Shaken,shrinking, hot,impoverished and informal: Emerging research agendas in planning

This is the second of two special issues in Progress in Planning exploring emerging research agendas in planning. It brings together scholars from diverse schools working on new areas of research and application in urban design and planning. Emergent research agendas include both novel areas of research and important shifts in the direction of a research area. The challenge for planning schools is to reflect critically on these changes and develop long-term research agendas that can better position our field in society and academia, and provide a basis from which to assess our academic programmes. The chapters in this issue display the different scales and fields of planning, including planning for: disaster recovery; climate change, especially opportunities for mitigation; shrinking cities in the First World; and rapidly urbanising informal and impoverished cities in the global South. At the same time, the chapters identify research areas that respond to major social and environmental changes. Olshansky and Chang highlight the increasing losses from catastrophic disasters, and address the need for disaster recovery planning. Wheeler, Randolph and London focus on climate change, and, noting the urgency of action now, their research agenda emphasises opportunities for planners to develop research and policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hollander, Pallagst, Schwarz and Popper look at increasing economic and population trends in many First World cities that result in city ‘shrinkage’. They present new opportunities for improving cities’ green space networks and natural features, and for research. The trebling of urban population in African cities by 2050, in conditions of poverty and informality, is the major trend driving Parnell, Pietriese and Watson's chapter. They present an agenda for new planning theories and for supporting empirical research to address the actual conditions of African cities.     

Restructuring and repositioning Shenzhen,China's new mega city

Shenzhen, a new mega city founded under China's ‘open door’ policy, has experienced dramatic urban development over the past 30 years. From humble beginnings as a fishing village before the 1980s, it benefited from locational advantage next to Hong Kong, an autonomous city with a global role in finance and trade. Shenzhen was first among cities in China to adapt the capitalist world's urban development practices to an indigenous, centrally controlled land management system. As a new city, Shenzhen may best represent the role of planning in a time of economic transition. Urban planning in Shenzhen was ambitious in its reach, using ‘experimental reform’ as a vehicle for institutionalising changes in management of the land resource. These reforms became generalised in China, leading to a recent decline in academic investigation of Shenzhen. While the city as ‘reformer’ seems to have run its course, new challenges upset the old assumptions and call for more research. Today, as industry moves inland away from increasingly costly coastal areas, the city is grappling with the need to restructure its economic base. The city has undertaken major infrastructural projects in a bid to secure its role as a major transhipment hub and logistics command centre, while also developing a rail-based mass transit system. The regeneration of disused industrial land and ‘urban villages’, built up to accommodate at low cost a huge factory workforce, are important ongoing city programmes. While the city extends its infrastructure to connect more effectively with the rest of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and with Hong Kong, more fundamental questions surround its role within a restructuring regional economy. Ambitions for international stature, bolstered by a large and young population base, a world-class port and modern facilities are challenged by a rapidly evolving regional economy.     

Beyond property: Industrial estates and post-suburban transformation in Jakarta Metropolitan Region

Past studies on urbanization in East Asia in general and in Indonesia in particular have taken the edge of large cities as the extension of the metropolitan core where the zones of urban-rural transition take shape. The current article argues that the emergence of global cities and decentralization trends in the last decades have challenged this traditional conception. Jakarta Metropolitan Region (JMR) is beginning to join the global trend of post-suburbia, which refers to the decentralization of urban life to the outskirts of a metropolis. Several post-suburban elements in JMR are identified in this article, including planned deconcentration of hi-tech industries and multinational companies, followed by the growth of projects beyond land and property development, including suburban cultural centers with a Western flavor. Despite these commonalities, this article argues that post-suburbia in JMR has its own uniqueness due to the reduced carrying capacity of the metropolitan core, the persistent yet relatively passive influence of the state, symbiotic relations between the market and the public sector, and the privatization of planning rules.     

