Understanding Infill: Towards New Policy and Practice for Urban Regeneration in the Established Suburbs of Australia's Cities

A major challenge for urban Australia and its fast growing cities in particular is the provision of an adequate supply of appropriately located, affordable and sustainable housing across a range of dwelling types. A related challenge involves attempts by the metropolitan planning agencies in the capital cities to restrict residential sprawl and deliver more compact cities. Residential infill in the established suburbs has emerged as one of the principal urban planning policies designed to address this dual challenge. Infill targets, typically in the 50–70 per cent range, are now integral to all capital city planning strategies. This article examines the current pattern of infill housing development in Melbourne, Australia's second largest and fastest growing capital city. It highlights the existence of two infill segments—brownfields and greyfields—each with distinctive patterns of development that need to be better understood if urban regeneration is to figure significantly in delivering more liveable and sustainable cities. Current urban policies, programmes and practices are lacking an effective response to redevelopment of the greyfields.     

Social Capital and Migrant Housing Experiences in Urban China: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

Rural–urban migration and housing for the urban poor have attracted worldwide attention from both scholars and policy makers. In China, empirical studies have revealed tremendous discrimination experienced by temporary migrants in the urban housing system, but most have emphasized constraints by formal institutions such as the hukou system. This paper adopts a sociological theory of social capital and employs structural equation modeling to investigate, simultaneously, the impacts of social capital on migrants' housing experiences in Chinese cities, as well as the causal relationships between a migrant's socioeconomic status and his/her social capital profile. Based on data from a twelve-city migrant survey conducted in 2009, statistical analysis revealed that, although migrant workers in general possess a small and truncated network of social ties in the city, those migrants who are connected to individuals with local hukou, rather than connected to more people, have higher access to formal housing and tend to enjoy better housing conditions.     

“FROM COAL TO COOL”: THE CREATIVE CLASS,SOCIAL CAPITAL,AND THE REVITALIZATION OF SCRANTON

ABSTRACT: This study examines the processes of revitalization within small cities, using Scranton, a postindustrial city in Northeast Pennsylvania, as a case study. Through qualitative interviews, I examine the motivation factors for key players in the revitalization of Scranton's downtown, such as business owners, city and nonprofit administrators, and cultural leaders. Revitalizers are heavily influenced by Richard Florida's creative class theory in that they strongly believe that promoting arts and culture and creating a consumer‐based downtown is imperative for urban renewal. However, revitalizers are also motivated because Scranton has a high level of social capital, especially in terms of bonding capital. Strong social ties (including community, family, and institutional) assist revitalizers in their creative endeavors. This study indicates that small cities attempting to achieve economic and population stability should focus on their strengths: city livability and the thick social ties that maintain communities.     

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT,HOUSING AND ZONING: A TALE OF TWO CITIES

Extensive economic development and central business district expansion generate both positive and negative public impacts; assessing those impacts is a major challenge for urban social and economic analysts. For students of urban politics and policy processes, the strategies and conflict patterns surrounding the generation and distribution of these impacts are of central interest. This paper examines exactive zoning/housing trust fund programs in San Francisco and Boston…the most far-reaching examples of emerging policies adopted by cities to shift pan of the public costs of private economic development back to the developer. The paper suggests that two conditions must be present for exaction programs to be implemented: (1) CBD demand so high that monies can be “creamed off” for redistribution without causing developers to “exit,” and (2) the mobilization of community and neighborhood interests to counter pro-CBD-growth advocates. The exaction programs in both cities, though not panaceas, appear to be generating substantial funds for housing.     

CONTESTING THE FINANCIALIZATION OF URBAN SPACE: COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND THE STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE AFFORDABLE RENTAL HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of “predatory equity,” a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid‐2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.     

The National Disability Insurance Scheme in an Urban Context: Opportunities and Challenges for Australian Cities

The NDIS will directly affect the lives of close to half a million people with a disability as well as significantly wider impacts on Australian cities. This review paper examines the urban policy and practice context for the NDIS, focusing specifically on housing, employment, governance, mainstream services (particularly health and education) and multiculturalism. Although the current Australian urban condition is hardly ideal for the implementation of such an ambitious scheme, the funding provided by the NDIS, coupled with appropriate adjustments to mainstream urban policy, can make important contributions to the social, cultural and economic thriving of Australian cities.     

