Built Environment

High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 4

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

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Europe has witnessed during the twenty first century its greatest ever period of high-rise construction. From London to Rotterdam, Barcelona, Moscow, Madrid, Vienna, Milan, Turin, paris, Lyon and warsaw, European city skylines have become higher, denser and more diverse. after a fallow period during which very few towers were built (1980–2000), European cities are currently experi-encing a renewed interest in this architectural form, following in the footsteps of the United states and emerging economies. while the resurgence of skyscrapers in Europe has, to date, been somewhat modest in terms of height compared to the Middle East or south-east asia, it has reached unprecedented pro-portions in a significant number of European countries, exceeding the post-war boom period,prompting the need to assess the nature of this upward urban growth (figure 1).
This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these re-cent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dy-namics of European urbanization. Through a combination of particular case-studies across Europe with wider analyses of national and international trends, the issue investigates the relationship in European cities between high-rise built fabric and planning regimes, finan-cial flows, cultural representations, technical innovations, and forms of modernist heritage. Developing cross-disciplinary perspectives and engagement with both academic and practitioner insights, the issue provides an initial assessment of high-rise Europe in the context of a wider world of vertical urbanisms (Graham and Hewitt, 2013; Harris, 2015).
 
European cities occupy a special place in the modern history of vertical urbanism. while European industrial architectural and engineering research inspired the construc-tion  of  the  first  skyscrapers  in  the  United States (Cohen, 1995), North american vertical architecture became in turn a key reference for post-war European planners in modern-izing urban centres (destroyed by conflict and plagued by housing shortages) according to a modernist perspective largely inspired by the circulation of references from across the atlantic (Gartman, 2000). However, contrary to its North american model, European post-war vertical urbanism was characterized by a culture of large-scale urban planning which was mainly the product of highly centralized forms  of  state  intervention,  a  configuration that helped create distinctive types of Europeanhigh-rise housing  (figure  2).  This  includedthe role for new architectural and structural standards, technological innovations and a shared culture of urban engineering in de-fining  a  vertical  urbanism  that  spread  well beyond European national borders (Tailland-ier et al., 2009). For example, many French architects and engineers of the post-war ‘re-construction’ period started their career in co-lonial cities before coming back to the French urban metropole where they applied their expertise (picard, 1994; Fredenucci, 2003; Kasmi, 2017). This expertise was then further circulated to be applied in post-colonial cen-tres, creating a transnational space for Euro-pean modernist urban references and vertical arts de faire (Verdeil, 2012; Beeckmans, 2014; stanek, 2012).
The epitome of the architectural modern-ization of European cities in the post-war period, high-rise urbanism was initially char-acterized by the construction of large-scale residential developments made of slab and point blocks and sometimes large-scale con-crete platforms which, following Corbusian principles of modernist urban planning, sep-arated  high-rises  from  traffic  infrastructure and historic centres (Esher, 1981; Monclus and Dies Medina, 2016). High-rise urbanism was then an essential feature of the expansion of Fordist developmentalist states in western and Eastern European countries (swenarton et al., 2014; Hatherley, 2016). as Jacobs et al.(2012, p. 132) argue, it was ‘the materialisation of a specific modernising vision for cities and city life, one that joined the progressive ethos of state-led welfarism with a modernist ar-chitectural aesthetics’. During this high-risepeak, architectural and urbanism referencesfollowed similar developments acrossEurope with a large number of slab-blocks built on the outskirts of towns and cities, re-flecting the importance of decision processes centralized by the post-war central state. But, as Turkington et al. note in their 2004 study, European cities then diverged with regards to the construction and dissemination of a high-rise urbanism. In western Europe most of the high-rise construction stopped in the 1980s, but the building of high-rise residential estates continued in Eastern European cities into the 1990s (Turkington et al., 2004, p. 266) (figure 3).
During the 1970s and 1980s, European high-rise urbanism became the locus for long-standing processes of demonization and stigmatization following a series of isolated incidents such as the collapse of Ronan point Tower in London (1968), the demise of large-scale social housing projects in France (Kad-dour, 2016), the broader restructuring and privatization of public housing in most Eu-ropean countries (power, 1993; sailer-Fliege, 1999) and the controversies that followed the construction  of  stand-alone  high-rise  office towers such as Tour Montparnasse in paris or Centre point in London. Having been one of the fields of experimentation for vertical ur-banism, several European cities experienceda reaction against high-rises that correlatedwith the institutionalization of forms ofheritage protection. after modernism, came the valuing of more pastiche or postmodern forms of urbanism, putting the accent more on morphological continuity and the conser-vation of historic urban centres (appleyard, 1979; Delafons, 1998; Glauser, 2016). Many heritage lobbies, which became major play-ers in the contemporary regulation of urban planning in European cities, were created in reaction to reconstruction and modernization projects (Backouche, 2016). The contemporary wave of verticalization must be understood in reference to these multiple legacies of a disputed vertical urban past, and is a distinc-tive feature of the European high-rise context(figure 4).
Nevertheless, the protected skylines of European cities have been troubled in the last 15 years by new waves of tall build-ings and high-rise residential structures, a tendency which has not been limited to the main global urban centres and is affecting a diverse range of cities (Drozdz and appert, 2012). The number of towers currently under construction exceeds the post-war boom pe-riod and high-rises are once again finding a certain legitimacy in European cities (appert, 2016). This contemporary high-rise urbanism in Europe comes in different sizes and forms. while the resurgence of skyscrapers has been a major phenomenon, including those that had put in place the most drastic anti-tower legislation after the modernist period, the process of verticalization in Europe has been far from linear, has not necessarily happened in the same type of locations, and has not pro-duced an urban form with unified properties.
 
The comparison of the spatial distribution of towers built in the 1980s and during the post-2000 period reflects the diversity of loca-tions for new towers in the last 10 years. Until the 2000s, the verticalization of European cen-tres corresponded to a piecemeal moderniza-tion of business districts that accompanied the rise of global finance in property markets for office buildings (Lizieri, 2009). The construc-tion of new towers in Europe was then main-ly  limited  to  international  financial  centres where the progressive elevation of heights contrasted with the sprawl of low- and me-dium-density suburbs around them and the diffusion of blanket regulations over historic centres (for instance, La Défense vs Central paris, or Donau City vs Vienna inside the Ring). During the 2000s, on the other hand, tower projects proliferated in European cit-ies, a process that can be understood as very much part of globalization and the financial-ization of real estate, even in cities that seem to be more marginal to these hyper-specula-tive economic markets (figure 5).
In cities such as Madrid, Milan, Turin or paris, a few monumental towers have come to break the silhouette of the cityscape, but with-out reaching the extent of London, where, as of 1 January 2015, more than 400 tower proj-ects were proposed, approved or under con-struction. The Chamartín district of Madrid has become home to the eponymous Cuatro Torres, while Barcelona has gone vertical with urban renewal operations at Fira de Barcelona or Diagonal Mar. south of the alps, Milan has been gracing the covers of specialist journals following the construction of the Bosco Ver-ticale, while Turin, not without opposition, allowed Renzo piano to build Torre san paolo. Further north, the Turning Torso has redefined the image of the city of Malmö in sweden.
 
