Urban transformations and complex values: insights from Beirut

Through an urban renewal process driven by a well‐resourced Lebanese diaspora and foreign investment, Beirut has undergone conspicuous morphological densification, characterised by parcel aggregation and exploitation of building height. Planning agencies have contributed to these transformations, deliberately involved in the production of illegality, and contributing to unplanned urban development. Although recent literature has substantially furthered our understanding of deregulated planning in Beirut, little is known of the preferences of residents with regards to the urban development process. This article sheds light on how morphological densification affects the complex values attached by residents to their urban environments using a novel data set and mixed‐methods approach. It explores how dramatic urban restructuring affects resident values of architectural amenities and neighbourhood belonging. Findings show that although living in areas with different rates of building change does not affect preferences for architectural amenities, it affects resident socio‐political activism towards the preservation of their built environment. Residents living in areas with high buildingchange rates had almost 50% lower odds of being willing to stop new construction near their location of residence because of their lack of confidence in the planning system. Neighbourhood belonging is not significantly affected by construction rates, but substantially increases both with the number of years lived in a neighbourhood and in locations with better building conditions, confirming a role for the built environment

Essays in planning policy and urban economics

This thesis consists of four independent chapters. Although the chapters are distinct works, they are related by their focus on urban policy and aim to contribute to the understanding of how planning policies and urban development affect specific outcomes in space. The chapters can be divided into two distinct parts. The first part comprises two studies on conservation planning. The first chapter investigates the complexities at play between conservation planning systems, their applications and how these vary between contexts. Based on a survey of conservation planning systems in 5 countries, focusing on 5 city case-studies, it considers how conservation compares between planning systems of the Global North and Global South and what this suggest about heritage value. The second chapter exploits the Italian context to examine to what extent non-compliance undermines conservation effects given that despite stringent planning regulation, the conditions of the urban environment vary widely throughout Italy, including within protected areas. This study is closely linked to the urban economics literature through an explicit consideration of housing markets and spatial issues. The second part of this thesis comprises two further chapters that focus on the effects of two distinctly urban occurrences: economic and morphological density. The third chapter investigates the costs and benefits of a widely supported policy paradigm: ‘compact urban form’. It asks to what extent even higher densities within cities are desirable by assessing the effects of density on a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, the cost of providing public services, transport- and environment-related outcomes to health and wellbeing. The final chapter focuses on deregulated planning using Beirut, Lebanon as a case-study given the city’s conspicuous transformations which have dramatically altered the city’s landscape, housing stock, and people-space relations. This chapter specifically investigates how morphological densification affects values residents attach to both their physical urban environments and intangible urban amenities such as neighbourhood belonging. The unifying theme of the thesis is to bring fresh evidence to policy-relevant issues in planning and urban economics by the generation of new datasets for all contexts and the application of multi-disciplinary techniques

The politics of conservation planning: a comparative study of urban heritage making in the Global North and the Global South

Urban heritage is the category of heritage that most directly concerns the environment of each and every person. Conservation or the integration of the built historic environment in city planning is typically viewed as a desirable undertaking, and policies to this effect are established as an integral element of planning in many countries. Our paper investigates the complexities at play between conservation planning structures, their applications and how these vary between contexts. It asks: how does conservation compare between planning systems of the North and South and what does this suggest about heritage value? Based on a survey of conservation planning systems in 5 countries, focusing on 5 city case-studies, this paper studies conservation’s position within planning in current urban policy in different contexts. Our paper analyses how different planning systems have adopted and integrated urban heritage definitions and accordingly, how zoning techniques, governance levels and planning constraints have resulted in quite varied conservation planning outcomes not only between the North and South but between European examples alone. In exploring contexts where the desirability of conserving and enhancing the historic environment is overlooked, overturned or simply ignored despite the existence of conservation policies, this paper also explores the limitations regulation has in pinning down heritage values

The compact city in empirical research: A quantitative literature review

The ‘compact city’ is one of the most prominent concepts to have emerged in the global urban policy debate, though it is difficult to ascertain to what extent its theorised positive outcomes can be substantiated by evidence. Our review of the theoretical literature identifies three main compact city characteristics that have effects on 15 categories of outcomes: economic density, morphological density and mixed land use. The scope of our quantitative evidence-review comprises all theoretically relevant combinations of characteristics and outcomes. We review 321 empirical analyses in 189 studies for which we encode the qualitative result along with a range of study characteristics. In line with theoretical expectations, 69% of the included analyses find normatively positive effects associated with compact urban form, although the mean finding is negative for almost half of the combinations of outcomes and characteristics

