with historic preservation, Lexington, Kentucky, provides an ideal case study to explore this transformation, highlighting the ways in which neighborhood associations and local preservation organizations collaborated to set the stage for widespread adoption of local historic districts in the 1970s.