Argentina in
Buenos Aires transformed a large disused
dock into a new
luxury residential and commercial
district. In
Buenos Aires,
Argentina,
Puerto Madero is a known example of an urban renewal project. In the 1990s, the Argentine government decided to build a new residential and commercial district to replace city's old port and docks. More than 50 skyscrapers have been built in the last 20 years. Puerto Madero is now Buenos Aires' most expensive and exclusive neighborhood.
Australia in 1987 to make way for
World Expo 88 Australia's built environment is quite young and the earliest large scale urban renewal projects didn't occur until the 1960s in the large cities of
Sydney and
Melbourne.
Housing Commission of New South Wales and the
Housing Commission of Victoria conducted large slum recalamation projects in the 1960s replacing large areas of Victorian era housing with international style housing commission towers. These projects were halted in the early 1970s as enthusiasm for
Towers in the Park planning waned. In 1971, a plan to raze Sydney's historic area
The Rocks for public housing was halted by
green bans. The CBDs and inner suburban areas of Australia's cities have been in constant renewal since the 19th century, however apart from large commercial re-developments this has mostly been done in ad-hoc fashion rather than as major planning initiative. Among the largest projects since the 1980s have been the clearing of most of
South Brisbane's commercial heart to become
South Bank for
World Expo 88 and the transformation of large industrial parts of South Melbourne to become the modern hi-rise dominated precinct
Southbank. More recent ongoing projects include
Darling Harbour in Sydney and
Docklands in Melbourne in the late 1980s as well as
South Wharf in Melbourne and
Barangaroo in Sydney in the 2000s. Urban renewal involving established residential areas is now seldom tolerated and more recent projects have instead concentrated on disused industrial and transport infrastructure or
adaptive reuse of older building stock particularly for new hi-rise housing projects.
Pyrmont and
Ultimo in Sydney and
Postcode 3000 in Melbourne in 1992 are two key early examples along with Beacon Cove
Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne and
Urban renewal in Woolstore Precinct, Teneriffe and later Northshore at
Hamilton in
Brisbane.
Brazil In
Rio de Janeiro, the is a large-scale urban waterfront revitalization project, which covers a centrally located five million square meter area. The project aims to redevelop the port area, increasing the city center attractiveness as a whole and enhancing the city's competitiveness in the
global economy. The urban renovation involves 700 km of public networks for water supply, sanitation, drainage, electricity, gas and telecom; 5 km of tunnels; 70 km of roads; 650 km2 of sidewalks; 17 km of bike path; 15.000 trees; and 3 plants for sanitation treatment.
China China experienced the fastest urbanization and has one of the greatest
urban sprawl scale in the world from 1990. Massive real estate development and reconstruction brought economic revitalization. However, when cleaning the urban decay area, traditional and historic buildings were destroyed to different levels. In the industry, researchers and practitioners used “old town reconstruction” and “urban regeneration” to describe the changes made to the urban decay area. 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. With the rapid development pace of urbanization in China, the urbanization rate reached the inflection point of the Northam curve. The city development was not about urban sprawl and real estate development on a large scale. China improved its urban development strategy by using inventory planning other than incremental planning. Chinese promoted urbanization aggressively as national policy. But due to the change from the concept of urban renewal in terms of its presentation from the physical dimension, China now promotes small-scale “repairs” to improve the urban environment in a more sustainable and reasonable way. At the 15th China Central City Work Conference, the policy, "urban repair and
ecological restoration," was put forward. 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. "Planning is inherently political", however, the urban development in China for the past decade is strikingly similar to the situation in many Western countries. 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.
Czechia The
Josefov neighborhood, or Old Jewish Quarter, in Prague was leveled and rebuilt in an effort at urban renewal between 1890 and 1913.
Hong Kong The
Urban Renewal Authority is the statutory body responsible for urban renewal in Hong Kong. The Operation Building Bright scheme was launched in 2009 and is subsidised by the government. People remain living inside the buildings during the renovation period, which usually lasts for over a year, leading to concerns about exposure to construction dust and the possible presence of asbestos. Such rehabilitation works are common in districts with older buildings, like Kowloon City, Mong Kok, Sham Shui Po, Yao Ma Tei and Tai Po. The government of Hong Kong has always been concerned with land shortage and has introduced various policies to increase land supply. One of the current initiatives, noted in the Chief Executive's 2022 Policy Address, is to consolidate property interests and expedite urban renewal.
India In some cities such as
Pune, redevelopment is the only option, as municipal corporations refuse new water connections to save water.
Iran Iranian Urban Renewal corporation is in charge of the program. Tehran and Isfahan and Khorasan and Khuzestan have some of the highest statistics of housing developments. Seventh program offers support to Ministry of Road and Urban and Development for gentrification and development in lesser developed zones. Funding will also support money going to mass housing developers.
Ireland During the 1990s the concept of
culture-led regeneration gained ground. Examples most often cited as successes include
Temple Bar in
Dublin where tourism was attracted to a bohemian "cultural quarter".
