Urban Studies

In economic literature, the quality of life (QoL) in a city is usually assessed through the standard revealed-preference approach, which defines a QoL index as the monetary value of urban amenities. This paper proposes an innovative methodology to measure urban QoL when equity concerns arise. The standard approach is extended by introducing preferences for even accessibility to amenities throughout the city into the QoL assessment. The QoL index is then reformulated to account for the unequal availability of amenities across neighbourhoods. The more unbalanced the distribution of amenities across neighbourhoods, the lower the assessment based on the new index. This methodology is applied to derive a QoL index for the city of Milan. The results show that the unequal distribution of amenities across neighbourhoods significantly affects the assessment of QoL for that city.

Intergenerational support between parents and children in Chinese cities has been dramatically affected by recent social changes. This paper investigates the changing pattern of intergenerational housing support between retired old parents and their children, and the legacy of public housing in shaping this pattern. By initially establishing an up-to-date picture of intergenerational housing support between retired old parents and their children, it seeks to determine how this support depends on whether parents have previously been allocated public housing and, if so, on whether they have disposed of it or have continued to occupy it. A survey with 1000 retired old people from Tianjin in 2009 is used for the analysis. A support flow model is used to go beyond studying housing support per se, and to study the flow of intergenerational support in both directions and in different forms.

This paper examines factors influencing Australian landlords’ decisions to retain their rental investments. A variety of statistical techniques are applied to uncover the factors precipitating the exit of landlords from rental housing markets. It is found that middle-aged investors are more attached to rental investments than younger investors. However, once retired, there is a sharp increase in the likelihood of exit from rental investments. The estimates also confirm the importance of financial variables. Leveraged loss-making investors with higher gross rental yields are more inclined to terminate leases. It is concluded that fiscal and monetary policy settings play an important role in shaping rental housing investment decisions, since interest rate and tax parameters are important in determining investors’ negative gearing status. These will in turn drive changes in housing supply and affordability in rental markets.

This paper explores the spatial and temporal patterns of green building in the commercial and institutional sectors in the US. While these buildings are becoming more commonplace, they have yet to reach a critical mass to affect the entire construction industry. Given the potential for green building practices to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, the paper seeks to understand the geography of green building. Using multiple metrics, it explains the patterning of geography of LEED and Energy Star certified buildings in the US. Strong evidence is found of clustering at the metropolitan and sub-metropolitan scales. This exploratory research serves as a foundation for future research aimed at specifying the nature of agglomerative processes in green buildings.

This paper analyses the rising importance of sustainable principles in property decisions and its impact on attractiveness for business districts in France. A behavioural survey of a large sample of corporate property managers and a multiple correspondence analysis highlight key factors indicating the influence of sustainable principles alongside more traditional determinants of territorial attractiveness. This approach enables the drawing up of a typology of companies according to the influence of sustainability issues, showing the rise in importance placed on sustainability in location decisions made by listed companies, companies that own their head offices and companies located in the main business districts of the Paris metropolitan area.

The aim of the article is to analyse the impact of the self-evaluated ethnic composition of the place of residence on interethnic contacts and attitudes through the comparison of four Nordic countries. Data come from the European Social Survey 2002. Compared with ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods, interethnic relationships are more common in ethnically mixed neighbourhoods with some self-reported ethnic minorities. However, living in an area with many perceived ethnic minorities does not necessarily increase the probability of having interethnic friends in all four countries. As contact theory suggests that, having interethnic friendship ties in combination with living in an ethnically mixed or ethnic neighbourhood is associated with the probability of having more tolerant attitudes towards immigrants in all four countries. Perceived ethnic threat, however, is generally at its lowest level in areas with only some ethnic minorities, which may leave some room for conflict or competition theories as well.

The community cohesion agenda in Britain has focused attention on the ethnic character of neighbourhoods and how population change affects cohesion. This paper examines the relationship between neighbourhood ethnic group population change and belonging. The paper measures population change as immigration, gross internal migration and with a categorisation of ethnic group population dynamics that combines migration and natural change. Pooled 2005 and 2007 Citizenship Survey data are analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. The paper does not find evidence for relationships between immigration or local population turnover and levels of neighbourhood belonging; nor is there evidence that ethnically differentiated population change matters. However, belonging does vary by individual’s ethnicity; and strong belonging is associated with high co-ethnic density for minorities. In addition, the overall population change of an area may be significant: highest levels of belonging were found in areas of White and Minority population growth driven by migration.

Dutch politicians claim that disorder and nuisance in the public domain have grown out of hand in deprived areas and that local inhabitants call for more repression. Recently, new administrative measures were introduced to tackle these issues more effectively, some of which were almost exact copies of British measures like the ASBO. Studies on ASB have usually focused on general views among the population. The present qualitative research studies the assumptions that the situation with respect to ASB has got out of hand and that the call for repression is dominant amongst local inhabitants. It is based on intensive fieldwork including observations and over 300 qualitative interviews with social workers, policemen, troublemakers themselves, and residents of 11 so-called problem neighbourhoods in four major Dutch cities. The study shows a more nuanced and mixed local public discourse on this policy landscape than politicians would like us to believe.

