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The survival of Chinatowns and other ethnic enclaves in cities is largely determined by who owns property. Ethnic enclaves such as Chinatowns have traditionally played important economic, social and cultural functions as places for recent immigrants to live and work, though Chinatowns have long faced redevelopment pressures. In North America, as Chinese immigrants and their descendants settle in the suburbs, and as historic Chinatowns’ locations close to revitalising downtowns attract increasing investment, the future of these historic enclaves is shaped by various, often intense and divergent, forces. This article describes changes in the patterns of property ownership in Boston and Philadelphia’s downtown Chinatowns over the last decade (2003–2013) and relates them to changes and continuities in these neighbourhoods’ population, commercial activities and building stock. The trends we observe simultaneously reinforce and complicate debates about gentrification and longstanding efforts to preserve these Chinatowns as ethnic Chinese residential, commercial, and cultural centres.

This paper explores the long-term sensitivity of street-level retailers to agglomeration to corroborate its theorised benefits under current economic modelling. It does so by studying the annualised chance of closure of retailers as a function of the number of surrounding retailers, as well as how different types of retailers respond differently to agglomeration. A time fixed effect model is used to study the mortality rate of retailers over the period of a century. The study draws from a self-created database of retail establishment locations and types in Detroit, Michigan and The Hague, Netherlands between 1911 and 2011. The case study cities have been selected for their combination of similarities and differences. While downtown Detroit is infamous for its high vacancy and The Hague has been praised as a vibrant Dutch urban core, both cities have in fact suffered significant loss of retail activity over the past century, allowing for the study of retail closure under different socio-economic and cultural circumstances. The study demonstrates a significant sensitivity of retailers to agglomeration in both cities. The study also indicates a specifically high sensitivity to agglomeration in the case of comparison shops. Without a critical mass of peers, these retailers will face a significantly higher than average chance of closure. The sensitivity to agglomeration is remarkably similar between both case studies, urban cores which at first sight have experienced rather different fates over the past century. This cross-cultural similarity may point to a generalisability of the underlying mechanism of sensitivity to agglomeration.

The CAD$1 billion transformation of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood from Canada’s largest public housing site to a mixed income community is likely to inform the next several decades of public housing redevelopment policy both nationally and internationally. This paper focuses on the process and impacts of large-scale redevelopment, in the context of attempts to build a physically and socially inclusive neighbourhood incorporating non-market and market housing in downtown Toronto. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 32 Regent Park community leaders and other key decision makers, the paper explores how resident engagement and leadership development opportunities impact redevelopment processes in mixed income initiatives. Results focus on three key emerging areas of both strength and concern: (1) efforts to build community alongside the redevelopment as an integral, evolving and place-specific strategy; (2) the impacts and challenges of both a strong institutional environment in Regent Park and a sense of weak institutional memory; and (3) formal and informal leadership and mentorship opportunities and their contribution towards the development of engagement and cohesion in Regent Park. The opportunity for low-income housing initiatives to support knowledge building and learning, preservation of institutional memory and local leadership development is significant in the context of examining physical and social redevelopment.

This paper examines shifting approaches to urban sustainability in the Arabian Gulf by focusing on the issue of air conditioning and thermal comfort. It considers the recent foregrounding of tradition and heritage within the arena of mega-project development in Qatar, using the Msheireb Downtown Doha Project as an example of a wider regional trend around urban sustainability. Through its focus on air conditioning, the paper draws on Appadurai’s recent critique of design singularity to examine built environment sustainability in relation to the indoor comfort norms and practices, for both bodies and objects, which are now well established across the Gulf region.

The perspectives of those most affected by urban change are often understudied, although these voices have the potential to inform academic understandings of the production of gentrified space. The Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC is undergoing a period of intense redevelopment, raising concerns about the potential displacement of its predominantly low-income residents. In this study, informal recyclers (people who earn income from collecting recyclable or resaleable items) share their observations of neighbourhood change based on their lives and work in the DTES. Informal recyclers’ observations reveal that diverse gentrifying processes are at play in the DTES, including restricted access to space, the social exclusion of othered bodies, and the symbolic construction of the DTES as a place of poverty that is in need of intervention. The inclusion of informal recyclers’ perspectives provides nuance to place-based processes of gentrification, and acknowledges the concerns of low-income urbanites most affected by urban change.