However, the post-2000 boom in vertical construction in Europe is not necessarily ex-emplified  in  super-tall  futuristic  structures like those in Middle Eastern and asian cities, but  in  supposedly  compact  energy-efficient residential urban blocks according to new high-rise urbanism principles. woven into the existing city fabric, these projects are often framed from the ground up, as initia-tives to reinvigorate local deprived or de-in-dustrialized neighbourhoods and to create urban amenities around transport nodes, embodying new sets of discourses and prac-tices among built environment professionals and planning authorities (appert, 2012). The particular historical context in urban Europe also gives much strength to heritage and con-servation groups and lobbies who strongly shape the height outlines of the European urban landscape, prompting the need to ex-amine closely the conditions of the emergence of a (renewed) European urban vernacular of contemporary high-rise urbanism (figure 6).
Considering this diversity of contempo-rary forms of high-rise urbanism, this issue ofBuilt Environment explores a range of practicesand manifestations across Europe accord-ing to three main perspectives: (i) politicaleconomy; (ii) heritage and planning; and (iii) symbolic landscapes. The first of these con-cerns contemporary high-rise construction, demolition and maintenance, and is a core component of the papers by Craggs, Lenne, Huré et al., and Charney and Rosen. Follow-ing  seminal  works  on  the  role  of  financial intermediaries and instruments in the verti-calization of North-american cities (weber, 2015), these four papers explore how Europe-an cities are located on the emerging global map of investment flows and trace back the genealogy of entrepreneurial forms of verti-calization which started in the 1970s. They offer insights to evolutions within internationalfinancial systems to show how the creation of new investment vehicles like REITs (Real Es-tate Investment Trusts) are driving (some of) the verticalization of European cities.
 
The physics of tall buildings and their ar-chitectural and engineering qualities have been the locus of a renewed interest (al-Kod-many, 2017); however the role of consultants and experts who guide investment and influ-ence decision-makers, prioritize places and participate in the construction of what could be  identified  as  a  European  tower  market remains  underexplored.  In  the  fierce  com-petition between European cities to attract investment, we seem to be witnessing a new common urban rationale in which the pres-ence of high-tech towers would allow urban centres to distinguish themselves and signal their economic dynamism (Grubbauer, 2014). Built and run by a variety of intermediaries, this intra-European market for entrepreneur-ial verticalization is structured by such sig-nals of local economic success. Like any mar-ket, it has echo chambers such as the MIpIM (Le marché international des professionnels de l’immobilier – the International Real Estate Pro-fessionals Trade Show, hosted in Cannes every March), where professionals of this small economic world are now presented with new tower projects, ‘unveiled’ with fanfare to at-tract investment.
 
The paper by Loïse Lenne explores the archaeology of contemporary commercial high-rise urbanism in the City of London by focusing on the history of one particular edifice, the Lloyd’s Building, constructed in 1986 and designed by Richard Rogers and partners. archives and interviews with plan-ners and architects, including Richard Rogers himself, provide the material for a detailed analysis of how the construction of this par-ticular building was a turning point for the theory and practice of high-rise urbanism and tall buildings in the City. Having designed several of its architectural landmarks such as the Lloyd’s Registers, 88 wood street or the recent Leadenhall Building (completed in2014), Rogers and his team have had a consid-erable influence on the physical fabric of the City. Lenne’s paper examines how their first intervention in the square Mile, the Lloyd’s Building, set the principles that still underpin tall buildings projects in the City. Not par-ticularly tall (95 metres high when Tower 42 completed in 1980 reached 183 metres), this building was nonetheless the only building of this size to be allowed at a time when high construction had been banned in the City. The debate around the building introduced new arguments where architectural quality was used as grounds to relax heritage regulations. assessing the architectural qualities of the building, Lenne shows that it also represent-ed a major change in the imaginary of the de-velopment of the City, shifting from compre-hensive public-led urban redevelopments to a piecemeal approach responding to the market needs.
If the architectural principles supporting the current wave of tall buildings in the Cityof London can be traced back to the 1980s, DavidCraggs’s paper explores how the recent surge in skyscrapers has been backed by a partic-ular political economy which appears to beincreasingly entangled with the dynamics of international property markets. Departing from the debates about the contested poli-tics of tall buildings and the management of London’s skyline, this paper assesses the financial  forces  driving  the  contemporary development of skyscrapers in London and questions the apparent consensus among London’s planning industry to supportthis highly speculative stage of high-rise ur-banism.  As  the  2008–2010  crisis  offered  an opportunity for new institutional investors to acquire a share in the prime market of central London, it reinforced the position of London as a magnet for an ever-expanding volume of capital searching for a return through the exploitation of the built environment. But the paper also exposes the fragility of the under-pinnings of this vertical expansion, rooted in a ‘dependency on rising asset-prices, loose monetary policy and the wealth preserving instincts of the global financial elite’. Reflect-ing on the patterns of capital accumulation through the built environment and its polit-ical regulation (or lack of) through planning, the paper also illustrates how the current growth of skyscrapers signals a profound shift in the ideology and spatial imaginaries that supported high-rise urbanism in Europe, particularly during the post-war period. while the commercial skyscrapers used to signal the peak of a building cycle in highly regulated markets, and the mass production of housing was absorbing much of the re-sources (capital and labour), the current pro-liferation of isolated monumental structures serves the purpose of producing a continuous stream of rental revenues for a constellation of investors in a crisis-prone environment. This shift is also manifest in the very physicality of the built environment and the weakening of comprehensive, public-led large-scale urban development projects, progressively replaced by splintered forms of planning (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Interestingly enough, the scale of these rent machines has expanded (santia-go Calavatra’s project for the Greenwich pen-insula has reached the stratospheric price of £1 billion) to the point where whole areas of European cities are again the subject of com-prehensive private-led redevelopment, and developers are reinventing a wholesale high-rise  urbanism  targeted  at  securing  different streams of rental revenues.
 
If understanding how the global restruc-turing of capital flows and the actions of mar-ket intermediaries may help in explaining some of the pressures towards verticalization in European cities, this perspective needs to be supplemented by an exploration of how local political elites and planners also inter-vene in the production of towers. The paper by Maxime Huré, Christian Montès and Manuel appert and that by Gillad Rosen and Igal Charney demonstrate that the somehow counter-intuitive geography of contemporary verticalization in Europe, far from reflecting only the geography and spatial conventions of real-estate experts, finds its root in intense political and regulatory activity that needs to be unpacked. Using, respectively, the cases of Lyon and Jerusalem, they show that the re-emergence of towers in urban centres does  not  always  flag  the  insertion  of  a  city into highly financialized real-estate markets, although it hints at entrepreneurial turning points in their urban policies (Charney and Rosen, 2016; Kaika, 2010). The evolution of the professional culture in architectural firms and planning authorities to adjust to vertical shifts and/or encourage them, and their adaptation to the demands and needs of international consultants is also part of this political mobili-zation. Using numerous planning documents, media coverage and interviews with public figures,  NGOs  and  real-estate  experts,  their papers illustrate how a pro-growth agenda has dominated the development of tall build-ings in both cities and toned down the polem-ics and controversies that characterized the previous rounds of high-rise projects. Both papers reflect on the politics of contemporary high-rise urbanism in each city and explore the response of the public to these important changes. In Jerusalem, where heritage plan-ning and height limitations were introduced by British planners at the turn of the twenti-eth century, high-rises have triggered several waves of opposition coming from both NGOs and heritage experts. The impossibility to discuss in a meaningful manner the intro-duction of new tall buildings in the city and the absence of arenas where this debate could take place finally lead the authors to highlight the post-political or what we could even call non-political qualities of the debate. In Lyon, the introduction of a special policy guidance on tall buildings helped create a consensus among planning and heritage experts, politi-cians and residents’ associations who agreed on containing the construction of tall build-ings near the main train station. However, the authors highlight that the very need for new tall buildings and skyscrapers in an economic context where the demands still seem limited was never openly discussed in public arenas.
 
