Journal of Urban Management最新文献

Providing adequate homes has been an ongoing challenge for Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government has utilized new town developments to meet its development goals, employing a balanced development principle. However, Hong Kong's new towns have long been criticized as ‘dormitory towns,’ as they cannot achieve self-sufficiency, partly due to the uneven distribution of public amenities. Access to public amenities, such as libraries, municipal halls, and performing arts venues is not only crucial for creating a sense of community and identity but also for the development of sustainable and livable communities while also helping to address inequality. Hong Kong's new towns have been developed through three generations, starting in the 1960s. Of interest for this paper is Tung Chung, the latest new town that has attracted public attention due to its lack of community identity and inadequate access to public facilities, all of which are exacerbated by the new town's poor urban form. To understand the relationship between access to cultural facilities and quality of life, this paper assesses and compares the total number, capacity, and overall access to public facilities within Hong Kong's new towns and the variation within each generation. After that, we focus on Tung Chung to explore, through spatial analysis and interviews, the impact of the new town's urban form and its limited offer of public facilities. Our findings suggest that the more recent new towns, particularly Tung Chung, are disadvantaged in both qualities of the urban form and access to public facilities. Moreover, lower-income households in public housing are particularly disenfranchised. This affects the residents' daily life, depriving them of access to social services and affecting community life, thus exacerbating inequality. Future expansion areas are designed based on the same principles and will thus likely result in similar issues.

This paper examines factors affecting community participation in the urban planning process in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A quantitative method employing a questionnaire style survey was used to test the research hypotheses, with a qualitative method used to obtain a better understanding of the quantitative findings. Findings reveal that the level of community participation in the urban planning process is low. Factors contributing to lack of participation are the unwillingness of individuals to participate, as well as the inability of social media platforms used by urban authorities to effectively interact with the local community. Therefore, this study recommends the establishment of a unified national strategy for social media platforms used by urban institutions, which will stimulate the use of government instruments such as dialogue and incentives, thereby enhancing social networks and the effectiveness of organizers. These activities will also ensure that all stakeholders who are interested in the process will be invited to participate, thus improving the overall level of community participation.

The restrictions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially during the first weeks of confinement in 2020, entailed marked changes concerning urban socio-spatial relations. This article analyzes perceptions of the importance of public space, neighbors' support, neighborhood safety, and home safety before and during the initial months of the COVID-19 lockdown. We conducted an online survey between March and April 2020 in Quito, Ecuador, and applied quantitative and spatial methods to analyze the perceptions. The results show statistically significant differences in neighbors’ support, home safety, and neighborhood safety between normal days and lockdown days. The perceptions of the public space as non-important before the lockdown and the perceptions of not being safe at home or in the neighborhood are spatially random, not concentrated in a specific area of the city. Our findings also show that gender, the importance of public space during normal days, and the willingness of neighbors to support each other on lockdown days could explain the perception of the importance of public space on lockdown days. This research provides unique information to contribute with perspectives and discussions of public space and social dynamics in pandemic and post pandemic times.

The application of data analytics in urban governance is crucial in addressing municipal issues. However, there are limited sources to review and discuss research related to urban observatories, which is one of the monitoring systems implemented in an urban area. This study aims to review existing urban observatory systems around the world to understand the pattern of data analytic themes, the analysis involved and types of the data. A total of 30 urban observatories were used as secondary data as an inductive analysis of thematic content using NVIVO 12 Plus. Environmental, economic, social, physical, and global agenda are the five key data analytic themes. The finding of the study is that environmental and social data analytics were the most commonly used themes in the 30 UOs surveyed. Also, the UO system developers focused on GIS (Geographic Information System) data relating to the physical environment and land cover. While efforts are being made to improve spatial data, in advanced analysis, however, data modelling and prediction/forecasts are still lacking. In conclusion, examining existing urban observatory systems are critical to the Malaysia Urban Observatory's development. Later, MUO will assist Malaysia in tracking the trajectory of urban development and well-being of its citizens.