Beijing residents tend to prefer central residential locations, probably because of the centralisation of employment and high transit ridership; both factors are thought to justify rail transit investments. The Beijing government has invested heavily in rail transit in recent years. Meanwhile, new small-sized apartments are also being developed farther away from downtown. Based on data on new housing projects, difference-in-difference estimates show that, on average, station proximity increases housing price and decreases dwelling size, especially in the suburbs, although suburban households may respond to rail transit plans less sensitively. Also, in areas where there are stations, both the estimated increase, after line announcements and openings, and the estimated decrease, after groundbreakings, in prices are greater for large than for small homes, although the negative groundbreaking effects particularly tend to vary considerably across lines. Government policies that encourage small-sized housing and affordable housing to be built around suburban stations also play a significant role. Beijing’s special experience offers a chance to make intercity comparisons.

The 2010 World Expo in Shanghai provided a unique opportunity to examine emerging visions of utopian urbanism in the Global South, and the contradictions contained within them. The theme of the event was ‘Better City, Better Life’, and in its own promotional literature the Shanghai World Expo Coordinating Committee stressed the importance of sustainable, harmonious cities. The Expo was seen by many proponents as a way to educate the public about the opportunities and challenges cities face, and to identify and demonstrate solutions that harnessed the dynamism of urban space. At the same time, the Expo was itself a massive undertaking of urban redevelopment that dramatically reshaped parts of the downtown landscape and beyond. The aim of this article is to examine the vision of the World Expo that its proponents put forth, and to explore both inherent and extrinsic tensions between this vision and the trajectory of urban development.

Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power, urban managerialist and collective consumption debates, this ‘new urban politics’ has appeared conspicuously absorbed with analysing a purported consensus around economic growth alongside a proliferation of entrepreneurially oriented governing regimes. More recent contributions, acknowledging the role of the state and governmentalities of criminal justice, uncover how downtown renaissance is inscribed through significant land privatisations and associated institutionalised expressions like Business Improvement Districts and other ‘primary definers’ of ‘public benefit’: all choreographed around an implicit consensus to ‘police’ the circumspect city, while presenting as ultra-politics anything that might disturb the strict ethics of consumerist citizenship. Beyond downtown, a range of shadow governments, secessionary place-makings and privatisms are remaking the political landscape of post-suburbia. It is contended that the cumulative effect of such metropolitan splintering may well be overextending our established interpretations of urban landscapes and city politics, prompting non-trivial questions about the precise manner in which political representation, democracy and substantive citizenship are being negotiated across metropolitan regions, from downtown streetscape to suburban doorstep. This paper suggests that recent theorisations on post-democracy and the post-political may help to decode the contemporary landscape of urban politics beyond governance, perhaps in turn facilitating a better investigation of crucial questions over distributional justice and metropolitan integrity.

Critical urban research arising from the ‘new urban politics’ rich heritage has conventionally privileged the politics of accumulation and the city’s downtown over the politics of social reproduction and everyday, residential spaces. This paper focuses on residential spaces and the politics involved in recasting everyday practices of social reproduction through private neighbourhood governance. Focusing on the masterplanned estates increasingly prevalent across Sydney’s residential landscape, it explores the material practices and subjectivities shaped by these estates’ contractual governance and the contours and limits to the formation of self-governing middle-class consumer citizens. The paper highlights a granular fabric to urban politics produced as residents engage with meeting the demands of daily urban life and providing the means of middle-class social reproduction in a neo-liberalised context. Finally, it points to opportunities for a more complete grammar of contemporary urban politics provided by this expanded focus.

This article explores practices of uniformed, mobile ‘hospitality’ teams called ambassadors in Canadian downtown cores through document analysis and in-depth interviews with ambassadors, police and business improvement district (BID) personnel. The study reveals how ambassadors conduct surveillance and produce knowledge to remake downtowns for a consumption-oriented order, the institutions to which knowledge is transferred and for what purposes. The paper argues that the significance of ambassadors in downtown cores cannot be reduced to a physical security function. Rather, ambassadors’ scope is broader and reflects BIDs’ peculiar and precarious institutional position in urban governance, one that is highly dependent on knowledge for shaping and encouraging downtown consumption, justifying practices to its mandatory membership and board, and persuading other institutions to do its bidding.