The second core thematic shaping this issue’s engagement with the dynamics of contemporary high-rise urbanism in Europe concerns planning and heritage, and is a cen-tral aspect of the papers written by Greco and Nijhuis and Van der Hoeven. Looking at the cases of Lyon and Turin, Elena Greco’s paper retraces how planning for tall buildings hasevolved from the 1960s to the new millennium.She  shows  how  the  first  major  wave  oftall buildings in Lyon and Turin during the 1960s and 1970s materialized there the advent of the vertical modern city, yet despite being radically different from what was previous-ly built, high-rise clusters were the result of strong planning regulations and codes that paradoxically related more to the urban fabric of these historic cities than the loose strategic guidelines developed more recently. since the 1990s, in addressing processes of de-indus-trialization and looking for new economic resources, urban planning has become more negotiated, opening up opportunities for pri-vate sector actors to initiate high-rise devel-opments in targeted areas or projets urbains. accompanying forms of urban design have consequently changed, being reduced in scale to specific locations where tall buildings are expected and in the process losing sight of city-wide elements of design. The regulation of the European historic environment through the processes of conservation – institution-alized following effective or proposed radi-cal transformations of cities – has come into direct collision with the latest tall building projects proposed as a means of leveraging economic  development,  fiscal  revenues  and rebranding cities. Steffen Nijhuis and Frank-lin van der Hoeven illustrate this through the case of The Hague considering how high-rises can epitomize the predominance of economic development goals over urban planning principles, including the protection of urban heritage. Both these papers acknow-ledge the lack of consultation and assessment of the landscape impacts of tall buildings in Lyon, Turin and Dutch cities, despite exist-ing tools and methodologies. Nonetheless, as an important rejoinder, Nijhuis and Van der Hoeven demonstrate how visibility analysis can overcome the subjectivity of perceived urban transformations often instrumental-ized in debates surrounding high-rise con-struction. Landscape analysis through GIs-based modelling can often help planners and politicians map the visibility of tall buildings so as to better confine or design tall buildings in relation to the existing urban fabric.
 
The last four papers of the issue, working across  social  policy,  film  studies  and  urban geography, explore how the changing sym-bolic landscapes and cultural representations of high-rise urbanism in contemporary Eu-rope need to be mapped directly onto new class relations and trajectories of neoliberal urbanism. all four of these papers, develop-ing analysis of a range of material including audio-visual texts, planning documents and oral histories, chart in particular how the high-rise residential block has lost much of its post-war egalitarian and modernist social cre-dentials. These have been largely superseded by a strong emphasis on upmarket lifestyles and investment priorities, and in the case of the UK and France have become part of a widespread and systematic programme of so-cial housing demolition. In investigating the key intersections between political and cul-tural dimensions of high-rise life, these four papers not only provide sharp critical per-spectives on the unequal vertical geographies emerging in Europe today, but emphasize how high-rise residential landscapes need to be understood as framed, sustained and ne-gotiated through particular representational strategies and urban visions.
The paper by Essi Viitanen uses an in-depth  analysis  of  four  feature-length  films from the last 5 years set in and around Helsin-ki to examine the relationship between high-rise urbanism and the changing social worlds of the Finnish suburbs, known as lähiö, asso-ciated from the 1950s with state-built mod-ernist housing blocks. Viitanen assesses the way that cinematic space depicts and engages with new forms of everyday lived experience associated with the high-rise landscapes of these marginalized suburbs and the asso-ciated framing and play around themes of constraint, alienation and dysfunction. also providing a focus on the way high-rise urban-ism in Northern Europe has been mediated through film, Pei-Sze Chow’s paper explores screen representations of scandinavia’s tallest building, the Turning Torso (2005) in Malmö, designed by the spanish architect santiago Calatrava, and regarded as the world’s first ‘twisted’ skyscraper. Chow develops a close analysis, rooted in an emphasis on film as a form of social practice, of the documentary film Sossen,Arkitekten och det Skruvade Huset (2005) and the television crime drama series, Bron/Broen (2011–), that has found wide-spread international exposure on the wave ofa ‘Nordic Noir’ trend. Chow uses these filmictexts to detail how this iconic example of high-rise European residential architecture is indicative of sharp tensions between welfare state ideology and neoliberal trajectories of post-industrial urbanism, in this case accom-panying the development of the Øresund region straddling southern sweden and Co-penhagen.
 
This emphasis on the unravelling of wel-farist social policies through dramatically altered high-rise landscapes continues in the final two papers of this issue by Vincent Ves-chambre and Vikki McCall and Gerry Mooney. These take us to France, the European coun-try with the greatest concentration of tower and slab blocks, and Glasgow, the European city with perhaps one of the highest number of high-rise social housing blocks. Both detail a similar story around the changing fortunes for tower-blocks over the last half-century. post-war idealism around their role in urban policy, part of what Veschambre calls an agen-da of ‘monumentalization’ in French social housing, quickly mutated to sustained disin-vestment from the 1970s. Critically, this was accompanied by the architectural discrediting of high-rise blocks and the stark territorial stigmatization of areas where they were con-centrated. The resulting negative narratives and discourses of ‘failure’ surrounding the people and places involved have been used by states and municipalities to justify and nat-uralize their demolition as the only response; a process Veschambre describes as ‘deverti-calization’. The symbolic logic of this agenda of tower demolition perhaps reached an ex-treme apogee in the UK with plans, as McCall and Mooney document, to broadcast globally the blow-down of the Red Road towers in Glasgow as part of the opening ceremony of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
 
although these four papers portray a downbeat assessment of the socially pro-gressive scope for high-rise living in contem-porary  Europe,  exemplified  by  the  horrific tragedy of the Grenfell Tower in London in June 2017, they also offer crucial ways of re-viewing the place for vertical life in Europe-an cities. whether it is a focus on everyday multi-ethnic practices in suburban Helsinki, isolated examples of tower rehabilitation inthe auvergne-Rhône-alpes region, documen-tary  films  that  highlight  the  contradictionsinherent to iconic vertical development, or the renewed radicalization of the UK’shousing crisis, these papers open up importantnew means of critically deconstructing – and in the process reconstructing – the social and political possibilities for the high-rise in the contemporary European imagination.
 
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Built Environment

Meet the editors

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 4

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

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Manuel Appert is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Planning at Université Lyon 2 and a member of the mixed research unit UMR 5600 – Environnement Ville Société. His research concerns the instrumentalization of architecture in urban governance. He has recently worked on the regulation of tall buildings in London and led a research team on skyline issues in European cities. His more latest work deals with planning regulations and the vertical city.

Martine Drozdz is a member of the French Council for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is a Research Fellow at Laboratoire Techniques Territoires et Sociétés and teaches at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and at the Paris School of Urban Planning. Her research explores the contemporary dynamics of urban democracy in relation to urban planning through a socio-technical lens, with a focus on London and Paris.

Andrew Harris is a Senior Lecturer in Geography and Urban Studies at University College London, where he convenes the interdisciplinary Urban Studies MSc and is a Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. His research develops critical perspectives on the role of art, creativity and culture in recent processes of urban restructuring, and on three-dimensional geographies of contemporary cities, especially London and Mumbai.

Built Environment
urban design and planning, architecture

High-Rise Urbanism in Contemporary Europe

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization. Through a combination of particular case-studies from across Europe, the issue investigates the relationship in European cities between high-rise built fabric and planning regimes, financial flows, cultural representations, technical innovations, and forms of modernist heritage.

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

This issue of Built Environment explores the processes of contemporary European urban verticalization and examines what these recent upward trajectories indicate about the social, political, economic and cultural dynamics of European urbanization.

