1st Edition
Urban Transformations Geographies of Renewal and Creative Change
Economic restructuring and demographic change have in recent years placed much strain on urban areas with the effects falling disproportionately on neighbourhoods that were previously underpinned by industry and manufacturing. This has presented policy makers and city planners with a binary choice: to resist change and stagnate or to change and attempt to keep up with the pace of global demand. This edited book tells the story of how urban transformation impacts on people’s lives and everyday interactions – to question where and to whom benefit accrues from these changes.
Urban Transformations offers insight into both risk and reward as local communities and public authorities creatively address the challenge of building vital and sustainable urban environments. The authors in this edited collection argue that understanding the specifics of community, space and place is crucial to delivering insights into how, where, when, why and for whom urban areas might successfully transform. The chapters investigate urban change using a range of approaches, and case studies from the four corners of the Earth – from the United States to Iran; from the United Kingdom to Canada. The varying scales at which governance or regeneration initiatives operate, the nature and composition of urban communities, and the local or global interests of different private sector actors all raise questions for urban policy and practice. It is important to not only consider the drivers of regeneration, but its beneficiaries need to be identified.
This edited volume addresses and elaborates on critical issues facing urban transformation and renewal as a basis for future discussion on strategies for ‘successful’ urban transformation.
List of Tables and Figures
About the Authors
Forward
Geographies of renewal and creative change: Assessing urban transformations
Nicholas Wise & Julie Clark
- Writing the past into the fabric of the present: Urban regeneration in Glasgow’s East End
- Urban regeneration In Motion: The High Line as a traveling urban imaginary
- Urban revitalization in a neoliberal key: Brownfield redevelopment in Michigan
- The New Main Street: Planning, politics and change in downtown Kent, Ohio
- Beyond rail: Amenity Driven High Density Development for polycentric cities
- Creating third places: Ethnic retailing and place-making in metropolitan Toronto
- Place-making and place-breaking on the banks of the Clyde
- Renewal of Tehran's deteriorated neighbourhoods: Opportunities for identity building and meaning making?
- When community and condos collide: The uneven geographies of housing wealth in mixed-income neighbourhood transformation
- Examining the transformation of Regent Park, Toronto: Prioritizing hard and soft infrastructure
- Theorising neighbourhood inequality: The things we do with theory, the things it does to us
- Developing a research agenda to assess local social impacts of sport
Julie Clark & Rebecca Madgin
Ian Riekes Trivers
Mark D. Bjelland & Ian Noyes
Jennifer Mapes
Jennifer L. Kitson, Stephen T. Buckman & David C. Folch
Zhixi Cecilia Zhuang
Georgiana Varna
Azadeh Hadizadeh Esfahani
Charles Barlow
Shauna Brail, Katerina Mizrokhi & Sonia Ralston
Amie Thurber
Biography
Nicholas Wise is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Health and Community at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Julie Clark is an urban policy specialist, lecturing in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of the West of Scotland, UK.