Progress in Planning最新文献

Nearly 40 years after the first wave of Ethiopian immigration to Israel, the country’s Ethiopian population still suffers from significant socioeconomic disadvantage: Many of its members live in highly homogeneous poor neighborhoods, which expose them to a variety of negative externalities. This study is the first to examine empirically the impact of Israel’s policy of absorption and spatial distribution on the formation of homogeneous ghettos of Ethiopians, and the contribution of the government’s major housing assistance programs for Ethiopians to solving or exacerbating this problem. The study, structured into four main stages, embraces a mixed-methods research approach drawing on diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks. In the first stage, we use descriptive statistics to introduce the current characteristics of the Ethiopian population in Israel and compare them with those of other marginalized social groups. In the second stage, we analyze the government’s various housingassistance programs for the Ethiopian population, focusing on three flagship programs. The third stage analyzes the spatial outcomes of the primary housing-assistance program, which remains active to date. Lastly, through in-depth interviews with policymakers and Ethiopian leaders, we delve into the underlying considerations that lay behind the policy decisions made. The research findings indicate that Ethiopians experience social and economic disadvantages, yet their spatial situation seems to be better than that of other disadvantaged groups, because a significant part of this population apparently enjoys the advantages of living in the center of the country. The findings further show that while the various government housing-assistance programs have elevated homeownership rates among Ethiopians, they have not prevent the formation and proliferation of spatial concentrations of poverty. Nor have they ever provided both the means and the knowledge needed to enable Ethiopians households to enhance their quality of life by moving out of these neighborhoods. To truly address the problem of homogeneous concentrations of poverty, a holistic but tailor-made housing policy is essential. This policy should not simply mirroring the national housing policy, which focuses almost exclusively on homeownership, but rather incorporate diverse policy measures for different populations. A good and just housing policy must take into account the existing spatial dynamic and the core–periphery relations and ensure an environment that provides quality employment and education opportunities alongside social networks that the residents can leverage to increase their social, economic, and cultural capital. Otherwise, the government housing-assistance programs will continue to be mere lip service and too little, too late.

This monograph presents findings from original research on urban heritage transformations and advances existing scholarship on three grounds: (1) it offers tested combinations of methods to capture the social values of heritage; (2) it distils the complex, diverse social values generated by urban heritage and revealed by the use of these methods; and (3) it discusses the implications and potential applications of these methods for urban planning. Cities are multi-layered deposits of tangible historic features and intangible meanings, memories, practices and associated values. These dense socio-material assemblages have been conceptualised as the ‘deep city’, a concept that recognises dynamic relationships between past, present and future, whilst simultaneously repositioning heritage at the heart of sustainable transformation. However, methods for understanding people’s relationships with urban heritage are mostly applied piecemeal in urban planning and heritage management. Here, we introduce research involving a suite of social and digital research methods, which can be deployed rapidly in online and offline spaces to examine the social values generated by urban heritage. Three in-depth case studies, in Edinburgh, London, and Florence, reveal how these values are involved in urban place-making. Failure to take them into account in development and regeneration projects can result in fragmentation and/or marginalisation of communities and their place attachments. The research has important implications for urban planning, offering methods and tools for working with communities to create more socially sustainable urban futures.

In the face of intensifying floods exacerbated by climate change, especially in coastal cities, there is a pressing global demand for effective flood risk governance and adaptation strategies. Such strategies are often informed by indigenous knowledge, aiming for a life in harmony with water and utilising amphibious living concepts to minimise flood impacts, preserving homes and livelihoods. In Indonesia, however, like in many nations in the majority world, these strategies tend to compete with and indeed to be dominated by imported technocratic, top-down, and inflexible planning approaches oriented on principles of the kind of ‘classical planning’ that had its hey-day in the Western world in the early decades following World War II. Like many nations in the majority world, Indonesia has long imported and continues to apply Western technocratic, top-down, and inflexible classical planning approaches. This paper criticises existing practices for failing to yield contextual development strategies that address site-specific urban issues and fall short of meeting the needs of the majority of the population. We explore the extent to which informal settlements, or kampungs of North Jakarta, can incorporate principles of flood adaptation incorporating local, livelihood, and indigenous knowledge. Fishers for instance reclaim land using shell mounds and construct stilt houses, ensuring coastal floods do not enter their homes and that water does not stagnate but can instead quickly drain due to the permeable land surface. Often, however, planning authorities in Jakarta have classified such flood-adapted built environments as illegal slums necessitating removal instead of adopting and encouraging the further development of site-specific settlement strategies generated by the community. This paper then argues that authorities in Jakarta, and potentially in other cities within the majority world, should consider adopting planning approaches that are more adaptive, flexible, and collaborative to pave the way for inclusive development founded on the experience and the aspirations of the community, including those who are marginalized.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) increasingly refers to global practices integrating land-use planning, urban development, and transit today, but their historical experiences have received little attention from the discussion, not to mention any theoretical elaboration with institutional thinking. The literature identifies Tokyo as a global exemplar of TOD as a new term for enduring practice. However, why and how Tokyo’s practice uniquely relies on private railway conglomerates remains underexplored. This article elaborates on a historical institutionalist approach using an inductive process tracing technique to understand Tokyo’s postwar history from 1945 to 1982, emphasizing incremental changes induced by endogenous forces. The exploration takes precedent insights into the private railway conglomerate-led TOD practice as an informal institution of “standard operating practice” and refines them with postwar history and supplementary prewar episodes. It finds that contingent policy choices allowed conglomerates to dismantle their geographical and financial constraints from prewar regulations. The actions reinforced their institutional privilege in public affairs as a foundation for subversive railway privatization reforms from 1982 onward. The finding thus identifies a socio-political dimension of TOD shaped by agents across sectors, developing the current methodology in planning studies and contributing to the debates on defining TOD.