Manuel Appert, Martine Drozdz, Andrew Harris
26 Jan 2018

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Contents

 
Planning, History & Environment
Peace Studies, urban history, Middle East studies, Irish Studies, urban planning

Trajectories of Conflict and Peace: Jerusalem and Belfast Since 1994

Creating peace for a city’s intimate enemies is harder than making war.

Scott A. Bollens
26 Jan 2018

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This book is about the trajectories of urban conflict and peace in the politically polarized cities of Jerusalem and Belfast since 1994 – how sometimes there has been hopeful change while at other times debilitating stasis and regression. Based on extensive research, fieldwork, and interviews, Scott Bollens shows how seeking peace in these cities is shaped by the interaction of city-based actors and national elites, and that it is not just a political process, but a social and spatial one that takes place problematically over an extended period. He intertwines academic precision with ethnography and personal narrative to illuminate the complex political and emotional kaleidoscopes of these polarized cities. With hostility and competition among groups defined by ethnic, religious, and nationalistic identity on the increase across the world, this timely investigation contributes to our understanding of today’s fractured cities and nations.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Chapter 1 National and Urban Co-Production of Conflict and Peace
  • Chapter 2 Jerusalem I: Urban Spatial Changes amid Political Impasse
  • Chapter 3 Jerusalem II: Interlocking Trajectories of National Politics and Urban Dynamics
  • Chapter 4 Jerusalem III: The Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Israeli Hegemonic Territoriality
  • Chapter 5 Belfast I: Building Peace in a Post-Violent Conflict City
  • Chapter 6 Belfast II: Peacebuilding as Process: Disrupted Trajectories and Urban Outcomes
  • Chapter 7 Belfast III: The Competing Demands of Political Stability and Urban Peacebuilding
  • Chapter 8 Conflict and Peace: Political and Spatial Trajectories
  • Interviews
 
Planning, History & Environment
city and urban planning, urban studies, Australia

Planning Metropolitan Australia

Australia has long been a highly (sub)urbanized nation, but the major distinctive feature of its contemporary settlement pattern is that the great majority of Australians live in a small number of large metropolitan areas focused on the state capital cities.

Stephen Hamnett, Robert Freestone
02 Oct 2017

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Australia has long been a highly (sub)urbanized nation, but the major distinctive feature of its contemporary settlement pattern is that the great majority of Australians live in a small number of large metropolitan areas focused on the state capital cities. The development and application of effective urban policy at a regional scale is a significant global challenge given the complexities of urban space and governance. Building on the editors’ previous collection The Australian Metropolis: A Planning History (2000), this new book examines the recent history of metropolitan planning in Australia since the beginning of the twenty-first century. After a historical prelude, the book is structured around a series of six case studies of metropolitan Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, the fast-growing metropolitan region of South-East Queensland centred on Brisbane, and the national capital of Canberra. These essays are contributed by some of Australia’s leading urbanists. Set against a dynamic background of economic change, restructured land uses, a more diverse population, and growing spatial and social inequality, the book identifies a broad planning consensus around the notion of making Australian cities more contained, compact and resilient. But it also observes a continuing gulf between the simplified aims of metropolitan strategies and our growing understanding of the complex functioning of the varied communities in which most people live. This book reflects on the raft of planning challenges presented at the metropolitan scale, looks at what the future of Australian cities might be, and speculates about the prospects of more effective metropolitan planning arrangements.

Stephen Hamnett is Emeritus Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of South Australia in Adelaide and a Commissioner of the Environment, Resources and Development Court of South Australia.

Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Contents

  • Chapter 1 A Metropolitan Perspective
    Stephen Hamnett and Robert Freestone
  • Chapter 2 Beginnings: The Evolution of Metropolitan Planning to the Late Twentieth Century
    Robert Freestone and Christine Garnaut
  • Chapter 3 Melbourne: Growing Pains for the Liveable City
    Robin Goodman
  • Chapter 4 Sydney: Growth, Globalization and Governance
    Raymond Bunker, Robert Freestone and Bill Randolph 
  • Chapter 5 Adelaide: Tough Times in the City of Light
    Stephen Hamnett and Jon Kellett
  • Chapter 6 Perth: From ‘Large Provincial to ‘Globalizing City’
    Paul J. Maginn and Neil Foley
  • Chapter 7 South East Queensland: Change and Continuity in Planning
    Paul Burton
  • Chapter 8 Canberra: ‘Normalization’ or ‘the Pride of Time’?
    Karl Friedhelm Fischer and James Weirick
  • Chapter 9 The Metropolitan Condition
    Brendan Gleeson
Built Environment

Planning for Equitable Urban and Regional Food Systems

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 3

Summary

How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and wellbeing of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of colour, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve? That is the question of concern in this special issue in which authors from across the Global North and South explore the role of planning and design in communities’ food systems, while explicitly considering the imbalances in equity, justice, and power.

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Food has captured the imagination of planning and design professions and disciplines across the globe as evidenced by the growing body of food-related scholarship (Moragues-Faus and Morgan, 2015; Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 1999, 2000), practices, pedagogies (Whittaker et al., 2017), and policies (Hodgson, 2012; Neuner et al., 2011). How does this burgeoning work on planning and design of food systems tackle issues of equity, inclusion, and justice? Who frames the problems? Whose voices are leading, amplifying, and engaging in planning and designing solutions? Drawing on Sen (2009), we suggest that equity and justice must be understood and judged in the light of the actual experiences of the lives of people – their wellbeing and freedom. We contend that planners’ and designers’ engagement with the food system must propel cities and regions towards conditions where the marginalized lead fuller, richer lives, not only as beneficiaries of a better food system but as those who articulate its problems and define its solutions. How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and wellbeing of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of colour, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve? That is the question of concern in this special issue.

Scholarship on city and regional food systems over the last two decades has documented the negative impacts of malfunctioning food systems, such as persistence of food insecurity, spatial disparities in access to food retail (Raja et al., 2008), increase in diet-related disease, and environmental degradation due to excessive use of fossil fuel based inputs (Canton Campbell, 2004; Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 1999, 2000). Scholars and activists called on planners to use their talents to address problems in the food system (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000), and in the last two decades planners have responded to this call. Local and regional governments in the Global North – particularly in the USA, United Kingdom, and Canada – as well as in the Global South – particularly Brazil, South Africa, and Argentina –have adopted and implemented plans and policies to strengthen city and regional food systems. Data from the US-based Growing Food Connections project suggest that more than 200 food-related plans and policies have been adopted by local and regional governments in the United States alone (growingfoodconnections.org). Globally, about 148 cities with nearly 470 million inhabitants have signed on to the 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, an international declaration in support of sustainable food systems that are inclusive, resilient, safe, and diverse (milanurbanfoodpolicypact.org). Further, the New Urban Agenda, adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador in 2016, makes multiple references to the importance of promoting food security, and explicitly endorses the use of food systems planning in one of its principles (UN-Habitat, 2016). In short, food is no longer a stranger to the planning agenda (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000).

City and Regional Food Systems (CRFS) enable food to flow from source to plate across cities and regions, drawing on material, cultural, and political actors, networks, and resources. The system and flow depend on inter-linked food-related practices including the growing, processing, distribution, and acquisition, preparation, and consumption of food, and management of food-related waste, all of which unfold spatially across the built environment. Well-functioning CRFS are often portrayed as enhancing food security, and having the ancillary benefits of promoting economic, social, health, and overall well-being in communities. Yet, thoughtful critique by food justice scholars notes that food systems are steeped in institutional racism, alternatives to fix them fail to interrogate the role of race and class, and that efforts to rebuild urban and regional food systems must look beyond food itself (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Passidomo, 2013).

