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This chapter addresses the related questions of how to assess housing redevelopment and what constitutes a successful redevelopment project, based on the HOPE VI transformation of Boston’s Orchard Park from one of the city’s most notorious, crime-ridden public housing projects into a mixed-income community that remained overwhelmingly composed of low-income residents.

The analysis is based on a unique set of interviews with a sample of residents before and after housing redevelopment occurred. In addition, we draw upon interviews with housing authority staff, official agency file documents, and archival materials.

We find increased residential satisfaction after redevelopment but lingering concerns about safety and security despite marked declines in crime. Although the redevelopment process displaced some households, residents attributed improvements in living conditions to changes in tenant composition prompted by the housing transformation.

The results suggest an alternative model of public housing redevelopment that accommodates a majority of poor, subsidized households with some displacement. Still, loss of housing units, tenant selection, and social problems complicate notions of successful redevelopment.

This chapter contributes to the literature by showing how some low-income families may benefit from housing displacement induced by the redevelopment process. We analyze an overlooked but frequently implemented approach to housing redevelopment under the HOPE VI program to keep the majority of redeveloped units for low-income residents. It is the only study of which we are aware that has collected public housing resident opinions both before and after HOPE VI redevelopment occurred.

In the post-industrial economies of large urban centers, redevelopment has become the primary engine of economic growth. Redevelopment projects are designed to encourage investment, attract tourism and bring new residents to the city. This form of city building is driven by a neoliberal urban agenda that embraces privatization, and is controlled by the economic interests of private business. In this chapter, we argue that city building under a neoliberal rubric is also a gendered political process, the outcome of which is the redevelopment of urban space in ways that reflect a masculinist and corporatist view of city life. Moreover, both the form of redevelopment and the process itself function to limit public participation in the life and growth of cities, particularly for women and other marginalized groups. In the first section of this chapter, Gendered spaces of redevelopment, we examine how the results of such a process are made manifest in the built form of Canada's largest city, Toronto, with a population of 2.5 million. The city is experiencing a major process of redevelopment and city building that is evident in a massive wave of condominium construction. We suggest that condominium projects, as a particular form of redevelopment, create privatized spaces and encourage privatized services that articulate neatly with a neoliberal urban agenda.

Governor Robert F. Casey made his first state visit to Homestead, Pennsylvania the day after his inauguration in January 1987 to announce a package of plans for restoring economic vitality to metropolitan Pittsburgh in the wake of steel's collapse. Earlier urban renewal had involved large-scale demolition of older downtowns for conversion to commercial and industrial use, but state and local officials now emphasized a two-pronged redevelopment approach largely modeled on the success of the postwar suburbs. The closure of the Monongahela River (Mon) Valley's mammoth steel mills opened large swaths of land and prompted calls for planned riverfront manufacturing and retail districts similar to those sites sprouting up at suburban interchanges. A second and related effort involved schemes to build new highways tying aging communities in the river valleys to both Pittsburgh and new suburban growth areas, such as the sprawling “edge city” of Monroeville less than 10miles away. Indeed, Casey had a special project in mind for revitalizing the iconic Homestead – construction of the long-delayed Mon/Fayette Expressway that would parallel the river south of Pittsburgh. “This is another big step [to] help bring businesses and jobs into the region,” the governor later declared. “No longer is this valley a forgotten valley” (as cited in Basescu, 1989, p. 1).

Previous research has shown that gentrification has mixed effects on residents of the community. This paper focuses on the differential implications of gentrification for youth in the gentrifying area and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Interviews were conducted among youth aged 11–16 and their parents in Asbury Park, a shore community in New Jersey that is currently experiencing tourism-related redevelopment.

Respondents describe various ways that gentrification creates visible disparities between neighborhoods. Uneven spatial investment leads youth and their parents to perceive their immediate, disinvested residential surroundings as more dangerous and violent than invested spaces near the ocean. Displacement causes neighborhood social networks of remaining residents to dissolve and erodes the social fabric of the community. Moreover, the prohibitive cost of new amenities limits residents’ access to new leisure opportunities nearby.

Future studies could compare similarly sized communities experiencing gentrification specific to tourism, as well as communities experiencing different types of redevelopment. Future studies should also seek to include a more representative sample of Latino residents.

This study contributes to our understanding of how children and youth experience gentrification. These findings should be of interest to policymakers, developers, and those working directly with youth, including teachers and social workers.

These findings point to how youth experience gentrification differently according to their proximity or distance from invested areas. This should influence measures to improve service provision and access.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on experiences of individuals living in gentrifying spaces by focusing on children whose families remain in the community.

