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The United Kingdom is one of the most spatially unequal Western countries. There have been continuing policy efforts to address this issue: the latest was a ‘levelling’ up strategy by the previous Conservative government. At the time of writing a new Labour government has dismissed the strategy as a slogan but the problem remains. The paper examines the detail of the Conservative’s levelling up policy and the theory underpinning it. It queries its basic premise that the problems of localities can be addressed in isolation. The paper argues that promoting mainly low-productivity jobs would not have instigated fundamental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, architectural history has responded to the climate crisis by strongly integrating environmental topics into its research agenda. The change has been so dramatic that it can be referred to as a paradigm shift within the discipline. The article reviews research tendencies in the environmental history of architecture by discussing the papers presented at a conference organized in Reykjavik in 2023 and several recent publications. The introduction of environmental perspectives in architectural history appears to call into question consolidated ways of understanding its relationship with planning history. Cities are no longer seen as an essential field of analysis to achieve meaningful generalizations in architectural research; many recent works privilege, on the contrary, the investigation of the flows and movements linking individual buildings to processes taking place at a global or planetary level. The paper discusses the question from three interrelated perspectives (the scales of observation, the articulation of temporalities, and the public role of historians). It argues that the environmental turn affecting many fields of the humanities open the way for rethinking patterns of cross-disciplinary collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report provides an overview of the 17th meeting of the Australasian Urban History/Planning History Group, held on Gadigal Country at the University of Sydney from 11 to 13 July 2024. The 2024 conference welcomed papers on diverse topics, but particularly encouraged contributions relating to possession and dispossession, housing histories and FIRE (Fire, Insurance, Real Estate). Over 60 papers were presented. The use of real estate, and the delineation of property as a tool of dispossession was a theme that ran through many of the papers, as was the unbuilt theme, which serendipitously threaded through presentations focused on many different cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The critique of planning in the 1960s and 70s legitimized the subsequent emaciation of governmental planning, which marked a shift from comprehensive, rational planning and government-created masterplans to looser forms of urban governance through regulations, codes and ‘flexible’ frameworks, produced by urban designers, planners, developers and local authorities. This paper interrogates the idea of contingency, a key ingredient in discrediting ‘the plan’. It argues that the proposition to ‘embrace contingency’, which permeated work of scholars ranging from Popper to Laclau, has had a detrimental impact on planning theory and practice. It has condoned the uncertainty and havoc caused by the free-market within the built environment. It continues to de-legitimize attempts to reintroduce ‘tight’ planning, which describes what ought to be done, and hence steers our cities towards evermore libertarian and neoliberal (non-) governance. This theory paper’s argument concisely studies the idea of contingency in general terms, proceeding to analyse key literature in urban design and planning that delegitimized ‘the plan’ in the 1960s and 70s through accusations of utopianism, and finally looks at more recent contributions that, as this paper demonstrates, continue to follow the contingency-dependent, anti-plan path identified decades ago, often explicitly criticizing neoliberalism while implicitly supporting it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates what has and has not changed in 100 years of professional planning in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The geographical focus is on the area of the historic core of the city known as Ng'ambo (a KiSwahili place-name meaning 'the Other Side'). The gap between formal plans for infrastructure, housing, or neighbourhood development, and their implementation, is examined in its evolution over this century. The central focus of the empirical examination resides with the most recent planning initiatives, since 2011, which present a strongly inclusive and participatory emphasis for planning on the Other Side. The key research question is this: has this new era of inclusive planning strengthened the urban poor majority's citizenship, or has it continued the long run of state planning failures for Ng'ambo's residents? This essay argues that, despite progressive ambitions, in implementation there are a number of continuities with both colonial and post-independence planning, where outside powers and elite interests have predominated. The paper is built from more than thirty years of the author's research on urban planning in Ng'ambo and engagement with the literature of urban planning studies in Africa and the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locally rooted industrial networks pose significant challenges to the sustainable regeneration of industrial land in China. This paper examines the process of rural industrialization in the Shunde District of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region and its relationships to current regeneration practices from a historical perspective. Drawing on assemblage thinking, the paper traces the four stages of Shunde’s industrial networks assembly process and depicts the ongoing regeneration activities, delving into how heterogeneous entities come together and (re)assemble unique networks