During the period of exhibition events such as COMPTEX, the traffic in downtown Taipei is often congested. To manage parking demand effectively, city officials had proposed to open bidding for public parking facilities with or without regulated rates. The regulated rates are calculated based on the optimisation of total social welfare which includes consumer and producer surplus as well as the external costs of all modes of transport. We find that the deregulated parking fees are mostly higher than the existing rates, while the regulated rates are generally higher than the deregulated rates, except for a few special cases. Although raising parking fees seems to be inevitable and is justified by the optimisation of social welfare, it is not necessarily a politically correct decision for local politicians. It is expected that new regulated rates to be lower than projected rates, but higher than existing rates.

This paper addresses two key gaps within the gentrification/displacement literature: whether gentrification is displacing social services and whether displacement patterns differ comparatively. To this end, evidence is examined of gentrification-induced displacement of 81 purposively sampled social service facilities across gentrifying boroughs in London (Islington, Lambeth, Southwark and Westminster) and areas in Los Angeles (Downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica and Venice) during the 1998–2008 period. Results suggested that substantial entrapment co-exists alongside displacement and, in fact, was more commonplace.

The purpose of this paper is to make an argument about the importance of geographical context and contingency in the emergence of the new economy within the inner city. Using a case study of Vancouver, it is suggested, first, that its new economy has emerged precisely out of the peculiar trajectory of the city and is bound up with a staples economy, branch plant corporate offices, transnationalism, and mega-project orientation. Secondly, to illustrate the importance of situation and site, the paper focuses on two of Vancouver's inner-city locales: Yaletown, on the margins of the Downtown South, a former industrial and warehousing district now regarded as the epicentre of Vancouver's new economy; and Victory Square, the former commercial heart of the early Vancouver, for many years experiencing disinvestment and decline, but now on the cusp of a major revitalisation which threatens to displace long-established social cohorts.

This paper examines conditions that impede inner-city gentrification. Several factors emerge from review of a scattered literature, including the role of public policy, neighbourhood political mobilisation and various combinations of population and land use characteristics that are normally unattractive to gentrifiers. In a first phase of analysis, some of these expectations are tested with census tract attributes against the map of gentrification in the City of Vancouver from 1971 to 2001. More detailed qualitative field work in the Downtown Eastside and Grandview-Woodland, two inner-city neighbourhoods with unexpectedly low indicators of gentrification, provides a fuller interpretation and reveals the intersection of local poverty cultures, industrial land use, neighbourhood political mobilisation and public policy, especially the policy of social housing provision, in blocking or stalling gentrification.

Business improvement districts (BIDs), which are formed when spaces that are legally public are put under private or semi-private forms of administration, have become increasingly prominent features of many cities internationally. This paper provides an in-depth, empirically grounded analysis of the practices of political activism and issue advocacy in one widely admired BID (Church Street Marketplace, Burlington, Vermont) in light of recent theoretical concerns about the decline of 'public' space within the current neo-liberal context of privatisation. The paper examines the ways in which various kinds of political activity are constructed by Marketplace management as either assets or liabilities, and how different forms of activism are differentially regulated and policed in pursuit of maintaining the carefully themed environment of the BID. The research raises important questions about the extent to which downtown (and other) spaces that have been (re)organised as BIDs can fulfil the role of public space in democratic societies.

As communities evolve greater capacities for mobilisation and political action, local issues are finding new entry-points into development and land use planning. In this regard, two strong discourses emerge: that of economic development and community. What are the synergies, antagonisms, or other relationships between these two frameworks? Do policy actors reconcile the differing discourses by appealing to a metanarrative, engaging in a pluralistic or agonistic process, or finding compromise solutions? Are there differing narratives within each of these broad frameworks? This article examines the divergences and convergences of these two discourses. It then focuses on Taylor Yard, a vacant brownfield in downtown Los Angeles, California, to study how policy actors reconciled differing visions for the use of the land. It can be seen that attempts to construct a metanarrative, that of a park, served to create a coalition of policy actors that was powerful enough to overturn a strong pro-industrial narrative. However, the weakness of the metanarrative became evident when tested by the need for explicit action, pointing to the need to fashion movements out of real relationships and grounded action. If discourse is conceived as text, then action requires that text encounter and be shaped by context.

