Multifamily housing and resident life satisfaction in Europe: an exploratory analysis

Much of the literature on sustainable communities and compact cities calls for higher density housing including multifamily dwellings. Some researchers suggest problems with such dwellings. However, rigorous comparative research on this topic has not been conducted to date. This paper draws on a high quality, comparative data-set, the European Social Survey, to analyse (a) the quality of multifamily dwellings in European urban areas, (b) the characteristics of residents, (c) their life satisfaction compared with those living in detached housing and (d) the relative importance of built form in explaining life satisfaction. One of the main findings from the multivariate analyses is that residing in multifamily housing is not a statistically significant predictor of life satisfaction when you control for standard predictors of life satisfaction and housing and neighbourhood quality. Overall, the findings provide support for both place-based and people-based responses to urban regeneration. Both physical and social regeneration are required, addressing the education/training needs of residents and economic development strategies.     

A capabilities approach to arts and culture? Theorizing community development in West Philadelphia

Arts and culture are increasingly part of the planning and development toolkit in the USA. Justifications for investment in the arts often center on economic development outcomes. In contrast, we propose the use of Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to human development, which asserts the importance of the freedom to achieve personal and group well-being through the creation of conditions that maximize opportunity. This paper advances the capabilities approach by exploring arts and culture engagement in three adjacent West Philadelphia neighborhoods. Amid conditions of material deprivation and pressure from gentrification, neighborhood residents strongly articulate their belief in arts and culture as a strategy of community empowerment. The capabilities approach offers planners an opportunity to reevaluate the way they incorporate arts and culture in their efforts. We conclude that arts-based development should employ comprehensive place-based strategies, with social and spatial justice as guides to practice and primary metrics for success.     

Disentangling neighbourhood problems: area-based interventions in Western European cities

Urban policies in Western Europe have increasingly taken a territorial focus in addressing social problems through area-based initiatives (ABIs). Policy discourses emphasise the role of the residential environment in the social economic deprivation. However, a territorial focus that tackles both place-based issues and people-based problems would only make sense either when a ‘critical representation’ of the target population resides in several areas in an already divided city, or when neighbourhood effects take place. In the European context, the existence of either scenario is not a matter of fact. Our overview of four urban policies reveals that even though the rhetoric makes multiple allusions to the existence of the two scenarios, there is no convincing evidence. Moreover, in some cases the evidence refutes policy assumptions. This means that the policies are merely tackling unrelated problems: people-based social economic deprivation and place-based liveability and housing issues. In addition, urban policies stand against a backdrop of social and cultural integration debates. It is unknown what the territorial focus will do for integration, but it is unlikely that ABIs will be successful in effectively tackling social economic deprivation in European societies.     

Canal oriented development as waterfront place-making: an analysis of the built form

Place-making, as a thoughtful planning, design and management approach to creating communities, is critical not only to designers of the built environment, but also to developers and municipal officials who look to build and/or regenerate urban spaces that translate into vibrant successful places. Using criteria established in the Project for Public Places ‘What Makes a Successful Place?’ matrix, this paper applies onsite ethnographic research in analyzing three US canal oriented developments (CODs) to determine whether each place-based development has created a ‘successful’ place and used its canal feature as a development component in spurring urban growth and regeneration. More specifically, these canal-oriented CODs are assessed on the basis of how successful each is at (1) embracing the canal in its design and development, (2) intermingling the space with the greater urban form, and (3) connecting private and public spaces.     

James N. Levitt (Ed.). (2014). Conservation Catalysts: The Academy as Nature's Agent. Cambridge,MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 368 pages. $30.00 (paperback).

Obtaining good estimates of local populations and subpopulations is always a problem with urban planners. One method widely used for this purpose is to count dwelling units and then multiply by a household population multiplier. A great weakness of this approach—the appropriateness of the multiplier used—can be improved upon using a data source known as the census public use samples. These samples of household records from the 1970 U.S. census of population provide a basis for tailor-made household population multipliers. Multipliers can be selected to be appropriate to the region, type of city, the neighborhood, type and age of structure, and for other observable characteristics of the dwelling unit. Tests reported in this article indicate that the multipliers to be obtained from the public use samples compare extremely well with the best available elsewhere. Further, they are available at a cost which is a tiny fraction of that for customary survey sources of data.     