The economic effects of density: A synthesis

This paper synthesises the state of knowledge on the economic effects of density. We consider 15 outcome categories and 202 estimates of density elasticities from 102 studies. More than 50% of these estimates have not been previously published and have been provided by authors on request or inferred from published results in auxiliary analyses. We contribute own estimates of density elasticities of 16 distinct outcome variables that belong to categories where the evidence base is thin, inconsistent or non-existent. Along with a critical discussion of the quality and the quantity of the evidence base we present a set of recommended elasticities. Applying them to a scenario that roughly corresponds to an average high-income city, we find that a 10% increase in density in per capita and year terms is associated with a $140 increase in wage and a$243 increase in rent. The decrease in real wage net of taxes of $171 is partially compensated for by an aggregate amenity effect of$106 and there is a positive external welfare effect of $29. Density has important positive amenity and resource implications, but also appears to create a scarcity rent, which harms renters and first-time buyers

Localised effects of re-allocated real estate mafia assets

In an effort to tackle organised crime, the Italian State implements a policy stipulating that properties confiscated to individuals convicted of mafia-related crimes are reallocated to a new use. The policy is meant to act as both an anti-mafia measure and a way to compensate local communities by converting real-estate assets into public amenities. We assess whether this scheme has an effect on the regeneration of local areas by assessing its impact on the value of properties in the vicinity of re-allocated assets and crime activity. The results unveil a positive effect of re-allocated real estate assets on house prices, driven by mafia strongholds, more deprived neighbourhoods, and areas with more inelastic housing supply. The findings suggest declining effects with distance from the re-allocation site, indicating that the policy impact is highly localised. Part of this effect appears due to a decrease in organised crime activity in the streets where re-allocations have taken place. These findings have implications for the effectiveness of policies aiming to improve the quality of neighbourhoods where mafia presence is more pronounced

Sustained citizen science from research to solutions: a new impact model for the social sciences

Participatory research offers a valuable opportunity for collaboration between universities and citizens. It allows people with diverse educational and professional trajectories outside of academia to become partners in the research process, leading to multiple positive outcomes such as enhanced capacity building, contextually sensitive research design, and effective dissemination of findings. The chain of activities in the standard version of participatory research, however, stops short of developing solutions for improved quality of life, without making clear how enhanced capacities or locally embedded research findings will translate into tangible change for the communities where the research takes place. This shortcoming, we claim, is linked to the relatively short-term nature of most participatory research, as well as the scarcity of institutional structures and funding schemes to support the development of community-led solutions in the long run. The present article demonstrates that another model of research is both possible and desirable. It does this by presenting the outcomes of a sustained, long-term collaboration between university researchers and citizen social scientists in Beirut, Lebanon. The sustained nature of this work – running for over 3 years at the time of writing – has enabled our team to roll out a substantial programme of qualitative and quantitative data collection on prosperity and quality of life, and to subsequently use the findings and experience gained to create a set of interventions that address pressing challenges. We specifically argue that sustained, open-ended work on multiple activities – from research design and data collection, to data analysis, design of interventions and more – leads to accumulation of skills and experiences within the team, which can then be channelled towards implementing high quality interventions. This new model of impact for social science research prioritises partnership between universities and citizens, while highlighting the potential of such partnership to lead to solutions that make a real difference

Urban Transformations and Complex Values: Insights From Beirut

Through an urban renewal process driven by a well-resourced Lebanese diaspora and foreign investment, Beirut has undergone conspicuous morphological densification, characterised by parcel aggregation and exploitation of building height. Planning agencies have contributed to these transformations, deliberately involved in the production of illegality, and contributing to unplanned urban development. Although recent literature has substantially furthered our understanding of deregulated planning in Beirut, little is known of the preferences of residents with regards to the urban development process. This article sheds light on how morphological densification affects the complex values attached by residents to their urban environments using a novel data set and mixed-methods approach. It explores how dramatic urban restructuring affects resident values of architectural amenities and neighbourhood belonging. Findings show that although living in areas with different rates of building change does not affect preferences for architectural amenities, it affects resident socio-political activism towards the preservation of their built environment. Residents living in areas with high building-change rates had almost 50% lower odds of being willing to stop new construction near their location of residence because of their lack of confidence in the planning system. Neighbourhood belonging is not significantly affected by construction rates, but substantially increases both with the number of years lived in a neighbourhood and in locations with better building conditions, confirming a role for the built environment.</jats:p