Residential relocation under market-oriented redevelopment: the process and outcomes in urban China

Residential displacement by urban regeneration in western economies and forced relocation in the Third World countries are contentious issues. This paper, based on a household survey in Shanghai, examines the process and outcomes of residential relocation under market-oriented urban redevelopment in China. The results show that commodification of the socialist tenancy right helped to initiate large-scale urban redevelopment. First, there has been a complicated process of negotiation during residential relocation, involving residents, development companies, and government agencies. The de facto right of public housing tenants is considered by a pragmatic attitude in urban redevelopment in the early years. Second, residential relocation is accompanied by the changes in housing tenure, housing conditions, and the improved built form of planned residential districts. Nevertheless, the social conflict has become intensified recently because the deepening of commodification began to favour property developers by constraining the compensation standard for relocated households.     

The revival of rural areas in advanced economies: a review of some causes and consequences

Recent years have seen a substantial growth of population in the rural areas of the United States and Western Europe. This is explored with particular reference to census evidence relating to Great Britain. Two sets of explanations are examined. The first relates to the exercise of residential preferences unconstrained by job location, and it is notable that the retired and the otherwise non-employed have increased substantially in numbers over the past 15–20 years. The second explanation focuses on employment relocation. Much resource-based, tertiary and, especially, manufacturing employment has grown in non-metropolitan areas. British and European evidence shows the manufacturing shift to have been substantial and it is suggested that this, coupled with (pre-)retirement migration and associated multiplier developments, may explain much of the counter-urbanisation that we are witnessing. The paper briefly explores some consequence of these trends, relating to the duplication of infrastructure, pressure on rural land and housing, and social change.     

Relocation of urban poor in Chicago: HOPE VI policy outcomes

The HOPE VI program was created in 1992 as a tool for public housing authorities in the US to deconcentrate poverty in project-based public housing neighborhoods. As part of the process, thousands of public housing residents have been required to relocate. They have the option to move to temporary housing in another project unit, to leave the subsidized housing system all together, or to participate in local housing voucher programs. This study focuses on those public housing residents in Chicago who move with a housing voucher certificate. The purpose of the study is to evaluate and reveal the relocation outcomes of these voucher users, both numerically and geographically. Conditions in their origin and relocation tracts are examined using 1990 and 2000 US census data to determine if they relocated to less poor and segregated neighborhoods. Evidence shows that voucher users are moving in an outward direction away from the central city. This movement is reshaping the landscape of advantage and disadvantage in Chicago: suburbs are becoming poorer while the old neighborhoods are gentrifying. Poverty is highly concentrated in the neighborhoods chosen by most voucher recipients, but not as high as the poverty levels which existed in the old neighborhoods. Mapping relocation shows that outcomes vary geographically, demonstrating the importance for future research to address spatial and contextual differences.     

Residential location decision-making and gender in Nigeria

The paper examines women’s involvement in residential location/relocation decision-making among tenants in Ibadan, Nigeria. The data used in the paper is from a larger cross-sectional survey of 721 households on gender and housing in Ibadan, Nigeria. The analysis in the paper focused on 365 subgroup of households that are tenants in the sample survey. Analysis of variance (ANOVA), correlation and simple statistical techniques such as frequencies and percentages were used to analyse the data. The result shows that generally there is low involvement of women in residential location/relocation decision-making. There is significant intra-urban variation in the involvement of women in residential location/relocation decision-making. Significant relationships are found between the level of women involvement in residential location/relocation decision-making and their educational level, occupation, and marital status. In addition, significant relationships are found between cultural and social support variables and involvement of women in residential location/relocation decisions. These results suggest that female empowerment and greater involvement in decision-making could be greatly enhanced by improved access of women to education, employment, the provision of good and reliable social support facilities and a reorientation of women’s view about responsibility for household housing provision.     

