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This chapter compares programmes for urban housing regeneration in France and England, showing how ideological similarities reflected in policy ideas and programmes played out differently in significantly different contexts.

The chapter draws on results of several major research programmes, including in-depth extensive fieldwork in a number of cities and regions in France and England. Field research included participant observation in participatory planning events, interviews, home visits, guided walks in the districts, etc. These enabled a multi-site and multi-perspective understanding of urban housing renewal at different sites.

In both contexts, early promises for participation in housing renewal gave way to an imperative for demolition, justified on purely technical grounds that were not shared with participants. The linking of social mix and demolition for local ‘improvement’ also then appeared to be a contradiction between different policies that few residents could endorse, other than selected beneficiaries. Participation, social mix and demolition thus formed an unholy trinity in urban renewal policies.

Housing renewal requires much greater commitment to the experience of residents, to avoid exacerbating social problems rather than relieving them.

The chapter reflects on a wealth of in-depth research over more than a decade to consider the broader implications and outcomes of housing renewal programmes in two countries. It highlights the different balances of power in the two cases and the trajectories of respective urban social politics, including the overlaps between policy objectives and similarities in the government of housing renewal. It also highlights the determination and commitment among residents to the value of housing that is judged from the outside to be ‘poor’.

The chapter is concerned with the policy led by Paris and London towards the visual artists during the XXth century up to the present day. It examines in detail the evolution of the political system developed in France – as Paris was the center of artistic culture – from philanthropic initiatives, the “cités d’artistes,” to the introduction of painters and sculptors in social lodgings in the 1920s by the City of Paris. This impulse was supported by the Ministry of Culture. The expression of welfare state promoting artists in Paris is opposed to the emergence of “arts infrastructure” in the former industrial buildings of London through various artists’ associations, such as Space and Acme. From an historical research and a sociological analysis concentrated on Paris and its suburbs, our fieldwork, we studied an emblematic example, Montmarte-aux-artists, located in the 18th arrondissement the evolution of the welfare politics concerning artists’ studios in the urban renovation of Paris up to the present day. In contrast, the social support concerning the artists living in London is opposite and the effects on the urban area are different. Our research is inspired from the School of Chicago methodology. The main results of our research underline how the introduction of artists’ studios in social lodgings reveals an utopian dimension linked to the artist. So, the artist is considered as a singular inhabitant who can encourage the empowerment in the social housings or who can contribute to the phenomenon of gentrification in an area. However, the utopian role given to the artists is limited to the social and political system.

Recent interest in the multimodal accomplishment of organization has focused on the material and symbolic aspects of materiality. We argue that current literature invokes diverse “multimodal imaginaries,” that is, ways of conceiving the relation between the material and the conceptual, and that the different imaginaries support a plurality of perspectives on materiality. Using the empirical case of a large urban renewal project in São Paulo, Brazil, we illustrate three different multimodal imaginaries – the concrete, the semiotic, and the mimetic – and indicate how each imaginary determines the way in which the site in question is discursively constructed. After outlining the different approaches, we discuss their theoretical implications, advantages, and constraints, setting an agenda for future studies of materiality in organizational and institutional contexts.

The chapters by Joo, Gerardo del Cerro Santamaría, and Bunnell have shown that UMPs go beyond the local scale regarding development, implementation, and consequences. In fact, as they argue the projects in South Korea, Bilbao, and Kuala Lumpur obey a logic of reterritorialization à la Brenner, whereby the regional or national state actively participates in urban development by designing urban policies and projects which, in turn, exhibit political, economic, and visual dimensions going beyond the frontiers of the urban realm. This tendency has implications for the role of local politics in UMPs. Local political conditions (e.g., a housing shortage or a desire for global visibility) play a prominent role in the implementation of UMPs, as shown by the Bundang and Ilsan new towns in South Korea as well as Bunnell´s recounting of the reimagining of Kuala Lumpur. In Korea, strong central government control over the real estate market led to addressing the housing shortage and preventing real estate speculation; the chronic housing shortage, with the increased economic power of individuals, resulted in distinctive advance-sale and dual-pricing systems for new apartment units. The huge unmet housing demand in Korea during relative economic prosperity quickly filled Bundang and Ilsan’s housing units with new residents, contributing to the new towns’ successful outcomes.

In port cities with declining industries, waterfront redevelopment is one major part of the competitive agenda. The increasing economic importance of service, leisure, and tourism industries created an opportunity to reuse urban waterfront areas no longer considered profitable. Parque das Nações in Lisbon is a product of such a process: It’s a newly built mixed-use waterfront neighborhood, planned, and developed, first and foremost, to be the site of Expo ’98. This former industrial and port area has been emerging in the last 15 years as a “showcase” for Lisbon: a piece of the competitive strategy of the Portuguese capital. Its public spaces are an important part of that strategy and have been managed in order to remain particularly safe and clean.

On one hand, Parque das Nações is a socially homogenous elite residential neighborhood, on the other hand, it is emerging as a new metropolitan centrality characterized by an intense mobility and by an increasing concentration of urbanites carrying on work and leisure related activities. It is the coexistence of these two complementary and contradictory dynamics that shapes the interactive logic of public life in the area.

This chapter explores the use, appropriation, and interaction patterns afforded by the public spaces of Parque das Nações. I discard both the idealized conception of public spaces that characterizes them as havens of diversity and accessibility and the more contemporary idea of public spaces as empty spaces that no longer promote encounters with others, serving exclusively as marketing tools for real-estate developers. Instead, I argue that the production of urban areas such as Parque das Nações is a socially unequal process resulting in excessively planned and controlled public spaces. However, when they attract different populations for different reasons, these spaces might foster unexpected, emergent, or even transgressive uses and interactions that promote public space vitality.

Investigating some enriching perspectives on mid-career PSM and UrbEd ‘teaching, researching and innovation’ (Public Sector Management; Urban Education).

Alternative approaches, analyses, designs and methods (1) focused on national and local problems and policies, (2) to be reconstructed, researched, taught and enriched in practice-oriented MEd-courses for mid-careerists and (3) which might strengthen their capacities to shift from reflection in action to reflection on action. Two decades of UrbEd and PSM experiences in Amsterdam and Rotterdam are analysed. New perspectives – Social Quality and Artistic Empowerment initiatives – are assessed. The implications for current and future higher education policies and perspectives are then considered.

Initiatives implemented since the 1980s are bearing fruit. These address urban problems, foster innovation, enhance mid-career education and enable cross-border initiatives such as Social Quality measures. Such measures are well supported at the moment by practice-oriented policies at Applied Science Universities (ASUs).

The chapter’s recommendations might incite lecturers, (mid-career-) professionals of ASUs and local managers and authorities to intensify their cooperation with urban renewal projects and vice versa.

Since the end of the twentieth century a movement has been observed, both in geography of tourism and in fashion, spreading to districts located on the outskirts of cities. This is the case of Château Rouge, located in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. For years considered as a “no-go-zone,” the district is now experiencing parallel phenomena of “off-the-beaten-tracks” tourism and fashion development. This chapter analyzes the processes and actors behind the expansion of the tourism perimeter and the diversification of fashion venues, as well as the implications of these developments for the city of Paris.