Urban Residential Satisfaction and the Planning Implications in a Developing World Context: The Example of Benin City,Nigeria

As urban expansion continues into the 21st century, one of the daunting challenges facing many developing countries is the planning and the management of cities in such a way as to meet a planning reformist role of promoting equitable, efficient and sustainable urban settlements. In the face of mounting criticisms of technocratic top-down approaches to housing and infrastructure development, there is a need for studies on the interface of satisfaction assessments and planning on the one hand and the social and cultural implications for urban management on the other. This is particularly so in the context of developing cities that are often characterized by dwindling public finances, urban poverty, spatial variations in housing and services, and poor socioeconomic conditions, as well as top-down approaches to urban management. A systematic spatial assessment of urban satisfaction is presented using Benin, a traditional West African city, as a case study. The significance of the satisfaction approach for planning, social and equity concerns is identified, and it is argued that we should look beyond it and incorporate community participatory approaches in the urban development process.     

The Limits and Potentials of the Housing Market Enabling Paradigm: An Evaluation of China's Housing Policies from 1998 to 2011

This paper examines the housing policies in China in the last 14 years in the context of the international debate on the World Bank's housing market enabling strategy to improve low-income housing provision in developing countries. A review of China's urban housing outcomes reveals housing price inflation and shortage of affordable housing in the fast expanding housing market. The paper analyzes policies to increase both demand for and supply of housing and argues that these policies have contributed to worsening affordability. This situation has been exacerbated by problems in the institutional framework managing the housing sector. The paper concludes that market enabling alone is not sufficient to achieve a satisfactory housing outcome for low- and middle-income groups in Chinese cities. It advocates more effective and direct public intervention for enhancing social housing provision and tightening market regulation to address both market and government failures to improve housing conditions for lower income groups.     

Social Groups and Housing Differentiation in China's Urban Villages: An Institutional Interpretation

Possessing different land rights and distinct landscapes, and separated from the rest of the city by invisible institutional boundaries, China's urban villages are unusual enclaves for landless farmers, rural migrants and other urban hukou (citizenship rights) holders in a period of rapid urbanization. Although urban villages are well known for their disorder and unruliness, they provide temporary livelihood for indigenous villagers and inexpensive shelter for migrants and other urban residents. Urban villages are typically perceived as homogeneous low-income neighbourhoods characterized by low quality and high density housing. In fact, housing differentiation has emerged in urban villages among residents who possess different quantities and types of capital, rights/entitlements, skills and other assets. This paper aims to understand the social groups and the housing differentiation among them in the Chinese urban villages from an institutional perspective. It is based on a large-scale household survey in 11 urban villages in six Chinese cities. Empirical data show evidence of significant housing differentiation within these enclaves: indigenous villagers have become a petty rentier class; rural migrants pay the highest rents while enduring the lowest housing conditions; and housing conditions for urban hukou holders lie between those of the other two groups. Regression analysis suggests that urban villages share similar dynamics of housing differentiation as wider urban spaces, i.e. the combination of strong institutional constraints and emerging market influences leads to housing differentiation and inequality. Residents in urban villages are also highly mobile. The inflows and outflows of population form an important part of the urban socio-spatial restructuring process.     

Differentiated Urban Citizenship and Housing Rights: Analysing the Social Impacts of Urban Redevelopment in Globalizing Istanbul

There is growing interest in the transformation of urban citizenship and the changing right to the city of the urban poor under neoliberal restructuring of cities in the Global South. This article examines a ‘squatter settlement transformation project’ in Istanbul that is intended to contribute towards the transformation of Istanbul into a global city. The transformation projects are based on private homeownership, incorporate the urban poor into a new ‘property regime’ and allocate them differentiated access to housing in the city. Using qualitative data, this article traces the unequal outcomes of the project for its displaced residents and demonstrates the emergence of ‘differentiated urban citizenship’. This emergent urban citizenship regime in Turkish cities organizes the distribution of substantive housing rights based on social inequalities among the urban poor, and thus consolidates and perpetuates these inequalities in society.     