The future of informal settlements: lessons in the legalization of disputed urban land in Recife, Brazil

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between legalization of land tenure and people's capacity to compete for and sustain their stake in the urban land market. Two aspects of land regularization are taken into account: the benefits of land regularization (as collateral for investments); and the perverse aspects of disputes over improved land (due to increased scarcity of illegal, but affordable housing land). Most research on illegal urban land has systematically investigated how to legalize illegal settlements to improve the effectiveness of service provision, whilst attracting public investments. But, few understand the underlying factors motivating people to improve and consolidate their houses where no legal tenure exists. The absence of substantial understanding about people's perceptions of their tenure security has encouraged most research to conclude that improving tenure security leads to higher levels of housing consolidation. What this paper shows is that the relationship between people's perceptions of land tenure security and housing consolidation is much more malleable and complex than conventionally assumed. The subtle difference between tenure of the land and tenure of the house indicates that people are willing to invest in their housing conditions almost irrespectively of their land tenure situation. This finding challenges the orthodox views of the property rights school of thought. In addition, this paper contends that what legalization is really doing is to reduce the available land stock for the poorest families, because legalization decreases the amount of illegal land (illegal land is undesirable, but affordable for the poor). The orthodox legal system needs to be revised to include the poorest families in the urban society of the new millennium.     

Estimation of indirect economic loss caused by house destruction in a natural disaster

Designing appropriate post-disaster emergency and recovery housing policies requires accurate estimation of the indirect or “flow” loss generated by the involuntary displacement of households to housing other than their own destroyed homes. We employed the stated choice method to measure residence choice following a hypothetical disaster in a procedure developed to estimate flow loss due to house destruction. This method was applied to households in the city of Nagaoka in Niigata Prefecture to estimate flow loss for a range of residence types and residence attributes following relocation. The results revealed that the relocation residence type itself (such as a shelter, temporary dwelling, rental housing, or one’s own home) had a substantial effect on residence choice. Regarding residence attributes, residential expenses such as rent, housing loans, and spaciousness had a significant effect on residence choice. Moreover, we found that respondents placed a very high value on living in their own home compared with other residence types, indicating that subsidizing the prompt repair and rebuilding of private homes is likely to be an effective recovery support policy. In addition, a cost–benefit analysis of our results revealed that rent subsidies are more efficient than the construction of public housing as a means of financially assisting economically constrained households after a disaster.     

Scientific fundamentals and ways of realization of the general scheme of population distribution in the USSR

The paper describes the current stage of transformation of the residential distribution system in the USSR, the state policy in the field of urban development, the tasks facing Soviet architects and the way to their solution. The state policy in the field of residential distribution and urban development provides for: the systematic and scientifically substantiated distribution of production and human settlements on the basis of coordinated development and distribution of productive forces and the perfecting of the systems of residential distribution; the utilization, improvement and protection of landscape; the restriction of the growth of very large cities and development of the network of small and medium towns; the transformation of villages into modern well-organized settlements of the collective and state farms and the elimination of the existing distinctions between town and country; the regular development and distribution of towns and settlements in different geographical zones and most favourable natural-and-economic regions of the USSR; the overcoming of irregular population distribution in the European and Asiatic parts of the USSR; the formation of group-systems of human settlements on the basis of big urban agglomerations and territorial-industrial complexes; the development of new territories through land improvement. Basic attention in the report is paid to the consideration of the master scheme of residential distribution in the USSR, its scientific fundamentals, main purposes and tasks. The analysis of the decisive factors and of the main trends of the development of the systems of human settlements for a long-term perspective is given. The master scheme of residential distribution contemplates the systematic development on the USSR territory of different human settlements contributing, to a maximum degree, to the achievement of the objectives of socialist construction, to the creation of most favourable conditions for the people's work, life and rest, to the development and intensification of social production taking into account objective tendencies of urbanization and the effective use of forecasted urban development resources. The realization of the master scheme of residential distribution will allow to fully take into account the economic, ecological and demographic requirements in the elaboration and realization of the plans of development of production and residential distribution aimed at the rise of the living standard of the Soviet people.     