Mainstream planning and design practice is sidestepping normative and empirical questions about equity and inclusion in urban and regional food systems – a central concern of the articles in this issue. We note three major oversights in planning practice. First, efforts to strengthen food systems through planning and design rarely confront historical trajectories, disruptions, and tensions within a community’s food system. In the United States, for example, contemporary planning discussions about ‘fixing’ the food system rarely acknowledge the role of failed public policy and planning in marginalizing black communities within food systems (Reynolds, 2002). For example, from 1920 to 2007 the number of farm acres owned by black farmers in the US declined precipitously by 80 per cent while acreage owned by white farmers increased slightly by about 4 per cent (Tyler and Moore, 2013), in part due to failed public policy. Yet the predominant contemporary narrative about food systems and black communities revolves around their poor diets or other individual behaviours – and planning solutions focus on bringing food to black communities. A national shift in narrative has turned black communities from being producers of food to those who must be fed. Contemporary efforts and solutions to plan and design urban and regional food systems must interrogate the historic basis for both articulation of problems and solutions.

Second, although plans and designs for urban and regional food systems invoke the needs of marginalized populations their voices are often absent in mainstream planning and design processes, as illustrated in several articles in this special issue. As a result, planners overlook the articulation of problems and solutions proposed by marginalized communities. Finally, as noted earlier, planners and designers approach city and regional food systems largely as a space within which planners and designers can affect change, but less as a lever for broader social and economic transformation and equity. For example, food-aware planners concern themselves with plans and designs to bring good, local food to a neighbourhood such as through establishing a supermarket, but rarely with strategies to use the food system as a vehicle for income generation, a far more important and pressing concern in low-income neighbourhoods. At its worst, CRFS undermine the goals of equity and inclusion by becoming vehicles for an exclusive form of green gentrification that masquerades as progressive localism (Morgan and Santo, 2017). Without deployment of CRFS as a lever for equity, broader social benefits are unlikely to be achieved. This special issue is concerned with equity as a central, not ancillary, concern of city and regional food systems planning and design.

This special issue fills a gap in the literature by documenting how the growing engagement of the planning and design disciplines subverts, reinforces, or exacerbates inequities and injustices within territorially framed food systems. Authors from across the Global North and South explore the role of planning and design in communities’ food systems, while explicitly considering the imbalances in equity, justice, and power. In so doing, they draw our attention to city and regional food systems as a space and a lever for equity and justice.

The first paper by Clark et al. lays groundwork for thinking about the capacity of local governments to create, implement, and sustain inclusive food system planning processes. Through examination of Growing Food Connections, a 5-year participatory research, education, and outreach project designed to strengthen food systems for underserved residents and farmers in communities throughout the United States, as well as a survey of political and planning theories, the authors argue that without a commitment to confront and unpack deeper systemic challenges in food planning processes, such as historic and cultural divides, racial disparities, and poverty, leaders are likely to replicate or reinforce inequities in community food systems. Drawing on qualitative empirical work from across the United States, the authors propose a theoretical framework of policy readiness for local governments to develop inclusive planning processes.

As alluded to earlier, local governments across the globe are involved in a wide variety of efforts to strengthen food systems to facilitate food access and healthy eating in their communities. Using an equity lens, a set of papers by Brinkley et al., Bohm, and Meenar challenges popular policy responses in the United States to reducing food insecurity, such as by building supermarkets and promoting urban agriculture. While such policy interventions have been praised for numerous benefits, the authors ask whether benefits are, in fact, accruing to underserved communities.

Brinkley et al. note growing public health concerns from the media, academics, policy-makers, and activists over healthy eating. The authors demonstrate the limitations of focusing on so-called ‘food deserts’ as a problem and establishing supermarkets as a solution to the health disparities found in communities of colour in the United States. Using a mixed-methods approach, the authors demonstrate that diet-related health outcomes are most strongly associated with income and race. The authors suggest new avenues for supporting the provisioning of food centred around existing community-based practices such as farm-to-market and self-provisioning.

The next two papers interrogate the potential of urban agriculture to provide benefits for residents lacking access to fresh, healthy foods. Bohm examines the extent to which urban agriculture in and on buildings (UAB) lives up to its potential as a strategy for promoting food access. Bohm assesses the extent to which UAB project sites are located in low-income communities and communities of colour that face barriers to food access. The author’s qualitative evaluation of nineteen UAB projects across North America suggests that UAB projects are not necessarily located in communities with high food insecurity. Meenar examines the links between urban agriculture (UA) projects and the food security conditions of their surrounding areas in the city of Philadelphia, USA. Meenar uses geographic information systems (GIS) analysis and statistical tests to explore access to UA in neighbourhoods with high food insecurity. Results suggest that there is a spatial mismatch between the siting of UA projects and location of neighbourhoods with prevalence of food insecurity, and that the most unstable or temporary UA projects are located in neighbourhoods with the least food security.

Burga and Stoscheck investigate how language focused on food justice and equity is integrated into local government plans through a content analysis of the Minnesota Food Access Planning Guide in the state of Minnesota, United States. The authors illustrate how policy recommendations and strategies can include but also exclude, co-opt, replace, and erase food justice and equity terms in the guise of progressive planning policies. Specifically, the authors find that issues of equity are framed through a narrow focus on health outcomes rather than critical race and class analysis. The analysis also reveals how food justice and equity may be complicated concepts to operationalize in planning and design practice.

Planning for urban and regional food systems leaves out important voices. In particular, the field fails to consider family farmers (in the Global South) and refugees (in the Global North), two groups that are confronting challenges within the food system and yet are left out of food planning and policy processes. The future of small-scale family farming remains uncertain in many communities across both the Global North and South despite a focus on food systems localization. Vasile and Duncan use a case study of Porto Alegre, Brazil to interrogate the ways in which structural inequalities limit family farmers’ participation in food governance. The authors find that top-down Brazilian regulation for organic food, and the policies and provision of technical assistance, are not designed to fit the local context nor the needs and circumstances of farmers. The authors caution that systematization of local food practices – such as through standards and regulations – may threaten the autonomy of farmers and dampen innovation in the food system. The authors offer guidance for inclusive engagement processes to enable city and regional food systems planning to reduce structural inequalities. Judelsohn et al. examine the ways in which refugees from Burma (Myanmar) experience a new food environment in Buffalo, New York, and the ways in which planning and public policy responds to the new arrivals in largely ‘food blind’ ways. While some studies in public health have focused on the challenges faced by refugees in navigating new food environments upon resettlement, there is a large gap in the planning literature. Drawing on qualitative interviews with refugee households, the authors articulate a set of ideas for the future that seek to redress this literature gap, but concentrate on practical applications for local government action.

Large-scale food systems transformation in the face of rapid urbanization and globalization is creating new challenges, the full impacts of which are yet unknown. The papers by Battersby (South Africa) and Soma (Indonesia) examine food system transformations in the food supply chain in the Global South where rapid urbanization is creating unintended consequences in the food retail and food waste management sectors, respectively. Both papers call for a purposeful re-examination of local government engagement in the food system. Battersby uses a case study of the changing food distribution system in Cape Town, South Africa to evaluate the role of local government planning in shaping community food systems throughout African cities. Although local government has no formal mandate to address the food system and is not engaging in food systems planning, Battersby argues that it is nonetheless playing a profound role in reshaping the food system through non-food policies focused on urban development objectives. Battersby urges local governments in Cape Town and other African cities to engage in food systems planning to understand the food security challenges and opportunities in their communities in accordance with the New Urban Agenda.

