Bring Your Own Politics: Life Strategies and Mobilization in Response to Urban Redevelopment

This article contributes to social movement literature and theories of strategic action by making the case for an analytic distinction between habitual and intentional life strategies, namely the ways in which people pursue what they value in life. Housing strategies are one example of life strategies. The distinction helps explain how political players, including social movements, bring about social change (or preserve the status quo) by changing or reinforcing people’s minds and their preferred ways of action. They can achieve their goals by first recognizing these habitual strategies, and then prompting people to articulate or adjust them during interactive, group-level situations. My analysis relies on a qualitative study of Renovation, a controversial urban renewal project in Moscow. I examine how Muscovites revisited, articulated and sometimes revised their housing strategies in response to the surprising, and for some, shocking announcement of the relocation project.

Relocation Scheduling in a Two–Machine Flow Shop with Resource Recycling Operations

This paper considers a variant of the relocation problem, which is formulated from an urban renewal project. There is a set of jobs to be processed in a two-machine flow shop subject to a given initial resource level. Each job consumes some units of the resource to start its processing on machine 1 and will return some amount of the resource when it is completed on machine 2. The amount of resource released by a job is not necessarily equal to the amount of resource acquired by the job for starting the process. Subject to the resource constraint, the problem is to find a feasible schedule whose makespan is minimum. In this paper, we first prove the NP-hardness of two special cases. Two heuristic algorithms with different processing characteristics, permutation and non-permutation, are designed to construct feasible schedules. Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms are also proposed to produce approximate solutions. We design and conduct computational experiments to appraise the performances of the proposed algorithms.

Progress in Research on Sustainable Urban Renewal Since 2000: Library and Visual Analyses

Urban renewal is an ideal approach to promoting the value of the urban fabric and improving the sustainability of the urban environment. This study, which shows the continuity of research on sustainable urban renewal, aimed to identify sustainable urban renewal literature based on a library analysis of scientific research since 2000. A total of 3971 scientific papers from the SCIE (Science Citation Index Expanded) and SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) databases were reviewed to examine how research concerning “sustainable urban renewal” has emerged and developed in the past 20 years. The h-indices and impact factors of the most relevant journals in urban renewal and sustainable development since 2000 were analyzed. The most frequently cited articles were analyzed using analysis of social networks (VOSviewer). The results revealed potential future focuses of research and guidelines that link urban renewal and sustainability: the engagement of all stakeholders in the decision-making process; the involvement of residents in projects; the development of cooperation between towns and cities; the preservation and reuse of built and industrial heritage while respecting environmental law; and, finally, the search for new financing techniques. These potential future research topics were analyzed in four research areas so that sustainable development can easily be integrated into an urban renewal project.

Governance through Conflict: Consensus Building in the Fenicia Urban Renewal Project in Bogotá, Colombia

The Fenicia project is an urban redevelopment project in an area of downtown Bogotá, within the immediate vicinity of Los Andes University, the principal promoter of the project. The project has not yet been completed but the way in which it has been formulated, as well as its characteristics and basic objectives, have made it a reference point in the city of Bogotá. From the very beginning, the project has confronted numerous conflicts and tensions between the different stakeholders involved in its implementation. The conflict management approach implemented in this case study has contributed to correcting many of the equity concerns that other urban renewal projects in the city have generated. It does so by promoting inclusive and deliberative dynamics between the promoter, local authorities, and property owners in the zone. Land readjustment is an instrument that could allow the current property owners to remain in the area, participate as partners in the benefits of the project, and play a leading role in decision-making processes.

Walking through Rio de Janeiro’s ‘Little Africa’: places and contested borders

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the urban renewal project in Rio de Janeiro’s port region emphasized the macroscopic scale of road building and projects designed for the future. In parallel, the production of localities and cultural heritage have often sought to adapt to the impacts of urban transformation. Guided tours fostering the idea of ‘African heritage’ construct places of historical and contemporary significance, reinterpreting their wider connections with people and places and their disputed borders. In this context, ‘Little Africa’ involves the production of a ‘place’ designed locally by cultural associations that promote walking tours in an attempt to fix routes that either adapt to or subvert times and spaces.

Fighting for the Working-Class City

This article examines the opposing sides taken by elderly tenants and labor unions over a major urban renewal project in 1970s San Francisco. Tenant activists sought to block the construction of the Yerba Buena Center and the resulting relocation of thousands of elderly residents of residential hotels. City labor unions lined up in support of the project, even though some of the displaced residents were former industrial workers and union members. By examining the path taken by both sides in the redevelopment struggle, this article grapples with their competing visions of working-class identity and interests. Ultimately, it argues that the position taken by labor leaders narrowed the labor movement’s vision of its constituents and its mission. This narrowed vision led them to view impoverished retired union workers as their opponents rather than as comrades in a shared struggle for working-class dignity and self-determination.

“One ruler measures to the end”: Rule hardening in grassroots governance – taking a pilot project in urban renewal as an example

Regarding launching an urban renewal project, rising social pressure makes the grassroots state harden the rules while the remaining high pressure from the top makes them keep rules elastic, the contradiction between which causes a dilemma in urban development nowadays. Taking a landmark pilot project as an example, via the observation of the practice of the rule-hardening principle described as “one ruler measures to the end”, this article tries to answer the question of how it is possible for power to reproduce its operational space under recently rising regulatory constraints. In this case, the principle of “rule hardening” includes both “results” and “process” and is fulfilled through a three-step mechanism of hardening in external conditions, hardening in compromising rules and hardening in the limitation of introducing pressure. Through this mechanism, the grassroots state manages to mobilize the resources embedded in the system and extend the hidden boundaries of the hard and rigorous rules on the surface that make the rules elastic and soft again, but in a more formal institutional and organizational way. This could be considered the state’s response to the rising social protests during the last phase and indicates a more subtle and less obvious manner of governance, which shows the continuous interaction between the state and the society in the long view of history.

La cinta muraria ed i fossati della città di Otranto. Il rilievo tridimensionale integrato per la conoscenza delle evidenze architettoniche ed archeologiche

The walls and moats of the city of Otranto. An integrated three-dimensional survey for studying the architectural and archaeological evidenceThe system of fortifications that rings the old town of the city of Otranto (Puglia, Italy) conserves the still visible traces of structures belonging to various historical periods, attesting to the evolution of the settlement’s defensive system from the Messapian period (fifth century BC) to the Aragonese period (sixteenth century). As part of a recent urban renewal project targeting the area of the moats, new archaeological, historic and architectural investigations were conducted. These included a painstaking analysis of the circuit of defensive walls and the broad and deep moat, which contains valuable archaeological and architectural evidence that has never before been studied. The use of advanced surveying technologies such as 3D Laser Scanners, parametric and georeferenced, enabled a holistic, synoptic and comparative reading of the structures, recording the distinctive features, building techniques, materials, alignments, range of thicknesses and losses of continuity in the walls, all of which are necessary for a correct identification of the construction phases. In addition, the data arising from the study and three-dimensional survey of some subterranean tunnels, entirely excavated in the rock in the area of the moats surrounding the Aragonese castle, have also enriched the framework of knowledge regarding specific military and defensive dynamics.