Sunday, 18 December 2016

A mind mapping-based literature review on urban renewal

A mind mapping-based literature review on urban renewal

Joseph Kim-keung Ho
Independent Trainer
Hong Kong, China

Abstract: The topic of urban renewal is a main one in housing studies. This article makes use of the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach to render an image on the knowledge structure of urban renewal. The finding of the review exercise is that its knowledge structure comprises six main themes, i.e., (a) Meanings of urban renewal, (b) Main approaches on urban renewal, (c) Specific urban renewal practices, (d) Main conceptual themes related to urban renewal, (e) Trends and drivers of urban renewal and, finally, (f) Controversies and issues of urban renewal. There is also a set of key concepts identified from the urban renewal literature review. The article offers some academic and pedagogical values on the topics of urban renewal, literature review and the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach.
Key words: Urban renewal, literature review, mind map, the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach

Introduction
Urban renewal is a main topic in housing studies. It is of academic and pedagogical interest to the writer who has been a lecturer on housing studies for some tertiary education centres in Hong Kong. In this article, the writer presents his literature review findings on housing studies using the mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach. This approach was proposed by this writer this year and has been employed to review the literature on a number of topics, such as supply chain management, strategic management accounting and customer relationship management (Ho, 2016). The MMBLR approach itself is not particularly novel since mind mapping has been employed in literature review since its inception. The overall aims of this exercise are to:
1.      Render an image of the knowledge structure of urban renewal via the application of the MMBLR approach;
2.      Illustrate how the MMBLR approach can be applied in literature review on an academic topic, such as urban renewal.
The findings from this literature review exercise offer academic and pedagogical values to those who are interested in the topics of urban renewal, literature review and the MMBLR approach. Other than that, this exercise facilitates this writer’s intellectual learning on these three topics. The next section makes a brief introduction on the MMBLR approach. After that, an account of how it is applied to study urban renewal is presented.

On mind mapping-based literature review
The mind mapping-based literature review (MMBLR) approach was developed by this writer this year (Ho, 2016). It makes use of mind mapping as a complementary literature review exercise (see the Literature on mind mapping Facebook page and the Literature on literature review Facebook page). The approach is made up of two steps. Step 1 is a thematic analysis on the literature of the topic chosen for study. Step 2 makes use of the findings from step 1 to produce a complementary mind map. The MMBLR approach is a relatively straightforward and brief exercise. The approach is not particularly original since the idea of using mind maps in literature review has been well recognized in the mind mapping literature. The MMBLR approach is also an interpretive exercise in the sense that different reviewers with different research interest and intellectual background inevitably will select different ideas, facts and findings in their thematic analysis (i.e., step 1 of the MMBLR approach). Also, to conduct the approach, the reviewer needs to perform a literature search beforehand. Apparently, what a reviewer gathers from a literature search depends on what library facility, including e-library, is available to the reviewer. The next section presents the findings from the MMBLR approach step 1; afterward, a companion mind map is provided based on the MMBLR approach step 1 findings.

