The perspective of state entrepreneurialism provides a powerful analytical lens for understanding the pivotal role of the Chinese state in land-centered urbanization. While existing literature has extensively documented the macro-level features of this governance model, its internal mechanisms and potential dysfunctions in practice necessitate further investigation. This paper contributes to the state entrepreneurialism literature by highlighting its key mechanism: the state’s strategic devolution of land development and governance rights to market actors. Drawing on a case study of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou, we argue that when this devolution is not accompanied by robust regulatory oversight, it creates a governance failure and fosters market disorder. This process generates significant reflexive effects, where the market instruments deployed by the state paradoxically undermine its own planning prerogatives and lead to a dual failure of both state and market. Our findings reveal a key tension within the state entrepreneurialism model and highlight the importance of “planning centrality” in stabilizing crises arising from market-oriented and speculative urban development.
In recent decades, urban natures have provided salient entry points to examine the socio-ecological transformations of cities. These changes are often highly diversified because of site-specific evolutionary and historical peculiarities – complicating catch-all attempts to both theorise about and plan for urban natures. Nevertheless, urban nature scholarship and municipal planning’s overriding focus on the spatiality of cities often overlooks these diverse cycles, rhythms and trajectories that comprise urban green spaces. To remedy this, we argue for an approach that takes the full breadth of urban nature temporalities into consideration, in practice as well as in theory. To this end, we consider the temporalities of urban natures, in their wider pluralistic, polyvocal and multiple forms. We do so through a multi-sited ethnographic study of divergent more-than-human temporalities in the redevelopment of informal green spaces in two post-industrial European cities. Specifically, we look to the regeneration of abandoned and decaying riparian zones in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Turin, Italy, as fruitful sites for exploring how diverse temporalities expose the tensions between municipal planning imperatives and more-than-human relations. Drawing on the work of philosopher Chantal Mouffe, we develop the concept of agonistic temporalities to theorise these confrontations as inherently pluralistic and productive for the politics of planning the more-than-human city.
The Local Climate Zone (LCZ) framework is commonly employed to represent urban form in morphological analyses despite its mapping predominantly relies on satellite imagery. Urban morphometrics, describing urban form via numerical measures of physical aspects and spatial relationships of its elements, offers another avenue. This study evaluates the ability of morphometric assessment to predict LCZs using a) a morphometric-based LCZ prediction, and b) a fusion-based LCZ prediction combining morphometrics with satellite imagery. We calculate 321 2D morphometric attributes from building footprints and street networks, covering their various properties at multiple spatial scales. Subsequently, we develop four classification schemes: morphometric-based prediction, baseline image-based prediction, and two techniques fusing morphometrics with imagery. We evaluate them across five sites. Results from the morphometric-based prediction indicate that the correspondence between 2D urban morphometrics and urban LCZ types is selective and inconsistent, rendering the efficacy of this method site-dependent. Nevertheless, it demonstrated that a much broader range of urban form properties is relevant for distinguishing LCZ types compared to standard parameters. Relative to the image-based baseline, the fusion yielded relatively distinct accuracy improvements for urban LCZ types at two sites; however, gains at the remaining sites were negligible or even slightly negative, suggesting that the benefits of fusion are modest and inconsistent. Collectively, these results indicate that the relationship between the LCZs and the measurable, visible aspects of urban form is tenuous, thus the LCZ framework should be used with caution in morphological studies.
Urban crises - floods, pandemics, economic shocks, and conflicts - function as accelerators of urban change, exposing structural vulnerabilities while creating windows for reinvention. Building on a prior theoretical contribution that identified fifteen principles of urban antifragility, this paper tests and operationalizes the framework through an empirical assessment of 26 cities selected for their post-crisis adaptation trajectories. Using a tailored diagnostic methodology, we benchmark cities' Stress Response Strategies (SRS) and then evaluate Urban Development Trajectories (UDT) across four weighted dimensions, positioning each case along a fragility-robustness-resilience-antifragility continuum and applying a balanced-threshold rule to confirm antifragile status. Results show that "resilience enhanced by innovation and technology" is the most effective response typology (86.9/100), and that six cities meet the antifragile trajectory criteria. By mapping best practices to activated principles and analysing co-activations, the study identifies a robust "hard core" of principles - Sustainable Resilience (O), Strategic Diversity (F), Proactive Innovation (I), and Active Prevention (N) - supplemented by operational enablers (e.g., anticipation, mobilization, shock absorption). The paper concludes by proposing an evidence-based, SDG-aligned operational model that links high-impact principle pairings to measurable indicators, offering a practical roadmap for cities seeking to convert crises into sustained transformation. Keywords: Post-crisis strategies, Urban antifragility, Sustainable cities and communities, Disaster resilience and urban regeneration, Risk governance and Black Swan adaptation.