The Politics of Poverty Deconcentration and Housing Demolition

Concentrated poverty is the organizing framework for much housing policy at the federal and local levels. This article examines the effect of concentrated poverty on the politics of housing and community development at the local level. A case study of the Minneapolis‐Saint Paul metropolitan area suggests that in high‐poverty neighborhoods efforts to deconcentrate lead to political battles reminiscent of the urban renewal era in which poor and minority residents fight to save their housing and communities from slum clearance. For central cities, the deconcentration of poverty as a policy objective introduces a new set of criteria against which community development efforts are judged, making the development of subsidized and affordable housing more difficult to initiate or sustain. At the regional level, concerns about the concentration of poverty can create new alliances of resistance to affordable housing and even justify demolition in older, inner‐ring suburbs.     

Housing,social capital and community development in Seoul

The nature of Korea’s tenure system and its future development has become an increasingly important aspect of housing policy and community development. A major question being posed is what are the implications of housing tenure differences in social capital for housing (estate) development? Are there differences in levels of social capital between ‘homeowners and tenants’ as well as ‘public rental tenants and private rental tenants’? The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast elements of social capital across different housing tenures in the Seoul Metropolitan Region. Using the results of 260 questionnaires and we assess three commonly recognized elements of social capital: social trust, norms and networks. Respondents from across different tenure types reported differences in feelings of acceptance in the neighborhood, and involvement in formal and informal networks. This study found that some of the elements of social capital differed significantly between housing tenures and that housing tenure was also relevant to negative perceptions of socio-economic diversity in the area. This article concludes housing tenure is relevant to the development of neighborhood-based social capital and that this needs to be considered by those involved in implementing housing (estate) development and sustainable communities in Seoul.     

Managing change: Seattle’s 21st century urban renaissance

ABSTRACT

Evolution of the urban planning and historic preservation disciplines has resulted in an “uneasy alliance” in practice, one further complicated by the back-to-the-city movement and increased development pressure in older urban neighbourhoods. In Seattle, as in other U.S. cities, the pace, intensity and scale of redevelopment has caused dramatic spatial and social transformations. Although research has shown that older built fabric provides economic and social benefit for cities, neither regulations created by planners for guiding redevelopment nor strategies created by preservationists for retaining urban heritage have been successful in reconciling these different, yet interconnected, sets of values. We engage three Seattle neighbourhood case studies to clarify and evaluate policies, programs and strategies used by planners and preservationists for reimagining neighbourhood transformations. This work suggests a need for more creative, integrative collaboration between the two fields to simultaneously engage – and reconcile – social and economic tensions caused by urban redevelopment.     

Maintaining an Arm's Length? Housing,Community Governance and the Management of ‘Problematic’ Populations

This paper examines how contemporary social problems of community care, anti-social behaviour, ethnic and racial tensions and the housing of sex offenders are conceptualised in UK housing and urban policy. It explores how and why the populations of social housing areas disproportionately bear the risks arising from these social problems, and how the responses of these populations are subsequently problematised. The redefining of social landlords' roles in managing ‘problematic’ populations is explored, and similarities in the responses to social problems in both private and social housing developments are identified, based around parochial ‘community’ forms of governance. The paper concludes that the increasing secession of local housing governance from a ‘public’ model of provision increases the ‘subsidiarity of responsibility’ upon deprived populations for managing social problems, reflecting a wider imbalance in the societal distribution of risks.     

The Egalitarian city: The restructuring of Amsterdam

Since the mid‐1970s, urban policy makers have responded to the pressures of fiscal crisis and unemployment by reducing expenditures and subsidizing business for the purpose of stimulating economic growth. The behaviour of urban governments largely corresponded with the argument of Paul Peterson that cities were forced to pursue economic growth at the expense of redistribution. Nevertheless, the response to economic forces, while generally in a market‐oriented direction, was not uniform within western cities. In particular, the Amsterdam municipality remains notable for its egalitarian policies when compared with London or New York. Housing policy has been a major instrument in maintaining the quality of life for the city's lower‐income population. Because subsidized housing units, as well as recipients of individual housing benefits, are scattered throughout the city, housing policy has sharply restricted spatial inequality of households by income. Moreover, the very large public subsidy involved in housing construction, by keeping rent levels low and thereby raising disposable income, has contributed substantially to popular welfare, mitigating class differentiation and thereby weakening resistance to residential integration of different income groups. This paper examines policies for physical and economic development in Amsterdam and their effect on social and spatial inequality. The conclusion briefly compares Amsterdam's trajectory with that of London and New York, then finally attempts to explain the continuing differences.     