Similarly, Soma observes the recent transformation of food retail in the Global South as well as the missed opportunity for local government planners to address simultaneously food systems issues and urban development priorities. Soma draws on interviews with key food systems stakeholders in Bogor, Indonesia to investigate the role of urbanization and urban development policies in transforming food consumption and the management of food packaging waste. Land once used for food production by low-income residents in the city has been lost to urban development, with negative impacts for residents’ food security. Furthermore, the new food acquisition and consumption practices of higher-income residents, fuelled by rapid development of supermarkets in urban areas, is creating challenges for lower-income residents in the form of increased food waste in their neighbourhoods. The author observes that the negative environmental impacts of food waste and its associated packaging are ‘distanced’ from those who are privileged, and brought nearer to those who are marginalized within the food system. Soma identifies avenues for local government planners to intervene in the community food system to overcome challenges around food waste and reduce broader inequities exacerbated by urban development.

The special issue concludes with a paper by Nunes who offers the possibility of a pragmatist ethics in city-regional food systems planning. Specifically, Nunes explores urban food enterprises (UFEs), socially innovative business practices that seek alternative, local responses to conventional food systems, as practical applications of theoretical concepts of social and economic justice in city-regional food systems planning. Similar to other papers in the issue, Nunes asks for a critical evaluation of what ‘doing food justice’ looks like and raises fundamental questions about the relationships between concepts of equity and justice and organizational policies and practices. f

Collectively, the papers in the special issue raise questions about the nature of planners and designers’ engagement in city and regional food systems, and the ways in which such engagement impacts inclusion, equity, and justice. These questions are especially important as municipalities across the world embrace planning for urban and regional food systems such as through the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact. Authors in this issue highlight voices that are excluded in formal planning processes and also the inequities exacerbated through urban and regional food systems planning. Furthermore, authors critique plans and designs that incorporate rhetoric around food justice but fail to provide actionable strategies that consider historical context, local identities, race and class inequities, and other issues of structural and systemic marginalization. The authors raise clear, promising, practical ideas for the future of both food systems planning scholarship and practice that draw on unique perspectives and ideas of a broad range of food systems stakeholders in diverse settings around the globe.  It is now up to the professions and disciplines that shape cities and regions to listen.

References

  • Alkon, A.H. and Agyeman, J. (2011) Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Caton Campbell, M. (2004) Building a common table: the role for planning in community food systems. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 23(4), pp. 341–355.
  • Hodgson, K. (2012) Planning for Food Access and Community-Based Food Systems: A National Scan and Evaluation of Local Comprehensive and Sustainability Plans. Chicago, IL: American Planning Association.
  • Moragues-Faus, A. and Morgan, K. (2015) Reframing the foodscape: the emergent world of urban food policy. Environment and Planning A, 47(7), pp. 1558–1573.
  • Morgan, K. and Santo, R. (2017) The Rise of Municipal Food Movements. Unpublished working paper.
  • Neuner, K., Kelly, S. and Raja, S. (2011) Planning to Eat: Innovative Local Government Plans and Policies to Build Healthy Food Systems Planning in the United States. Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities Policy Brief 39. Buffalo, NY: Food Systems and Healthy Communities Lab, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Available at: http://cccfoodpolicy.org/sites/default/files/resources/planning_to_eat_s....
  • Passidomo, C. (2013) Going ‘beyond food’: confronting structures of injustice in food systems research and praxis. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development, 3(4), pp. 89–93.
  • Pothukuchi, K. and Kaufman, J.L. (1999) Placing the food system on the urban agenda: the role of municipal institutions in food systems planning. Agriculture and Human Values, 16(2), pp. 122–124.
  • Pothukuchi, K. and Kaufman, J.L. (2000) The food system – a stranger to the planning field. Journal of the American Planning Association, 66(2), pp. 213–224.
  • Raja, S., Ma, C. and Yadav, P. (2008) Beyond food deserts: measuring and mapping racial disparities in neighbourhood food environments. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 27(4), pp. 469–482.
  • Reynolds, B.J. (2002). Black Farmers in America, 1865–2000: The Pursuit of Independent Farming and the Role of Cooperatives (Vol. RBS Research Report 194). Washington DC: United States Department of Agriculture Rural Business/Cooperative Service.
  • Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Tyler, S.S. and Moore, E.A. (2013) Plight of black farmers in the context of USDA farm loan programs: a research agenda for the future. Professional Agricultural Workers Journal, 1(1). Available at: http://tuspubs.tuskegee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=pawj.
  • UN-Habitat (2016) New Urban Agenda. Available at: http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/New-Urban-Agenda-GA-Adopted-68th-....
  • Whittaker, J., Raja, S., Clark, J. and SanGiovanni, S. (2017) Planning for food systems: community-university partnerships for food-systems transformation. Metropolitan Universities, 28(1). Available at: https://journals.iupui.edu/index.php/muj/article/viewFile/21471/20710.

Acknowledgements

This Special Issue is inspired by the work of Kameshwari Pothukuchi and Jerome Kaufman whose landmark article ‘The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field’ in the Journal of the American Planning Association (Pothukuchi and Kaufman, 2000) catalyzed a conversation on food in the field of planning across continents. Articles in this special issue were selected following an open, global competitive call for manuscripts. The number of submissions far exceeded the editors’ expectations. We are especially delighted to recognize the excellent work of early career scholars in this special issue. The editors thank the anonymous reviewers who took the time to review submissions for the issue, as well as colleagues at the UB Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab and the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo for their support. This special issue was made possible with the support of a grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) of the United States Department of Agriculture grant no 2012-68004-19894 and the University at Buffalo Community for Global Health Equity (UB CGHE). 

Built Environment
urban and regional food systems, urban agriculture, urban design and planning

Planning for Equitable Urban and Regional Food Systems

How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and wellbeing of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of colour, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve? That is the question of concern in this special issue in which authors from across the Global North and South explore the role of planning and design in communities’ food systems, while explicitly considering the imbalances in equity, justice, and power.

About this issue

Issue number

Summary

How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and wellbeing of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of colour, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve?

Enjoli Hall, Kevin Morgan, Samina Raja
02 Oct 2017

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Contents

 
Built Environment

Meet the editors

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 3

Summary

How does and can planning and design enhance the freedom and wellbeing of marginalized actors in the food system – low-income residents, people of colour, small-holder farmers, and refugees – the very people the alternative food movements purport to serve?

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Samina Raja is a Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Principal Investigator of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Her research, teaching, and civic engagement focus on the use of planning and policy to promote health and food equity.

 

Kevin Morgan is the Professor of Governance and Development in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, where he is also the Dean of Engagement. He was one of the founders of the AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Group and the founding chair of the Bristol Food Policy Council. He is the co-author of The School Food Revolution.

 

Enjoli Hall is an Associate Planner at the University at Buffalo Regional Institute. She previously worked as a Research Assistant in the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.

Built Environment

Editorial: Public Space and Urban Justice

About this issue

Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 2

Summary

In academic, government and public arenas there is increasing interest in public space as a facilitator of urban justice and, further, that urban justice is not an abstract concept, but has practical implications. Therefore, the question is what are the ways of studying public space to promote urban justice in the city? The intention of this issue of Built Environment is to bring contributions which explore and ground this question.

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Over the last decade, public space has received increasing attention and debate in urban research, policy and public debate as a facilitator of urban justice. The 2008 economic crisis underlined these debates, which questioned the role of economic competitiveness as a global socio-economic model shaping the cities along with profit-oriented developments. They addressed the distribution of income inequalities (Buitelaar et al., 2016) as one of the central issues to be challenged in contemporary and future urban planning.