Cities thrive on social interactions that foster well-being, innovation, and prosperity; yet, exogenous shocks such as pandemics, hurricanes, and wildfires can severely disrupt them. Different urban venues exhibit widely divergent response patterns, raising key questions about what factors contribute to these differences and how we can anticipate and respond. Understanding these questions is crucial for safeguarding social resilience, the capacity of urban venues to maintain both visitation and diversity. In this study, we analyze large-scale human mobility data from 15 US cities covering more than 103 million residents across three distinct urban shocks. Despite a general trend of declining visitation and weakened social mixing, 36.28%-53.01% of venues exhibit reduced segregation, and 21.04%-38.55% of venues exhibit increased visitation. By constructing a mobility network interlinking types of urban venues, we reveal that eigenvector network centrality tends to indicate the provision of essential services and robustly predicts social resilience across varied urban shocks. Specifically, centrality elevates the explanatory power by more than 80% in predicting both segregation and mobility change, compared with more intuitive features. Furthermore, compared to peripheral venues, core venues featuring shorter visit distances, broader neighborhood visitation, shorter visitor dwell times, and steadier popularity throughout the day. Such patterns imply a dual social mechanism: core venues sustain social ties through frequent informal interaction, while peripheral ones facilitate deeper engagement around specialized interests and their corresponding social circles. By bridging urban mobility research with economic theories that distinguish staple from discretionary products, we propose a well-and-pool analogy that suggests how people spend their varying urban mobility budgets.
Abstract This paper explores the early modernization of a medium-sized Chinese city, Ningbo. Based on the remapping of the street system in modern Ningbo by every 10 years from 1844 to 1936, the whole process of the late Qing and Republican eras was divided into two periods, with the port opening and the establishment of the municipal system as the critical junctures. The transformation and re-structuring of the street system limited to the walled city in the late Qing to a systematic one covering the whole urbanized area in the 1930s was explored. This transformation was driven by the construction of the Foreign Settlement in the Jiangbei area and then the introduction of municipal ideas by the local gentle and commercial group class.
Urban region representation is essential for various applications such as urban planning, resource allocation, and policy development. Traditional methods rely on fixed, predefined region boundaries, which fail to capture the dynamic and complex nature of real-world urban areas. In this paper, we propose the Boundary Prompting Urban Region Representation Framework (BPURF), a novel approach that allows for elastic urban region definitions. BPURF comprises two key components: (1) A spatial token dictionary, where urban entities are treated as tokens and integrated into a unified token graph, and (2) a region token set representation model which utilize token aggregation and a multi-channel model to embed token sets corresponding to region boundaries. Additionally, we propose fast token set extraction strategy to enable online token set extraction during training and prompting. This framework enables the definition of urban regions through boundary prompting, supporting varying region boundaries and adapting to different tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of BPURF in capturing the complex characteristics of urban regions.
زویا موسوی مبارکه, سید محمد رضا میراحمدی, حسن قربانی
در عصر جهانی شدن و رقابت فزاینده میان شهرها برای جذب سرمایهگذاری، گردشگران، نخبگان و منابع انسانی، برندسازی شهری به ابزاری استراتژیک بدل شده است. برند شهری قدرتمند، میتواند تصویر ذهنی شهر را در ذهن ذینفعان داخلی و خارجی بازآفرینی کند و زمینهساز توسعه پایدار و رقابتپذیری بینالمللی گردد. هدف این پژوهش استخراج مفهوم برند شهری با استفاده از دادههای شبکههای اجتماعی است. مورد مطالعه پژوهش، برند شهر اصفهان است که اخیراً به عنوان پایتخت فرهنگ و تمدن اسلامی ایران انتخاب شده است. این پژوهش از نظر هدف توسعه ای - کاربردی و ازحیث ماهیت و روش، اکتشافی است. داده های مربوط به هشتگ های مورد استفاده با محوریت شهر اصفهان در شبکه اینستاگرام و با استفاده از هشتگ «#اصفهان» گردآوری شد. جهت تجزیه و تحلیل دادههای پژوهش از دو روش آمار توصیفی و تحلیل شبکه معنایی با رویکرد سهمرحلهای تعریف، اندازهگیری و مصورسازی استفاده شد. نتایج خوشهبندی مفاهیم مرتبط نشان داد که برند شهری اصفهان شامل شش خوشه از مفاهیم مرتبط و درهمتنیده بود که این خوشه ها با نامهای «مکانها و جاذبههای گردشگری»، «اصفهان قدیم»، « محلهها و شهرهای مجاور»، « توصیف اجتماعی شهر و مردم»، « کسبوکار» و « هنر اصفهان» نامگذاری گردید. شناسایی خوشههای مفهومی مرتبط با برند شهری اصفهان به سیاستگذاران و مدیران شهری کمک میکند تا برنامهریزیهای دقیقتری برای توسعه و بازاریابی این بخشها انجام دهند. همچنین نتایج این پژوهش میتواند به عنوان نقشهای راهبردی برای برنامهریزی و اجرای سیاستهای توسعه شهری، گردشگری و اجتماعی در اصفهان مورد استفاده قرار گیرد.
