Introduction
Urban renewal, a multidimensional undertaking oriented at rejuvenating urban areas, is a fundamental enterprise in tackling challenges facing cities worldwide. Aiming to explore the current debates on urban renewal, the present literature review extracts ideas concerning dominating themes, issues, and innovative trends. Through reviewing a few recent scholarly articles, this review explores various views, the latest topics developed, and key findings in this field. By employing a critically focused literature review, the purpose of the evaluation will include illuminating urban renewal intricacies and policy and practice influences and laying the ground for future research, which is part of the race toward sustainable and inclusive urban development. The research question guiding this literature review is: “What are the major issues and conclusions from the existing evidence relating to urban renewal?”
Public Participation and Social Innovation
Bianchi (2019) accentuates the crucial role of public participation and social innovation in urban regeneration, especially in community-led initiatives. The research stresses the importance of grassroots involvement in the regeneration process, drawing attention to the community interest companies’ CIC’s social cohesion and integration facilitation. By involving local shareholders and enabling the accumulation of resources within the community, CICs foster innovative answers to urban challenges and support sustaining development. The study shows how community-led initiatives such as Gill Square revitalize physical spaces and create a sense of belonging and pride among residents. Furthermore, the initiatives form more inclusive and resilient urban ecosystems by putting social values on top of purely market-driven strategies. Bianchi’s work overall emphasizes the fact that urban regeneration efforts need community empowerment and collaboration to be meaningful.
Comprehensive Benefit Evaluation
Chen et al. (2022) attempt to tackle the difficulties of a holistic evaluation of urban redevelopment projects, revealing the underlying problems of such measuring methods. The study points out the requirement for a coordinated way of evaluating the multidimensional effects of these projects in the urban sphere. Including the hybrid entropy weight method based on Back Propagation neural network methods in the proposed integrated evaluation framework, the research intends to fill the shortcomings of existing literature regarding area-scale project evaluations. Undoubtedly, their implications are not restricted to evaluation strategies only; they offer insights into making informed decisions and policy formulation for urban sustainability. Chen et al.’s work provides a substantial contribution to the existing urban renewal discourse in proposing a structured approach for the holistic assessment of these projects, thus achieving the set objective and extending knowledge in this area.
Stakeholder Perspectives and Collaborative Governance
Liu and Liu (2023) go into the critical obstacles constraining urban regeneration from the stakeholders’ perspective, providing invaluable information concerning the issues involved in reviving urban areas. An extensive review of the existing literature and bibliometric analysis reveals some economic and social constraints hamper the further advancement of urban renewal initiatives. Barriers of such nature involve intricate relations among numerous stakeholders, rival interests, and governance complexities. On this foundation, Liu and Liu suggest a strategic framework for collaboration governance that aims to overcome these obstacles and enhance stakeholder istakeholder’sThe framework stresses value creation, collaborative management, and benefits sharing and thereby offers a way forward towards tackling the complexities of urban regeneration and the challenges due to multiple stakeholder objectives.
Supporting this view, Wang et al. (2022) provide examples of how peacebuilding occurs in street-level urban regeneration projects, whereby they demonstrate that grassroots city revitalization efforts are faced with unique challenges and opportunities. The research investigates collaborative governance mechanisms as a tool for realizing regeneration goals through case study analysis and conflict and tension resolution among stakeholders. The study lays emphasis on the need to balance diverse regeneration goals and address grassroots-level concerns so that governance effectiveness can be achieved. Through examining the interactions between different players in street projects and their governance arrangements, Wang et al. illuminate how collective governance operates and contributes to sustainable urban regeneration outcomes. As a whole, both studies are of great importance in the body of current literature since they unravel the complexities of stakeholder engagement and collaborative governance in urban renewal; thus, the research question is answered, and knowledge in the field is advanced.
Equitable Housing and Environmental Justice
O’Neill et al. (2020) critically scrutinizes the nexus between equitable housing and environmental justice amid the state’s fostered transit-based development (TOD). The research examines the impacts of TOD policies on housing equity, especially in high-cost metro areas in California. The data analysis combined with land-use and housing trends brings out the disproportionate impacts of TOD on marginalized communities, i.e., displacement of lower-income residents. The research focuses on local land-use regulations and exclusionary zoning practices as dominant factors shaping inequitable housing outcomes through continued segregation and disinvestment. Such an approach allows O’Neill et al. to stress the need to reconcile state-directed TOD policies with local land-use regulations to facilitate more equitable outcomes in housing and advance environmental justice objectives. By focusing on the intricacies of housing policy and its association with urban development, the research adds significantly to the debates on fair housing and environmental justice, the analytical question, and the suggestions to policy-makers and practitioners who wish to implement more inclusive urban renewal methods.
Conclusion
Summarizing the main themes emerging from the reviewed literature on urban renewal contributes to our understanding of its multifaceted character. Within different approaches, common themes are identified, which stress the necessity of community input, comprehensive benefit assessment, stakeholder participation, collaborative governance, and results in urban regeneration endeavors. Such themes thus illustrate the complexity and interdependence of urban renewal initiatives, calling for adopting integrated policies that promote inclusivity and sustainability. The implication of it is considerable, as it underlines the advantages of employing the models with the broad engagement of various stakeholders in the planning to meet the interests of all the parties and to arrive at the best results. Besides, the information gaps pinpoint areas for future research, which involve strengthening evaluation mechanisms, investigating novel governance mechanisms, and tracking urban regeneration schemes’ long-term social and environmental impacts. By applying these recommendations and drawing on the lessons from the literature, policy actors, practitioners, and researchers can tailor urban revitalization approaches that generate prospering, resilient, and equitable cities for all residents.
References
Bianchi, M. (2019, July 30). Renewing the City through Public Participation and Cultural Activities. The Case Study of Gillet Square, a Community-Led Urban Regeneration Project. Papers.ssrn.com. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3443559
Chen, Y., Liu, G., & Zhuang, T. (2022). Evaluating the Comprehensive Benefit of Urban Renewal Projects on the Area Scale: An Integrated Method. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 20(1), 606. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20010606
Liu, Z., & Liu, M. (2023). Critical barriers and countermeasures to urban regeneration from the stakeholder perspective: a literature review. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2023.1115648
O’Neill, M., Gualco-Nelson, G., & Biber, E. (2020). Sustainable Communities or the Next Urban Renewal? Ecology Law Quarterly, 47(4), 1061–1122. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27069934
Wang, H., Ran, B., & Li, Y. (2022). Street-level collaborative governance for urban regeneration: How were conflicts resolved at the grassroots level? Journal of Urban Affairs, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2022.2133725
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