Study notes on academic ideas about urban renewal

Study notes on academic ideas about urban renewal

Academic ideas are bolded

David Webb (2010): Rethinking the Role of Markets in Urban Renewal: The Housing Market Renewal Initiative in England, Housing, Theory and Society, 27:4, 313-331.

“Accounts of urban renewal that rely on the gentrification heuristic exaggerate the distinction between state and capital. Consequently, they tend to promote the state’s role as a counterbalance to market capital and warn against the outcome of a “neoliberal” politics, which is responsible for serving market interests through public–private partnership”;

Marietta Haffner Æ Marja Elsinga. “Deadlocks and breakthroughs in urban renewal: a network analysis in Amsterdam” J Hous and the Built Environ (2009) 24:147–165.

“In the past, urban renewal was dominated by hierarchical government steering, though there were signs of network governance at the local level”;

“The joint non-hierarchical responsibility of local actors for urban renewal is currently reflected in the fact that the local actors are involved in a local urban renewal network. This situation is rather new and dynamic, which implies that actors are changing as are the rules of the game”;

Liza Weinstein Northeastern University and  Xuefei Ren∗ Michigan State University. “The Changing Right to the City: Urban Renewal and Housing Rights in Globalizing Shanghai and Mumbai” City & Community 8:4 December 2009.

“Issues of residential displacement and housing security have long been central to inquiries in urban sociology, whether displacements were caused by “natural” processes of invasion and succession (Burgess, 1967), by the federal bulldozers of urban renewal (Gans, 1962; Jacobs, 1961), or by the surplus value extraction associated with gentrification (Smith, 1979; Zukin, 1982). 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 (Logan and Molotch, 2007; Fainstein, 2001; Harvey, 2003b)”;

“Over the past decade, several scholars have posited that cities—global or globalizing cities in particular—have become strategic sites at which new forms of citizenship are enacted (Isin, 2000; Holston, 2001, 2008; Chatterjee, 2006; Sassen, 2006). While conceptions of citizenship had, until recently, referred almost exclusively to the rights and obligations associated with membership in a nation-state, these scholars have highlighted political communities at the subnational and supranational scales and thus questioned the exclusivity of national-level citizenship. They suggest that as strategic nodes of global flows of people, capital, and information, global cities are among the sites at which the contradictions and inequalities intrinsic to global capitalism materialize in their most concrete forms. These conditions have rendered global cities as both the context for disadvantaged groups to renegotiate political rights and the substance of their renegotiations (Holston, 2001, 2008)”;

ROELOF VERHAGE. “Renewing urban renewal in France, the UK and the Netherlands: Introduction” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment (2005) 20: 215–227.

“When urban renewal is studied from a cross-national perspective, two phenomena can be observed at the same time. The first one is the uniqueness of each operation: each urban renewal project takes place in a particular constellation determined by the institutional, economic, social, cultural and geographical context. The importance of the context is a recurrent item in cross-national studies of urban renewal (Trache and Green, 2002; Various authors, 2002; Couch et al., 2003). Path dependency, i.e. the influence of choices made at an earlier moment in time, is another important aspect that contributes to the uniqueness of each country”;

“Urban renewal generally combines social, economic, and physical interventions (cf. Ministerie van VROM, 1997; Chaline, 2003; Couch et al., 2003). Helleman et al. (2001: 19) give a clear description of the three objectives pursued in urban renewal policies: – Socio-economic: ....

– Socio-cultural: .... – Physical-economic: ...”