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The neighborhoods north and northwest of downtown St Louis are blighted by their abundance of substandard, abandoned, and demolished housing. Crime, poverty, and unemployment are high while family stability, educational achievement, and health outcomes are low. These conditions are not unique to St Louis, but can be found in neighborhoods in every city in America. How did this happen? What factors led to the demise of these neighborhoods? This chapter examines the history of St Louis along with theories of neighborhood succession to identify possible explanations for the city's collapse.

The purpose of this paper is to review the economic theories that lie behind the assessment of compulsory purchase compensation and the issues that arise from them.

The method has been to review the literature about the theories and the critiques of them and to examine the extent to which they provide guidance in specific cases.

The Hicks-Kaldor compensation test was developed as a way around certain problems in welfare economics but attempts to use it to determine whether projects involving compulsory purchase increase welfare are subject to a number of problems. Ultimately, there are issues of equity as well as efficiency so that a test that just looks at efficiency issues is problematic.

Understanding the weaknesses in the theoretical models behind compulsory purchase compensation can help policy makers devise alternative approaches in situations in which land has to be assembled for regeneration or infrastructure projects and fairer systems of compensation.

The use of the Hicks-Kaldor test has been challenged in environmental economics but the validity of these criticisms for compulsory purchase has not been recognised to the same extent. The use of some original case studies helps to identify some of the issues and alternatives.

Blighted and vacant properties represent a persistent and costly problem for cities and local governments throughout the USA. The purpose of this paper is to identify data needs and requirements for value creation in the context of urban blight. The main assumption is that sharing and opening data through a robust and effective code enforcement program will facilitate more informed management, mitigation and remediation of blighted and vacant properties. Code enforcement programs must be grounded on organizational and technical infrastructures that enable data sharing and value creation for the city and the communities that share its space.

In this paper, the information needs and realities of a city’s code enforcement environment are described, based on data gathered through a series of workshops and focus groups with a range of stakeholders, which included city government departments, police, fire, bank representatives, realtors and community groups.

The analysis reveals key data elements that could potentially help to build a code enforcement program to better manage the cycles and costs of urban blight. Although some of these data elements already exist, and are public, they are not easily accessible to key stakeholders. The paper ends with sets of short-term and long-term recommendations for establishing an information-sharing infrastructure, which would serve as the main conduit for exchanging code enforcement data among a number of city government departments and the public that may play a role in managing urban blight and its consequences.

In this paper, the authors are connecting extant literature on sharing and opening data with literature on the creation of public value. They argue that sharing and opening government data constitute effective ways of managing the costs and cycles of urban blight while creating value. As a result of an initial assessment of data and information requirements, the authors also point to specific data and its potential value from stakeholder perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the study of representative bureaucracy by exploring attitudes about the use of public funds to support privately‐owned real estate development projects. Data collected from over 1,400 members of the American Planning Association are used to determine if urban planners' demographic characteristics influence attitudes about public‐private partnerships designed to achieve different policy goals. By examining these linkages, conclusions can be drawn as to whether diversity in the planning profession offers a means of ensuring citizen preferences are taken into account when collaborative arrangements are formed to encourage urban development.

Ordinal logistic regression models are estimated to determine if the characteristics of urban planners influence perceptions about real estate projects designed to: provide affordable housing; eliminate urban blight; encourage the use of public transportation; prevent urban sprawl; enhance pedestrian mobility; and preserve historic structures.

Strong support for public‐private partnerships was observed in the sample and demographic characteristics were found to influence attitudes. Minority planners tended to be more supportive of programs designed to provide affordable housing and eliminate blight, while female planners and planners in older age cohorts were more supportive of efforts to rejuvenate urban areas. Political ideology was, however, found to have the most consistent impact on attitudes.

The paper's results suggest diversity in the planning profession offers one means of protecting citizen preferences when public‐private partnerships are formed to encourage urban development. However, the benefits of diversity must be evaluated in conjunction with planners' attitudes about the appropriate role of government in real estate development.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of tax increment financing (TIF) as a viable financial mechanism for urban regeneration programmes in Nigeria. This is with a view to engendering a sustainable, productive and competitive urban land market towards enhancing the economic development of the country.

This paper adopts a desk-based study approach and review of secondary literature on urban regeneration and TIF to examine the usefulness of TIF for funding local infrastructure development. It then examines the key requirements for the successful application of TIF as a financial instrument for urban regeneration in an emergent economy like Nigeria.

