Regenerating Urban Spaces under Place-specific Social Contexts: a Commentary on Green Infrastructures for Landscape Conservation

This study investigates the issue of green infrastructures in contemporary cities, adopting a strategic vision for increasingly complex metropolitan regions. Green infrastructures play an important role in ecological services and biodiversity preservation, improving significantly the quality of life of residents and visitors. The social dimension of gardens and parks at local (e.g. urban district) scale and green infrastructures at larger spatial scales is also addressed, fostering the relationship between local communities and urban landscapes. With economic crisis, urban parks are increasingly considered a primary component of integrated strategies for urban regeneration with a bottom-up approach, addressing the demand for "natural landscape" in peri-urban areas. By recovering public spaces with social purposes and providing a comprehensive strategy for aesthetic improvement of common goods, the analyzed case studies give examples of specific measures for promoting environment-friendly urban regeneration strategies under place-specific social contexts

Chapter 5 - Urbanisation: Toward a future balanced development and an ecological civilization

The urban transformation in China is a transition in progress, with many opportunities for guiding its future. The complexity of this transformation urgently requires integrated policies and strategies that can simultaneously address emerging challenges. As China looks at its future, a compromise between the speed and quality of urbanisation appears to be the most desirable and viable option. Some challenges are more urgent than others; decisive actions on some can make a significant impact on human development. Without strong governance mechanisms and institutions for implementation, the policies needed to act on increasingly complex urban challenges will not be successful. In China's transition to more sustainable development, new perspectives and a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between economic, social and environmental costs and benefits are urgently required

Rural Crossroads: Class and Migration in Peri-urban Chiang Mai

Peri-urban Thailand is a site for the coming together of rural and urban people from various class, economic, and value backgrounds. In many ways, the peri-urban is Thailand’s new frontier to which people are migrating from diverse directions and with different expectations of the place. Its physical and social changes have been even more dramatic than urban and rural areas. The previously agricultural communities in the countryside surrounding Chiang Mai have increasingly been drawn into the city’s peri-urban zone through connections by roads. Despite the pace of change, there is limited scholarly attention to peri-urban areas. Studies of migration in developing countries including Thailand also mainly focus on rural to urban migration through the process of agrarian change. This case study shows similar movements of urban middle class people from city to non-urban areas to that observed in the wider field of counter-urbanisation in developed countries. The processes of mixing of different groups in the peri-urban village help to redefine the village as place, both in physical and social dimensions. Physically, place is remade as a result of proximate residential patterns bringing together different groups previously living far from one another. Socially, as revealed through a partly auto-ethnographic study, peri-urban place-making today is an outcome of everyday processes of class formation. A key tension in the peri-urban village is between the expectations and desires of different social groups. While local aspirations are towards modernity and livelihood enhancement, urban middle class migrants still hold on to rural images shaped by public representations of the elites. Class defines how people position themselves in relation to one another through values and lifestyle, and study of social relations in the peri-urban village thus differs from the productionist emphasis of earlier agrarian studies

Rural Crossroads: Class and Migration in Peri-urban Chiang Mai

Peri-urban Thailand is a site for the coming together of rural and urban people from various class, economic, and value backgrounds. In many ways, the peri-urban is Thailand’s new frontier to which people are migrating from diverse directions and with different expectations of the place. Its physical and social changes have been even more dramatic than urban and rural areas. The previously agricultural communities in the countryside surrounding Chiang Mai have increasingly been drawn into the city’s peri-urban zone through connections by roads. Despite the pace of change, there is limited scholarly attention to peri-urban areas. Studies of migration in developing countries including Thailand also mainly focus on rural to urban migration through the process of agrarian change. This case study shows similar movements of urban middle class people from city to non-urban areas to that observed in the wider field of counter-urbanisation in developed countries. The processes of mixing of different groups in the peri-urban village help to redefine the village as place, both in physical and social dimensions. Physically, place is remade as a result of proximate residential patterns bringing together different groups previously living far from one another. Socially, as revealed through a partly auto-ethnographic study, peri-urban place-making today is an outcome of everyday processes of class formation. A key tension in the peri-urban village is between the expectations and desires of different social groups. While local aspirations are towards modernity and livelihood enhancement, urban middle class migrants still hold on to rural images shaped by public representations of the elites. Class defines how people position themselves in relation to one another through values and lifestyle, and study of social relations in the peri-urban village thus differs from the productionist emphasis of earlier agrarian studies

