Creating an African Riviera: Revisiting the Impact of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront Development in Cape Town

The use of leisure and tourism to re-image and redevelop cities has been interpreted as a mechanism for attracting capital and people. In a period of intense inter-place competition and urban entrepreneurialism, whole built environments become centerpieces of urban spectacle and display. Waterfront developments have become emblematic in this regard. Over the past two decades the redevelopment of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (V&AW) in Cape Town has been transformed from ‘port’ to ‘playground’ and is internationally acknowledged as one of the most successful of these developments. This redevelopment has, as has been the case with numerous other waterfront developments, not been uncontroversial. New tensions and conflicts have arisen over the use, meaning, and ownership of this space. The acquisition of the waterfront by a consortium of London- and Dubai-based property developers in 2006 has renewed concerns about the ‘plasticization’ of the waterfront and signals the symbolic start of a new phase in this waterfront’s development trajectory. The paper tracks the development of the V&AW since its inception in the late 1980s and argues that general critiques of waterfront developments sit uneasily in the Cape Town context. It is also suggested that these developments can fulfil a very significant and positive role for developing world cities.     

Lifestyles and the city: connecting daily life to urbanity

Urban households are part of what makes a city a city: economically, because of their labour market participation and use of urban facilities; and socially, because of their participation in public life. In turn, these urban households profit from what the city has to offer. In this paper, a household typology is constructed according to type and extent of ‘urban connectedness’. Urban connectedness is not identified as people’s stated preference but rather as people’s revealed relationship with the urban society through their residential choices. Subsequently, the urban orientation of these household types is explored. Empirical data are obtained for the city of Amsterdam.     

Aging in place and housing over-consumption

Societies are aging and the number of households with heads or even all members over 65 is increasing rapidly. Many of these households are well established in the housing market and occupy housing at the apex of the housing choice process. These houses are large, nearly always owned and with substantial equity value. The households that occupy such dwellings have lower mobility rates than households in general and are likely, with low mobility rates, to continue to occupy their houses even when they no longer need the same space as when they were raising families. The paper examines the extent of this phenomenon in the Netherlands and traces under what circumstances older households are exchanging these large houses. The data, derived from the Housing Demand Survey in the Netherlands, reveal that older households occupy very spacious housing, that they have relatively long durations of stay, and that owners over 60 are nearly certain to be ‘over-consuming’ housing with respect to equilibrium consumption. At the same time, when older households do move, they reduce the amount of space they consume. The issue for society at large is whether the low mobility rates create a bottleneck in access to spacious housing by younger families.This paper was originally designed and initiated in collaboration with Frans Dieleman. We wish to acknowledge our long time collaboration with Frans. We will miss his insight and creativity.     

Urban planning and a Europe transformed: The landscape politics of scale in Valencia

This paper explores how urban planning in a European, regional capital—Valencia—is shaped by economic globalization and political restructuring. Employing the vocabulary and concepts of the emerging literature on scale, this paper examines how planning efforts—like Valencia’s massive new redevelopment project, the City of the Arts and Sciences—are driven by the wider “re-scaling” or “re-territorialization” of the European political economy. This is a case study that moves beyond abstract theorizations about scale to the complex details of planning strategy in a regional context. More, it argues that an analytical shift from abstract theory to the empirical detail of a European city reveals two basic points. First, the re-scaling of Europe is more contested locally than this literature would suggest, negotiated politically as planners attempt to “re-scale” urban spaces. Second, the planned re-scaling of the city is about more than just space, but is also about the cultural landscape. Planned efforts to transform cities like Valencia in the image of global capitalism or European integration must navigate these complex, cultural politics. Theories of European re-scaling must account for the cultural politics in which planning is embedded, since planners must surely do so.     

Pricing accessibility: Urban morphology,design and missing markets

Urban design happens at a variety of scales—individual sites, streets, neighbourhoods, infrastructure projects, whole cities. At any of these scales, the benefits of good design spill over to a wider set of individuals than those with a direct interest in the project—land owners, developers, financiers, consultants, government officials, residents, neighbours, pedestrians, road users and so on. Indeed, urban design becomes an issue precisely because of these wider benefits. So we would like, in principle, to maximise the quantity of well designed urban morphology. One way of achieving this would be to attach a price to the benefits of urban design. The purpose of the paper is to take this argument as far as it will go in various directions. To facilitate this, the idea of well designed urban form is translated into the idea of accessible urban form; accessibility being a somewhat easier concept to deal with, there being a well established scientific literature to draw upon—in the fields of economic geography, spatial economics and spatial analysis. The term also has a singular common sense meaning. When applied to urban social science, it breaks down into a small number of more specific and equally well-defined concepts. The paper explores these in turn, considering the following: the role of markets in allocating scarce resources; accessibility as a scarce resource that planners and urban designers seek to supply; approaches to enhancing urban accessibility; the tricky problem of securing collective action; the idea of missing markets; the property rights ambiguities at the heart of collective action and missing market problems; mechanisms for pricing accessibility and organising its enhancement; the example of urban open space; and the distinction between general (geometric) and specific (economic) accessibility.     