This chapter looks at the changing politics of urban redevelopment in a politically divided democratic regime following the end of state socialism in 1989. It contrasts the emergence of two cultural institutions of national importance, the Palace of Arts and the National Theatre, as part of a megaproject in Budapest. They emerged almost at the same time as part of the Millennium City Center, a large-scale urban redevelopment project, but have come to stand for two radically opposed worlds dividing the nation and pitting against each other – the cosmopolitans and the nationalists. The research design is that of incorporated comparison; the two case studies are embedded in the analysis of the larger redevelopment project. The study mixes primary and secondary sources; draws on interviews, extensive discussions with architects and planners, as well as an analysis of planning documents, expert reports, and media coverage. It describes the dynamics of private–public partnerships in urban politics pointing to the changing role of the post-socialist state and the new power relations among the various groups involved in urban development in a newly democratizing regime. On the one hand, the analysis shows how local and national-scale political fights make sense from a larger political–economic perspective of waterfront regeneration; on the other, it argues that party politics in politically divided regimes have serious implications on the processes of large-scale urban development, ultimately making them even more under-determined than suggested by the literature. The chapter breaks the assumed unity of the state in studies of urban megaprojects and demonstrates the usefulness of both a scalar analysis and that of the changing political content of the state, which ultimately account for much of the variation in this global genre.

The purpose of the chapter is twofold. First, it discusses the causes and characteristics of the current proliferation of rail station area redevelopment megaprojects around the globe, revealing them to be an important subset of the new generation of megaprojects discussed in this volume. Second, it offers a detailed and timely account of recent struggles surrounding “Stuttgart 21,” a massive, hugely controversial rail station redevelopment megaproject in Southern Germany, drawing lessons from the controversy over Stuttgart 21 for urban megaprojects more generally. This study is a qualitative case study analysis that involved interviews and document analysis. The experience of “Stuttgart 21” validates previous criticisms of megaprojects regarding transparency and public accountability in decision-making, environmental challenges, and cost-overruns. The political conflicts over “Stuttgart 21” are intimately tied to fundamental disagreements over future urban development and transportation policy, the costs and benefits of multibillion Euro megaprojects, and related democratic decision-making procedures. Rail stations emerge as an important, as-of-yet underexplored subset of urban megaprojects. Rail stations, especially those serving new high-speed rail corridors, are crucial development nodes within complex postindustrial urban–regional restructuring processes. But they also have a distinct character and historical identity. As the mass protests in Stuttgart show, they also clearly serve important identification functions in citizens’ lives.

This chapter discusses the Brazilian redevelopment policy denominated urban operation. First implemented in São Paulo in the 1980s, it was included in the Brazilian federal urban legislation in 2001 as an instrument to promote the redevelopment of great urban areas through public–private partnerships. On the one hand, the local public administration would provide incentives to investments in a given project, especially by selling construction rights; on the other hand, the value captured would be reinvested in the same area, following a list of works that may include urban infrastructure and services. The main benefits expected are structural change without onus for the public administration; a more balanced urban growth, estimulating higher density in areas well served by urban infrastructure; and real estate valorization. Nevertheless, this chapter critically analyzes its early experiences in São Paulo, demonstrating an entrepreneurial and speculative logic of spatial production. In this sense, the chapter is structured in four parts. The first one presents the legal instrument, while the following two sections explore the two main aspects of its functioning: great urban projects and public–private partnerships. In the final section, the Urban Operation Faria Lima will be assessed, especially on its attempts to promote São Paulo as a global city. If it is not possible to generalize from this particular experience, it exposes the necessity of discussing how the instrument, now a federal policy, may be implemented in other Brazilian cities, which type of redevelopment it may promote and for whom.

This paper analyzes the connection between black political protest and mobilization, and the rise and fall of a black urban regime. The case of Oakland is instructive because by the mid-1960s the ideology of “black power” was important in mobilizing two significant elements of the historically disparaged black community: (1) supporters of the Black Panthers and, (2) neighborhood organizations concentrated in West Oakland. Additionally, Oakland like the city of Atlanta also developed a substantial black middle class that was able to mobilize along the lines of its own “racialized” class interests. Collectively, these factors were important elements in molding class-stratified “black power” and coalitional activism into the institutional politics of a black urban regime in Oakland. Ultimately, reversal factors would undermine the black urban regime in Oakland. These included changes in the race and class composition of the local population: black out-migration, the “new immigration,” increasing (predominantly white) gentrification, and the continued lack of opportunity for poor and working-class blacks, who served as the unrequited base of the black urban regime. These factors would change the fortunes of black political life in Oakland during the turbulent neoliberal era.

Cities by the sea have a strong identity which comes from the historic relationship between an urban community and the ocean and is important in attracting tourists. This chapter analyzes urban regeneration, waterfront redevelopment, touristic valorization, and marketing strategies used by seaside cities that, by sharing their maritime culture, have achieved integrated urban transformations. This is facilitated by developing a “collaborative commons” of producers and consumers for the touristic enhancement of the metropolitan area such as Naples.