Mobile Design as Neighborhood Acupuncture: Activating the Storytelling Networks of South Los Angeles

Abstract

A delicate touch is required to empower neighborhoods using civic media. Funding is persistently scarce. Especially in marginalized neighborhoods, blunt designs can be counterproductive and even entrench complex problems. New metaphors may be needed to guide design and empower local neighborhoods. Urban acupuncture is used as the basis for this study, emphasizing a light-touch strategy that has shown success in Brazil with urban transit, and more recently in Europe with urban design. We specifically propose “neighborhood acupuncture” to address the local level, tapping the sociology of place-based communication. To investigate the implications for systematic design, a case study is probed in South Los Angeles using mobile media for community mapping. Using qualitative methods, three tactics were investigated for the potential to “poke” the network into action, including one to bridge diverse storytelling networks. Each tactic ultimately seeks to build the capacity for collective action around neighborhood issues. Acupuncture is broadly argued to sustain two design shifts: first to help approach neighborhoods as ecosystems, and second, to design for circulation rather than any single technology platform.     

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Science and Civic Technology Innovation

Instrumentation of the urban environment is not by itself sufficient to have a meaningful impact on the quality, sustainability, and resilience of cities – or more broadly on urban policy and planning. Understanding the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of urban life requires both an appreciation of the social sciences and a substantive engagement with communities across neighborhoods. The “Smart City” messaging is replete with claims of the potential for sensors and information and communication technologies (ICT) to re-shape urban life, although such rhetoric ignores the practical realities and constraints of urban decision-making and the social and distributional concerns of policy outcomes. Rather, significant progress could be achieved at the neighborhood scale by focusing diverse, intensive, and persistent real-time data collection and analysis on a “Quantified Community” (QC). The QC—a long-term neighborhood informatics research initiative—is a network of instrumented urban neighborhoods that collect, measure, and analyze data on physical and environmental conditions and human behavior to provide a rich resource to better understand how neighborhoods and the built environment affect individual and social well-being. The resulting unique experimental environment provides a testing ground for new physical and informatics technologies, policies, and behavioral interventions, allowing for unprecedented studies in urban planning and design, urban systems engineering and management, and the social sciences. Focusing on the neighborhood scale also allows for meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space and shifts the emphasis of data-driven design away from top-down routinization to a human-centric problem-solving. This paper presents the conceptual framework and justification for the QC, built on the lessons learned from three initial deployments in New York City, and a networked experimental environment of neighborhood labs.     

Exploring the relationship between landscape characteristics and urban vibrancy: A case study using morphology and review data

Urban vibrancy is a vital component that supports urban form and is dependent on the physical entities in urban landscapes. Thus, the relationship between urban landscapes and urban vibrancy is a major concern for city planners. While existing studies mainly capture mixed land use, density, and accessibility properties of the physical environment, urban characteristics depicted by the city morphologies have seldom been addressed. To fill this gap, a novel framework is proposed in this paper to explore the relationship between landscape characteristics and urban vibrancy. First, research approaches for delineating multi-level urban landscape characteristics – including places, land use, and single and multiple landscape elements – using spatial metrics were analysed. Then, place-based reviews from social media data were applied as proxies to quantitatively measure urban vibrancy. Finally, regression analyses were proposed to assess the relationship between landscape characteristics and urban vibrancy. Satisfactory regression model performances were attained with adjusted R² values of 0.65, 0.65, 0.66, and 0.67 at each landscape characteristic level. The results indicate that changes in urban vibrancy are variable and highly dependent on the proposed multi-level characteristics. These findings may provide guidance for city planning and urban landscape design.     

城市街道视域景观指数与邻里尺度特征效应

城市街道景观指数提取为城市街景研究量化途径之一。结合已有指数,提出用全景静态图的不同数据类型,分类计算视域景观指数的优化方法;提出基于计算机视觉尺度不变特征转换(SIFT)的关键点邻域尺度区间频数;采用层次聚类分析指数不同的邻里尺度最优簇数、贡献度,确定分布特征重要指数组成;探索不同指数作用于不同邻里尺度的特征效应。研究发现视域景观指数具有不同邻里尺度效应。研究指数中城市街道空间的绿视率和天空开阔度(空间组成层面)、关键点邻域尺度(0,10]和(10,20]区间频数(对象尺度层面),以及色彩丰富度指数(颜色层面)是构成城市街道分布特征的重要特征指数。通过确定不同邻里尺度城市街道特征分布,可以为城市街道空间的景观质量提升、量化管理和城市微更新提供参照。     

Defining University Anchor Institution Strategies: Comparing Theory to Practice

Since the 1990s, some urban universities have served as neighborhood anchors with an interest in revitalization. Current theory suggests anchors adopt ‘shared value’ approaches, leveraging resources for mutually beneficial improvement in the community. This study explores assumptions in contemporary anchor frameworks and uses a survey to examine how 22 U.S. universities approach their roles as anchor institutions. The study finds that the universities tend to prioritize place-based initiatives, while contemporary frameworks are more normative and highlight socioeconomic practices. Based on reported strategies, the author proposes an alternate typology that accounts for the ways universities most commonly describe anchor approaches, complementing contemporary theory.     