人本规划体系的建构及意义

以人的全面发展为价值基础的科学发展观的建立,为城市规划奠定了理论基础,为我们重新认识和实践城市规划提供了一个全新视角和行为方式。基于此,通过人的活动探讨城市空间的生成,以城市规划在城市空间融合中的作用为出发点建构城市规划体系,具有重要的现实意义,不仅有利于城市规划科学性地位的确立,有利于建立人与城市规划之间的有机联系,还有利于城市规划为和谐社会建立基础,为创新城市创造条件。     

Tokyo’s Dojunkai experiment: courtyard apartment blocks 1926–1932

Dojunkai apartments were constructed by the Japanese Government as a work of relief, after the Great Kanto Earthquake in Tokyo. These apartments were leading examples in concrete construction in Japan and were innovative in their exterior space design ideas and building organizational themes. Dojunkai apartments were designed not only as solutions to particular sites, but as possible models for the further development of well-planned, secure, and communal neighbourhood style residential developments. During 1920–1930, Japanese architects and designers were actively involved in experimenting with foreign concepts of urban remodelling and town planning. However while these town-planning concepts and theories were embraced by Japanese architects and town planners, the resultant apartment complexes suggest that they endeavoured to adapt and transform them to suit Japanese sensibilities and urban requirements. This paper examines the nature of these adaptations and transformations. The principles of exterior space design are deployed to examine and identify patterns in building arrangement and exterior space design for six selected Dojunkai apartments. This paper discusses the pre-existing models of urban planning in Japan to establish a relationship between the adopted foreign town-planning models and the pre-existing ideas of urban settlements in the Japanese society.     

Develop first,make amends later: accessibility within residential neighbourhoods in Ghana

Accessibility is frequently reported in transportation and urban planning studies as an important factor in the location or design of residential neighbourhoods. But, to what extent does accessibility influence residential location decisions of households remains unknown in urban Ghana. This paper uses household surveys and agency consultations to examine the relative importance of accessibility (i.e. street connectivity, motorability and mobility) in households’ residential location choices in the Adenta Municipality, Ghana. The experiences described by urban households indicate a strong association with accessibility in their location decisions. This implies that areas with poor street connectivity, motorability and mobility will possibly tend to be less attractive to would-be residents. The study further revealed that household respondents do not merely locate in areas just for the sake of it, rather, they are informed by a variety of accessibility attributes among them include cost of travel, proximity to road, street type, distance to work, travel time, proximity to work and traffic-related nuisance. As a result, although many household respondents (59.74%) developed their residential units in areas with limited or no accessibility, they expressed strong appreciation of the importance of, and the need for accessibility in residential neighbourhoods to ensure effective functionality of the municipality, in relation to connecting activity zones such as work places, shopping and recreational areas. Planning implications are further presented.     