attached to the locality over time. The findings show that the assembly and regeneration of industrial networks are subject to diverse interactions between multiple translocal assemblages and Shunde as a place-assemblage. These interactions are conditioned by the distributed agency that emerges from the components of the place-assemblage. Local agency’s enactment of sustainable futures requires a comprehensive understanding of the historical development of local industrial networks and the socio-spatial relationships between heterogeneous entities within or across assemblages to inform and precede interventions such as sustainable regeneration policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sydney's Waterloo estate is one of Australia's largest and most concentrated areas of public housing. There has been an almost two-decade-long effort to renew the estate, with successive governments persistently making the case that the demolition and mixed-tenure redevelopment must happen. In the process, the quality of the housing on the estate has been denigrated and misrepresented. This paper combines a detailed examination of the architectural qualities of the Waterloo estate with a critical analysis of historical and contemporary policy settings and political decisions driving the redevelopment project. It identifies the phases of development at Waterloo since the first buildings were constructed in 1948, describing the key characteristics of the dwellings that were part of each phase and situating them within in the wider story of public housing in NSW. It then evaluates the qualities identified in the buildings on the estate against the government's own guidelines for new apartment development. This evaluation reveals the extent to which the state government has avoided a good-faith assessment of the architectural quality of the estate. The paper concludes by reviewing planning and policy objectives and highlighting that tenant interests and housing quality have been obscured through the stigmatzation of the estate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a collection of papers that explore the concept of Olympic urbanism, which refers to the close relationship between city planning and the Olympic Games. The papers discuss various cities that have hosted the Olympics and cover topics such as the impact of the Games on urban form and planning culture, the sustainability and legacy of the Games, and the role of security in Olympic city planning. The papers emphasize the need for historical awareness when analyzing the Olympic experience of a city and highlight the complex and unpredictable nature of urban planning for the Games. [Extracted from the article]

Chosen three times as the host city for the Summer Olympic Games (1940, 1964 and 2020), Tokyo's city layout is historically linked to the Olympics. Including the bid project for the 1960 and the 2016 Games, Tokyo has presented five Olympic projects, each time with five different urban visions which enlighten the nature of the past and present political Japanese regimes. The recurrence of the Olympic Games in the planning and growth of Tokyo leads to the idea of a major influence of the Olympics both on the physical evolution of the urban structure but also on that, immaterial, of its planning culture – or, in other words, on the representations, imaginary and practices of the institutional stakeholders of Tokyo's urban fabric. The aim of the paper is therefore double. First, it analyses each urban vision of the Games of 1940, 1964 and 2020. Secondly, it analyses the influence of each Olympic project on greater Tokyo's urban planning and regional development, as well as the influence of each Olympiad on the following ones. Doing that, the paper discusses the formalization of a planning culture through organizing the Olympics on the long run in Tokyo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the urban consequences of failing to host Olympic Games. Using the example of Paris and its unsuccessful bids to hosts the Olympic Games of 1992, 2008 and 2012, the paper analyses the pre- and post-bid status of key projected 'Olympic' sites within the context of urban plans and aspirations of the city of Paris. The French capital attracts special attention because of the rapid succession of submissions that proved to be outbid by those presented to the IOC by the cities of Barcelona (1992), Beijing (2008) and London (2012). The paper will briefly outline the reasons for failing to attract the Games but will devote most of its space for an analysis of the siting of the planned Olympic Villages, which often form the most lasting of legacies of Olympic Games in host cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the emergence of the concept of sustainable development, the Olympic Games have become a vehicle to demonstrate and promote the principles and practices of sustainability. The aim of this paper is to explain and evaluate how the application of sustainable development in the context of the Summer Olympic Games has evolved. Two processes have been influential in this change: first, the institutional expectations of the International Olympic Committee have encouraged greater responsibility towards the creation of legacies by potential host cities through the IOC Charter, the Olympic Agenda 2020, and the Olympic Agenda 2020+5; and second, the context and inventiveness of host cities has created new perspectives on sustainability to secure the event and raise its global profile. This paper will focus on the sustainability benchmarks established in London 2012 and evaluate whether these have been continued or extended in the subsequent editions of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro (2016), Tokyo (2021) and Paris (2024). The changing discourses reveal the tensions between the IOC's agendas for the event, the motivations of the host cities and the realities of delivery in changing socio-economic and political circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the form, function and impact