Social Housing And Urban Renewal

Contemporary urban renewal is the subject of intense academic and policy debate regarding whether it promotes social mixing and spatial justice, or instead enhances neoliberal privatization and state-led gentrification. This book offers a cross-national perspective on contemporary urban renewal in relation to social rental housing.

This edited collection investigates the human dimension of urban renewal, using a range of case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, India and North America, to explore how the conception and delivery of regeneration initiatives can strengthen or undermine local communities. Ultimately aiming to understand how urban residents can successfully influence or manage change in their own communities, contributing authors interrogate the complex relationships between policy, planning, economic development, governance systems, history and urban morphology. Alongside more conventional methods, analytical approaches include built form analysis, participant observation, photographic analysis and urban labs. Appealing to upper level undergraduate and masters' students, academics and others involved in urban renewal, the book offers a rich combination of theoretical insight and empirical analysis, contributing to literature on gentrification, the right to the city, and community participation in neighbourhood change.

This issue of A+BE addresses two critical urban issues China faces today: housing and urban renewal. In the recent two decades, the Chinese urban housing stock underwent a significant, if not extreme, transformation. From 1949 to 1998, the urban housing stock in China largely depended on the public sector, and a large amount of public housing areas were developed under the socialistic public housing system in Beijing and other Chinese cities. Yet in 1998, a radical housing reform stopped this housing system. Thus, most of the public housing stock was privatized and the urban housing provision was conferred to the market. The radical housing privatization and marketization did not really resolve but intensified the housing problem. Along with the high-speed urbanization, the alienated, capitalized and speculative housing stock caused a series of social and spatial problems. The Chinese government therefore attempted to reestablish the social housing system in 2007. However, the unbalanced structure of the Chinese urban housing stock has not been considerably optimized and the housing problem is still one of the most critical challenges in China.

Concern about rising crime rates, high levels of unemployment and anti-social behaviour of youth gangs within particular urban neighbourhoods has reinvigorated public and community debate into just what makes a functional neighbourhood. The nub of the debate is whether concentrating disadvantaged people together doubly compounds their disadvantage and leads to 'problem neighbourhoods'. This debate has prompted interest by governments in Australia and internationally in 'social mix policies', to disperse the most disadvantaged members of neighbourhoods and create new communities with a blend of residents with a variety of income levels across different housing tenures (public and private rental, home ownership). What is less well acknowledged is that interest in social mix is by no means new, as the concept has informed new town planning policy in Australia, Britain and the US since the post Second World War years. Social Mix and the City offers a critical appraisal of different ways that the concept of ‘social mix’ has been constructed historically in urban planning and housing policy, including linking to 'social inclusion'. It investigates why social mix policies re-emerge as a popular policy tool at certain times. It also challenges the contemporary consensus in housing and urban planning policies that social mix is an optimum planning tool – in particular notions about middle class role modelling to integrate problematic residents into more 'acceptable' social behaviours. Importantly, it identifies whether social mix matters or has any real effect from the viewpoint of those affected by the policies – residents where policies have been implemented.

Winner of the Bancroft Prize In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good. It wasn’t always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America’s Cities, the prizewinning historian Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the “New Boston” of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City. Logue’s era of urban renewal has a complicated legacy: Neighborhoods were demolished and residents dislocated, but there were also genuine successes and progressive goals. Saving America’s Cities is a dramatic story of heartbreak and destruction but also of human idealism and resourcefulness, opening up possibilities for our own time.

Le quartier des Pyramides à Evry n'est pas un quartier comme les autres. Il ne constitue pas un territoire de projet ordinaire. Sa conception et ses ambitions, sur lesquelles se sont penchées les plus hautes autorités, pour lesquelles tous les acteurs de la ville se sont passionnés, lui ont longtemps conféré un statut d'exception, au sein d'une ville nouvelle elle-même hors normes (...) " Mais le décalage entre les temps glorieux des années 1970 et leurs écoles ouvertes , où l'on envoyait des cartes postales représentant l'autoroute A6 comme symbole de développement et d'avenir, et les heures les plus sombres des contestations urbaines une vingtaine d'années plus tard continue d'interroger les acteurs de la ville d'aujourd'hui. Il convient de revenir sur la mythologie des villes nouvelles, voire même de la déconstruire, pour développer des représentations sociales et des outils de politique publique renouvelés, adaptés à la demande sociale contemporaine. Le travail conduit dans le cadre du présent ouvrage à partir de l'exemple des Pyramides possède une portée qui dépasse le cadre des villes nouvelles, et c'est ce qui en fait l'un de ses principaux intérêts. Il nous invite en effet à réévaluer les approches couramment admises pour le traitement de la question des grands ensembles dans le cadre des politiques de renouvellement urbain. Il ne s'agirait pas de réparer un passé contesté, mais de développer les outils méthodologiques et les cadres d'action pour des politiques urbaines démocratiquement efficaces. C'est également dans ce sens qu'un travail croisé avec une agence de planification urbaine londonienne, Space Syntax, a été conduit, ouvrant des perspectives de travail inédites et prometteuses. Les dynamiques de la rénovation urbaine... constituent un plaidoyer vigoureux et riche en faveur d'une véritable politique publique de renouvellement urbain, d'autant plus convaincant qu'il s'appuie sur un cas d'espèce exceptionnel en apparence, mais au fond redoutablement ordinaire.