Land is a major part of the total cost of residential development, particularly in advanced economies where significant proportions of economic value resolve to land and where land for development is rationed through planning systems that seek to corral extractable value into specific locations, in support of the infrastructure investment needed to unlock development opportunity. In England, strong markets assign a high value for land allocated for housing in local plans, relative to unallocated land. In England’s rural areas, constraints on land development – for reasons of landscape and amenity protection, or to support food security – contribute to significant affordability challenges for households on lower rural wages, who may be out-competed in the housing market by adventitious purchasers, or simply by more affluent buyers bidding for a limited supply of rural homes. Planned development (on sites allocated in a local plan) may not meet the needs of lower-income groups in constrained rural housing markets. For that reason, it is necessary to support housing affordability by granting exceptional permission for development on unallocated land, and then negotiating land sales at a price that will allow a non-profit housing provider (a ‘registered provider of social housing’) to build affordable rented homes for local households in need. Development on ‘rural exception sites’ (RES) has a thirty-year history. It is an important means of supporting the development of affordable homes in smaller villages (market-led schemes on allocated sites are the norm in larger settlements, with affordable homes procured through agreement with for-profit developers). The RES approach lays bare the impact of land cost on housing affordability. Only if a sufficiently low price for land, which is well below ‘full residential’ value, can be agreed will it be viable to develop affordable homes, with rents matching local wages. Where such a price is agreed, it may be possible to build homes without cash subsidy. If the price rises, affordability may be threatened, unless public grant support is more generous or market homes on the RES can be used to mitigate a higher land cost by providing cross-subsidy for affordable homes. This monograph details research exploring the recent granting of exceptional planning permissions in England, the critical relationship with landowners, and how those landowners may be incentivized to sell land at a price that supports affordability. It analyses extant threats to the approach, and therefore the risk that a key mechanism for delivering affordable homes may be undermined by a market logic that continuously questions the efficacy of ‘non-market’ and ‘non-profit’ housing solutions in England.

The issue of sustainable development is a topic that needs to be studied, analysed, and addressed by higher education institutions. Campus sustainability assessment tools (CSATs) are commonly adopted internationally to evaluate and improve measures utilised for the development outcomes of universities. Whilst some Chinese universities have taken positive steps towards attaining sustainability in their operations, teaching and/or research, and China has come up with its own evaluation criteria for green universities, majority of their approach still have shortcomings, such as lack of multiple stakeholder involvement and a one size fits all approach to campus sustainability strategy. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate two core methodological issues (top-down and non-transparent approaches and the limited consideration of context-specific issues) that impact the efficacy of CSATs in order to optimize the selection process for indicators and enhance the development CSAT for Chinese campuses and other campuses globally. Based on the widely used assessment tools (both campus and neighbourhood) in foreign countries, 147 corresponding assessment indicators in 16 domains were collated through qualitative review of existing assessment tools and the questionnaire-based analysis through the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The case study campus selected was the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. The indicators to be investigated were selected based on frequency and distributed in the form of a questionnaire to the staff and students after a comprehensive stakeholder survey analysis. The staff and students were used to illustrate the high interest and high influence dynamic versus the high interest and low influence dynamic. This research was conducted to gain insight towards developing an integrated, inclusive, and context relevant CSAT. Furthermore, a new framework was developed for Chinese Campus sustainable assessment planning, using the University of Nottingham Ningbo as Case study. This framework provides step by step phases for CSAT development that includes the database phase, minimization phase, stakeholder phase and integration and implementation phase. Within these phases, factors that determined the success and failure were discussed such as issues of acceptability versus pragmatism, willingness of stakeholders to participate, weighing of indicators, stakeholder analysis and redistribution of power for the less influential. This led to the sample selection of indicators, which serve as validation of impact of this integrated methodological process. The final recommendation given is that all regions should create and provide avenues for tailored processes for the selection, weighting and criteria development of sustainability indicators and assessment tools. This needs to promote inclusivity, transparency and contextual relevance in decision making, which should be the main considerations for any truly sustainable framework.