of previous Olympic security arrangements and their intersection with planning practice. Drawing from prior and ongoing empirical research investigating the security practices at summer Olympic Games, the paper argues that wider shifts towards 'total' security models comprising continually reproduced security motifs can be observed that are increasingly standardized, mobile, globalized and planned-in. For most Olympic organizers, preparations now necessarily include attempts to equate spectacle with safety and to 'design-out' terrorism by relying on highly militarized tactics and expensive and detailed contingency planning. Such securitizing practices have intensified in form and scale since 9/11, with such intensification set to continue at the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris, where a vast security infrastructure is being embedded into the large-scale and long-term master-plans for the central city. This represents a high point in spatial planning practice through embracing principles of security-by-design where Games-time security infrastructure, whilst providing effective protection, becomes a less visible but permanent, physical legacy that can also contribute to local programmes of regeneration, climate resilience and crime prevention. The paper concludes by reflecting upon what the continual evolution of security infrastructure means for the balancing of planned-in security and spectacle at future Olympiads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the writing of Black activists, planners, and critics to reconcile two opposing perceptions of the Model Cities Program: an initiative known for its elevation of Black elected officials and a program that used the guise of citizen participation to stifle more radical forms of dissent. In 1966, Model Cities emerged in part from the call for a domestic Marshall Plan for Black Americans. Yet as the program began making incremental changes to the country's neighbourhoods from 1967 to the early 1970s, participants and critics instead began to see Model Cities' relationship to Black Americans as a new form of colonialism. To determine how this shift occurred, this paper analyses this critical commentary against the archival evidence of Model Cities implementation in the cities in which it appeared. Situating these authors' arguments within the parallel emergence of Black studies and participatory planning as well as within larger Cold War diplomatic history, planning history, and African American intellectual history reveals how visions of revolution turned into a program of representation. Meanwhile, the plans these figures produced as part of Model Cities point to what a revolutionary program might yet be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The winners of the IPHS 2024 Prize and Awards were announced at the Awards Ceremony at the Hong Kong Conference on 4 July 2024. This year, the recipients include the Planning Perspectives Prize, IPHS Book Prizes, Anthony Sutcliffe Dissertation Award, IPHS Best Postgraduate Planning History Paper Prize, Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Achievement, the East Asia Planning History (EAPH) Prize, and IPHS Professional Commendation Award. However, the Koos Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation was not awarded as no submission met the criteria. The Judging Panel Reports provide additional information and commendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the process behind the post-war pedestrianization of the urban core of Antwerp, Belgium and specifically the role of the urban design imaginary of pedestrianized public spaces in this process. It investigates how pedestrianization as an urban design concept and image first arrived in Antwerp, how it evolved over time, and how it contributed to the implementation of pedestrian projects across the urban core. The research underscores the persistence of the idea of pedestrianization beyond individual actors, across time, and through political processes. The eventual pedestrianization of Antwerp’s urban core and its main shopping street the Meir represents the realization, maturation and evolution of the urban design idea that had persisted and circulated for decades. This research stands as an example of how urban design concepts are shared, adapted, and localized across national, ideological, and professional divides. The process of pedestrianization in Antwerp provides generalizable case study of how urban design concepts may adapt and be realized in pluralistic stakeholder settings over time. Though the conceptual roots of pedestrianization are grounded within modernism, its implementation process evolved into something much more tactical and flexible than the original modernist comprehensive plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes three main contributions: First, we argue that spatial planning institutions have become fundamental ‘rules of the game’ regulating development and defining urban property rights, and that the differences of approach between places can best be explained as a product of historical processes of institutional development. Second, we introduce a historical institutionalist theory of contested institutional development based on concepts of critical junctures of major institutional change followed by reactive sequences of institutional contestation in strategic action fields. We outline a methodologically institutionalist research method designed to produce replicable comparative research of long-run processes of institutional change, based on historical narratives employing process-tracing of institutional change and examination of permissive and productive factors structuring such change. This approach generates clear research questions and supports causal analysis of processes and mechanisms of change in urban property systems to explain why current institutions take the form they do. Third we illustrate the theory and research method with the case of Toronto, a fast-growing city where property rights and