Gated communities in Bulgaria: interpreting a new trend in post-communist urban development

Private residential neighbourhoods encircled by a wall or fence and cut off from the public by a remote-controlled or guarded gate are not entirely new in Bulgaria. Both ‘dacha’ and leisure settlements of the communist rulers existed in such enclosed developments on the outskirts of Sofia, in mountain resorts, and on the coast of the Black Sea until the end of the 1980s. After the political change in 1989, new types of walled settlements, similar to gated communities in the U.S., began to spring up in Bulgaria, a result of the dramatic and decisive changes in Bulgarian society that are still very much underway today. Seven gated communities, comprising 78 housing units and six projects that are not yet fully completed create an entirely new social context and a residential landscape in the Sofia metropolitan area, which may indicate future residential desires. Ivanyane, situated on the western periphery of Sofia, and Mountain View Village to the southeast, exemplify the two main types of gated communities which are either self-organized by residents or developer-organized. The reasons why these gated communities were built appear to be very similar to those in other places. It can be expected that the demand for this new type of residential living will continue to increase in Sofia’s urban periphery, but it would be unwise to assume that these developments will necessarily provide a positive context for building a new society. The research for this paper was made possible through a project on post-communist urban development approved and financed by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and the Austrian Institute for East and Southeast Europe (Liaison Office in Sofia).     

Multiethnic Rome: Toward residential segregation?

This research examines the presence of foreign national residents in Rome, through an examination of their distribution and localisation in different administrative districts. Since there is a close relationship between localisation and access to services, job opportunities, linguistic integration, and education, the residential patterns of migrant communities need to be explored in order to foster the process of ethnic integration. The 1998 census is used to analyze the presence of foreign nationals both in the districts and in the different urban zones of the Capital. For this reason it is possible to apply the index of segregation to 7 foreign national groups and then produce maps which detail where these groups are concentrated. The study also discusses public policy issues in order to improve the process of integration of different ethnic groups in Rome.     

Residential mobility in the Seoul metropolitan region, Korea

The spatial pattern of residential mobility in Korea is found to be one of intraregional rather than interregional movement. Net inmigration has taken place only in the Seoul metropolitan region (SMR) since 1970. People from the Cholla region have formed the main stream of net inmigration into the SMR. The decentralization of population from Seoul to Kyonggi and Inchon has generated a transformation of the Seoul urban fringe since 1970. This metropolitanization process is accompanied by residential and employment suburbanization to 45kms from the center of Seoul. Residential mobility in the SMR is the result of metropolitan job opportunities, availability of housing, and the effects of the various regional policies. Availability of transportation between Seoul and its urban fringe encouraged the wide expansion of the urban areas and population redistribution within the SMR.     

Developing a community-based approach to urban redevelopment

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to analyze the Joint Redevelopment Project (JRP), a housing renewal program in low-income residential communities, and second, to develop a community-based approach to urban redevelopment in Korea. In urban areas of Korea, particularly in Seoul, housing renewal has systematically reduced the supply of substandard housing in the areas where low-income families have concentrated, thereby isolating and marginalizing the displaced tenants. Housing renewal or urban redevelopment projects are basically profit-oriented rather than upgrading-oriented for a community by means of community dynamics and residents' participation. Although many renewal projects have contributed to the increase of homeowners among middle-income families who had enough financial resources for the purchase of a house, there have been no programs giving sufficient consideration to tenants. In fact, most renewal projects displaced low-income residents affected by housing speculation and attracted more middle-income families into the projects.For local governments, a community-based approach to urban policy means encouraging comprehensive planning and cooperation between governments and communities. It is a holistic approach built around families and communities. We need to use a learning and enabling process in order to develop a community-based approach to redevelopment in urban areas of Korea.     