Abstract The shift and decline of port functions present opportunities for spatial and functional transformation in historic port areas. However, maintaining spatial vitality during urban renewal remains a significant challenge. While practical experience in revitalizing these areas abounds, a theoretical model for assessing and fostering vitality remains lacking. Existing research often overlooks crucial factors such as development context, spatial characteristics, and the development stages of different urban spaces. This research addresses this gap by developing and validating a big-data-driven theoretical framework to dynamically monitor spatial vitality in post-industrial port areas and evaluate the impact of regeneration strategies on a global scale. Focusing on Shanghai, Liverpool, and Marseille as comparative case studies, this study aims to achieve four key objectives: (1) refining the concept of spatial vitality within the context of global port area regeneration; (2) identifying key determinants—spanning spatial, functional, historical, and waterfront characteristics—that shape vitality, and analyzing their statistical and spatial relationships; (3) applying regression and machine learning models to uncover the distinct factors influencing vitality in post-port settings; and (4) assessing the effectiveness of regeneration strategies in the selected cases based on these insights. Beyond its empirical application, this framework provides a robust theoretical lens for understanding vitality dynamics, offering actionable guidelines for policymakers, planners, urban designers, and managers to support the sustainable redevelopment of post-port areas worldwide.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
This study integrates historical legacies and contemporary disparities to provide a comprehensive analysis of persistent educational inequality in Nepal. It uses a theoretical framework based on Rousseau, Marx, and Bourdieu, along with Subrahmanian’s four-dimensional framework of access, learning process, outcomes, and external results. Guided by this framework, it uses a mixed-methods approach that integrates enrollment records, examination results, and NLSS IV survey data with qualitative analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews, collectively providing a robust lens to reveal the existing educational disparities. The results show that despite constitutional guarantees and various policy guidelines, Nepal’s education system continues to perpetuate educational inequality. It also shows that public schools enroll 51.2% girls compared to 41.5% for private schools, reflecting economic stratification. Dalit girls in private schools and girls with disabilities in public schools have significantly lower grade transition ratios compared to others. Examination results reveal that private and urban students consistently outperform their public and rural counterparts. At the output level, education does not translate into equitable labor market returns, with female graduates earning substantially less than their male counterparts at all levels. The study concludes that progressive policies have been insufficient to overcome deep-rooted historical and structural barriers. Key policy recommendations include equitable funding mechanisms, stronger regulatory oversight of private providers, investment in inclusive infrastructure, and improved connections between education and labor markets.
This research examines the evolution and renewal of Shanghai’s Huangpu River industrial zone after the 2010 Shanghai Expo, with a temporal focus on the profound changes and development philosophies driven by this mega-event. By investigating emblematic case studies along the Huangpu River, such as the transformative 80,000-ton silo, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Long Museum, this research articulates how mega-events serve as pivotal moments for reimagining and repurposing industrial heritage. In the wake of the 2010 Shanghai Expo, these industrial relics emerged as focal points of urban regeneration, embodying the tensions and synergies between historical preservation and contemporary urban development. This study explores the temporal layers—from the event’s catalytic role to enduring legacies—and reveals how time influences the trajectory of urban spaces and the community’s connection to them. Through this temporal lens, the paper analyses the redevelopment process, assessing how these initiatives have reconfigured the industrial waterfront into a dynamic cultural landscape. The findings offer a dynamic perspective on the temporal dimensions that underpin the redevelopment of industrial heritage sites, providing insights into how such spaces can be continuously activated and symbiotically integrated into the fabric of the city. This paper aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the complexities involved in harnessing industrial heritage for mega-events, with implications for future urban planning and heritage conservation strategies.