obligations and development control regulations have been vigorously contested. The conclusions explore the implications for planning theory and for comparative-historical research of this analysis of institutional change processes and mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parks built by the gentry represent a special type of parks in modern China. They were admission-free public places financed and controlled by the gentry. Nominally, these parks were public properties under the jurisdiction of the government, thus possessing dual attributes of privatization and nationalization. The planning and construction of such parks reflected the gentry's aesthetic interests and their deep involvement in local affairs. However, at the same time, these parks were always subject to the constraints of the specific power structure within the local society. Taking the Chengzhong Park in Wuxi as an example, this paper explores how the interaction among local gentry power, official power, and party power affected the history of park development and ultimately shaped the function and form of the park. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the process of reordering and intensification associated with the Spanish cereal sector, which began in 1937 under Franco's regime. Considering the process as a practice of design and spatial re-planning of the territory, the first stage focuses on the reordering of the sector through an intense state interventionism in the processes of production, distribution, and consumption of cereals. The second stage, framed in a context of significant economic development in the country encouraged by the international context, focuses on the adoption of multiple measures for the intensification of production. Approached from an anthropic perspective of instrumentalisation of the natural environment, this process would lead to the reconfiguration of the structure of operations and to the alteration of part of the biophysical and sociocultural components of the sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the history of the housing cooperative Trondhjems Kooperative Boligselskap (TKB) [The Trondheim Cooperative Housing Association] in relation to societal and political currents in contemporary Norway. The article also discusses how the neighbourhood and its architectural layout were adapted to changing uses over a 100-year period. Established in 1922, the TKB is the second-oldest housing cooperative in Norway. An important distinction from similar cooperatives was its construction process, where members of the construction workers’ union built their own homes and set up a production unit to continue developing new projects. Two related movements contributed to the TKBB’s foundation: Firstly, the work of the Norwegian Association of Housing Reforms, and the Own Homes movement, both inspired by the Ebenezer Howard Garden City concept. Secondly, the labour movement, which initiated the construction of the TKB. The main actor behind the housing association was the Norwegian architect and planner, Sverre Pedersen. Consisting of 86 units in 11 duplexes and 16 quadruplexes, the timber houses are organized with small gardens and within larger green communal spaces. The article elaborates on how elements from the TKB’s organizational and architectural principles are relevant to developing social housing in Norway today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medan is a port city in Sumatra, Dutch East Indies, developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A special case among colonial cities, it featured a large number of Chinese migrants – a third party in addition to the colonizer and the colonized – who played a key role in its urbanization process. Highlighting a trichotomous power framework formed by the Dutch colonizer, the indigenous people and the Chinese diaspora, this paper argues that the Chinese diaspora, with the arrival of commercial elites, obtained opportunities to shape the backbone of the city through skilfully transforming their economic power into political and spatial power. Chinese economic activities such as property investment and co-development not only led to unconventional Chinese quarters but shaped the zoning and axiality of the whole city. The Chinese diaspora also shaped Medan’s streetscape and architecture through individual building design, which, in turn, strengthened their economic power by the careful manipulation of architectural elements from various sources to suit different purposes. The planning history of Medan represents an alternative trajectory to colonial urbanization often led by Europeans, highlighting an ambiguous and shifting power relation among three parties in a transforming colonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often seen as the ushers of modernization in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. company California-Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), which became Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in 1944 used a well-crafted public relations programme to present itself as a ‘partner’ in Saudi Arabia. Through archival and published material, this paper uses three lenses (environment; minds and bodies; homes) to unpack the different policies implemented by CASOC/Aramco towards its Saudi hosts and employees. First, the active greening of the Saudi desert extended a form of environmental determinism in which the making of a productive landscape at the hands of U.S. experts would create a hospitable environment. This productive landscape would supposedly influence and shape the Saudi man. Secondly, the Saudi man’s mind and body were targeted through training programmes which aimed to shape the Saudi employee into an ideal worker. Lastly, the modern Saudi house, funded by Aramco, was crafted as the ultimate symbol of development and progress. Establishing the Home Ownership Program (HOP) in 1951, Aramco sought to use housing as a tool for development in the same manner that it did with the environment. Thus, using