Mind mapping-based literature review on urban renewal: step 1 findings
Step 1 of the MMBLR approach is a thematic analysis on the literature of the topic under investigation (Ho, 2016). In our case, this is the urban renewal topic. The writer gathers some academic articles from some universities’ e-libraries, books on urban renewal as well as via the Google Scholar. With the academic articles collected, the writer conducted a literature review on them to assemble a set of ideas, viewpoints, concepts and findings (called points here). The points from the urban renewal literature are then grouped into six themes here. The key words in the quotations are bolded in order to highlight the key concepts involved.
Theme 1: Meanings of urban renewal
Point 1.1.              By urban renewal, we refer to a multiscalar process of regulatory change, undertaken to facilitate rapid land and property redevelopment in central city areas” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 1.2.              In a narrow sense urban renewal addresses the processes which influence the condition of the city’s physical plant. The plant ages, becomes obsolescent, and is consumed in the production of shelter and other services. It is also constantly being renewed through the market processes in the form of capital replacement investment” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 1.3.              The term urban renewal was introduced in France in the Loi solidarite’ et renouvellement urbains (Loi SRU) of December 13th, 2000. Until then, terms like renovation, reconstruction, recycling or refurbishment were used to indicate similar phenomena..... It appears that ever since its introduction in 2000, the notion of urban renewal has been subject to variations in its meaning and in its implementation” (Bonneville, 2005);
Point 1.4.              For much of the 20th century, the people who cared most about the health and form of cities in the USA – including city planners, government officials, and downtown businessmen – considered dilapidated and deteriorating neighborhoods as among the most vexing of problems. The solution they chose was ‘‘urban renewal,’’ a term which today is commonly understood to mean the government program for acquiring, demolishing, and replacing buildings deemed slums. In fact, the original meaning of the term ‘‘urban renewal’’ was quite different” (Von Hoffman, 2008);
Point 1.5.              In the case of urban renewal in Turkey, marketization has both a spatial and a temporal aspect. Urban renewal aims to incorporate spontaneously developed and partially regulated spaces into the formal circuits of capital accumulation by replacing unauthorized substandard housing with fully legal and certified housing units” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 1.6.              “There is an immense literature on informal housing, slum clearance and organized struggles around the right to housing. A common thread running through all these debates is the ways in which urban renewal has been used as a tool of dispossession, expropriating residents and uprooting them from their social networks” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 1.7.              Urban renewal decision-making, then, focuses on the older parts of the region, while treating them in the context of overall regional development. The phenomena with which it must deal are essentially aspects of the intrametropolitan processes at work shaping the spatial organization of the metropolitan region” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 1.8.              Urban renewal is a complex process that has been commonly adopted to cope with changing urban environment, to rectify the problem of urban decay and to meet various socioeconomic objectives” (Lee and Chan, 2008);
Point 1.9.              Urban renewal is not just renewing buildings; more is renewing city economy, transportation, education and other aspects” (Ou and Wu, 2014);
Point 1.10.         “The fundamental goal of urban renewal is to carry out reconstruction, refurbishment, and maintenance in the context of urban planning to promote the sustainable use of the overall environment and to improve environmental quality and quality of life. Urban renewal itself consists of the replanning and re-designing of older urban areas for more efficient use while simultaneously bringing about a rise in housing prices in the affected areas” (Lee, Liang and Chen, 2016);
Point 1.11.         Urban renewal refers to the specific stage of city development, the process and model of development and utilization of city land” (Ou and Wu, 2014);
Theme 2: Main approaches of urban renewal
Point 2.1.              ….. In policy circles there have been three broad approaches to tackling the ‘slum problem’. The oldest approach, slum clearance … entails the complete eradication of an existing slum, often supplemented by a program of resettlement into public housing….. … Tenure legalization emerged as a second approach in …This involves the provision of legal title to urban informal and illegal settlements... Since the late 1980s, ‘property-led redevelopment’ has emerged as the dominant paradigm … This approach relies on real estate development as the driving force for urban regeneration” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 2.2.              “…a review of the laws SRU and Borloo on the one hand, and the observation of the practice of urban renewal on the other, indicate two different approaches to urban renewal that exist alongside each other…. The first approach is to be found in operations of urban renewal realised in line with a logic of reinserting the areas into the land and real estate market…  The second approach is to be found in operations officially labelled urban renewal. These concern almost exclusively areas of degraded social housing in large high-rise housing estates. This approach shows more continuity with earlier interventions, which privileged a social approach to urban renewal ….   In some cases, the two types of urban renewal are mixed” (Bonneville, 2005);
Point 2.3.              In Dutch urban renewal, we observe an implementation gap between dreaming and doing. Dutch national government recently proposed to focus urban renewal on more than 50 priority areas in the cities and to reduce urban renewal subsidies. It is not very likely that this policy will accelerate urban renewal. This contribution suggests a different approach: the formulation of an urban district vision shared by the sustainable stakeholders in those districts” (Priemus, 2004);
Theme 3: Specific urban renewal practices
Point 3.1.              “…Public–private partnership in urban renewal in France concerns mainly housing, transport infrastructure and large public facilities. The distinction between public, private and civil actors does not concern social and economic development. This situation tends to limit the integration of different issues and approaches in renewal projects. Also, French urban renewal projects do not produce a new type of partnership between public and private actors and the regulatory framework” (Dormois, Pinson and Reignier, 2005);