Pathum Thani Province is one of the provinces surrounding the Bangkok Metropolitan Area (BMA) that has received the spillover growth and expansion of the city of Bangkok. However, this has resulted in urban changes into sprawling characterized by clusters of peri-urbanization interspersed along major transportation corridors that has absorbed provincial municipal centers within almost a hundred-kilometer radius from the center. The results of this uncontrolled, unplanned sprawl with weak or ineffective land use or transportation planning have detrimental effects on the overall well-being of the residents and the quality of life in the metropolitan area. This study uses the healthy city concept to analyze the factors that affect the health of the population by using Pathum Thani Province as the case study of 1055 structured questionnaires in face-to-face interviews. After data collection, the data was used in a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to analyze the factors that affect the health of the population in this highly urbanized province. The result of the study showed that factors affecting urban health have components relative to health issues, social and economic, physical, and environmental factors. Finally, this approach could help to quantify the complex interactions involved in health and wellbeing in relation to the constantly changing urban environment of sprawling areas to help guide policy decisions for achieving the development of a healthy city.

This paper explores the relationship between land tenure security and housing investment among households in Bangladeshi poor settlements. The level of housing investment is measured through the type of physical structure of the house, or more specifically, floor materials. Cluster-robust standard error logistic regression method is utilized to explore this relationship in order to fix the issue of households located in the same settlement being correlated with each other. The results show that houses with greater tenure security, whether owner-occupied or rented out, are more likely than houses with insecure tenure to have cement floors, which are more permanent and expensive than other types of floors like bamboo, wood, or dirt/mud. Importantly, renters are more likely than owner-occupants to have cement floors. In sum, although greater tenure security may positively impact housing investment, the market force in which housing is seen as a business opportunity may be an equally strong factor in encouraging investment even in poor communities.

The article deals with the digitalisation of planning from a sociological perspective. The authors summarise results of their international empirical research in an analysis in which they place everyday digital planning practices at the centre of their considerations, where profound and intricate affects in planning occur at the level of embodied practices, spatial knowledge, planning processes, and workplaces. The authors examine the use of digital tools at different study sites and particularly discuss how the digitalisation of planners’ actions through the use of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) programmes affects the way spaces are planned and how spatial knowledge is changing through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). What is striking is that on the basis of digital practices, the relationships between planning actors are being refigured insofar as planning teams often work not only locally but at the same time globally networked and thus plan translocally. This refiguration through digitalisation (Knoblauch & Löw, 2020) in its social and spatial dimensions is also reflected in the design of workplaces (including the layouts of planning offices) as is shown in the article. Finally, it is outlined that risks and potentials for planning products are unfolding today through phenomena such as the digital datafication of spatial realities and translocal planning by the globally distributed members of planning teams.

Semantic web technologies have the potential to significantly improve urban regulatory data access, integration and usability, with potentially large implications for planning practice. Ontologies are a cornerstone of the semantic web. In this paper, we describe OntoZoning, an ontology representing relationships between zoning types, land uses and programmes (more specific land uses) in Singapore. We link the ontology to geospatial data stored in a knowledge graph, which allows executing multi-domain queries on urban data. We demonstrate how such a semantic web based approach can improve access to and usability of land use regulation data, and in particular facilitate site selection and exploration. We also discuss the difficulty of defining some concepts in the land use regulation field, and how OntoZoning could be linked to a broader semantic-web based urban planning regulatory framework.

Despite the growing literature on sustainability assessment in the urban context, the resulting approaches and methods utilise several differing theoretical frameworks and lack a unifying vision and modus operandi. Innumerable tools and instruments have been developed for particular purposes and rather narrow goals. Curiously, these tools and instruments remain unable to trace and assess sustainability in vernacular forms and traditional built environments, even though environments such as these demonstrably possess sustainable principles beside their aesthetic values and spatial qualities.

This paper reviews the theoretical background underpinning the current sustainability assessment methods in the urban context to identify their general limitations and their specific applicability to vernacular and traditional built environments. Also, this paper discusses some of the cultural and spatial qualities of traditional built form to identify its embedded sustainable strategies and practices. The paper concludes with an outline conceptual framework intended to develop general sustainability principles for traditional built forms in response to their natural and cultural contexts.

A literature review of the concepts of sustainability assessment in the urban context and embedded sustainable principles in vernacular and traditional built form is followed by a thematic analysis of its limitations, which feeds into this conceptualisation of a new, principle-based framework. A total of 10 principles of sustainability are proposed to assess sustainability in traditional built environments, taking into account the variation of locality and site-specific context.