these lenses, the narrative below unravels Aramco’s carefully curated but fraught narrative of ‘partnership’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workers' villages are social housing districts built during the early period of New China for accommodating state-owned factory employees and their families. By borrowing the Soviet collective housing model, workers' villages triggered significant socialist transformations architecturally and socially – shaping a new collective lifestyle. This article discusses the formation approach and manifestation of collective life in workers' villages focusing on one case: Tiexi Workers' Village in Shenyang City during the 1950s–1970s period. The evidence illustrates that through collectivization of living space and coordinating administration structure, a collective life represented by intense organized activities and personal interactions was indeed shaped in this pilot housing project. This paper sheds light on the collectiveness of the spatial pattern on the one hand, and the role it played in moulding everyday life under the socialist political/ideological circumstances of early New China on the other. This article concludes emphasizing the practical significance of this collective living model, which is more than just a historical proof of the past socio-spatiality but is also an important heritage beneficial to contemporary housing and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range of global concepts of cultural heritage conservation has provided inspiration for China's cultural heritage conservation. China's approach to cultural heritage conservation has evolved from a focus on cultural relics conservation within urban planning to the formulation of specialized and multiple conservation planning. Furthermore, China is actively seeking ways to combine conservation planning and urban planning in order to achieve integrated conservation goals. However, the current practice indicates that 'multiple-planning integration' still needs to be improved to ensure the integrity of cultural heritage. This paper examines the influence of international organizations on the formation and development of China's multiple conservation planning. It also explores how heritage discourse has impacted the multiple-planning integration through a case study. International exchanges have a twofold impact: they improve the conceptual and technical development of China's cultural heritage conservation planning, and they guide its transition from cultural relics to historic city conservation. The primary effect of heritage discourse is that the demolition-and-reconstruction-oriented discourse has compromised the practice's integrity through multiple-planning integration. In the context of the localization of cultural heritage protection, it analyses the process and problems of the localization of cultural heritage conservation planning in China to draw wider attention to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scholarly investigation provides a critical analysis of the developmental trajectory of the central linear axis in the context of South Korean new towns. The study traces the genealogy of this urban planning model, examining its conceptual origins in the 1960s, maturation through the Mok-dong New Town project in the 1980s, and subsequent iterations in first- and second-generation new towns. Employing a diachronic methodology, the research elucidates the changing dimensions, compositions, and functionalities across these phases, with a particular emphasis on how the model has been localized to suit socio-temporal and site-specific conditions. This adaptation process has yielded variations such as the 'service axis' and the 'community corridor,' each contributing to the heterogeneous landscape of South Korean urban planning. Within this evolutionary trajectory of urban design concepts, this paper highlights the pivotal roles of institutional environment, planners, and other stakeholders such as land developers and local municipalities. As the first scholarly work to formally define and contextualize the 'community corridor' concept, this study makes a significant contribution to academic discourse. It provides valuable insights into the mechanisms through which imported urban planning methodologies undergo transformation and localization in different cultural and temporal contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city plan of Kuching is not influenced by systematic planning principles, but rather, it is deeply embedded within colonial infrastructural logistics to meet the demands of global trade services and social structures. The postcolonial city is a palimpsest of hierarchical and territorial imprints from former colonial governance. Much of urban growth is concentrated around nodes, prioritized for resource collection and distribution. Therefore, this paper delineates how the current state and city governance recalibrate inherited infrastructures of economic development from the past, resulting in fragmented hybrid spaces of ethnic enclaves and economically marginalized groups in this northwest city of Borneo. We narrate how the Brooke dynasty, British administration and the Malaysian state have each developed and reappropriated logistics infrastructure based on their own agenda, leaving an indelible mark on the urban fabric and society of Kuching today. These findings are based on content analysis of city plans, visual surveys, government media, and secondary sources. We aim to open up new ways of understanding how multi-layered infrastructure and spaces produced by successive waves of different political strategies resulted in uneven development around the postcolonial city, and why some centres are given preference over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines Tianqiao, the largest commercial and entertainment centre, which underwent a significant transformation into the most popular public space in Republican Beijing. Spatial informality has often been overlooked in planning history, due to its deviation from traditional disciplinary norms, tools, and materials, yet it can offer valuable insights into Chinese urban public spaces and their social values. