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For a good part of the U.S. system of federalism municipal incorporation has been the formal structure for local communities. Over the last 60 years there has been a shift in this structure to special district government. The Woodlands, Texas presents an interesting case study on the incremental development of a former New Town community, the change in formal government organization and the potential for a different model of local governance structure in the 21st Century. The authors explore the four stages of development for The Woodlands over the past 40 years and assess this development through several model theories including institutional, urban regime, and urban governance. Contrary to some current literature on governance, The Woodlands appears to have transitioned from decentralization to more centralization while at the same time avoiding full incorporation as a municipality. It may be indicative of the new governance.

Playing as a global city, to maintain the economic dynamics and urban vitality, Hong Kong government would like to take urban regeneration in urban core as a kind of urban growth strategy. The government monopolizes land supply for urban development through the leasehold system, while the redevelopment agency is authorized to take land acquisition for urban redevelopment. The transformation of agency from Land Development Corporation (LDC) to Urban Renewal Authority (URA) reflected the formation of a coalition composed of quasi-public redevelopment agency and private developer, which facilitates land and property resumption in urban redevelopment. The URA-led projects often tend to redevelop obsolete communities into up-market neighborhoods, which possibly enables redevelopment agency and developers to gain more economic benefits from real estate appreciation. Nevertheless, evidences from some large redevelopment projects conducted by URA in Hong Kong such as Lee Tung Street, Langham Palace and Kennedy Town have presented that urban redevelopment is closely associated with gentrification triggered by displacement of original neighborhood residents. Hence gentrification in Hong Kong has raised more and more concerns about booming housing price as well as fragmentation of social networks. Through urban regime combined with growth machine approach, this paper will explain the collusion of redevelopment agency and private developers that jointly turns the URA-led redevelopment into neighborhood gentrification. And by examining Kwun Tong Town Centre Project (KTTCP), findings indicate that soaring property value will crowd low-income groups and working classes out from their original neighborhoods; and then those gentrified residential estates will be occupied by rich class. Moreover, increasing rent and operation costs will inevitably eliminate those family-operated small businesses; and then they will be superseded by high-end retailing and services. In this way, urban morphology will be reshaped perpetually through more and more gentrified neighborhoods.

Local governments have long been concerned with economic growth and development. Some local governments take an aggressive, proactive stance on economic development, while others take a more incremental, reactionary approach. When economic development opportunities arise, the frequently asked question is “Who’s on first?” Is it the responsibility of local government to take the lead in promoting economic development opportunities, or should local government remain in the background leaving development activities to private developers? This article uses community power theory to examine the evolution of economic development in Wichita, Kansas and the roles played by the public and private sectors and their impact on the course of development activities. In order for a booster regime to be successful, the lead government must establish the legitimacy of the development effort with other potential members of the coalition. The lead government must establish a hospitable business climate and establish a commitment to support the infrastructure and service needs of developers. Coalition members must view the undertaking as a positive-sum gain.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how North American professional team owners are engaging in broader urban development projects that have their teams as anchor tenants in new sports facilities, by examining the case of Rogers Arena in Edmonton, Canada.

Approached from a constructionist perspective, the study employed an instrumental case study strategy as it facilitates understanding and description of a particular phenomenon and allows researchers to use the case as a comparative point across other settings (with similar conditions) in which the phenomenon might be present.

Using urban regime theory as a framework, the authors found that in Edmonton, the team owner was able to align his interests with other political and business interests by engaging in a development strategy that increased the vibrancy of Edmonton’s downtown core. As a result, the owner was able to garner support for both the arena and the surrounding development.

The authors argue that this new model of team owner as developer has several implications: on-field performance may only be important insofar as it drives demand for the development; the owner’s focus is on driving revenues and profits from interests outside of the sports facility itself; and the team (and the threat of relocation) is leveraged to gain master developer status for the ownership group.

This paper adds to the understanding of owner interests and how franchise profitability and solvency can be tied to other related business interests controlled by team owners.

The purpose of this paper is to explore urban mobilisation patterns in two post-Soviet cities: Vilnius and Moscow. Both cities were subject to similar housing and urban policy during Soviet times, and they have implemented urban development using neoliberal market principles, provoking grassroots opposition from citizens to privatisation and marketisation of their housing environment and local public space. However, the differing conditions of democratic Lithuanian and authoritarian Russian public governance offer different opportunities and set different constraints for neighbourhood mobilisation. The purpose is to contrast local community mobilisations under the two regimes and highlight the differences between and similarities in the activists’ repertoires of actions in two distinct political and economic urban settings.

The paper employs qualitative methodology using data from semi-structured interviews conducted with community activists and state officials, presented using a comparative case study design.

Although, citizens’ mobilisations in the two cities are reactions to the neoliberalisation of housing and local public space, they take different forms. In Vilnius they are institutionalised and receive formal support from national and local authorities. Moreover, support from the EU encourages organisational development and provides material and cognitive resources for grassroots urban mobilisations. In contrast, residents’ mobilisations in Moscow are informal and face fierce opposition from local authorities. However, even in an authoritarian setting, grassroots mobilisations evolve using creative strategies to circumvent institutional constraints.

Little attention has been paid to grassroots urban mobilisations in post-Soviet cities. There is also a lack of comparative attempts to show variation in post-Soviet urban activism related to housing and local public space.

Smart urban governance research has progressed over the past few decades following changes and increasingly complicated city management difficulties. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to use a scoping review and bibliometric analysis to examine all the publications on smart urban governance, especially in Asia.

A total of 1,900 smart urban governance articles indexed in the Scopus database was analyzed through scoping review and bibliometric analysis. The articles were analyzed by the number of publications per year, contributing countries, subject areas, authors, cited documents, related issues and cited papers. Furthermore, VOSviewer was used to provide a visual analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords.