To the market and back: Housing policy and state housing in New Zealand

Housing policy in New Zealand has traditionally been characterised by significant market intervention in support of home ownership and a residual state housing rental sector. Within the context of dramatic social welfare reforms in the 1990s, a set of radical housing reforms was introduced that profoundly transformed the role of the state in the housing system. Key elements of the reforms included the creation of a profit-oriented company to manage state rentals, a move to market rents in the state sector and the introduction of an accommodation supplement. This paper examines the underlying rationale and impacts of the reforms focusing on issues of privatisation, tenant turnover, affordability and tenant protest. Having examined the ongoing problems engendered by these reforms the paper reviews more recent political and legislative reforms that were sought to reassert the state's traditional position within the New Zealand housing market. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Probabilistic GIS-based method for delineation of urban flooding risk hotspots

Identifying urban flooding risk hotspots is one of the first steps in an integrated methodology for urban flood risk assessment and mitigation. This work employs three GIS-based frameworks for identifying urban flooding risk hotspots for residential buildings and urban corridors. This is done by overlaying a map of potentially flood-prone areas [estimated through the topographic wetness index (TWI)], a map of residential areas and urban corridors [extracted from a city-wide assessment of urban morphology types (UMT)], and a geo-spatial census dataset. A maximum likelihood method (MLE) is employed for estimating the threshold used for identifying the flood-prone areas (the TWI threshold) based on the inundation profiles calculated for various return periods within a given spatial window. Furthermore, Bayesian parameter estimation is employed in order to estimate the TWI threshold based on inundation profiles calculated for more than one spatial window. For different statistics of the TWI threshold (e.g. MLE estimate, 16th percentile, 50th percentile), the map of the potentially flood-prone areas is overlaid with the map of urban morphology units, identified as residential and urban corridors, in order to delineate the urban hotspots for both UMT. Moreover, information related to population density is integrated by overlaying geo-spatial census datasets in order to estimate the number of people affected by flooding. Differences in exposure characteristics have been assessed for a range of different residential types. As a demonstration, urban flooding risk hotspots are delineated for different percentiles of the TWI value for the city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.     

Population shifts and local democratic representation in Eastern Germany

The shift to market forces in East Germany has fundamentally reconfigured its social and economic geography. In particular, spatial inequalities between localities and regions have re-emerged forcefully in response to new values, expectations and preferences. Increased mobility through private transport, changing job opportunities, educational choices and desire for new housing qualities have inter alia created new parameters for the population's lives. The responses i.a. in the form of migration have altered demographic structures and spatial patterns of the population considerably, often varying significantly over relatively short distances within and between regions. After initial population losses generally through outmigration from East to West Germany, population losses in cities occurred in favour of suburban areas, and rural depopulation in favour of the cities; creating a highly differentiated basis for future development through new urban-rural contrasts and differences between urban regions. This paper will outline some of these processes and demonstrate their effects on the already-considerable inequalities inherited from communism. Attention will also be given to the effects of changing population structures and patterns on local government and the future prospects for an indigenously supported, sustainable economic development for regions and the likely pathways of transformation and adjustment. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Precarious residence: Indigenous housing and the right to the city

Drawing on findings from a study of Indigenous housing in a regional Western Australian city, this paper examines the experiences of Indigenous peoples as a particular set of ‘right bearers’ within the right-to-the-city discourse. In settler-states, colonial discourses of absence, threat, and authenticity have informed policy frameworks that have militated against various Indigenous claims of belonging, rights, and aspiration in relation to urban places. Housing has been a representative domain of struggle in this respect. Consequently, today, Indigenous peoples have disproportionately high rates of dependence on more volatile and discriminatory forms of tenure than their non-Indigenous counterparts.The paper examines the incongruence between State aspirations to move (Indigenous) people along a housing continuum in urban environments, and the actual experiences of Indigenous urban residents, which fix discursively on barriers to such movements. It also traces the deleterious, displacing impacts for urban Indigenous households of the retreat of the State in its role as a landlord for the socio-economically disadvantaged, and in responding to market signals and particular sociological theses regarding poverty, with specific spatial logics. In so doing, we advance two interwoven arguments. First, we assert that Indigenous people face a unique precarity in the Australian urban housing system, which is a result of both colonial and racially discriminatory forces, and economically discriminating processes such as capital concentration and the commodification of land. Second, we contend that this precarity sets many Indigenous people on housing career trajectories that are antithetical to policy intentions.     