Point 3.2.              Entrepreneurial policies have been widely accepted as a panacea for post-industrial urban decline in North American and Western European cities. However, scholars reporting on the disempowering consequences of zero-sum competition and trickledown economic policies have shown that entrepreneurial policies have had limited success in generating economic growth and employment, and have in many instances exacerbated social divisions and inequalities …. In addition, the ‘spill-over effects’ of flagship projects have been rarely observed” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 3.3.              “The [Hong Kong] Government’s intention in changing the institutional arrangements in relation to the control of property rights was to provide an additional incentive for the private developers by reducing uncertainty in the land assembly process” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.4.              To a certain extent, the Chinese construction industry can be characterized by the substantial demolition and rebuilding works in urban areas” (Shen, Yuan and Kong, 2013);
Point 3.5.              To define the physical form of an urban area fulfilling the sustainable development objectives, Planning Department [in Hong Kong] has issued urban design guidelines, which underpin the future urban development directions of Hong Kong. They emphasize the importance of urban design and address issues like development height profile, waterfront development, cityscape, pedestrian environment and pollution mitigation” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 3.6.              “[In Hong Kong] The adoption of a tenants-in-common property rights system has had far reaching implications for the process of assembling land held in multiple ownership. In order for redevelopment to take place, it is necessary to acquire all the interests in a property, but for the private sector this is entirely dependent on negotiating agreement and any individual owner can prevent the process by refusing to vote their block of shares. In these circumstances, private developers often face extended negotiations and unrealistic highly expectations as to values, resulting in delays in the land assembly process” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.7.              ….urban renewal policy in France is not limited to the operations labelled as such by central administrations handing out subsidies and dealing with peripheral social housing estates. Local authorities also launched their own urban renewal programmes mobilising a large diversity of public and semi-public funds. These programmes do not only target large peripheral social housing estates but also central or semi-central boroughs still characterised by a degradation of housing estates and by their proximity to the main loci of estate market valorisation, i.e. the city centres” (Dormois, Pinson and Reignier, 2005);
Point 3.8.              “…an information system for urban renewal decision-making can build on the state of knowledge of intraregional processes and the special informational requirements of urban renewal decisions” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 3.9.              “…in 1999, as part of the wider changes to the institutional environment, [the Hong Kong Government] introduced the Land (compulsory sale for redevelopment) Ordinance Cap545 which, it was believed, would facilitate land assembly by the private sector and thereby encourage greater interest in the area of urban renewal” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.10.         “…the application of the concept of sustainable urban design is not limited to urban development projects. This idea has also been introduced to local urban renewal practices recently [in Hong Kong]” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 3.11.         “…the evolution of public policy [on urban renewal] has shifted the policy focus from the slum area to the neighborhood, to the central city, and ultimately to the region; from limited concerns with the lowest housing strata to the total housing stock and even to the state of the physical plant of the region; from a policeman-and policed relationship between local governments and parts of the private housing sector to an intricate net of public-private relations into which are drawn neighborhood organizations, financial institutions, welfare agencies, local interest groups, and the complex an ay of housing, planning, land use, and transportation agencies from every level of government” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 3.12.         “Although the Urban Renewal Authority chooses to negotiate with affected parties, the power to implement resumption procedures without the requirement of meeting a 90 per cent ownership threshold ensures that land assembly is less of an issue” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.13.         “In Hong Kong, the major public agency involved in the urban process is the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA)… But in addition to the public agencies, the Government has always encouraged private sector involvement in the renewal process” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.14.         Land and housing reforms are the key institutional mechanisms that have facilitated urban renewal in China and have been the focus on numerous studies” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 3.15.         Squatting as a housing strategy and as a tool of urban social movements accompanies the development of capitalist cities worldwide.…. the dynamics of squatter movements are directly connected to strategies of urban renewal in that movement conjunctures occur when urban regimes are in crisis” (Holm and Kuhn, 2011);
Point 3.16.         The design and execution of urban projects under an entrepreneurial regime of governance are oriented towards development of particular places through often spectacular projects — the primary aim of which is the upgrading of the image of a locality—as opposed to comprehensive planning aimed at improving living or working conditions within a larger juridical context” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 3.17.         The new institutional arrangement [the Land (compulsory sale for redevelopment) Ordinance, one of a series of urban renewal policy initiatives introduced by the Hong Kong Government]    was mooted as a means to facilitate greater private sector participation in the renewal process by overcoming existing constraints on land assembly, which arise as the result of a system of common property ownership” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 3.18.         “Urban renewal in South Africa involves contending with a combination of high crime rates, increasing inequality and growing public frustration” (Samara, 2005);
Theme 4: Main conceptual themes related to urban renewal
Point 4.1.              “A project [e.g. a urban renewal project] is said to be socially sustainable when it creates harmonious living environment, reduces social inequality and cleavages, and improves quality of life in general” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 4.2.              As it [urban entrepreneurialism] fundamentally hinges on public–private partnerships, privatization of publicly owned assets and deregulated spatial development, it is very much insulated from public accountability and is therefore effectively anti-democratic” (Karaman, 2013);