This study indicated that urban smart governance publications continue to increase yearly. Even though the area of analysis is Asia, the USA and China seriously contributed to the analysis. Therefore, the topic of smart urban governance has become a discussion for scholars in the international. From the Scopus database analysis, the top three subject areas are social sciences (28%), environmental science (20%) and medicine (16%). The synthesis using bibliometric analysis by VOSviewer obtained 13 clusters.

This study only focuses on the Scopus database and one specific topic, using one bibliometric analysis tool. Meanwhile, national and international index databases are not used.

This paper examined publication trends on smart urban governance. This paper provided a comprehensive analysis of topic-specific knowledge areas based on previous studies. Additionally, this paper suggested the direction of the development of smart urban governance in the future.

The aim of the research is to examine the role of property tax in land and building administration and to develop a dynamic model. The paper investigates the extent to which local governments take advantage of property tax in generating revenue and encouraging certain life cycle assessment-oriented land and building speculation patterns in Shashemene, Ethiopia.

The study was conducted using case study and survey research strategies. Shashemene's administrative area (i.e. specific to four peri-urban villages) was purposively selected as the case study area. A combination of different data collection instruments was employed: questionnaires and field observation. Moreover, an extensive survey of owners of undeveloped land and building, throughout the study area, was conducted. Multiple regression analysis was applied to the analyzed data as well as the use of dynamic modeling of land and building via qualitative and numerical analysis of property.

Results indicate that speculators will hold land and building for a marginal period only if the difference between present net rates of return exceeds the difference between discounted expected percent return.

This paper provides a simple model to recognize the optimum length of time to hold a parcel of land and building from the market by land speculators.

The introduction and potential implementation of dynamics modeling to the local government calls for controlling speculation that has resulted in local revenue enhancement.

Many Olympic cities are faced with the challenge of converting various remaining infrastructures after the Games have been held. These infrastructures, often imposing and highly specialized, require local actors to innovate and engage in an urban renewal process that can be very complex and expensive when trying to give them a second life as tourism sites. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Based on an online survey administered to international travellers (n=5,553) and 36 semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders, this study shows that the Olympic Park, mainly through the stadium, has international recognition.

However, the sustainability and development of these attractions will need a major overhaul with its welcoming amenities and the integration of the surrounding neighbourhoods in the regeneration plan.

Among these facilities, we have the Montreal Olympic Stadium, which is often identified as the architectural jewel of the games and is used as an urban flagship in tourism development strategies. This situation raises several questions not only in the field of tourism, but also the fields of urban studies, leisure and sociology. This paper will examine the case of the Olympic Park in Montreal and its urban regeneration concepts and place branding that have been integrated into the tourism strategies since the early 2000s.

The purpose of this paper is to understand urban sculpture venues that emerged in the recent decade and their connections to the on-going entrepreneurial urban policies and urban strategies in Shanghai. How does this phenomenon relate to Shanghai’s urban policies? How does urban sculpture development reflect the nature and characteristics of the urban sculpture authority?

Case study is the major research method used to achieve an in-depth understanding of the developmental processes, mechanisms and characteristics of urban sculpture projects. Three cases were selected and studied using purposeful sampling methods, including Duolun Road Sculpture Project (2002), the Shanghai International Sculpture Center (2006) and the Jing’an Sculpture Park (2009).

A twofold main argument is established in this paper. Urban sculpture venues emerged as a new type of instrument to advance urban entrepreneurial policies; the use of this instrument, however, also involves politics in that art politically transforms the features and functions of open spaces in Shanghai.

Although scholarly interest in exploring cultural development through urban planning in the Chinese context is evident, urban sculpture planning (termed as “urban sculpture” in the Chinese ideological context) in Chinese metropolitan cities, in particular, is an unexplored topic, and thus leaves a gap in the knowledge. This paper introduces a new conceptual model, i.e., “aesthetic regime,” to describe the role of the urban sculpture authority in the development of the urban sculpture scene. It looks at the artistic representation of artworks, design of the sculpture venues, functionality of the artworks and social mechanisms for the actualization of these projects. An evolutional trend of the three sites across the decade is concerned.

This study seeks to explore the powerful role(s) of institutionalised performance measurement systems or metrics in smart city governance in a politically and militarily sensitive developing country.

This study extends the application and contribution of a multi-level institutional framework to previous management accounting literature on the potential relationship between performance measurement and smart city governance. The value of utilising a multi-level framework is to broaden and deepen theoretical analyses about this relationship to include the effect of political pressure from the military regime at the macro level on the institutionalisation of a performance measurement system at the micro-organisational level. Taking the New Cairo city council smart electricity networks project (Egypt) as an interpretive qualitative single-case study, data collection methods included semi-structured interviews, direct observations and documentary readings.

Performance measurement systems or metrics, especially in politically and militarily sensitive smart cities, constitutes a process of cascading (macro-micro) institutionalisation that is closely linked to sustainable developments taking place in the wider arena of urban policies. Going a step further, accounting-based performance metrics, arising from political and military pressures towards public-private collaborations, contribute to smart city management and accountability (governance). Institutionalised measurement systems or performance metrics play a powerful accounting role(s) in shaping and reshaping political decisions and military actions in the city council.

Theoretically, this study goes beyond the cascading institutionalisation process by arguing for the powerful role(s) of institutionalised accounting and performance measurement systems in smart city decision-making and governance. Empirically, it enriches previous literature with a case study of a developing Arab Spring country, characterised by an emerging economy, political sensitivity and military engagement, rather than developed and more stable countries that have been thoroughly investigated. It is also among the first politically engaged accounting case studies to highlight public-private collaborations as a recent reform in public sector governance and accountability.