Spatial patterns and residential densities in Israeli “moshavot” in process or urbanization

In the process of development of the Israeli Moshavot into towns a number of factors have created specialized pattern of residential land-use and a typical pattern of densities. Private and ownership, private and public housing agencies and a housing policy have all been the cause of a clear dichotomy between the center and the outskirts of the settlements during their growth. The outskirts received their form during thirties and the forties and finally in the fifties. From that time most of the development has taken place in and around the center.     

Recent urban policy in Nigeria: Housing rent edict in the Cross River State

The urban areas within the Cross River State of south-eastern Nigeria are characterized by severe housing shortages and overcrowding, a situation due in large part to the marked levels of rural—urban migration and the high rents that have been charged by landlords. This paper examines the character and background to this situation and describes the Cross River State Housing Rent Edict which was introduced in 1977. The limiting influence of the Rent Edict is described and alternative strategies advanced.     

Property-based redevelopment and gentrification: The case of Seoul, South Korea

The urban experiences of South Korea in times of its rapid urbanisation and economic growth show that wholesale redevelopment had been a dominant approach to urban renewal, leading to redevelopment-induced gentrification. This was led by a programme known as the Joint Redevelopment Programme, transforming urban space that was once dominated by informal settlements into high-rise commercial housing estates. This paper tries to explain how this approach was possible at city-wide scale in its capital city, Seoul. Through the examination of redevelopment processes in a case study neighbourhood, it puts forward three arguments. First, the development potential arising from the rent gap expansion through under-utilisation of dilapidated neighbourhoods provided material conditions for the sustained implementation of property-based redevelopment projects. Second, this paper critically examines the dynamics of socio-political relations among various property-based interests embedded in redevelopment neighbourhoods, and argues that external property-based interests have enabled the full exploitation of development opportunities at the expense of poor owner-occupiers and tenants. Third, South Korea had been noted for its strong developmental state with minimum attention to redistributive social policies. The Joint Redevelopment Programme in Seoul was effectively a market-oriented, profit-led renewal approach, in line with a national housing strategy that favoured increased housing production and home-ownership at the expense of local poor residents’ housing needs.     

House types and their spatial patterns in Singapore

Four major groups of residential houses coexist in Singapore. They are: (a) bungalows, semi-detached and terrace houses; (b) public flats; (c) private flats; (c) shophouses; and (d) attap and zinc-roofed houses. Each group of houses has its own features and specific locations. The share of each group of houses in the total housing stock as well as in a census unit varies with time. The aim of this paper is three-fold. Firstly, it gives an overview of the house types, their features, growth and spatial spread; secondly, it examines the spatial patterns of housing as in 1980; and finally, it outlines the future trends of housing development. The present composition and the spatial pattern of housing in Singapore are very much a result of government planning since 1960. Having solved the problem of housing, the Singapore government now aims at improving the quality of public housing which presently accomodates some 88% of the total population of 2.7 million to a level close to that of the private housing.     

Gated community and residential segregation in urban China

Research on gated community in Chinese cities has been growing very fast, but empirical studies are limited, especially those on the relationship between gated community and residential segregation. A retrospective questionnaire survey was conducted in three gated communities in Chongqing, China. The findings from the survey include that, after moving into the gated communities, many homeowners’ contact with other people decreases. It is also found that homeowners’ participation in local public affairs decreases. These results hold even when we compare with the reference group and control for duration of stay. They support the view that gated community aggravates residential segregation. However, the survey shows that many homeowners feel the income differences among the neighbors increase and the changes of several types of external activities don’t show a consistent pattern. All these empirical findings suggest that a complex relationship between gated community and residential segregation exists in urban China and the removal of work unit from the housing system affects people’s experience in gated community.