The Politics of Design and Development in the Postmodern Downtown

As cities cope with new economic realities their downtown spaces are changing. Downtowns have become consumption–based places that are designed more like amusement parks for tourists than as urban places for residents. The increasing privatization of design and oversight of downtown spaces raises questions about democratic access and in whose interests public development policy is made. The case cities examined here suggest that cities are struggling to find ways to make their need for development success match their desire to make downtowns accessible. Despite citizen participation and political rhetoric about public access, cities make compromises. They are willing to give private control over formerly public space in exchange for a productive economic return. Such behavior produces a positive cultural reference but allows little room for diversity.     

City edges in Germany: Quality growth and urban design

Forty years of explosive growth have dissolved the hard edge of old walled cities throughout Germany. Undefined suburban mess has consumed vast areas of land and degraded picturesque German landscapes. The new interest in strengthening local identities coincides with national priorities to enhance the cultural and natural heritage. Policies for quality growth at the city's edge evolve through a series of steps, including the community's vision statements, comprehensive master planning, environmental prioritization of potential development sites, and land banking for mitigation of future impacts. The merits of high density urban form with strategically placed ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ edges include preservation of landscape with special environmental and scenic value; proximity of residential and recreational areas; convenient and car-free transit; and openness contrasts with urban density.     

Off-street parking policy surprises in Asian cities

This paper provides an international comparative perspective on non-residential, off-street parking policy in 14 large metropolitan areas in East, Southeast and South Asia. These are regions where parking challenges are widespread and acute. It utilises a new typology which groups parking policy approaches into ‘conventional’, ‘parking management’ and ‘market-oriented’ categories. Several distinct parking policy orientations are identified among the cities studied. Given their characteristics (most have relatively low car-ownership, high-density development and high usage of public transport) Asian cities might be expected to have off-street parking policies akin to those of many older areas in western cities. Yet, most of the Southeast and South Asian cities studied have parking policies that are surprisingly conventional and promoting of automobile-dependence. It is less surprising that a number of cities, mostly in East Asia, do not have such an auto-centric conventional approach. However, it is a surprise that their parking policies still involve minimum parking requirements and have generally not adopted the most common alternative to the conventional approach (parking management).     

论城市竞争的空间效应

全球化和地方化作为城市竞争力的外部环境因素,是城市竞争优势的重要源泉。同时城市通过竞争影响着全球化和地方化的过程,并在不同层面空间上投下其竞争效应的投影。在全球层面,城市竞争效应主要表现在全球城市体系的形成、首位城市主宰世界经济趋势明显、多极多层次世界城市网络体系的形成。在区域层面,城市竞争效应主要表现在区域产业集聚、城市集聚;在城市层面城市竞争效应主要表现在新产业空间与城市竞争。     

Situating Fortaleza: Urban space and uneven development in northeastern Brazil

The academic literature on Brazilian cities focuses overwhelmingly upon the metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. While fruitful in its own right, this research confronts scholars of Latin American cities elsewhere with two ongoing limitations: (1) Despite estimates that nearly one quarter of Brazil’s urban population inhabits the conurbation of Rio and São Paulo, at least 75% of urban space in Brazil, an area populated by roughly 120 million people, is consistently overlooked; and (2) the findings from these two megacities are often (and unfairly) extrapolated across other urban contexts in Brazil, perpetuating lingering misgivings about the overall ‘nature’ of Brazilian cities.In this paper, I consider the Northeast of Brazil, drawing upon my own research from the favela (slum) community of Pirambu, located in the city of Fortaleza, to help understand urban development outside of the Rio/São Paulo corridor. By considering historical circumstances, geographic specificity, theoretical implications, and the course of Brazilian development, I highlight informal urban growth in an oft-overlooked region of Latin America while, at the same time, revealing many of the geographic attributes that give Rio and São Paulo their truly exceptional character. My goal in this work is not to refute the work of others, but rather to underscore the importance of geographic context to socio-spatial processes of urban development.     

