• In terms of the similarity sharing with U.S. urban renewal programs, both countries viewed older neighborhoods as outdated and blighted, encouraged local governments to cooperate
  with local development interests for downtown redevelopment, failed to provide enough support and concern for residents of cleared areas, who often were the low-income residents, and building plenty of highways to reach large scale urban sprawl.

• [4] Goals of urban renewal The goal of urban renewal evolved into a policy based less on destruction and more on renovation and investment, and today is an integral part of
  many local governments, often combined with small business and big business incentives.

• After having more research about urban renewal in terms of international trends and domestic development, the practitioners in the industry built consensus to use “urban renewal”
  to describe all the changes made to the old town area.

• Prior to the Urban Renewal policies of the 1950’s, cities in the United States revitalized with large scale projects like the design and construction of Central Park in New
  York and the 1909 Plan for Chicago by Daniel Burnham.

• [10] Israel[edit] New buildings under construction in Haifa as part of the evacuate and build program Israel has been undergoing extensive urban renewal projects due to the
  large number of concrete tenement buildings in its cities which do not meet modern Israeli safety standards and have what is widely considered to be an impoverished and unattractive appearance.

• [32] In Boston, one of the country’s oldest cities, almost a third of the old city was demolished—including the historic West End—to make way for a new highway, low- and moderate-income
  high-rises (which eventually became luxury housing), and new government and commercial buildings.

• It also planned for residential development by building a completely new community.

• [32] The Housing Act of 1949, also known as the Taft-Ellender-Wagner Act, provided federal loans to cities to acquire and clear slum areas to be sold to private developers
  to redevelop in accordance with a plan prepared by the city (normally with new housing), and grants to cover two-thirds of the portion of the city’s costs in excess of the sale prices received from the developers, as well as provide millions
  of dollars to create public housing throughout the country.

• These redevelopments then led to the success of Singapore’s urban renewal because the government could provide sufficient amount of public housing and business areas.

• A similar concept was carried out by Lombardy Region by mean of its Regional Law of 26 November 2019 – n. 18 “Simplification and incentive measures for urban and territorial
  regeneration, as well as for the recovery of existing building heritage.

• Examples most often cited as successes include Temple Bar in Dublin where tourism was attracted to a bohemian ‘cultural quarter’, Barcelona where the 1992 Olympics provided
  a catalyst for infrastructure improvements and the redevelopment of the water front area, and Bilbao where the building of a new art museum was the focus for a new business district around the city’s derelict dock area.

• The City Planning and Housing Council (CHPC) founded in 1937 had a large hand in the reconstruction of urban slums, with their primary mission being the elimination of poor
  housing conditions, creating less crowded and cleaner public housing.

• [32] In 1956, the Federal-Aid Highway Act gave state and federal government complete control over new highways, and often they were routed directly through vibrant urban neighborhoods—isolating
  or destroying many—since the focus of the program was to bring traffic in and out of the central cores of cities as expeditiously as possible and nine out of every ten dollars spent came from the federal government.

• This came to be seen as a tragedy by many residents and urban planners, and one of the centerpieces of the redevelopment—Government Center—is still considered an example of
  the excesses of urban renewal.

• Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States[1]) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address
  urban decay in cities.

• [citation needed] The redevelopment of urban land has been orchestrated by so called culturepreneurs, who develop and manage experiences that span traditional professions
  and artistic media, such as city beaches.

• These early projects were generally focused on slum clearance and were implemented by local public housing authorities, which were responsible both for clearing slums and
  for building new affordable housing.

• Although efforts were made to house the victims of the demolitions in the same area as before, in practice this was too difficult to fully implement and many people were rehoused
  in other areas, even different cities.

• [27] This marked the start of a long 20th century tradition of state-owned housing, which would much later evolve into council estates.

• Another problem was that the government had to purchase the private land owned by the middle and upper society to make the land vacant and be used for redevelopment.

• In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, huge areas of productive buildings were demolished to enable speculative future development which never materialized.

• The report’s recommendations, coupled with a chronic housing shortage after the First World War led to a government-led program of house building with the slogan ‘Homes for
  Heroes’.

• Christopher Addison, the Minister for Housing at the time was responsible for the drafting of the Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919 which introduced the new concept of
  the state being involved in the building of new houses.

• The aims of which is: • Tackling barriers to economic growth • Decreasing the level of unemployment • Increasing the level of attractiveness for both local residents and investors
  • Increasing residents satisfaction in where they live • Creating opportunities for deprived communities • Unlocking potential in deprived areas[3] Village renewal The process of urban regeneration is often carried out in rural areas, referred
  to as village renewal, though it may not be exactly the same in practice.

• In an effort to rehouse the poorest people affected by redevelopment, the rent for housing was set at an artificially low level, although this policy also only achieved mixed
  success.

• In the industry, researchers and practitioners used “old town reconstruction” and “urban regeneration” to describe the changes made to the urban decay area.

• At the 15th China Central City Work Conference, the policy, “urban repair and ecological restoration,” was put forward.

• Other programs, such as that in Castleford in the United Kingdom and known as The Castleford Project[30] seek to establish a process of urban renewal which enables local citizens
  to have greater control and ownership of the direction of their community and the way in which it overcomes market failure.

• The Housing Act of 1930 gave local councils wide-ranging powers to demolish properties unfit for human habitation or that posed a danger to health, and obligated them to rehouse
  those people who were relocated due to the large scale slum clearance programs.

• Black families that had their homes and neighborhoods destroyed had to find housing options deeper in the inner city as whites could then use those highways to spread further
  and further into the suburbs but continue to work in the city.

• Other cities across the US began to create redevelopment programs in the late 1930s and 1940s.