A number of key requirements for a successful TIF programme particularly in the context of an emergent economy are identified. These are: a functional urban land market with well-developed and documented market indices on performance measurement to serve as reliable benchmarks for investors; an established land use planning system consisting of clear rules and effective decision-making processes; an active capital market that is accessible to institutional and private developers; a viable tax administration system and most importantly an efficient institutional framework with clearly defined formal property rights and sound enforcement mechanisms to monitor contractual agreements and to police deviations.

This paper represents a pioneering attempt at examining the prospects of the application of TIF to urban regeneration in the specific context of an emergent Sub-Saharan African country.

Of the many problems which confront urban policy makers and planners at the present time, that of housing the lower income groups is one of the most general and the most pressing. The term “lower income groups” is used advisedly and not merely as a euphemism for “the poor” who live in “slums”. Housing quality covers a wide spectrum from the most luxurious to the most spartan and while on the whole it is closely related to the current income of the household, the association is not perfect. The level of income is of vital importance in achieving a given level of quality but the contraction of incomes towards the end of the lifespan of a household is not necessarily associated with a lowering of housing quality. Equally, the slum is a multi‐dimensional concept which though easy to recognise is difficult to define. Not all housing occupied by low paid workers are slums and not all slum‐dwellers are poor. The term “slum” often denotes a type of neighbourhood in which flourishes a sub‐culture containing its own socio‐economic stratification. The solution of low income housing problems is obviously closely bound up with the question of slums but neither begins nor ends with it. The purpose of this paper is to examine the causes of the housing market manifestations of the problems of urban blight or congestion from the economic point of view (i.e. to consider the operation of the market mechanism in allocating resources) and to suggest an approach to the formulation of policy which will achieve an economically efficient distribution of housing resources.

I remember some ten years ago taking my children north across the Woolwich ferry, making for the highest tower block of flats we could see, and taking the lift to the top floor as this was the only way to get a good view into London's docks. Stretched out below were the oblongs of water, holding the ships etched in black and white with vivid bands of colour round their funnels, overhung with the tracery of cranes and derricks. Today there is no need for such complications: one can drive straight through Gate 19 into King George V docks, along the wide empty roads to the waterfront. I saw two ships moored on the north side, “Bunga Orchid”, carrying containers which were handled by the traditional cranes, and “El Flamingo”, carrying timber. Each was some 6,000 tons and each was importing — historically the trade was either import or export at one berth, not both, for congestion precluded the double operation. Today there is no congestion. The great sheds and lines of grey cranes are still there, and with them the small brick block offices of the shipping companies who have long gone. In one such block on the south side, a small firm, Advanced Battery Systems (Pb) Ltd, has taken up residence, having started originally in temporary accommodation at what was once the Medical Centre of the National Dock Labour Board. From the upper floor of the company's new home the skyline of tower blocks, chimneys, cranes and the occasional church spire is bright on a sharp December morning.

The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize space as a field of struggles between multiple agents.

The author draws from field theory and uses visual methods to explain how graffiti shapes how neighborhoods are branded and aligned with creative city redevelopment plans.

By exploring space/place as field, the author moves beyond the structure/culture dichotomy to explain both place making and displacement.

The findings suggest gentrification is not an abstract force, but rather the outcome of struggles to define place and attract new, consuming populations to the neighborhood.

Sociologists share a long and rich tradition of associating opportunity with space that traces back to W.E.B. DuBois’ research on the seventh ward in The Philadelphia Negro (1899). More recently, sociologists have reified space and have attempted to distinguish place as an outcome of human experience. How space and place is reproduced remains unclear. This paper contributes toward the understanding of space, place-making and displacement.

This paper aims to focus on increasingly entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance in the country’s second city Cork, where neoliberal strategy has driven uneven spatial development.

This paper combines insights from literature review with new knowledge derived from interviews with key informants in the city.

Post-colonial themes provoke a consideration of how uneven power dynamics stifle social innovation in the built environment.

Assembled narratives expose opaque aspects of governance, ownership and participation, presenting opportunities for rethinking urban vacancy through placemaking.

These draw on nuanced models for tourism as a platform for a broader discourse on rights to the city.

A century after independence, Ireland is recast as a leading small European economy, away from historical framings of a rural economic backwater of the British Empire.

The model of success is based on a basket of targeted investment policies and somewhat dubious indicators for growth.