NEIGHBORHOOD DIVERSITY,ECONOMIC HEALTH,AND THE ROLE OF THE ARTS

Policymakers pursue a range of strategies aimed at diversifying neighborhoods despite research indicating the complicated and potentially damaging results of these efforts. One increasingly common approach is to incorporate the arts into planning efforts in the hope of enhancing diversity and catalyzing positive neighborhood change. Using data from the Cultural Data Project, the authors determine where newly established New York City arts organizations locate in terms of neighborhood racial, income, and industry diversity. They then analyze how diverse contexts interact with an arts presence to impact neighborhood economic health over time. They find that neighborhoods with high levels of racial diversity and low levels of income and industry diversity benefit most from an arts presence. However, the arts are attracted predominantly to neighborhoods with moderate levels of racial diversity and high levels of income and industry diversity. This complicates the use of the arts as a tool in urban revitalization policy.     

Coupling urban regeneration with age-friendliness: Neighborhood regeneration in Jangsu Village,Seoul

This paper examines a neighborhood regeneration effort in Jangsu Village, Seoul, through which residents strived to continue living in the area on the verge of wholesale renewal. In Seoul, a large-scale urban development and/or regeneration has shaped urban fabric since the 1960s, while the recent phenomenon of rapid aging has led to a sudden demographic shift. Jangsu is a low-income, dilapidated neighborhood in the center of Seoul where many inhabitants are aging long-term squatters. Therefore, this research provides a glimpse into how older inhabitants with fewer resources are able to continue living in their neighborhood in a gentrifying city undergoing rapid spatial, socio-economic and population changes. The paper demonstrates how neighborhood social capital has fostered multi-stakeholder collaboration and the participation of older residents in the area's regeneration, enabling residents to continue living there and improving living conditions by repairing and reusing existing buildings. Thereby, this paper highlights: (1) neighborliness as a significant dimension in making age-friendly cities and, (2) the notion that age-friendliness might serve as an urban regeneration framework, emphasizing stable and affordable residency as well as progressive transformation.     

邻里再生的理论与实践探索——以百万庄小区为例

社区再生不同于传统物质空间的更新.尝试应用西方邻里再生的理论视角研究我国社区再生问题.首先,梳理了邻里再生的理论基础,发现“问题诊断”与“社区能力”是邻里再生的两个关键技术.其次,基于理论研究,选择百万庄小区作为实证案例,通过问题诊断与能力分析,发现百万庄小区存在设施与人口结构老化、租户增加、机动车冲击、邻里关系疏远、集体行动能力缺失等一系列问题.最后,基于问题诊断与能力分析,提出“以价值传承为基础,以共识激发能力,以行动凝聚共识”的百万庄社区再生策略,力图为我国新常态下的城市住区更新提供参考.     

CITIZEN PARTICIPATION AND URBAN CAPACITY BUILDING: REPRESENTATION AND CONFLICT

The paper focuses on two major urban capacities to which citizen participation policies are expected to contribute—the capacity to represent diverse interests and the capacity to sustain conflict. The comparative strengths and weaknesses of two different citizen participation structures are considered—single-purpose, appointed advisory boards and multiple-purpose, elected neighborhood councils. Drawing from both the literature and original data from Wichita's innovative citizen participation approach, the paper suggests ways in which each participatory form contributes to urban representation and the avoidance of rancorous conflict.     