城市快速发展时期的社会住房建设:法国的教训与启发

在1950至1970年代的城市化快速发展时期,法国在城市边缘和郊区进行了以大型住区为主要形式的大规模社会住房建设,虽然有效缓解了战争破坏和人口增长带来的住房短缺,却因廉租性社会住房在城市特定地区的大量集聚,以及大型住区本身存在的选址远离中心、建筑形式单调、空间尺度夸张、建设质量低下、设施配套缺失等不足,在1960年代末和1970年代初引发了居住空间的社会分化现象,并在1980年代随城市社会经济结构转型而不断加剧,迫使法国城市不得不从社会、经济、环境、设施和住宅建设等多方面入手,通过实施一系列城市政策和项目计划,对其进行综合整治和更新改造,以抵制社会排斥,鼓励社会混合,促进城市整体和谐发展。文章通过梳理法国社会住房的发展历程,特别是城市快速发展时期社会住房的建设发展,总结其中的经验教训,旨在为当前处于快速发展时期的中国城市的社会住房建设提供有益的启发和借鉴。     

A critical analysis of research of a mass-housing programme

ABSTRACT

A recent expansion of mass-housing programmes has occurred in emerging economies. The analysis of research on programmes raises questions about what type of research is produced and what its impact is on housing. The Brazilian ‘My House, My Life’ (Minha Casa, Minha Vida – MCMV) programme demonstrates that more of the same type of housing is produced and that the focus of most research repeats the same mistakes. Three million homes have been built and the research community has examined the programme’s social, economic and environmental impacts. A total of 2477 scientific studies on MCMV are analyzed. Few studies were found to assess living conditions from a user perspective at the residential unit scale. Although improvements have occurred on some social issues, the siting of housing on the urban periphery is problematic for urban mobility, social segregation and aesthetic monotony. Also, the design model does not respond to the diverse needs of inhabitants. Opportunities are identified for actions and essential missing research on mass housing. Retrofit strategies are urgent and social cost studies should induce change to the design model. Evidence-based research is needed to support policies and design processes for affordable and quality housing solutions that value users, their needs and aspirations.     

Learning from St. Thomas: Community,Capital, and the Redevelopment of Public Housing in New Orleans

Current efforts to redevelop public housing in the US create new opportunities and risks for low-income residents. Although cities are able to pursue innovative strategies for combatting troubled public housing, the danger is that the interests of the residents will be subordinated to those of the local power structure—especially where public housing poses an obstacle to revitalization. This article examines the efforts to redevelop the St. Thomas Housing Development in New Orleans in order to discover the impact on residents and to evaluate prevailing theories of urban power. The case involves empowered public housing residents and powerful economic interests. Although residents of St. Thomas gained access to the pro-growth coalition pursuing revitalization of the surrounding Lower Garden District, the outcome for residents is mixed. In order to understand the constraints faced by public housing residents we must recognize how political discourse can enhance the power of the business community in urban regimes.     

Revenge Of The Property Owners: Community Development and the Politics of Property

ABSTRACT: This study examines the conflict between inner city property owners and lower income tenants for control of neighborhood development agendas and community-based organizations. Utilizing a case study of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the authors investigated neighborhood conflicts over community revitalization. In a number of neighborhoods in the two cities, the community organization has come to be dominated by property owners espousing an “ideology of property” hostile to affordable housing. This has led to tension and conflict between neighborhood organizations pursuing owner interests and community development corporations focusing on low income housing.     

Housing Reform and its Impacts on the Urban Poor in China

Housing provision in Chinese cities has experienced many changes since 1979 when the country embarked on major economic reform. During the late 1980s and the 1990s many publicly owned houses were sold to their existing tenants or other public sector employees. Large numbers of new houses were built by commercial property developers for the emerging urban housing market. As a result, new patterns of residents have emerged. Housing areas of different standards for different social groups became a dominant feature of large Chinese cities at the end of the 1990s. Will the urban poor benefit from these changes and what is their housing situation like under the reformed system? This paper addresses these questions by examining the nature of the emerging urban poor and their accessibility to housing. It involves an assessment of the implications of recent housing reform policies for the disadvantaged groups. The paper identifies two major groups of urban poor in Chinese cities: the poor among the official urban residents and the poor rural to urban migrants. It concludes that while housing problems of the official urban poor have been recognised, there is no formal policy in relation to housing provision for the unofficial poor.