Eureka and beyond: mining's impact on African urbanisation

This collection brings separate literatures on mining and urbanisation together at a time when both artisanal and large-scale mining are expanding in many African economies. While much has been written about contestation over land and mineral rights, the impact of mining on settlement, notably its catalytic and fluctuating effects on migration and urban growth, has been largely ignored. African nation-states’ urbanisation trends have shown considerable variation over the past half century. The current surge in ‘new’ mining countries and the slow-down in ‘old’ mining countries are generating some remarkable settlement patterns and welfare outcomes. Presently, the African continent is a laboratory of national mining experiences. This special issue on African mining and urbanisation encompasses a wide cross-section of country case studies: beginning with the historical experiences of mining in Southern Africa (South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe), followed by more recent mineralizing trends in comparatively new mineral-producing countries (Tanzania) and an established West African gold producer (Ghana), before turning to the influence of conflict minerals (Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone)

BRICS Cities: Facts & Analysis 2016

BRICS Cities: Facts & Analysis is a compendium of research produced through a partnership between the South African Cities Network (SACN) and the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. It presents key general and thematic descriptive and comparative information about urban growth and development in the five BRICS states: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The comparative analysis includes a section relating to cities in Africa, while the detailed Factsheets cover thirty-one of the largest BRICS cities. BRICS Cities provides a first-of-its-kind research base to inform ongoing sub-national BRICS research and policy consideration. Recent reports on urbanization point out that over the next 20-30 years, almost all of the expected growth in the world population will be concentrated in the urban areas of the less developed countries of which a significant 42% will occur in cities in BRICS countries. Despite the fact that the distribution of the urbanization figures will be highly unequal between the different countries, considering the currently high levels of urbanization in Russia and Brazil and the extremely low levels (just over 35%) in India, the realities of large scale urbanization can and no doubt will have substantial impacts on the material conditions of urban life, governance, service provision, social relations and the environment. There has also been, and will continue to be, the expansion of networks of all kinds far beyond designated urban boundaries. In some cases, these challenges and the expanding boundaries have been met with additional layers of government, innovations in policy-making, and the reconfiguring of relationships between urban actors. However little is known in a comparative sense around some of the most important sites and cities in the BRICS countries , and insufficient research has been undertaken to learn from the differences that have been identified. The SACN and SA&CP, in line with our mutual interest around the nature and shape of urbanization and urban processes in South Africa and in BRICS countries, have developed a compendium of comparable information around key cities in the BRICS countries. BRICS Cities will serve as a useful reference of important base line information but also offers comment on the state of key areas of shared concern: innovation-driven economies, transport and mobility, and green energy. Furthermore, the publication provides a careful analysis of these factors in a comparative and relational framing.AA2017https://www.wits.ac.za/archplan/research-entities/spatial-analysis-and-city-planning/featured-projects/brics-fact-sheet-book

Refractions of the National, the Popular and the Global in African Cities

Case studies of metropolitan cities in nine African countries – from Egypt in the north to three in West and Central Africa, two in East Africa and three in Southern Africa – make up the empirical foundation of this publication. The interrelated themes addressed in these chapters – the national influence on urban development, the popular dynamics that shape urban development and the global currents on urban development – make up its framework. All authors and editors are African, as is the publisher. The only exception is Göran Therborn whose recent book, Cities of Power, served as motivation for this volume. Accordingly, the issue common to all case studies is the often conflictual powers that are exercised by national, global and popular forces in the development of these African cities. Rather than locating the case studies in an exclusively African historical context, the focus is on the trajectories of the postcolonial city (with the important exception of Addis Ababa with a non-colonial history that has granted it a special place in African consciousness). These trajectories enable comparisons with those of postcolonial cities on other continents. This, in turn, highlights the fact that Africa – today, the least urbanised continent on an increasingly urbanised globe – is in the thick of processes of large-scale urban transformation, illustrated in diverse ways by the case studies that make up the foundation of this publication