In North American cities, shopping malls are heralded as the new town square. Historically, the town square was a place where diverse people came together and where politics, economics and sociability were intermingled. However, shopping centres, which are separated from the old downtown by distance or design, seem for many people to be the new heart of public and social life. It is argued in this article that the regulation of the spaces of the mall is intended to create 'community' rather than a 'public'. In the process of creating community, the political potential of public space and the quality of publicity created are contorted so as to muffle political opposition and critique in the name of civility. This argument is illustrated through an examination of the Carousel Center Mall in Syracuse, New York.

Over the past 10-15 years, many cities in the US have experienced a form of development unknown since World War II-middle-income housing in their downtown cores. Such downtown housing initiatives assume that functional interdependence among different property sectors-office, residential, retail, entertainment-will ensue and that the resultant, co-ordinated investments will produce a lively and attractive downtown environment. This article explores the impediments to this synergism using a perspective that emphasises the 'thicknesses' of property markets; that is, the social, institutional and place-specific qualities of real estate investment. New York City's lower Manhattan revitalisation plan, designed to subsidise office conversions, is used as an example.

The effect of land leases as opposed to freehold tenure on selling price is investigated for income property in proximity to the city centre. Hedonic estimation with multiplicative and additive models in a cross-section analysis is used to estimate the relationship between property characteristics on the one hand and selling price on the other. If land leases are valued by the market as the present value of the lease payments independent of other property features, an additive lease component should be appropriate. If, on the other hand, the valuation of the land lease aspect is not independent of other property features, a multiplicative lease component should be appropriate. Theoretical arguments can be advanced for either point of view, making it interesting to study the issue empirically. A sub-issue of interest is the effect on value of distance to the city centre. The sample consists of major apartment buildings centrally located in downtown Stockholm sold during a selected three-year period.

This paper uses US Census Bureau data from 1990 to identify employment centres in the five counties surrounding Cleveland, Ohio. The results indicate the extent to which the former dominance of downtown Cleveland has been eroded by the growth of suburban employment centres. Location quotient analysis is used to identify the specialisations of each of the employment centres. The results illustrate the extent to which the changes in urban form identified by researchers examining cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago have become the norm for cities throughout the US.

Probes into the consumer culture in the postmodern city through a survey of a population that recently moved into refurbished homes in downtown Manchester, England. Attraction to the middle class of culturally based urban regeneration; Cultural consumption and lifestyle; Sociology of contemporary cultural change.

A theory is posed with some empirical support on how the American exurban land market behaves near edge cities. The exurban land market exists beyond the built-up urban area within commuting range of urban employment and service opportunities. It responds differently to proximity to downtown, edge cities and the boundary of urban development. Three relationships between the value of exurban land and these landscape features are theorised and empirically supported. First, as exurban households are dependent upon dispersed employment opportunities and rely on the urban area for many services, the value of residential land falls with respect to distance from the boundary of urban development. Secondly, since exurban households view edge cities as sources of congestion, pollution, noise and other factors associated with perceived ills of suburbia, the value of exurban land rises with respect to distance from edge cities. Thirdly, since downtowns are the dominant centre of reference for many metropolitan regions, exurban land values fall with respect to distance from downtowns. Taken together, exurban land values fall with respect to distance from the boundary of urban development but, because of the disamenity influences of edge cities, at a flatter slope than suggested by monocentric land value theory. The effect of edge cities may be to push the urban field farther out than would be expected without this influence.

This paper examines work-residence relations for downtown and suburban head office employees working in Greater Vancouver during a period of rapid house price inflation. Using data for the entire head office workforce of two utility corporations, the effects of severe house price inflation and the decentralization of one of the corporations are assessed as they have influenced changing residential patterns and the journey to work. Next, the results of a survey of 229 employees are discussed in terms of the journey to work, residential quality, and residential affordability. Suburban office workers enjoy a 25 per cent differential in their journey-to-work time. While there are no major variations for the entire sample between downtown and suburban workers in residential affordability, significant subgroup differences emerge. The theme of employee adjustment to changing conditions appears in the data.

There exists a substantial variation in apartment rents between cities of the world. Several factors must contribute to inter-city variations in rents. This paper presents an empirical identification and measurement of some of the relevant factors explaining the variations in rents between a sample of forty-nine cities. The results of our empirical analysis show that the variables which explain inter-city variations in rents are: population size, costs of public and private intra-urban transport, tax assessments, and social insurance contributions.