The new urban politics (NUP) literature has helped to draw attention to a new generation of entrepreneurial urban regimes involved in the competition to attract investment to cities. Interurban ...competition often had negative environmental consequences for the urban living place. Yet knowledge of the environment was not very central to understanding the NUP. Entrepreneurial urban regimes today are struggling to deal with climate change and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.Carbon reduction strategies could have profound implications for interurban competition and the politics of urban development. This paper explores the rise of a distinctive low-carbon urban polity—carbon control—and examines its potential ramifications for a new environmental politics of urban development (NEPUD).The NEPUD signals the growing centrality of carbon control in discourses, strategies and struggles around urban development. Using examples from cities in the US and Europe, the paper examines how these new environmental policy considerations are being mainstreamed in urban development politics. Alongside competitiveness, the management of carbon emissions represents a new yet at the same time contestable mode of calculation in urban governance.
Historic preservation is typically regarded as an elitist practice.
In this view, designating a neighborhood as historic is a project
by and for affluent residents concerned with aesthetics, not
...affordability. It leads to gentrification and rising property
values for wealthy homeowners, while displacement afflicts
longer-term, lower-income residents of the neighborhood, often
people of color. Through rich case studies of Baltimore and
Brooklyn, Aaron Passell complicates this story, exploring how
community activists and local governments use historic preservation
to accelerate or slow down neighborhood change. He argues that this
form of regulation is one of the few remaining urban policy
interventions that enable communities to exercise some control over
the changing built environments of their neighborhoods. In
Baltimore, it is part of a primarily top-down strategy for
channeling investment into historic neighborhoods, many of them
plagued by vacancy and abandonment. In central Brooklyn,
neighborhood groups have discovered the utility of landmark
district designation as they seek to mitigate rapid change with
whatever legal tools they can. The contrast between Baltimore and
Brooklyn reveals that the relationship between historic
preservation and neighborhood change varies not only from city to
city, but even from neighborhood to neighborhood. In speaking with
local activists, Passell finds that historic district designation
and enforcement efforts can be a part of neighborhood community
building and bottom-up revitalization. Featuring compelling
narrative interviews alongside quantitative data, Preserving
Neighborhoods is a nuanced mixed-methods study of an important
local-level urban policy and its surprisingly varied consequences.
A rural borderland just forty years ago, today Shenzhen is a city of twenty million and a technology hub. This success is attributed to its status as a Special Economic Zone, but no other SEZs ...compare. Juan Du looks to the past to understand why. It turns out that Shenzhen is no prefab "instant city," but a place influenced by deep local history.
A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban development
Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban ...neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality.
Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods.
Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.
Urban villages are typical informal settlements in Chinese cities where rural villages were gradually surrounded by urban built environments during urbanisation. In the era of urban renewal, these ...“urban enclaves” have been systematically demolished due to their “chaotic” building layouts and “backward” appearance. Existing policies related to the redevelopment of urban villages mainly follow a “demolish-rebuild” orientation, while lacking sufficient consideration of the mechanisms behind their environmental aspects and performances. In the long run, such a direction of urban redevelopment will hinder the achievement of sustainable development goals. This paper reviews the major municipal-level policies that relate to urban villages and urban renewal in Shenzhen through the adoption of systematic literature survey and content analysis. An analytical framework of “Three Contents and Six Instruments” is established to examine the highlighted and overlooked aspects of these policies. Results reveal that Shenzhen’s implemented policies aim to formulise, modernise, and consequently homogenise urban villages into “urban-like modern communities” through the following upgrades: urban infrastructure development, improvement of sanitation conditions, and building façade beautification. However, these approaches for “environmental enhancement” were not primarily based on identifying and understanding the real causes of the exhibiting “environmental problems.” Meanwhile, the inspiration and inheritance of informal rules, especially the involvement and participation of residents for the rehabilitation of urban villages have been entirely overlooked. These two overlooked crucial aspects should be introduced in policy-making and integrated with existing adopted strategies to match local contexts and resolve specific issues. The paper advocates to extend the connotation of the concept of environment from an infrastructural consideration to a mechanism-based and performance-orientation thinking during the making of urban renewal policies. It suggests that environment could be utilised as an inclusive medium to efficiently frame and link multiple aspects in the policies.
•Demolish-rebuild-oriented urban village renewal affects urban land use and sustainability.•Content analysis was adopted to identify focused and overlooked aspects of Shenzhen’s policies.•Environmental evaluation and informal intervention were overlooked in the existing policies.•Guidance and framework for inclusive and sustainable urban renewal policy-making are provided.
There has been much written on the new creative economy, but most work focuses on the so-called 'creative class,' with lifestyle preferences that favor trendy new restaurants, mountain biking, and ...late night clubbing. This 'creative class,' flagship cultural destinations, and other forms of commodity-driven cultural production, now occupy a relatively uncritical place in the revitalization schemes of most cities up and down the urban hierarchy. In contrast, this book focuses on small- to medium-size post-industrial cities in the US, Canada, and Europe that are trying to redress the effects of deindustrialization and economic decline through cultural economic regeneration.
Despite a proliferation of research on neighborhood effects on health, how neighborhood economic development, in the form of gentrification, affects health and well-being in the USA is poorly ...understood, and no systematic assessment of the potential health impacts has been conducted. Further, we know little about whether health impacts differ for residents of neighborhoods undergoing gentrification versus urban development, or other forms of neighborhood socioeconomic ascent. We followed current guidelines for systematic reviews and present data on the study characteristics of the 22 empirical articles that met our inclusion criteria and were published on associations between gentrification, and similar but differently termed processes (e.g., urban regeneration, urban development, neighborhood upgrading), and health published between 2000 and 2018. Our results show that impacts on health vary by outcome assessed, exposure measurement, the larger context-specific determinants of neighborhood change, and analysis decisions including which reference and treatment groups to examine. Studies of the health impacts of gentrification, urban development, and urban regeneration describe similar processes, and synthesis and comparison of their results helps bridge differing theoretical approaches to this emerging research. Our article helps to inform the debate on the impacts of gentrification and urban development for health and suggests that these neighborhood change processes likely have both detrimental and beneficial effects on health. Given the influence of place on health and the trend of increasing gentrification and urban development in many American cities, we discuss how future research can approach understanding and researching the impacts of these processes for population health.
Observations of surface ozone available from ∼1,000 sites across China for the past 5 years (2013–2017) show severe summertime pollution and regionally variable trends. We resolve the effect of ...meteorological variability on the ozone trends by using a multiple linear regression model. The residual of this regression shows increasing ozone trends of 1–3 ppbv a−1 in megacity clusters of eastern China thatwe attribute to changes in anthropogenic emissions. By contrast, ozone decreased in some areas of southern China. Anthropogenic NOₓ emissions in China are estimated to have decreased by 21% during 2013–2017, whereas volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emissions changed little. Decreasing NOₓ would increase ozone under the VOC-limited conditions thought to prevail in urban China while decreasing ozone under rural NOₓ-limited conditions. However, simulations with the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemical Transport Model (GEOS-Chem) indicate that a more important factor for ozone trends in the North China Plain is the ∼40% decrease of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) over the 2013–2017 period, slowing down the aerosol sink of hydroperoxy (HO₂) radicals and thus stimulating ozone production.
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