Financialization and development regime building in waterfront redevelopment in Chinese port cities under neoliberalism: A case study of Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre

Post-industrial waterfront redevelopment refers to the transformation from the Keynesian-Fordist industrial landscape to the post-industrial service-based waterfront (Vormann, 2014). Neoliberal financial devolution has empowered local development coalitions to tap into local financial resources by leveraging private investment. Coalitions made up of city hall and private sector actors may be considered as urban development regimes that can utilize their institutional resources to make potent governing decisions (Stone, 1989).This research focuses on the financing of waterfront redevelopment projects in Chinese port cities under neoliberalism. The study examines Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre as an example of how such urban development coalitions function to promote waterfront redevelopment projects, and by extension, to understand how post-industrial waterfront redevelopment is pursued in Chinese port cities. In addition to the Sailing Centre, the relocation of Beihai Shipyard exemplifies how post-industrial waterfront redevelopment, in conjunction with the effect of gentrification, shapes the neoliberal urban landscape. The financing story of the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre is explored as a case study of entrepreneurial urban redevelopment strategy, and this study uncovers the process to present how an urban development coalition extracts land value from entrepreneurial strategies amid the trend of neoliberalism. How the Chinese urban growth coalitions, made up of the local city halls and private developers, conduct city redevelopment projects in an entrepreneurial way via mobilizing market elements and land resources to avoid the conventional budget public financing has been missing in past literature. Hence, the discussion about the financing of the waterfront redevelopment projects in the second-tier Chinese port cities contributes to filling the literature gap of how the second-tier Chinese cities conduct great-mega projects through off-budget financial instruments

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis research focuses on the application of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial analysis methods to urban and regional development studies. GIS-based spatial modeling approaches have recently been used in examining regional development disparities and urban growth. Through the cases of Guangdong province and the city of Dongguan, the study employs a spatial-temporal, multiscale, and multimethodology approach in analyzing geographically referenced socioeconomic and remote sensing data. A general spatial data analysis framework is set through a study of regional development in China's Guangdong province and urban growth in the city of Dongguan. Three intensive spatial statistical analyses are carried out. First, the dissertation investigates the spatial dynamics of regional inequality through Markov chains and spatial Markov-chain analyses. In so doing, it addresses the effect of self-reinforcing agglomeration on regional disparities. Multilevel modeling is further employed to evaluate the relative importance of regional development mechanisms in Guangdong. Second, a spatial filtering perspective is employed for understanding the spatial effects on multiscalar characteristics of regional inequality in Guangdong. Spatial panel and space-time regression models are integrated to detail the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of underlying mechanisms behind regional inequality. Third, drawing upon a set of high-quality remote sensing data in the city of Dongguan, the dissertation analyzes the spatial-temporal dynamics and spatial determinants of urban growth in a rapid industrializing area. Through the application of landscape metrics, three types of urban growth, including infill, spontaneous, and edge expansion, are distinguished, addressing the diverse spatial patterns at different stages of urban growth. A spatial logistic approach is further developed to model the spatial variations of urban growth determinants within the Dongguan city. In short, the dissertation finds that regional inequality in the Guangdong province is sensitive to spatial scales, dependence, and the core-periphery structure therein. The evolution of inequality can hardly be simplified into either convergence or divergence trajectories. Furthermore, development mechanisms and urban growth determinants are apparently different in space and are sensitive to spatial hierarchies and regimes. Overall, through the application of GIS spatial modeling techniques, the dissertation has provided more valuable information about spatial effects on China's urban and regional development under economic transition and highlights the importance of taking into consideration spatial dimensions in urban and regional development studies