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including government documents, newspapers, social surveys, and personal records, this paper elucidates how everyday life and popular culture emerged as effective strategies for the poor population to exert their political power and passively resist the state's incomplete urban regularization efforts. This exemplifies a distinct type of Chinese public space that acts as a mediator between the state and society, particularly from a bottom-up perspective of urban modernization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, the decolonization of planning systems has garnered significant scholarly attention encouraging the consideration of more diverse contexts. This study uses a historical institutionalist approach to reconstitute the history of planning institutions in the context of Morocco as a former French colony and builds an institutional understanding of the current framing of its practices. It then uses an institutional design approach to propose potential trajectories for the gradual decolonization of its systems. This paper discusses the Moroccan planning tradition as a dual-level approach: formal planning conducted by planning professionals and informal urban governance implemented by the state. Thereby, the study suggests that a potential way towards the decolonization of the practice is to create a trajectory where planning professionals are encouraged to cultivate a more systematic interaction with informality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the infrastructure projects undertaken for the event initially known as the Semaine des sports d'hiver, which took place in Chamonix, France, from 25 January to 4 February 1924 and was later recognized as the first Winter Olympics. Although the already famous resort town was able to use its existing hotels to accommodate visitors and athletes, it also made a considerable investment in the construction of new sports infrastructure. Following an agreement signed just 9 months before the Games, these facilities included a large ice rink, a bobsleigh run and a ski jump. The project was entrusted to the Ponts et Chaussées engineers, who encouraged local firms to help with the construction. Archival analysis will be used to examine the relationship between the project and the changing environment. Our aim is to show how the work in Chamonix modified the environment by exploiting certain natural elements (e.g. water, soil and forests) and, conversely, how the natural (in particular, the geological and climatic) and historical (notably land ownership) components of the environment affected the execution of these works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Olympic Games of 1940 were due to be organized in Tokyo, Japan, but because of the Sino-Japanese war, the event was hastily re-scheduled to be organized in Helsinki, Finland. The Second World War however interrupted the preparations. Instead of 1940, the Games were organized in Helsinki in 1952. It thus became necessary to prepare twice for the same event. During the 12 years that had passed, the political situation had become significantly different, while also views concerning architecture and urban planning had changed. The postponed Helsinki Olympics represent an intriguing case in the history of Olympic Games, that has remained relatively little researched. This paper proposes that this 12-year 'Olympic gap' brings to view on one hand the need to prepare twice, and on the other hand, the processual, slow nature of building and planning, which continued almost uninterrupted. A close reading of period newspaper articles, history of urban planning and architecture, as well as studies of the Olympic Games reveals tensions between architecture, planning, and politics on local, national, and international level, as they unravel in the context of preparing for the Helsinki Olympics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the growth of the Olympic Games against that of former host cities to understand whether this mega-event may have 'outgrown' its hosts. The increasing hosting requirements and governments' expansive use of mega-events as tools for urban development would suggest that the 'Olympic city' – a term we use for describing the size of the Olympics as hosted in different cities over the decades – has grown at a faster rate than former host cities. The analysis contrasts historical indicators that capture the evolving size of planning for the event based on four dimensions – sport, spectators, marketing and costs – as well as the urban dimension of hosting experiences (venues and infrastructure) with city trajectories based on demographic and economic indicators. This is done through a longitudinal analysis of former Olympic host cities from the 1960s and 1970s and from which continuous longitudinal data are available: Tokyo, Munich, and Montreal. The findings indicate that the Olympic city has grown more strongly than these former host cities, although not uniformly across trajectories. This gives evidence for the need to review the size of mega-event impacts if they ought to continue to generate interest in hosting them in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid increase in large-scale redevelopment projects in Tokyo’s inner-city has demonstrated the shortcomings in Japan’s ‘flexible’ urban planning system. While authorities explain many of these redevelopments as being necessary for disaster prevention and economic revitalization, citizen opposition to some projects has fuelled ongoing debates about public participation. Pundits of Japanese cities often hail Tokyo as a successful example of flexible urban planning that allows for a more market-led approach to development through loose regulations. This research highlights the controversies around this approach and its implications as