This paper analyzes the federal urban renewal and slum clearance program. This program was enacted by Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 and was one of the largest and most controversial policies used to rehabilitate neighborhoods in the United States. I construct a new spatial dataset documenting the locations of approximately 200 urban renewal projects across 28 U.S. cities. I use this newly constructed dataset to examine the characteristics of neighborhoods cleared for redevelopment and the effect that urban renewal projects had on neighborhoods over time. I show that conditional on experiencing urban blight, black neighborhoods were between two and three times more likely than white neighborhoods to be targeted for slum clearance. Further, the resulting redevelopment led to a persistent decline in population density, housing density, and in the share of black residents in directly treated neighborhoods. Simultaneously, median rents and median incomes increased. These results are consistent with predictions from a spatial equilibrium model of locational choice. Viewed through the lens of this model, my results imply that households in the lowest end of the income distribution were made worse off by slum clearance policies. JEL Codes: I38, N32, N92, R23, R38, R58 I am extremely grateful to Allison Shertzer and Randall Walsh for their continued guidance and support throughout this project. I also thank Jason Cook and Brian Kovak for helpful comments and suggestions, as well as participants at the applied microeconomics brown bag at the University of Pittsburgh, the NBER Development of the American Economy poster session, University of Michigan’s H2D2 Conference, and the AERUS Midwest Graduate Student Summit. Financial support for this project has been generously provided by the Economic History Association’s Exploratory Travel and Data Grant. This research was also supported in part by the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research Computing through the resources provided. All errors are my own. Department of Economics, Bowdoin College, jlavoice@bowdoin.edu.
In response to the global demand for sustainable development in urban areas, there is an urgent need to enhance the ecological environment of urban areas. Urban renewal through sponge cities has become an effective method for achieving this goal. As one of the most dynamic elements in urban spaces, manhole covers play a crucial role in enhancing the city’s image. To facilitate urban redevelopment effectively, improve the functionality of urban manhole covers, and promote sustainable urban development, this study explores ecological design factors for urban manhole covers, providing recommendations for future designs in China. Grounded on existing literature research and the urban redevelopment planning of the central district in Maanshan City, the FAHP method was used to determine the weights of five indicators containing environmental esthetics, ecological sustainability, intelligent detection, intelligent interaction, and safety, and scientifically constructed the ecological design and evaluation index system of intelligent grass pot manhole cover. The weighted average algorithm was used to obtain the index priority ranking, and the most critical elements were selected for design and refinement. The evaluation results indicate that safety, ecological sustainability, and the enhancement of the ecological design of intelligent manhole covers show the most significant improvement. The research outcomes can be used as a reference for enhancing urban ecological environments, promoting urban regeneration, and advancing sponge city construction.
Phim Pha Prommanop Thirak, M. H. Wahab, Rohayah Che Amat
As urbanization and modernization continue to shape Malaysia’s cities, balancing progress with preserving city identity is important. Unfortunately, many cities are neglecting their existing identity in urban planning, hindering the image-making and the function of the city. Despite some efforts being made, the focus remains on economic and functional spaces to cater to the growing population. This study seeks to create a framework for Malaysia’s cities that foster a renewed appreciation towards meaningful city characteristics and heritage preservation while encouraging sustainable urban practices. It draws on successful international examples and takes into account Malaysia’s unique historical and cultural background. The absence of specific legislation in Malaysia regarding urban development has pushed the government to draft The Urban Renewal Act, which aims to facilitate redevelopment and revitalization efforts. The government’s ‘MADANI’ policy aims to improve collaboration between policymakers and the public to ensure more humane policies are being implemented. This paper provides a review of the relationship gap between the city identity and future city planning. The findings of portraying identity strategies in Malaysia’s existing structural plans and its recommendations that could help practitioners, legislators, and decision-makers involved in urban planning matters while ensuring the importance of preserving and enhancing city identity that aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 11 in creating sustainable cities and communities.