Point 4.3.              “..it is generally agreed that economy, environment and social equity are three foremost components of sustainability concept” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 4.4.              ….The field of urban planning strongly values the ideals of public participation and public debate. However, during much of the twentieth century, urban planning seldom acknowledged the needs or desires of the public to shape their own communities’ futures. During the 1950s and 1960s, many federal planning programs, including urban renewal and highway construction, destroyed vibrant urban neighborhoods despite strong neighborhood opposition” (Tighe and Opelt, 2016);
Point 4.5.              As large cities concentrate both the most advanced service sectors and a large marginalized population, cities have become a setting for new citizenship practices to emerge. Here she makes a distinction between power and presence, arguing that powerless political groups can still produce presence and gain visibility by claiming rights to the city” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 4.6.              “Foreign scholars study about urban renewal generally focuses on the following aspects: (1) Exploration and practice of urban renewal…(2) The study of city renewal evolution law…. (3) City sociology study on environmental behavior of human space…. (4) Study on mixed mode of urban renewal…” (Ou and Wu, 2014);
Point 4.7.              Frequently recast in the frame of global and globalizing cities, more recent inquiries into residential displacements and housing rights have tended to employ a political economy perspective, examining the decisions of governments, local elites, and those acting on behalf of global capital to promote higher value land uses, thus facilitating the residential and employment displacement of the city’s lower income residents” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 4.8.              “It is clearly not coincidental that characteristics of the metropolitan social structure are closely related to the condition and rate of replacement of the region’s housing stock-poor people, for example, consume only the dwelling services of a deteriorating, obsolete segment of the stock. The relationship between marginal firms and old, poorly maintained commercial structures is similarly clear. Because there tend to be concentrations of such deteriorated structures in the city, the “problem” of blight exists” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 4.9.              Recent theoretical inquiries into urban citizenship have made important contributions to understanding the social consequences of urban renewal” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 4.10.         Recently, sustainable urban design has gained popularity to deal with the problems and to increase positive outcomes of urban renewal projects … This approach intends to take into account of the sustainability concept when designing the projects in order to create sustainable communities for the citizens” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 4.11.         The concept of sustainable development was defined by World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as ‘‘a development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’’ in 1987” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 4.12.         The concept of sustainable urban design ….. refers to a process in which sustainability concept is taken into account when deciding which urban design features should be incorporated into urban (re)development plans” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 4.13.         “The main goals of community participation [in urban renewal projects] are to empower the residents, to build beneficiary capacity, to increase project effectiveness, to improve project efficiency and to share project costs…” (Kotze and Mathola, 2012);
Point 4.14.         A broader construction of the urban renewal problem would embrace the critical ecological dimensions which accompany the differential rates of replacement of the plant in various parts of the city” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 4.15.         “Cities, like businesses, are seen as being in competition with each other for securing or defending their share of the global market …. urban entrepreneurialism has been widely promoted to urban policymakers as the only viable solution. Urban entrepreneurialism denotes an array of governance mechanisms and policies aimed at nurturing local and regional economic growth by creating a business environment favorable to capital investment and accumulation  ...” (Karaman, 2013);
Theme 5: Trends and drivers of urban renewal
Point 5.1.              “….Since the late nineteenth century, urban renewal programmes have focused on improving housing for the poor, marginalised urban population …. These programmes invariably embody slum clearance, the replacement of dilapidated housing structures with new subsidised housing units, and also make provision for infrastructural development, schools and other amenities… From an international perspective, this transformation process varies from city to city, but the overall trend allegedly reduces the gap between the rich and the poor within cities …” (Kotze and Mathola, 2012);
Point 5.2.              “Although not without its successes, the notion of urban renewal became deeply unpopular by the late 1960s not just among those who were displaced but also with those concerned about the profound social consequences of that displacement for the city and wider society” (Gold, 2012);
Point 5.3.              “European cities are currently facing problems of social and economic decline and physical decay, but they also put attractiveness and development issues on their agenda. In this context, the objective of urban renewal projects is to attract new firms or high-income households …. Urban renewal projects are seen as part of a broader growth-oriented strategy shaped by local elites to re-image their cities in an increasingly competitive urban system” (Dormois, Pinson and Reignier, 2005);
Point 5.4.              In recent years, there is significant growth in the interest of merging sustainability concept into urban (re)development policies through urban design skill” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 5.5.              In South Africa, the spatial legacy of Apartheid has resulted in township areas that can be recognised as intense concentrations of poverty. Variations in the types of housing, often dominated by informal structures and overcrowded conditions, are characteristic of these areas. As such, they are generally perceived as areas of limited economic potential. In response to these conditions and in an attempt to alleviate the associated problems, the African National Congress government has initiated an Urban Renewal Programme in eight nodes in six urban areas in the country” (Kotze and Mathola, 2012);