residents attempt to influence the transformation of their neighbourhoods. A study of the legal framework and the internal processes governing redevelopment projects in three Tokyo neighbourhoods reveals Japan's consensus-building approach, which prioritizes rights-holders while lacking specific requirements for the participation of the surrounding residents. By critically examining Tokyo’s large-scale redevelopments, this paper questions Tokyo’s suitability as a developmental model and advocates for striking a better balance between flexibility and participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a periodized overview of informal urbanization in Vienna in the twentieth century. It offers a new perspective on the evolution of planning discourse and the phenomenon's handling by planning authorities. The variegated manifestations of 'Informal Vienna' triggered an ongoing dispute on how orderly city development could be re-established after 1945. Our approach combines quantitative and qualitative aspects and illuminates not only the shifting significance of informal urbanization over several decades – especially in their lengthy formalization process – but also highlights the co-evolution of formal planning and the Viennese informal 'grand project'. In a comparative historical analysis based on the evaluation of the balances of formal and informal production of space, previous narratives of Red Vienna's dominant role in answering the 'housing question' in the interwar period (and beyond) are challenged. The frictions it created with the instruments and categories of formal planning, we argue, are crucial to understanding the consequences of informal development in Vienna. Furthermore, we present a typological approach on the grades of informality which allows for a reconstruction of the formalization processes in time. This 'graduation of informality' contributes to the ongoing attempts to classify various manifestations of informal urban development in the global South and North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of urban planning and architecture in mitigating infectious diseases has lately attracted more scholarly attention. The paper explores an epidemic of plague in nineteenth-century Odesa (then the Russian Empire, now Ukraine) and argues that the city's development was fundamentally linked to activities focused on preventing the disease's reoccurrence and creating a healthy urban environment. It analyzes never discussed visual materials from the collections of the Hermitage Museum, State Museum in Berlin, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), British Museum, and Library of Congress and places them in the context of literary work, mainly travellers' diaries and memoirs of contemporaries. Although over the last two decades, several publications focused on Odesa's history, literature, culture, and social life came into existence, the urban development and architecture of this metropolis have yet to garner sufficient scholarly attention. The article focuses on primary sources making new attributions of visual materials. It illuminates such essential aspects of urban life as health and hygiene, sanitation, design of open green spaces, and control of air and water supplies. It also helps to understand the architectural solutions for mitigating infectious disease and establishing Odesa as one of the leaders in pandemic-related development at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the emergence of China's workers' villages, and their changes over time in the 1950s in terms of residential planning and housing design characteristics. The new socialist regime realized in the 1950s numerous workers' villages around China. Along with the fluctuant Soviet impact and China's domestic realities, workers' villages built in different phases during this decade show diverse features in their plans and styles. In this article, the characteristics are analysed by selecting typical cases in each phase. The findings show the workers' village in early New China was driven mainly by triple reason: realistic demand, political commitment, and ideological instruction. In the first years, before the design and construction were Sovietized, the neighbourhoods were realized by following a western way. Since 1952, Soviet models were applied in China's workers' villages. But quite rapidly Chinese architects nationalized the Soviet prototype. From the mid-1950s, workers' neighbourhoods were gradually simplified due to political and economic policy adjustment. By analysing the evolution of worker villages impacted by multiple factors, this article sheds lights on China's socialist architectural discourse and supplements the existing scholarship on the transnational socialist architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kamaishi in Iwate Prefecture has suffered devastating damage on several occasions, including the 1896 Meiji Sanriku tsunami, the 1933 Showa Sanriku tsunami, the 1945 naval bombardment during W.W. II and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Each time, the city has recovered. This paper explores the history of reconstruction planning and urban development in Kamaishi and how the city's landscape and urban space have been shaped by disaster and reconstruction. In the Kamaishi area in modern times, temples, shrines and public facilities have been moved and new infrastructure has been developed repeatedly, after each disaster. The accumulated reconstructions have generated a landscape in which the city is centred on wide streets that form a vertical axis connecting the coast and the highlands. The need to evacuate has been woven into the urban space of Kamaishi through repeated experiences of disaster and reconstruction. In the reconstruction that took place after the Great East Japan Earthquake, new layers and facilities were added for commercial recovery and residential reconstruction, but the underlying intention was to build a network of evacuation routes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]