• [26] Interwar period[edit] The 1917 Tudor Walters Committee Report into the provision of housing and post-war reconstruction in the United Kingdom, was commissioned by Parliament
  as a response to the shocking lack of fitness amongst many recruits during the War; this was attributed to poor living conditions, a belief summed up in a housing poster of the period “you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes”.

• [17] Since the establishment of the Republic of Singapore, urban renewal has been included in the part of the national improvement policy that was urgently put in action.

• The politics of urban renewal which frequently relies on the state’s dominance in the discourse of removing the character and infrastructure of older city cores, with that
  which is required by existing market based constituents has to be examined further.

• Syracuse, Cincinnati, and Niagara Falls, among many others, cleared entire neighborhoods under urban renewal plans only to have the cleared areas end up as surface parking
  lots, sparse industrial uses, and vacant land.

• “Planning is inherently political”, however, the urban development in China for the past decade is strikingly similar to the situation in many Western countries.

• A primary purpose of urban renewal is to restore economic viability to a given area by attracting external private and public investment and by encouraging business start-ups
  and survival.

• Urban renewal involves the clearing out of blighted areas in inner cities to clear out slums and create opportunities for higher class housing, businesses, and other developments.

• [37][38] Early to mid-20th century Detroit was a prime area for urban “redevelopers”, as much of the city had only decrepit housing available.

• [15] Singapore[edit] Main article: Urban renewal in Singapore The history of Singapore’s urban renewal goes back to the time period surrounding the Second World War.

• In addition, these buildings do not meet modern safety regulations: Israeli law has required all new buildings to be built in an earthquake-resistant manner since 1980 and
  to be built with bomb shelters since 1991.

• The redevelopment hoped to increase the prosperity of the eastern district and the convenience of urban life for existing residents.

• [11][12][13] Italy[edit] In Italy, the concept of urban renewal had been having the classical meaning of “recovery”, “re-use”, and also “redevelopment” for many years.

• [18] Affordable land value also became one of its reasons.

• Areas are often cleared in order to construct highways, which bring pollution and heavy vehicle traffic to surrounding neighborhoods, or replaced with experimental new development
  patterns which prove undesirable or not economically sustainable.

• Like many of the social housing estates, the Abbey Orchard Estate was built following the square plan concept.

• [32] In 1944, the GI Bill (officially the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act) guaranteed Veterans Administration (VA) mortgages to veterans under favorable terms, which fueled
  suburbanization after the end of World War II, as places like Levittown, New York, Warren, Michigan and the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles were transformed from farmland into cities occupied by tens of thousands of families in a few years.

• [citation needed] Reaction against urban renewal[edit] In 1961, Jane Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the first—and strongest—critiques
  of contemporary large-scale urban renewal.

• The process has had a major impact on many urban landscapes and has played an important role in the history and demographics of cities around the world.

• Similarly, the efforts of Jacob Riis in advocating for improved living conditions in degraded areas of New York in the late 19th century were also formative.

• The project was hailed as setting “new aesthetic standards for housing the working classes” and included a new laundry, 188 shops, and 77 workshops.

• This law defines the urban regeneration as “the coordinated set of urban-building interventions and social initiatives that can include replacement, re-use, redevelopment
  of the built environment and reorganization of the urban landscape by mean of recovery of degraded, underused or abandoned areas, as well as through the creation and management of infrastructure, green spaces and services […] with a horizon
  towards sustainability and environmental and social resilience, technological innovation and increasing biodiversity” (Art 2.

• It has not been long time that this meaning has changed, or has begun to change, towards the Anglo-Saxon model taking in account the idea of an action that “determines an
  increase of economic, cultural, social values in an existing urban or territorial context.

• However, when cleaning the urban decay area, traditional and historic buildings were destroyed to different levels.

• Immediately thereafter, new urban renewal models such as Guangzhou’s micro-renovation and Shanghai’s micro-renewal appeared to lead the trend of a new era of urban renewal
  programs in China.

• Cities with a large proportion of Victorian terraced housing – housing that was no longer deemed of sufficient standard for modern living requirements – underwent the greatest
  changes.

• Before that, the 1958 master plan had already been designed to solve the city problems.

• This resulted in a serious degradation of the tax bases of many cities, isolated entire neighborhoods,[39] and meant that existing commercial districts were bypassed by the
  majority of commuters.

• The approach has become very popular in the UK due to the availability of lottery funding for capital projects and the vibrancy of the cultural and creative sectors.

• Some areas did improve, while other areas, such as East Liberty and the Hill District, declined following ambitious projects that shifted traffic patterns, blocked streets
  to vehicular traffic, isolated or divided neighborhoods with highways, and removed large numbers of ethnic and minority residents.

• [33] Under the powerful influence of multimillionaire R.K. Mellon, Pittsburgh became the first major city to undertake a modern urban-renewal program in May 1950.

• The efforts of the CHPC and the FHA to renew Detroit caused huge amounts of black displacement due to the construction of highways and airports directly through black neighborhoods
  like 8-mile and Paradise Valley.

• They are one of the earliest large-scale philanthropic housing developments in London.

• In terms of utilizing the eminent domain as a legal method to take private property for city-initiated development, Kelo case is the real-life example of the resistance against
  eminent use.

• Israel built large numbers of these tenement buildings, known in Israel as “train buildings” (binyanei rakevet), in the first decades of independence to house masses of Jewish
  refugees coming from Europe and the Muslim world.

• The redevelopment of large sections of New York City and New York State by Robert Moses between the 1930s and the 1970s was a notable and prominent example of urban redevelopment.

• It required all new residential construction to include running water and an internal drainage system and also prohibited the construction of shoddy housing by building contractors.

• [28] With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, increased house building and government expenditure was used to pull the country out of recession.

• The city development was not about urban sprawl and real estate development on a large scale.

 

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