This article provides a critical reassessment of the role of the state in processes of neighborhood change in Hong Kong, based on mixed‐methods research conducted in the rapidly changing Sai Ying Pun neighborhood. We argue that common narratives of ‘state‐led’ processes of neighborhood change often overstate, oversimplify or unduly assume the influence of state agencies, especially the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) and other ‘usual suspects’, obscuring the complex ways that states facilitate and compel the actions and agendas of other actors. By elaborating implications of several specific forms of state action, especially a 2010 amendment to Hong Kong's Land (Compulsory Sale for Redevelopment) Ordinance, we demonstrate that the state in Hong Kong plays many different roles in facilitating neighborhood transformation, creating an uneven geography of state intervention dependent on locally specific factors such as the particularities of architecture, housing types and residential density in different urban areas as well as existing configurations of policy, legislation and infrastructure. These many articulations of the state are of strategic value to a variety of elite interests, from property developers to wealthy residents and international consumers, whose distinct and competing agendas could hardly be so well served by a less dynamic state.
Abstract Through an interpretivist and hauntological approach, our study explores how self-guided ghost walks use ‘spectral-geographies’ to reconcile problematic colonial histories while simultaneously supporting urban regeneration goals. To achieve this, Port Adelaide was selected as our study context. Port Adelaide, founded in 1837 as the Crown Colony of South Australia’s first port, was quickly plagued with numerous challenges, earning it the colloquial title of ‘Port Misery’. While its fortunes waxed and waned over the decades, the port fell out of use in 1970 and quickly plunged into disarray, characterised by abandoned shopfronts, derelict buildings and social malaise, subsequently resurrecting its ‘Port Misery’ epithet. To reverse its misfortune, a series of state-led and public-private regeneration projects were initiated from the 1970s, however, each ultimately ended in failure. Despite this, another ambitious 15-year renewal plan was launched in 2012 where the spectre of decline is interred by redevelopment visions inspiriting the Port’s maritime history and heritage. While Port Adelaide may be haunted by its dark colonial history and repeated failings to regenerate, paradoxically, the government-sanctioned ghost tour narratives, may in fact exorcise its past as ‘Port Misery’ and positively inform goals to develop the Port as a progressive and innovative ‘Post-Misery’ place.
In contemporary design practices, the integration of computer vision and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) represents a transformative shift towards more interactive and inclusive processes. These technologies offer new dimensions of image analysis and generation, which are particularly relevant in the context of urban landscape reconstruction. This paper presents a novel workflow encapsulated within a prototype application, designed to leverage the synergies between advanced image segmentation and diffusion models for a comprehensive approach to urban design. Our methodology encompasses the OneFormer model for detailed image segmentation and the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) diffusion model, implemented through ControlNet, for generating images from textual descriptions. Validation results indicated a high degree of performance by the prototype application, showcasing significant accuracy in both object detection and text-to-image generation. This was evidenced by superior Intersection over Union (IoU) and CLIP scores across iterative evaluations for various categories of urban landscape features. Preliminary testing included utilising UrbanGenAI as an educational tool enhancing the learning experience in design pedagogy, and as a participatory instrument facilitating community-driven urban planning. Early results suggested that UrbanGenAI not only advances the technical frontiers of urban landscape reconstruction but also provides significant pedagogical and participatory planning benefits. The ongoing development of UrbanGenAI aims to further validate its effectiveness across broader contexts and integrate additional features such as real-time feedback mechanisms and 3D modelling capabilities. Keywords: generative AI; panoptic image segmentation; diffusion models; urban landscape design; design pedagogy; co-design
Existing methods for learning urban space representations from Point-of-Interest (POI) data face several limitations, including issues with geographical delineation, inadequate spatial information modelling, underutilisation of POI semantic attributes, and computational inefficiencies. To address these issues, we propose CaLLiPer (Contrastive Language-Location Pre-training), a novel representation learning model that directly embeds continuous urban spaces into vector representations that can capture the spatial and semantic distribution of urban environment. This model leverages a multimodal contrastive learning objective, aligning location embeddings with textual POI descriptions, thereby bypassing the need for complex training corpus construction and negative sampling. We validate CaLLiPer's effectiveness by applying it to learning urban space representations in London, UK, where it demonstrates 5-15% improvement in predictive performance for land use classification and socioeconomic mapping tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. Visualisations of the learned representations further illustrate our model's advantages in capturing spatial variations in urban semantics with high accuracy and fine resolution. Additionally, CaLLiPer achieves reduced training time, showcasing its efficiency and scalability. This work provides a promising pathway for scalable, semantically rich urban space representation learning that can support the development of geospatial foundation models. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/xlwang233/CaLLiPer.