Articoli taggati con ‘urban regeneration’
Large-scale urban regeneration threatening historic urban landscapes. The Liverpool Waters development and the loss of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The city of Liverpool has undergone repeated processes of urban transformation and urban regeneration over the last half a century. The city has been a test bed for urban experimentation with mass clearance, housing, and relocation schemes in the 1970s followed by culture, event, and heritage-based regeneration strategies from the 1980s through 2000s. Following the perceived success of the 2008 European Capital of Culture and city centre Liverpool One development, an even larger, longer-term, and more expensive development was proposed – Liverpool Waters. Yet unlike its antecedents, which were consciously woven into existing urban fabric and combined multiple strategies and funding schemes simultaneously, the Liverpool Waters approach envisioned a tabula rasa disconnected from its surrounding context and which would also introduce new building typologies to the city – the skyscraper. This article examines the long-term history of urban regeneration in the city and nearly ten-year process of negotiations and redesigns of Liverpool Waters that ultimately led to the deletion of the Liverpool – Maritime Mercantile City site from UNESCO’s World Heritage List. This case provides valuable lessons for cities seeking to implement large-scale urban regeneration schemes and the need for strategic and contextually sensitive approaches.
Impact of Urban Regeneration on Housing Satisfaction: A comparative study in Iran and Turkey
This paper investigates housing satisfaction in regeneration projects and emphasizes on the fundamental attributes which mainly influence inhabitants’ well-being. In this respect, two urban regeneration projects in Tehran, Iran and Ankara, Turkey were selected and a qualitative approach was used to explore dimensions of human-environment connections in these projects. Accordingly, a model consisting of seven variables (housing-related features, accessibility, housing environment characteristics, facilities, safety and security, social ties, appearance of housing environment) was applied. In order to collect the necessary data, in-situ observation and questionnaire, addressing 80 family units in both projects, were conducted. The results of the study indicate that the factors which affect the quality of the life are different in two neighborhoods regarding the distinct socio-cultural and economic background of the residents and the diversified urban qualities. It is found out that residents living in Dikmen Valley to some extent are more satisfied with the quality of their living environment. Among seven attributes of environmental quality, residents are more dissatisfied with facilities, and safety risks in this neighborhood. In Navvab project, the extent of dissatisfaction is higher. They are highly dissatisfied with housing environment characteristics, facilities and the appearance of the housing environment variables. Analysing these two urban regeneration projects reveals that paying few attentions to the social needs of inhabitants, lack of opportunity for creating place attachment, designing spaces that does not convey any sense of congruence with residents’ social and cultural status, designing spaces with poor environmental quality and poor urban physical features decrease neighborhood satisfaction and reduce inhabitants’ involvement in their urban space. It ultimately can result in higher insecurity, higher migration rates and social and physical segregation.
It happens in Turin. From Cascina Roccafranca to the “Case del Quartiere Network”
In the last 20 years Turin has gone through several radical transformations and changes. When we talk about that we can’t forget its passage from “industrial town” to “post-industrial town”, breaking away from its past. From automotive to baby-parking and from heavy metallurgic plants to organic and “from farm to fork” food-stores. But that’s not all. Empty spaces, left by a decaying industry fabric, have inspired requalification initiatives and a social, educative, cultural enterprise everywhere in the city. In this context stems the need for re-appropriating and re-dwelling, through the involvement of the whole town community So, those ready to fill, empty spaces themselves become, in a perspective of recycling and re-use, the perfect container for inclusion, increased participation and for offering possibilities, events and moments of social aggregation. Here was the most fertile “humus” to create new special structures: the Case del Quartiere (Houses of Neighbourhood). Common spaces, multipurpose cultural hubs, social laboratory – all at the same times. In an House it is possible to propose events, to organize or attend a workshop or an artistic atelier, to discuss about common themes or simply use services provided. They are friendly places, where a person is not only a guest, or a resident, but above all is a citizen.
European Capitals of Culture: structures and infrastructures
Culture and territory. A pair with an ancient but actual flair. A binomial that a growing number of public managers choose as the asset to economic development and to increase the quality of life, like in Qatar, where culture has peeped out with a certain delay on the desks of the European Union. At first excluded from EU subjects and focuses, culture has been recognized only at the beginning of the 90s as a subsidiary competence, while on the contrary, it would have been the essence of the integration in the European project. As Jean Monnet, one of the fathers and founders of Europe stated, “If Europe has to be rebuilt, maybe we should start from culture”. The absence of a real and shared cultural project should have been inserted in the process of economic integration to reinforce the EU directives. From a different perspective, it is to say that the absence of an economic structure, deprived of its cultural infrastructure, is visible in the diffused phenomena of dissatisfaction towards the European institutions, in the many misunderstandings and in the race amongst member states.
Contemporary Art and Urban Regeneration in the City of Milan
In an enclosed space, such as a district, a city, or an area within the city, creative potential is intimately linked to the degree of knowledge and innovation, let alone the kind of cultural opportunities that space provides. On a global scale, the trend seems to be that of first creating and then promoting creative and cultural circuits in urban spaces in accordance with competitiveness and value production criteria. These strategies have multiple objectives. These range from the more intangible ones, such as finding a role for a city or an area within the knowledge economy, to the more measurable ones, such as those that show immediate economic results. Different criteria and means can be used to evaluate the achievement of the stated objectives. This article examines the current transformation of the city of Milan within the above-described interpretive framework. Such transformations are often directly linked to creative and cultural representations. This article places and examines contemporary art at the centre of these transformations. Art, and contemporary art in particular, could play a most beneficial role in city’s regeneration.
What an effort “to enter out”! Closures and resistances in the cultural sector
“It might be easy for you, but you cannot imagine how difficult is for us to enter outside”. Few years ago, walking in the yards of Santa Maria Della Pietà, psychiatric hospital already closed, Thomas Lovanio, Franco Basaglia’s colleague, got these words from one of the guest of the hospital. He was referring to the difficulty of coming back into the city, a city that years ago had jailed and forgotten him. But now, just because someone have decided to close the psychiatric hospitals, this city has to absorb him again. The articles in this issue reminded me those words. How difficult is for our artistic and cultural system to shape open and innovative relations with the environment and the urban space, and to generate an innovative and transparent management. These difficulties are surely a limit to innovation and an obstacle to the cultural growth of our country. Urban studies have long observed that the most innovative systems are those capable of hybridizing different worlds.
Working with surfaces to create spaces: street art or landscape project?
The presence of urban voids within contemporary cities imposes to consider the importance of new interpretations/actions on the landscape. These actions have to use formal representation devices more related to community needs. Thanks to its expressiveness, art can be used as a landscape regeneration’s tool for degraded environment. Street art and community participation actions can realize surfaces projects able to change the future of indefinable urban spaces.