Point 5.6.              The growth of urbanization in China has resulted in a large amount of housing demand throughout the country, inducing a huge number of construction projects in urban areas. These housing demands can be commonly met through urban sprawl development and urban renewal” (Shen, Yuan and Kong, 2013);
Point 5.7.              The problem of urban decay in Hong Kong is getting worse recently; therefore, the importance of urban renewal in improving the physical environment conditions and the living standards of the citizens is widely recognized in the territory. However, it is not an easy task for the Hong Kong Government to prepare welcome urban renewal proposals because the citizens, professionals and other concerned parties have their own expectations which are difficult to be addressed all at the same time” (Lee and Chan, 2008);
Point 5.8.              the two terms used most commonly in discourse about urban change in the two decades after the Second World War were undoubtedly reconstruction’ and ‘renewal’..” (Gold, 2012);
Theme 6: Controversies and issues of urban renewal
Point 6.1.              Urban renewal may be the most universally vilified program in planning history, remembered primarily for its destruction of established, central, urban neighborhoods along with the construction of isolated, peripheral, housing projects” (Tighe and Opelt, 2016);
Point 6.2.              “…a useful restatement of the policy problem of urban renewal would shift the emphasis away from efforts to arrest blight directly and toward the determination of how much and what kinds of community actions should be taken to achieve specified levels of conservation of the physical plant of the community” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 6.3.              “…the use of social differences to distribute rights to different categories of citizens produces a differentiated or disjunctive citizenship” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 6.4.              A number of authors …. have examined the urban renewal process in Hong Kong. In each case the authors identified the problem of land assembly as an underlying constraint of the success to redevelopment projects” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 6.5.              “Despite the fact that the importance of buildings’ lifespan has been well addressed in previous studies, buildings’ short lifespan as a result of urban renewal in China has been hitherto given little attention” (Shen, Yuan and Kong, 2013);
Point 6.6.              Determining a sustainable [urban] renewal proposal is a difficult and complicated process because a lot of tradeoff decisions have to be made” (Lee and Chan, 2008);
Point 6.7.              In both Shanghai and Mumbai, large swaths of urban land have been privatized or leased to private developers for redevelopment. Amidst increased pressures to attract capital investment, and to position their cities as global ones, governments, operating at multiple geopolitical scales, have taken often brutal measures to remove residents and clear land. In the process, the rights to housing and livelihoods for millions of city residents are being dismantled” (Weinstein and Ren, 2009);
Point 6.8.              In Hong Kong, numbers of urban renewal projects have been conducted but many of them fail to achieve their goals and generate environmental and social problems in the community … Some people argue that this phenomenon is probably due to poor quality of the urban renewal proposals(Lee and Chan, 2008);
Point 6.9.              “In urban renewal, as elsewhere, there is a gap between the idea and the reality, between the conception and the creation. Throughout the country there are communities with renewal programs that show no material indications of their existence, except perhaps a hole in the ground. In other communities “something has happened”; their “success” is indicated by the clearance of blighted areas and new construction. But the renewed areas seem to bear little resemblance to the initial visions as they appeared in the blueprints of the planners or the pictures in the glossy brochures” (Bellush and Hausknecht, 1966);
Point 6.10.         One of the difficulties in probing the rationale of urban renewal policy is the lack of consensus about both what the program is and what it ought to be. It certainly began as a housing program: its antecedents were instituted in large degree to improve the welfare of the low income consumers of housing services. Other interests have injected new viewpoints and objectives which have diluted considerably the housing goals” (Wingo Jr, 1966);
Point 6.11.         “Over time different developers will have gained experience and developed their own areas of expertise. Since operating in a familiar environment increases the frequency of operation and reduces transaction costs, the introduction of a new institutional mechanism may be of little interest to developers who do not chose to assemble land in this way” (Hastings and Adams, 2005);
Point 6.12.         Regardless of the evolution of participatory planning theory, memories of past planning mistakes and oversights continue to impede planners. Consequently, planners must try to move forward and beyond their predecessors’ mistakes while simultaneously taking responsibility for them so as not to seem indifferent to or apathetic to the harm done” (Tighe and Opelt, 2016);
Point 6.13.         The current urban renewal programs in some developing countries, such as China, are at the expense of demolishing a huge number of existing buildings without distinction. As a consequence, the buildings’ short lifespan due to premature demolition and resultant adverse impacts on environment and society have been criticized for not being in line with sustainable development principles” (Shen, Yuan and Kong, 2013);
Point 6.14.         Urban renewal is commonly adopted to cope with changing urban environment, to rectify the problem of urban decay and to meet various socio-economic objectives … However, the urban renewal projects are often beset with social problems such as destruction of existing social networks, expulsion of vulnerable groups and adverse impacts on living environments” (Chan and Lee, 2008);
Point 6.15.         Most previous studies have discussed urban renewal issues in terms of legal systems, operational methods, and case studies. The impact of urban renewal on neighbourhood housing prices, however, has rarely been discussed” (Lee, Liang and Chen, 2016);
Point 6.16.         “…in French renewal projects, the private actors involved in the partnership with local authorities remain the ‘‘usual suspects’’: the property developers and the main landowners, the local private–public society and the regional banks (Heinz, 1994). Yet, these ‘‘powerful’’ private actors often see their intervention limited to the provision of resources in order ‘‘to fill’’ a project pre-elaborated by public planners and bureaucrats. As a consequence, the traditional domination of public regulations (regulatory imposition, legal sanction of public choices) is not challenged” (Dormois, Pinson and Reignier, 2005);