Local experiences of urban sustainability: Researching Housing Market Renewal interventions in three English neighbourhoods

Ideas and thinking about sustainability and sustainable development have permeated over the last decades into most disciplines and sectors. The area of urban studies is no exception and has generated an impressive body of literature, which aims to marry ‘sustainability’ and ‘urban development’ by grounding the many interpretations of sustainability in an urban setting. This has taken many forms and inspired a range of initiatives across the world including ‘healthy cities’, ‘urban villages’, ‘millennium communities’ and the ‘mixed communities’ movement. Moreover, urban regeneration has come under considerable scrutiny as one of the core mechanisms for delivering sustainable urban development. At the most basic level, it can be argued that all urban regeneration contributes to a certain extent to sustainable development through the recycling of derelict land and buildings, reducing demand for peripheral development and facilitating the development of more compact cities. Yet, whether urban regeneration bears an effect on urban sustainability is an underresearched area. In addition, little is known about these impacts at local level. This paper aims to extend our understanding in these areas of research. We do so, by taking a closer look at three neighbourhoods in Salford, Newcastle and Merseyside. These neighbourhoods underwent urban regeneration under the Housing Marker Renewal Programme (2003–2011), which aimed to ‘create sustainable urban areas and communities’ in the Midlands and North of England. Approximately 130 residents from the three areas were interviewed and a further 60 regeneration officials and local stakeholders consulted. The paper looks at the impact of urban regeneration on urban sustainability by examining whether interventions under the Housing Market Renewal Programme have helped urban areas and communities to become more sustainable. It also discusses impacts at local level, by probing into some of Housing Market Renewal's grounded ‘sustainability stories’ and looking at how change is perceived by local residents. Furthermore, it re-opens a window into the Housing Market Renewal Programme and documents the three neighbourhoods within the wider context of scale and intervention across the whole programme.     

A systematic review of gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation in African cities

Globalization and the spread of neo-liberal models of urban restructuring have resulted in the rise in gated communities worldwide, including in Africa. The on-going scholarly debate revolves around the drivers of gated communities, their impacts and implications on the planning and management of cities. To contribute to and advance scholarly debate on gated communities and the challenge of urban transformation, we used standard systematic procedures to synthesize findings from 31 peer reviewed journal articles from 1990 to 2020, that examine the phenomenon of gated communities in African cities. Despite the differences in study settings, key findings emerge from gated community studies in Africa. Majority of the reviewed studies attribute the emergence of gated communities to the rise in crime and the search for good quality living environment. Globalization also plays an important role in facilitating new market-oriented gated communities. The globalization of lifestyles of the urban elite has also found expression in African cities. Reviewed studies are critical of gated communities for promoting spatial fragmentation, privatization of public space and local governance and for propagating socio-economic inequality and urban segregation. These issues have implications for the planning and management of cities; in terms of balancing between the need for secure neighbourhoods and promoting inclusive urban societies. The systematic review makes a case for re-thinking urban models that inform the production of new urban spaces; with a view to balance between private capital interests and the need for spatial justice.

     

Climatic city: Two centuries of urban planning and climate science in Manchester (UK) and its region

This paper traces the history, and current challenges, of climate science and urban design in Greater Manchester, UK. The Mancunian metropolis is a remarkable example of a ‘climatic city’, one that shapes its climate as much as it is shaped by it. From the efforts to control smoke and clear slums in the 19th century, to today’s race to be at the forefront of ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ cities, climate is a central actor in Manchester’s history and will likely be so in the near future. We analyse the continuities and inflections of this history of climate science and urban planning in the metropolis by drawing on historical material and interviews with key local stakeholders, to understand the natural, social and political construction of this singular ‘industrial ecology’. Ultimately, we ask whether stakeholders in the Greater Manchester area can overcome existing challenges to go towards a greener, more resilient and sustainable city.     