American planning in republican China, 1911-1937

This paper argues that in China, between the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the onset of the fullfledged Chinese war of resistance (Kanzheng) against Japan in 1937, American planners and Chinese municipal experts trained in American universities initiated significant planning schemes in several Chinese cities. This influence marked a crucial change in Chinese city planning because from the mid-19th century to 1911 it had primarily been British, French or German planners who had exerted foreign influence on Chinese urban form, particularly in the treaty ports of eastern China. Three of the best examples that demonstrate this shift of emphasis to American-based ideals of municipal progress are the plans for Guangzhou (Canton) in the early 1920s, the new capital plan at Nanjing (Nanking) and the greater Shanghai plan in the late 1920s. Although some scholars have analysed the Shanghai and Nanjing plans, few have explored the ways city planning during the republican period reflects a pattern of North American influence in the reshaping of Chinese urban form. In identifying this pattern, this paper will argue that Guangzhou was a first testing ground where Chinese politicians, within a decade after the first American city planning conference of 1909, consciously tried to apply up-to-date American planning principles associated with the 'city functional', the 'city scientific' or the 'city efficient' to a Chinese city that they perceived as inefficient. There were two initial spheres of influence associated with this American connection: (1) an institutional one, in which Guangzhou planners experimented with a commission form of American municipal government which, since 1900, had become popular especially in the American west and midwest; and (2) an influence related to urban space and form, as planners widened several narrow streets of congested Guangzhou and demolished its city wall, thereby following the gospel of Americans such as Benjamin Marsh who, since 1907, had been proselytizing about the ill effects of urban congestion. Guangzhou's planning experiments in the 1920s were at the forefront of further American planning connections, manifested in four ways: (1) through the actions of largely American-trained Chinese municipal experts, who studied in the US using scholarships from the Boxer Indemnity Fund; (2) through American planning advisors, such as Henry K. Murphy, who were hired by Chinese politicians to provide direct planning assistance; (3) through the formation of professional organizations, such as the Association of Chinese and American Engineers; and (4) through publications in English and Chinese that disseminated information about city planning, urbanism and architecture to a professional audience. This paper will discuss these trends as they apply to Chinese cities of the Republican period, with particular attention to Nanjing and Guangzhou. A fuller recognition of these Chinese cities' planning histories, as well as those of others such as Xiamen (Amoy), Shenyang (Mukden) or Fuzhou (Foochow) that followed their lead, demonstrates that American planning efforts in the western Pacific were far more pervasive than has previously been assumed. Although the initiatives of Daniel Burnham and William Parsons in the Philippines after the American military victories there in 1898 are well-established, and although Walter Burley Griffin's Canberra plan of 1913 is even more fully documented, the work of American planners in China, or of Chinese planners deriving their concepts from American practices, is less well understood. This paper clarifies the historical perspective associated with these planning tendencies.     

Longer View: From Congestion to Sprawl: Planning and Health in Historical Context

There is an increasing awareness of the need for background theory for planning, for a coherent body of ideas and concepts to provide perspective and to link together day-to-day operations. Downtown planners have sought this perspective from many sources, but they have largely ignored theoretical developments in contemporary social science. Emerging concepts in the general theories of location would seem to be fruitful ideas for them to explore more thoroughly. This kind of exploration could lead to substantial advances in downtown planning for such critical problem areas as: defining the functional nature of the CBD; explaining relationships between the CBD and other portions of the urban region; analyzing the internal structure of the CBD; and understanding variations among urban regions in CBD size and function.     

Hidden Spaces and Urban Health: Exploring the Tactics of Rural Migrants Navigating the City of Gold

Urban health practitioners working in African cities require an in-depth understanding of the context within which they work in order to plan and implement effective urban public health programmes. This paper provides insights into the complexities of the urban African environment and its residents by describing and analysing the tactics employed by a population of rural migrants as they enter and navigate the City of Gold: Johannesburg. This population resides within inner-city areas that are broadly disconnected from local government initiatives, that I term here as ‘hidden spaces’. Reflecting on personal experiences and involvement in participatory photography and film projects within these ‘hidden spaces’, the paper considers the concept of ‘being hidden’ as something that can be both a deliberate tactic employed by particular urban populations to evade the state, and as a result of marginalisation where the state bypasses groups in need of intervention.     

From Liquor to Leisure: The Changing South African Hotel Industry 1928–1968

Historical scholarship in tourism studies is relatively limited, mainly focused on North America and Western Europe. The aim in this article is to examine one neglected facet of the historical development of urban tourism in South Africa. Specifically, the focus is on the changing nature of South African hotels and of the hotel industry during the period of 1928–1968. During this period, a transformation occurred in the nature of the hotel sector ‘from liquor to leisure’. This change shifted the trajectory of hotel developments in South Africa and laid the essential foundations for the beginnings of an internationally competitive tourism industry. An understanding of developments taking place in the hotel industry through this formative period of 1928–1968 is essential for interpreting the evolution of the modern South African hotel industry.     

Patterns of Residential Mobility Amongst Children in Greater Johannesburg–Soweto, South Africa: Observations from the Birth to Twenty Cohort

Frequent residential movement challenges children to adapt to change, amongst others, houses and neighbourhoods, friends and schools, and this may have either or both negative and positive influences on their health and well-being. However, there is currently little knowledge of the patterns of child residential mobility within South Africa’s urban environment. This paper uses address data of children in the Birth to Twenty cohort to analyse the frequencies and patterns of residential mobility observed over the first 14 years of these children’s lives. Of the 3,273 children enrolled into the cohort in 1990, two thirds of the children (64%) have moved home at least once. Nonetheless, a third of the children never moved, indicating some stability among the urban child population. Residential moves by children were found to be associated with both the lowest resourced and the highest resourced households.     

