ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Keeping it Real: Reconciling Housing Pressures and Economic Character in the Heart of the European City.

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 13 | HOUSING AND SHELTER

Speaker

Dr Austin Barber (University of Birmingham)

Description

A defining planning challenge for contemporary European cities is the housing provision and affordability crisis. City planners are compelled to increase the delivery of dwellings, while addressing concerns about affordability, project viability, and functional complementarity through mixed-use developments. Moreover, in the context of climate crisis, these ambitions are accompanied by concerns over how to best achieve a “humane” form of urban density which addresses liveability, prosperity and environmental considerations.
This complex planning challenge is especially acute in second tier, restructuring cities, where there is an economic imperative to attract and retain young households and talent as part of their competitive and prosperity policy agendas, while strengthening the existing economic base and resident’s needs.
Tackling this can entail difficult decision-making involving the prioritisation of certain policy objectives and balancing various planning interventions. . One such conundrum is how to retain and nurture the kind of small business base which typically flourishes in centrally-located, yet often marginally-invested in, areas of the city. These business activity concentrations often serve as contributors to the distinctiveness of cities as well as important seedbeds of economic innovation. Yet they are located where opportunity and market pressure for new housing is most acute.
The challenge of reconciling these priorities – “keeping it real” – is explored here through comparative case study research involving second tier cities Birmingham (UK) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) and their experience in managing change in central station urban regeneration areas. These second tier cities face similar planning cultural context and the challenges mentioned above, with the station areas Digbeth (Birmingham) and Schiekadeblok (Rotterdam) as cases in point. Both regeneration sites with established fine-grain local entrepreneurial and cultural economies, experience market pressure to accommodate high density housing due to their vicinity to high speed rail station investments and improved connectivity resulting in contested pro-preservation versus pro-development visions for the area.
This study explores the implications of the use of planning tools, policies, and powers on the decision-making and actions by key actors in two urban transformation areas. It addresses the following question: how do actors make decisions about the integration of planning challenges in mixed-use urban station areas balancing established local economies with housing development pressure. It considers understanding and framing decision-making processes around retaining often scrappy business space , (re-)integrating these functions into new developments, by using density and development processes as a mechanism for innovation – all through lens of the cities’ planning histories, cultures and governance contexts.

References

Naess, P. (2018) Urban Sustainability: Is Densification Sufficient? European Planning Studies, 28, 1, pp146-165
Wicki, M. et al (2022) Planning Instruments Enchance the Acceptance of Urban Densification, PNAS, 199 (38).
Dembski S. et al (2020) Enhancing Understanding of Strategies of Land Policy for Urban Densification, Town Planning Review 91, 3.