消费时代城市公共空间的特点及其理论批判

公共空间,是城市物质环境与社会生活中最基本、最重要的元素之一。随着当代城市的发展模式由生产驱动向消费驱动的转型,"私有化、商品化、符号化"成为当今消费时代下城市公共空间的三大特点。这些深刻的变化引发了对当代城市公共空间的理论批判与质疑:不少研究者指出公共空间正日益成为"纯粹的消费场所",一方面,其为公众服务的社会功能已明显"失落"了;另一方面,也有研究者指出当代公共空间仍然具备促进社会"融合"和提升公共生活"多元化"的能力,因此,公共空间并未失落,而是处于"演变"之中。总的来看,这些看似不一致的观点各自揭示了当代城市公共空间真实的一面;因此,采取一种"兼收并蓄"的态度有助于人们更全面地认识消费时代城市公共空间的本质,从而采取更切实有效的策略对公共空间进行设计与管理。     

‘The planned city sweeps the poor away…’: Urban planning and 21st century urbanisation

In recent years, attention has been drawn to the fact that now more than half of the world's population is urbanised, and the bulk of these urban dwellers are living in the global South. Many of these Southern towns and cities are dealing with crises which are compounded by rapid population growth, particularly in peri-urban areas; lack of access to shelter, infrastructure and services by predominantly poor populations; weak local governments and serious environmental issues. There is also a realisation that newer issues of climate change, resource and energy depletion, food insecurity and the current financial crisis will exacerbate present difficult conditions. As ideas that either ‘the market’ or ‘communities’ could solve these urban issues appear increasingly unrealistic, there have been suggestions for a stronger role for governments through reformed instruments of urban planning. However, agencies (such as UN-Habitat) promoting this make the point that in many parts of the world current urban planning systems are actually part of the problem: they serve to promote social and spatial exclusion, are anti-poor, and are doing little to secure environmental sustainability. Urban planning, it is argued, therefore needs fundamental review if it is to play any meaningful role in current urban issues.     

Urban Space Production in Transition: The Cases of the New Urban Areas of Hanoi

In recent decades, hundreds of master-planned new urban areas (NUAs) have developed on the urban fringes of expanding cities in Vietnam. They are promoted as a new urban planning concept in the post-reform policies. This article discusses the NUAs' planning concepts based on qualitative case studies of four NUAs in Hanoi, and on an examination of the 1990–2000 urban policies. It sheds light on transitional planning and urban space production processes in Vietnam and discusses urban quality in a rapidly urbanising Asian context. The article argues that NUAs are products of a hybrid, transitional system in which local government and the public sector form an alliance with the private sector to serve private interests in urban development. At the same time, NUAs are hybrid products of government-led, entrepreneur-driven planning and self-organising space production by the residents. The self-organising space production activities contribute to the urban quality of these new urban spaces, while the production of privatised, commodified spaces by corporate actors poses a threat to community life.     

论城市竞争与竞争力的基本理论

在城市竞争力概念辨析的基础上,归纳城市竞争与竞争力的若干规律.①新经济时代城市竞争机制呈现与传统经济时代不同的特征;②城市竞争力取决于"起动和活性作用"的资源因素、成长性激励作用的内部能力因素,及起推动和滞缓作用的外部环境因素;③城市竞争力影响因素的资源和内部能力的组合反映和决定了城市竞争态势及竞争的核心能力.一方面,影响因素的静态组合状态,反映了竞争"类型"的不同;另一方面,影响因素的动态组合,表现为竞争优势驱动的"时序"特征;④全球化、地方化过程作为竞争的外部环境提供了城市的全球体系优势及地方据点优势源泉;⑤城市竞争在全球、区域及城市层面上具有不同的空间投影.     