Place and Function of African Cities in the Global Urban Network: Exploring the Matters Arising

As the world shrinks into a ‘global village’, cities have come into focus as dominant nodes in the global transactions and flows of capital, commodities, people and services. The resulting economic cum information order is not only transforming the architecture of discrete cities everywhere but is also motivating new patterns of inter-city relations and networks. Global urban network is now synonymous with the trans-state processes that make up the global economy (Taylor, Political Geography 19:5–32, 2000). Hence, cities are increasing perceived as a new ‘resource’ and ‘spring board’ for connecting to and operating at the global level. The article explores these issues with reference to the place and function of African cities in the global urban network. A city-based assessment of this nature offers a fresh and fluid scope to African development question and quest as against the more conventional ‘state-centric’ benchmarking.     

Meanings of housing qualities in suburbia: empirical evidence from Auckland, New Zealand

Housing research has mostly addressed notions of housing qualities either from a quantitative approach or through the provision and availability of housing. The literature has predominantly focused on physical structures, often neglecting residents’ experiences of the built environment. Including individuals’ perceptions of their dwelling environment can add insights valuable to planning and design efforts which are aimed at providing good ‘quality’ and need to be taken into account in concepts of housing quality. The present study considers the housing qualities of a suburban built environment as psychological and socio-cultural aspects that are experienced by residents. Owner-occupants’ perceptions of housing quality are illustrated through the use of ‘tag clouds’ that represent visual dwelling-quality profiles. They highlight which attributes of the occupants’ living environment are meaningful to them and how they achieve a greater sense of belonging in the dwelling as well as in the neighbourhood. This paper draws on results from in-depth interviews and brainstorming about housing qualities with 19 owner-occupants in the suburb of Farm Cove in Manukau City in the Auckland Region, New Zealand. Two predominant age groups were identified in this case study: the elderly long-term residents who moved to the area in the 1970s during the time of suburbanization; and families in their thirties and early forties who moved to the area in recent years. The paper reveals a shift in experienced housing qualities from tangible among the younger cohort towards more intangible qualities among the elderly. An assessment of the findings suggests a need for future planning which caters for more heterogeneous housing qualities.     

Role of urban greenway systems in planning residential communities: a case study from Egypt

Greenways have long played a significant role in the development of urban and sub-urban areas. They help mitigate the loss of “natural” space, often have scenic qualities, provide for recreation, education, a sense of well-being, and preservation of the natural habitat. This article explores the concept, history and development of urban greenways. The article illustrates the concept of linked parks and urban greenways in structuring urban and sub-urban developments while suggesting a methodological blueprint for their implementation in the planning process. A case study of a sub-urban development west of the city of Cairo, Egypt is presented to demonstrate the role of urban greenway systems in planning residential communities. An in-depth investigation of the planning process, context, approach, and development concept is followed by an overview of the rationale and significance of the method. The objective of this article is thus two-fold. First, to illustrate the concept of urban greenway systems in structuring communities; and second, to suggest a model for the integration and proper application of the concept of linked parks and urban greenway systems in planning residential communities. In conclusion, the article identifies a step-by-step procedure for integrating natural, recreational and cultural greenways and corridors in planning future residential developments.     

德国城市开放空间规划的规划思想和规划程序

对德国城市开放空间的发展以及规划内容做了系统的回顾和分析 ,总结了 1980年代以来德国城市开放空间建设的经验和教训 ,以及现在较为完善的规划方法和规划程序。指出 ,近 2 0年来的开放空间规划实践逐步向“可持续发展的城市开放空间”方向转变 ,形成了较为科学的、以生态科学、环境科学、美学和休闲娱乐相结合的规划体系     

Policy and practice restructuring urban neighbourhoods in the Netherlands: Four birds with one stone

Since 1997, the Netherlands Ministry of Housing has taken a new course in its effort to restructure urban neighbourhoods. Compared with traditional urban renewal policy, the new approach is both similar and different. The traditional policy was to ‘build for the neighbourhood’ and was thus mainly concerned with accommodating sitting tenants and providing social housing. The new policy differentiates its approach and targets a diverse urban population, specifically by reducing the stock of social rented housing and expanding the stock of expensive owner-occupied dwellings. This paper reviews the new policy and questions the conventional wisdom of avoiding spatial concentrations of low-income households. Instead, it proposes objectives that seem much more viable: objectives related to strategic housing stock policy, economic vitality, and the sustainability of the city. As an outcome of urban restructuring, cities may become vibrant, undivided, and sustainable while providing a housing stock for which there is a real demand—four birds with one stone, not a bad, score.