Each of them has a set of associated points (i.e., idea, viewpoints, concepts and findings). Together they provide an organized way to comprehend the knowledge structure of the urban renewal topic. The bolded key words in the quotation reveal, based on the writer’s intellectual judgement, the key concepts examined in the urban renewal literature. The referencing indicated on the points identified informs the readers where to find the academic articles to learn more about the details on these points. Readers are also referred to the urban development and redevelopment Facebook page for more information on the urban renewal topic. The process of conducting the thematic analysis is an exploratory as well as synthetic learning endeavour on the topic’s literature. Once the structure of the themes, sub-themes[1] and their associated points are finalized, the reviewer is in a position to move forward to step 2 of the MMBLR approach. The MMBLR approach step 2 finding, i.e., a companion mind map on urban renewal, is presented in the next section.

Mind mapping-based literature review on urban renewal: step 2 (mind mapping) output
By adopting the findings from the MMBLR approach step 1 on urban renewal, the writer constructs a companion mind map shown as Figure 1.




Referring to the mind map on urban renewal, the topic label is shown right at the centre of the map as a large blob. Six main branches are attached to it, corresponding to the six themes identified in the thematic analysis. The links and ending nodes with key phrases represent the points from the thematic analysis. The key phrases have also been bolded in the quotations provided in the thematic analysis. As a whole, the mind map renders an image of the knowledge structure on urban renewal based on the thematic analysis findings. Constructing the mind map is part of the learning process on literature review. The mind mapping process is speedy and entertaining. The resultant mind map also serves as a useful presentation and teaching material. This mind mapping experience confirms the writer’s previous experience using on the MMBLR approach (Ho, 2016). Readers are also referred to the Literature on literature review Facebook page and the Literature on mind mapping Facebook page for additional information on these two topics.

Concluding remarks
The MMBLR approach to study urban renewal provided here is mainly for its practice illustration as its procedures have been refined via a number of its employment on an array of topics (Ho, 2016). No major additional MMBLR steps nor notions have been introduced in this article. In this respect, the exercise reported here primarily offers some pedagogical value as well as some systematic and stimulated learning on urban renewal. Nevertheless, the thematic findings and the image of the knowledge structure on urban renewal in the form of a mind map should also be of academic value to those who research on this topic.


Bibliography
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[1] There is no sub-theme generated in this analysis on urban renewal.

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