In urban literature, increasing inequalities are closely associated with the decline of a welfare state model (Musterd and Ostendorf, 1998) and a rise in the neo-liberal approach to urban development to achieve economic success and international competition (Gleeson and Low, 2000; Jackson, 2009; Cardama, 2015; Sager, 2011; Lord and Tewdwr-Jones, 2012). This requires marketing strategies to promote the city into a ‘growth machine’ (Sassen, 2005; Fainstein, 2010; Harvey, 2013). It also serves to legitimatize costly interventions in prestige developments such as stadia, inner-city historical areas, waterfronts, business hubs for finance and high-tech industries, and neighbourhoods for creative industries (Zukin, 1995; Hall and Hubbard 1996; Graham and Marvin, 2001). This implies that in order to support the city’s economic prosperity and global competiveness, investments are not evenly distributed but concentrated in some selected areas of a city, and created what is called ‘splintering urbanism’ (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Some of the evident consequences of these laissez-faire developments on public spaces are, among others, the escalation of control on public space by privately owned public space (POPS), shrinkage and limitation of public space to perform as a civic place as well as place for protest.

In order to challenge these conditions of injustice, some action at the global level has been taken at least at a declarative level. The 2016 UN Habitat Conference, HABITAT III, adopted what it called The New Urban Agenda, which focused on public space as a promoter of sustainable cities that facilitate ‘inclusive, connected, safe and accessible’ cities, which are key aspects of urban justice (UN Habitat, 2016). Good public space is seen as a crucial element to achieving good quality of life for people of all walks of life as it supports the local economy, contributes to a sense of community, encourages interaction across social, cultural and economic boundaries, but also increases mobility and contributes to better health and wellbeing (Andersson, 2016). Accordingly, the just city can be achieved by offering equal opportunities to a city’s inhabitants for self-development and enjoyment of a good quality of life (Griffin, 2015).

However some studies showed that despite the reduction of urban inequalities has been a continuous topic on the global political agendas since 1945 (Andersson, 2016; Gupta et al., 2015), the inequalities between and within the states, regions and cities keep growing (Sassen, 2005; Leigh, 2017; Chakravorty, 1996; Saunders et al., 2016). This is also clearly addressed in public debates. For example, the British newspaper The Guardian’s web blog ‘Cities’ presented a series of articles, relating to the ‘unjust’ conditions in the cities in relation to public space through the themes of privatization, exclusion of social groups, lack of accessibility and distribution of amenities (Hatherley, 2016; Garrett, 2015; Engelen et al., 2014, Ayala and Fallshaw, 2017). These articles present examples from a wide geographical area including cities from Europe, Americas, Asia, Middle East, Australia and Africa, and show that the issues related to urban justice and public space are not limited to just some parts of the world; rather they are a global phenomenon.

All these illustrate that in academic, governmental and public arenas there is increasing interest in public space as a facilitator of urban justice and that urban justice is not an abstract concept, but has practical implications. This increasing interest requires attention and practical approaches able to link public space to urban justice must be considered. Therefore, the question is what are the ways of studying public space to promote urban justice in the city? Our intention in this special issue of Built Environment is to bring contributors and case studies together to explore and ground this question.
We approach public space as a concrete, physical space that is accessible to everyone in real space and time, and not as a virtual, immaterial category. Streets, markets, parks, playgrounds and many other spaces attract people from various gender, income, age, cultural groups, who are not necessarily familiar with each other (Sennett, 1970; Sandercock, 2003; Iveson, 2006). By offering opportunities for strangers to be in same place at the same time, public space performs as site of sociability, in the sense of spontaneous social interaction, through simple greetings, or just seeing and being seen, or social gatherings and commercial exchanges (Jacobs, 1961; Sennett, 1971; Watson, 2006). All these forms of interaction and exchange are at the core of vibrant public life of the city and can be observed and experienced the most in public spaces.
These various qualities of public space closely associate with some aspects of the just city: diversity, equity and democracy (Fainstein, 2010; Griffin, 2015).

Public Space and Diversity

Diversity aspects of the just city relate to the capacity to welcome and embrace a variety of people with differing cultural views and practices, as well as land uses. This view dates back to the antiquity as Aristotle famously stated, ‘The city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring the city into existence’ (Aristotle, cited in Sennett, 1970, p. 13) and was widely embraced by the early contributors to urban theory (Simmel, 1976; Park, 1915; Wirth, 1938) as well as scholars of urban justice, political science and urban design. Some address the need to recognize group diversity without homogenizing and marginalizing tendencies, as a fundamental aspect of civility – in other words, conditions in which different groups can show respect to each other and learn how to live together (Young, 1990; Fainstein, 2010; Low, 2008). Others approach diversity in terms of variations in land uses and programmes, which attract different user groups and foster vitality in public life (Talen, 2006; Montgomery 1998). Diversity is used as a conceptual tool to measure the outcomes of urban plans, policies and interventions as just or unjust by looking at whether projects dislocate certain urban groups, or whether zoning plans are inclusive for diverse user groups (Steil and Connolly, 2017; Fainstein, 2010; Honneth and Fraser, 2001; Fincher and Iveson, 2008).

Public space provides the means to observe and study the effects of urban interventions on diversity both in terms of group differences and land uses (Low et al., 2005; Montgomery 1998). It enables the study of changes in activities, user types and behavioural patterns in the urban environment. For example, the effects of social mixing policies, which suggest mixing households through introducing new types of housing for higher income groups, often affects a neighbourhood’s diversity through gentrification. In such processes, public space reflects a city’s capacity to embrace social and economic differences, e.g. between people of different income, age, faith or ethnic backgrounds. A lived experience of such diversity in public space not only makes diversity part of everyday life but also celebrates opportunity, equality and justice for all. If properly managed it contributes to the acceptance of diversity in the built environment and highlights the need to consider it in decision-making processes (Zarate, 2015; Griffin, 2015). By enabling citizens as well as visitors to encounter not just what they want to encounter, it reinforces coexistence in the urban environment. Thus public space not only acts as a connector of different neighbourhoods in the socially and economically segregated ‘dual’ contemporary city (Fainstein, 2013; Low, 2013), but also as an indicator of the lived diversity of the city. In addition, Lazear (2000) introduces economic aspects to the concept of the diverse city and public space by claiming that the productivity is higher in urban environments that hold diversity in their public space, as they are capable of new ways of thinking.

Public Space and Equity

The second feature of the just city, equity, suggests a fair allocation of wealth, resources, benefits and opportunities among the citizens. This approach draws on and extends the ancient Athenian city-state as a distributor of power and resources, and has influenced ideas about justice in Western societies, where justice is strongly associated with the legal system, regulated by the law through political, economic and social institutions (Rawl, 1971; Harvey, 1973; Fainstein, 2000; Soja, 2010). In context of urban planning, equity is directly related to the distribution of housing, urban amenities and environmental sources such as clean water, air and urban greenery.

When it comes to the public spaces, equity implies the provision and regulations of public space, as well as their access regardless the social and economic profile of the population (Low and Iveson, 2016). This raises questions about the distribution and accessibility of public space. For example, in Western Europe, the provision of public space is well regulated, but increasing land prices and processes of gentrification have influenced the use of public space by certain groups, excluding some. In Asian and Middle Eastern cases, where expensive residential towers in exclusive enclaves are constructed and gated communities created, the accessibility of public space for general population is notably decreased. Such developments are to be found around the globe and not only create fragmented city areas, but for the excluded parts of population decrease confidence in right to ownership, inclusion and belonging to the public spaces ‘because of the frequent reminders expressed by those who presume to judge and challenge those rights’ (Griffin, 2015, p. 8). Segregation of urban territories also causes environmental hazard (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Harvey 2013).

