Knowledge intensive regeneration versus sustainable communities

Regeneration is deemed as the enabler for societies and nations to transform them from industrial age to knowledge. In this regard, knowledge intensive regeneration is one of the latest models, called as New Century Cities (NCC) to make progress and ultimately achieve the transformation towards knowledge societies, which have the features and characteristics of sustainable communities. However, meeting the key features or characteristics of sustainable communities can be challenging due to its complex and interrelated features such as socio-economic requirement, environmental and physical requirements, which are all correlated to each other. This paper aims to discuss the knowledge intensive regeneration model in relation to the sustainable communities in order to highlight the level of match and conformance between them in order to justify the suitability of knowledge intensive regeneration for the sustainable communities' vision. Research methodology adopted in the paper is the case study approach, which is the Mediacity project, and used literature review, observation and interviews for data collection, while concept mapping was utilised for data analysis. Research findings reflect that the level of conformance is relatively high, social aspects is still weakly addressed in comparison to other dimensions. Therefore, paper proposes the stronger attention and strategic planning at the visioning and masterplanning stages of such projects in order to address this most challenging dimension of regeneration project

The SURegen Workbench

Urban regeneration is of considerable contemporary public interest and debate. Sustainable urban regeneration requires a comprehensive and integrated vision and action to address the resolution of urban problems and bring about a lasting improvement in the economic, physical, social, and environmental conditions of an area that has been subject to change. Thus, there are increased requirements for decision making and knowledge sharing by urban planners, local authorities, and other practitioners to achieve sustainability in urban regeneration activities. To address these challenges the research team of the Sustainable Urban Regeneration (SURegen) project (UK Government EPSRC funded, £2.5 Million, in the SUE programme) designed and implemented a prototype Regeneration Workbench, which addresses the key challenges in regeneration practice and provides a flexible and integrated e-platform. Over the past 20 years many Planning Support Systems (PSS) have been developed. Whereas most of these systems address a small range of issues, the SURegen workbench takes a holistic approach to all aspects that have influence sustainable regeneration. Furthermore, the workbench specifically addresses the management of urban regeneration projects and the skills gaps amongst regeneration professionals. This article describes the urban challenges addressed and details the SURegen approach to meeting these challenges