邻里环境对居民健康的影响及其差异——基于广州市28个社区的结构方程模型

伴随着中国城市居民生活水平的提高,居民健康及其邻里环境的影响因素日益受到地理学和规划学研究关注。本文以广州市28个社区为例,利用2016年社区问卷调查数据、空间兴趣点POI、土地利用现状、全国第六次人口普查等数据,构建结构方程模型以探究居民健康的邻里影响研究,并通过多群组分析剖析不同社区邻里影响的差异。研究发现:(1)建成环境:高密度、混合型、公共交通发达的邻里会鼓励居民进行体育锻炼,并对心理健康带来积极影响;(2)社会环境:互助、信任、沟通交流以及社区参与程度较高的邻里对体育锻炼具有正向影响,并对身体健康、心理健康带来积极影响;(3)不同社区邻里影响存在差异,社会经济指数(SESI)低的社区居民体育锻炼受到建成环境影响更显著,社会经济指数(SESI)高的社区居民体育锻炼受到社会环境影响更显著。研究希望为健康社区建设提供研究基础和政策支持。     

Commercial Gentrification and Entrepreneurial Governance in Shanghai: A Case Study of Taikang Road Creative Cluster

Commercial gentrification—based on the adaptive reuse of historic dwellings for upscale shopping, dining and culture—is emerging as a new model of neighbourhood regeneration in China. Through an analysis of Shanghai's urban restructuring and a case study of Taikang Road Creative Cluster, this article demonstrates that entrepreneurial local government is a key facilitator. Conscious of the synergistic value of restored urban heritage with conspicuous consumption, tourism and even the creative industries, local officials have utilised their urban planning authority to open up urban heritage to a host of gentrifiers including businesses, artists and creative firms. In terms of social outcomes, some local residents have capitalised on inflated property values and gained the opportunity to move out of poverty. Nevertheless, socially exclusive outcomes have also been evident, as commercialisation eroded the living environment of rural migrants and other poor residents.     

Sustainability issues in the industrial heritage adaptive reuse: rethinking culture-led urban regeneration through Chinese case studies

Targeted at the fragility of culture-led regeneration as a result of market frustrations and policy instability, the paper proposes a sustainable perspective to re-examine the prospects of culture-led urban regeneration projects at the local level through the taxonomy of three signatures—The Beijing 798 Art Zone, The Shanghai M50 and The Guangzhou Xinyi International Club are chosen as different, yet representative cases of industrial heritage transformed creative clusters. By comparing the development trajectories and statuses of these pioneer culture-led regeneration projects, the paper reveals the mechanism and confirms the model of practice for the reincarnation of industrial heritage by creative clusters in the local context of the cities. Ultimately, the analysis of this model indicates that the reuse of industrial heritage is an effective approach in response to the cultural demands of the post-industrial era; however, it brings forth the inevitable challenges beyond economic dimension, from a sustainability perspective. The analysis further identifies those underlying reasons of unsustainability and provides recommendations in order to explore the full potential of the “cultural value” of urban regeneration.     

多学科视角下当代西方人与建成环境关系 研究的发展、转型及趋势

随着中国城市建设走向存量更新的发展模式,深入 思考人与建成环境间的关系有助于进一步推动人居环境建设向 以人为本的可持续方向发展。西方社会在20世纪由快速城市化 引起的学术思潮极大地丰富和发展了城市空间认知研究,从多 学科视角探讨了人与建成环境间相互影响的互作关系。通过梳 理近几十年来涵盖多个不同学科的人-境关系研究,从认知及 空间意象、现象学、社会及自我认同视角对相关概念和研究维 度进行了系统解读,并结合当下信息化技术的发展,探讨了人- 境关系研究在新时代的应用途径和发展趋势。最后指出随着数 据挖掘和量化分析能力的提升,经典理论研究也应与数字化技 术深度结合,进一步解读现象产生背后的机制与动因,将人-境 关系研究在精细化城市规划与管理时代推向全新的维度。     

Designing successful urban regeneration strategies through a behavioral decision aiding approach

Finding a new use for abandoned buildings provides an opportunity for urban and rural regeneration as reconversion policies arrest decay processes and re-establish continuity in the territorial system, using existing buildings and thus limiting the consumption of new soil. This study combines quantitative stakeholders' analysis with Decision Aiding tools to design and evaluate alternative strategies for the regeneration of an abandoned military barrack in Italy. In particular, the paper details how the collaborative decision support process developed from the initial map of the local needs to the final assessment of five different regeneration projects. The main objective of the study is to develop a transferable framework able to support collaborative planning and decision-making processes related to urban regeneration transformations. The contribution brought by the study is twofold and refers to: (i) the development of an inclusive final recommendation based on the innovative integration of Multi Attribute Value Theory with quantitative stakeholders' analysis and (ii) the provision of a replicable working tool for policy makers and urban regeneration specialists. The study has thus an innovative value and may stimulate a cross-disciplinary use of behavioral decision analysis to support a value-based generation and evaluation of alternative solutions in complex multi-actor decision making settings.