Mapping urban public spaces based on the Nolli map method

In 1748, Giambattista Nolli published a large map of Rome, which accurately depicted the form and system of public space in the city. This graphic presentation has become a powerful tool for urban space research. However, given the increasingly abundant types of contemporary urban spaces and diverse functions of public buildings, the application of the drawing principle of the Nolli map to contemporary cities remains uncertain. Taking the Laochengnan area in Nanjing as an example, this study investigates the mapping of urban public spaces based on the Nolli map method. On the basis of a field survey, the public and private spaces in the blocks are identified. By comparing the graphic information of the Nolli map and that of the Nolli-type map in terms of public, private, and green spaces, this work also reveals the similarities and differences between traditional and modern urban spaces. Urban spatial mapping methods, including the figure-ground map, street map, and Nolli-type map, are explored and compared using complementary mapping techniques. The practicality and effectiveness of each technique are also discussed. Results show that the Nolli map method is effective in mapping contemporary urban public spaces and provides an effective tool for urban designers and architects to depict and analyze urban public spaces.     

基于“边缘空间”的思考——以江南当代城市为例

从当代古建筑保留较好的江南城市着手,对建筑边缘、景观边缘、城镇边缘等部分做了相关的调查摸索.边缘空间是区分空间的一种因素,也是空间形象塑造、空间存在含义表达、场所认知、氛围营造等的一种媒介.不同类型、不同等级的边缘空间将城市中各种不同功能和空间融为一体,在整个城市空间格局与建筑构建中有着深远的意义,引发更多的基于“边缘空间”的思考.     

三度空间理念下城市韧性评价与提升策略研究

如何实现城市韧性建设,提升城市韧性强度成为当今国家建设的重要内容。针对这一现象,依托三度空间理念,建立了城市韧性评价体系,并利用 CRITIC-熵权及 TOPSIS 方法构建了城市韧性的评价模型。基于此,选择东北地区 4 个副省级城市哈尔滨、长春、沈阳和大连作为分析对象,对各个城市的韧性进行了综合评价和分空间评价。实证结果不仅能够确定现有城市的韧性强度,也能通过不同城市韧性建设的对比,探索出各个城市物理空间、社会空间、信息空间韧性建设存在的不足,从而提出促进城市韧性建设,提升城市韧性强度的策略。     

Proximity to source populations and untidy gardens predict occurrence of a small lizard in an urban area

Very little is known about how lizards respond to urbanization. Given their small space requirements, opportunist lizard species can potentially exist in small patches of suitable urban habitat. This study identified the relative importance of landscape and habitat-level factors that influenced the occurrence of an opportunist and generally abundant species, the common skink Oligosoma nigriplantare polychrome in suburban private gardens in New Zealand. Private gardens are potentially important in sustaining urban wildlife as they make up a significant proportion of the total area of many cities. Common skinks were largely absent from the central suburbs and distributed in less highly ordered gardens around the city edge. Skink occurrence was influenced mainly by landscape-level features that reflect opportunities for dispersal into gardens from source populations (distance to city edge; presence of an adjacent grassy paddock) and habitat quality (messiness). To a lesser extent skink occurrence was associated with lower cat densities, less native vegetation and south-facing sites. Within private gardens common skinks were associated with areas with a high proportion of basking surfaces, lower plant species diversity, shorter distances to potential cover, and vegetation that was low in height and made up mainly of long exotic grasses. Despite common skinks’ ability to thrive in exotic vegetation and their small spatial requirements, it is unlikely that they will thrive in urban areas unless gardening practices change to increase resource availability and provide refuges from predators.     

New high-density intensified housing developments in Asia: qualities,potential and challenges

In the context of urban development intensification, public space often faces typological and programmatic contest and negotiations among the increasing number of diverse users, resulting in the emergence of new urban space typologies. This paper highlights the key considerations and trends in the development of new urban spaces in the context of high-density, high-intensity residential urban environments in Asia. It employs a comparative analysis of critical parameters and challenges of urban space design in three exemplary case studies from Singapore, Beijing and Tokyo, assessing their capacity to become models for quality-intensified housing development in future high-density environments.