People reside in homes; however, they live in neighbourhoods comprised of parks, sidewalks, restaurants, shops and other everyday places. Whether current or potential neighbourhood residents feel at home in these places remains an undertheorised aspect of neighbourhood change. Rather than housing policy or real estate development, this essay explores public space as a mechanism of neighbourhood change. Drawing from ethnographic research in the Latino barrios of North Denver, It deconstructs the history of one small yet vital public space—la Raza Park. During the 1970s, this park, its pool and the many events it grounded, built community cohesion and fostered cultural identity. In 1981, city authorities went so far as to deploy a SWAT team to la Raza Park to enforce a permit violation. The following summer, they demolished its pool. North Denver is now gentrifying rapidly. This essay stitches these disparate-seeming events into a story of neighbourhood change.

Housing renovation is a topical issue in CEE countries facing the need to tackle their troubled post-war housing estates and improve their energy efficiency. In this paper the renovation decisions of households living in multidwelling buildings are modelled to identify the key determinants of such decisions and to gain a better insight into the reasons for the insufficient extent of renovation in CEE. Considering general factors as well as CEE specific factors, and specifically adding variables of social capital, renovation decision-making is modelled by applying a discrete choice framework of analysis. The results clearly show that, next to the physical characteristics of the stock, such as its age, an important role in the renovation process is played by residents and particularly their relations in terms of social capital. The results thus identify some of the key missing pre-conditions for renovating multidwelling buildings across CEE.

China’s dramatic urban expansion has encompassed many peri-urban villages and turned them into so-called urban villages that provide a niche housing market for rural migrants for whom the formal housing market is unaffordable. Yet urban villages are very distinct from informal settlements elsewhere, because they are being developed by the original village community on collectively owned land. As these communities cannot sell their land and only build housing units for low-paid workers, the only way to make a higher return from their land is to increase its built intensity. This paper tests the hypothesis that the driving factors of this built intensity are analogous to factors that drive land prices in the formal city. Results of multivariate regression models of the built intensity of urban villages across the city of Shenzhen show a remarkable resemblance to hedonic models of land prices elsewhere. Location matters and access to employment, along with development constraints, are the most important determinants for the development of Shenzhen’s urban villages.

This paper discusses the changing urban policy framework in Turkey through a detailed analysis of a unique coupling of neoliberalism and Islamism. In this, rather than political projects with clear ultimate ends, both neoliberalism and Islamism are approached as distinct political rationalities aiming to reconfigure all aspects of social life. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party has successfully established networks of economic and political interdependence (or has tapped into existing networks) by appeasing both the emergent Islamic capitalist class through lucrative contracts and business-friendly reforms, and the urban poor through gracious gestures ingrained in traditional Islamic community values and morality. The working of this co-articulation is examined in the case of an urban renewal project in a peripheral neighbourhood in Istanbul.

This study returns to the topic of unauthorised development in the south of Italy. It starts by assessing the main positions that have informed the debate since the 1960s and evaluates the consequences of the condono edilizio (building amnesty) policy, in the light of the impact that illegal construction has had on the landscape, both urban, rural and coastal. A close observation of three case studies, unplanned settlements in Lazio, Campania and Sicily, suggests that the original energies and expectations behind their development have long since lost their momentum. Rather, the emergence of new evolutionary trends—hitherto underrepresented within the political debate—demand a different interpretative framework. Three design scenarios are outlined, based on recycling existing social and physical material: they translate into a future-oriented discourse those symptoms of change that are already appearing in an embryonic form throughout Italy’s Mezzogiorno.

While the design of urban space provides an opportunity to create places sensitised to the manifold complexities of the body, places continue to be designed with little understanding of the interrelationships between design, disability and space. One issue is the absence of embodied knowledge about impairment in urban design, and the understanding of disability as an aberration, not intrinsic to the crafting of well-designed environments. With the focus on vision impairment, the paper evaluates a popular approach to improving the quality of street environments, shared space, in which pavements and roads are merged into single and shared surfaces. Data from a study of English local authorities show that the diverse needs of vision-impaired people are barely recognised or given a platform to influence shared space policy. It is suggested that this marginalisation of vision-impaired people is part of a post-political condition, in which deliberative techniques, such as public consultation, are part of a process to manage those that dissent from the preferred policy choice—i.e. shared space. An implication is the depoliticisation of shared space policy in which the unequal, and unjust, ways in which urban design impacts on vision-impaired people are neither articulated nor recognised by formal policy programmes.

Jaap Nieuwenhuis, Beate Völker and Henk Flap (2013) ‘‘A Bad Neighbour Is as Great a Plague as a Good One Is a Great Blessing’’: On Negative Relationships between Neighbours. Urban Studies 50(14): 2904–2921. DOI: 10.1177/0042098013482508.