Another rising issue is the differentiation of users of public space in terms of their mean of transport. Even if in the Western world there is a strong movement towards sustainable mobility, the continued motorization of the urban population disadvantages non-motorized users who are often of disadvantaged social status (Cowie et al., 2016). To address these complex issues, different policies and interventions have been introduced aiming to mitigate the inequity (such as urban renewal policies, housing policies and urban design interventions); often these have safeguarding and development of public space as one of their core measures.

Public Space and Democracy

The democracy element of the just city refers to representation and public participation in the urban planning process which are often regarded as measures of how inclusive and democratic this process is (Mitchell, 2003; Isin, 2000; Mollenkopf and Castells, 1991; Rudd, 2009). In scholarly work there seems to be a wide consensus on advantageous effects of participatory urbanism for a more just city. However there is an ongoing discussion on definitions and attributes of truly participatory processes as well as approaches to get citizens effectively involved in decision-making (Kaza, 2006; Denters and Klok, 2010; Moore and Elliott, 2015; Parnell, 2016). These discussions are very relevant to the design and management of urban public open spaces as truly common grounds for urban life (Madanipour, 2010). By definition these are contested places, appropriated by different groups. The various interests, needs, expectations and contestations that come together in these spaces need to be equilibrated in the participatory process. Unless this process is inclusive, the more influential groups’ interests will prevail which marginalizes others and effectively limits their right to the city.

Public spaces offer conditions to study practices of representation in terms of political participation and claims to use public spaces. One of the measures is the level of individuals’ and groups’ incentives in the co-design of public spaces (Kaza, 2006). This is not conditioned only by the planning system procedures and the ability of authority to be an attentive listener (Moore and Elliott, 2015), but also by people’s motivations to participate based on their personal costs and benefits. The other indicator is the level to which public spaces act as places of protest or spaces to initiate change in the established socio-economic and political systems (Juris, 2012; Rosenstone, 2016; Uitermark et al., 2012). In either case, the level of participation can be an indicator of inequality – the lower the level of participation, the higher the degree of political inequality and the more serious the problems of representativeness (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993). On the other hand. the inflation of grassroots practices in public space design can be an indication of an (un) just city as that may indicate the unfulfilled needs of certain user groups (Pares et al., 2012).

Some studies suggest that indicators such as gender, educational and income levels, occupation, ethnicity, living arrangements and belonging to certain types of groups are the key factors that distinguish people who participate from those who remain uninvolved (Xu, 2007; Rubin and Rubin, 2001; Steggert, 1975). Further, the physical design and aesthetics of public space are a measure of its level of democracy, as it influences who will feel invited to use public space and who not. Therefore design of public space should be a product collaboration of users with designers, in which designer leads the process (Schupbach, 2015).

The relations between public space and the features of the just city show us that public space may offer just/unjust consequences for the ability of urban policies and practice to combat the conditions of injustice from three perspectives: diversity, equity and democracy. The papers in this special issue reflect on these three perspectives, based on examples from cities, which vary in size, and their historical and contextual backgrounds.

The Ankara paper presents in a historic perspective in the case of Gençlik Parkı, a central public park in Ankara, Turkey. The park was initially used as an inclusive public space, reflecting a modern vision of the newly established Turkish Republic. This vision changed slightly especially after the 1980s, along with the neo-liberal policies. In this context, conditions of injustice became visible in the park, for example through uneven patterns of accessibility to urban amenities, the sale of urban green areas to private developers, or giving additional development rights to political allies. By describing the typical development phases of the park within a wider socio-economic historic framework, the paper problematizes the nature of urban development and modernization, and how they can lead to a less just urban form.
The next paper investigates, from the perspective of urban justice, urban transformation processes within street amenities in immigrant neighbourhoods in Amsterdam Metropolitan Region. It approaches the issue through the visibility of immigrant amenities – such as shops, restaurants, and places of worship – with distinctive cultural signs and practices, that are recognizable in public space. Cultural visibility provides empirical evidence for the role of these immigrant street amenities in stimulating public life and the changes of their role in the context of neighbourhood transformation. The study highlights the decline of visible Turkish amenities in the neighbourhood undergoing urban development processes that promote gentrification. This contradicts the policy objectives aimed at enhancing immigrant integration and relates to the diversity and democracy aspects of urban justice.

The case of Ljubljana, Slovenia, which follows, shows how planning for urban walkability can contribute to the equity aspect of the just city. Urban walkability is interpreted as a capacity of the built environment related to the design of public space and the distribution of the land uses. It focuses on two development phases of the city: the socialist framework and the contemporary neo-liberal socio-economic framework. It argues that planning for walkability must not be used as an exclusivity measure from which only privileged parts of the city or only a certain group of citizens can benefit; rather it should be equally distributed across the urban territory.

The next paper, whose focus is the Columbian city of Medellín addresses the issue of a city authority’s interventions in public space. Recent governments have invested massively in a design-led physical upgrading of the city’s public space with the goal of increasing both spatial justice and the city’s competitiveness, tackling both inner-city areas and peripheral informal settlements. Through a multi-method qualitative approach, the paper focuses on the case of one informal settlement. It questions whether the current programme’s focus on image creation and international competitiveness has detrimental effects on the empowerment of the settlement’s residents. The findings of the study show that there is a conflict between equity and empowerment measures in the various stages of the participatory process, which raises issues relating to the equity and democracy aspects of the just city.

The dominance of real estate development on the individual initiatives, which claim to use public space, is addressed next in the Lebanese case of Beirut. The research is based on a study of one farmers’ market and emphasizes exchange value over use value of public space. It focuses two periods of the market, in 2007 and 2016, and explores how and to what extent such a market is able to generate spontaneous social interactions and exchanges between different groups. The study concludes that, despite the unstable political and social context, the market is able to act as a place of sociability, which is key for the diversity of the just city.

The final paper adds another important perspective by addressing the issue of the (under)representation of children in making urban planning decisions that affect public space in Auckland, New Zealand. In broader terms it challenges the formal protection of the rights of specific user groups to be part of meaningful participation, as it argues that these rights are rarely processed in practice. The paper focuses on the processes and outcomes of the Auckland Council’s children’s participation event for the redevelopment of an inner-city square. Based on the findings, the research discusses the prospects for the children’s effective participation becoming a part of city making processes, which is crucially related to the equity and democracy aspects of the just city.

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Acknowledgements

This special issue has its origins in a conference entitled ‘Becoming Local Bucharest’ held at Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism in Bucharest, Romania in 2014. The conference brought together a group of scholars to explore and compare the relations between different features of public space and the just city. This conference evolved out of the activities of the Thematic Group ‘Public Spaces and Urban Cultures’ established under the AESOP (The Association of European Schools of Planning). We would like to express our gratitude to Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism and we owe special thanks to Gabriel Pascuriu and Celia Ghyka for hosting this event. Finally, our appreciation is to all the authors in this issue for their commitment to the project, their responsiveness to requests for revisions from us and from reviewers.

 

 

 

 

 

Built Environment

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Issue number
Volume 43 – Number 2

Summary

In academic, government and public arenas there is increasing interest in public space as a facilitator of urban justice and, further, that urban justice is not an abstract concept, but has practical implications. Therefore, the question is what are the ways of studying public space to promote urban justice in the city? The intention of this issue of Built Environment is to bring contributions which explore and ground this question.

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Matej Nikšič is an architect and urban planner specialized in urban public space and urban regeneration in relation to participation and mobility issues. He works as a researcher at the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Slovenia. Currently he leads Slovenian part of the EU Human Cities project and teaches at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana.

 

Ceren Sezer, an architect and urban planner, works as a Guest Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Urbanism of Delft University of Technology. Her research interests focus on public space, street markets, urban renewal and immigrant neighbourhoods. She is a co-founder of an international research and design network ‘Public Spaces and Urban Cultures’ established under the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).

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