Israel 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. Israel built large numbers of these tenement buildings, known in Israel as "train buildings" (בנייני רכבת,
binyanei rakevet), in the first decades of independence to house masses of Jewish refugees coming from Europe and the Muslim world. Since then, Israeli architectural styles have changed. 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. There are two main urban renewal programs: the evacuate and build program and TAMA 38. The evacuate and build program, launched in 1998, allows developers to tear down older building complexes and replace them with larger and more modern buildings, while TAMA 38, launched in 2005, enables developers to extensively remodel buildings, strengthening them against earthquakes, adding safety rooms, remodeling the building's appearance, and adding new apartments. In both projects, the tenants are temporarily evacuated for the duration of the work and the developer pays for their alternative accommodation. In both programs, the developers add more apartments so as to sell them to additional tenants and make a profit.
Italy In Italy, the concept of urban renewal had been having the classical meaning of "recovery", "re-use", and also "redevelopment" for many years. 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." For instance, we can mention the regional law of 29 July 2008, nr. 21, of the
Puglia Region, "Norms for urban regeneration", which states: «By this law, the Puglia Region promotes the regeneration of parts of cities and urban systems in coherence with municipal and inter-municipal strategies in order to improve urban, socio-economics, environmental and cultural conditions of human settlements "LEGGE REGIONALE 29 luglio 2008, n. 21: "Norme per la rigenerazione urbana". 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. Changes and addendums to the regional law 11 March 2005, n. 12 (Law for the Government of the Territory) and other regional laws "Legge Regione Lombardia 18/2019. 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. L.R.18/2019). The same law introduces some rewards reserved to whom builds for social purposes. Moreover, these rewards are also reserved for those who carry on some particular implementation models. For instance, you can increase the volume of your building whenever "integrated safety systems and construction site risk management processes are applied; methods that are based on traceability and control activities, with particular reference to soil movement and waste traceability, based on advanced technologies", the increase in the building index is recognized in the art. 3 and these rewards are also given when technologies as geolocation, video surveillance and perimeter protection are implemented in order to prevent the "risk of crime during all phases of construction sites" La legalità per la rigenerazione urbana: a law analysis.
Morocco In the French colonial period, the entire city of
Marrakesh - the city inside the defensive walls - was razed and redeveloped, except for the preservation of mosques, madrassas, and funerary memorials. The preserved madrassas include buildings erected as caravanserai. in 2017
Russia In 2017,
Moscow launched a large-scale program to renovate dilapidated
Soviet-built housing, known as
Khrushchevki. The program provided for the demolition of 5,171 apartment buildings and the resettlement of 1.6 million city residents by 2032. The program was later extended to a number of other Russian cities.
Singapore The history of Singapore's urban renewal goes back to the time period surrounding the
Second World War. Before the war, Singapore's housing environment had already been a problem. The tension of both infrastructure and housing conditions were worsened by the rapidly increasing number of the Singapore population in the 1930s. As a consequence of the war and the lack of economic development, between the 1940s to the 1950s, the previous evil of housing conditions continued to happen. As much as 240,000 squatters were placed in Singapore during the 1950s. It was caused by the movement of migrants, especially from
peninsular Malaysia and the baby boom. In mid 1959, overcrowded
slums were inhabited by a big number of squatter populations, whereas these areas lacked the existence of service facilities such as sanitation. 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. Before that, the 1958 master plan had already been designed to solve the city problems. However, due to the lack of
urban planning experts caused by the deficiency of professional staff, criticism came from many urban practitioners. The professional team recommended by the United Nations then was asked by the government to cope with the urban renewal matters and its redevelopment plan in 1961. Based on the UN assistance report, two pilot developments were initiated in the end of 1964 by the government. 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. Affordable land value also became one of its reasons. 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.
Taiwan in
Taipei transformed large disused industrial sites into a new commercial
district. Taiwan's urban planning is governed primarily by the Urban Planning Act, which delineates three types of plans: city/town plans, countryside street plans, and special district plans, distinguishing between new urban developments and renewal of older, dilapidated areas. Local governments periodically update their plans, aligning with national policies on sustainable land use, green space, disaster mitigation, and urban–rural integration. In
Taipei,
Taiwan,
Xinyi Special District is a known example of an urban renewal project. Its historical development began in 1976, when the Taipei Municipal Government accepted the proposal to redevelop the area east of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. The goal of this redevelopment was to set up a secondary commercial center away from the more crowded old city center (
Taipei Station,
Ximending area). The redevelopment hoped to increase the prosperity of the eastern district and the convenience of urban life for existing residents. The center's purpose was to expand business investment in the area and attract international financial services and technology firms. It also planned for residential development by building a completely new community. The Xinyi Project Area is the only commercial development area in Taipei with a wholly planned street and urban design. In addition to attracting corporations, it also features large retail spaces, department stores, and shopping malls. Xinyi Special District is now the prime central business district of Taipei.
United Kingdom 's colour-coded
poverty map, showing
Westminster in 1889 – a pioneering social study of poverty that shocked the population
19th century From the 1850s onwards, the terrible conditions of the urban poor in the
slums of
London began to attract the attention of
social reformers and philanthropists, who began a movement for social housing. The first area to be targeted was the notorious slum called the
Devil's Acre near
Westminster. This new movement was largely funded by
George Peabody and the
Peabody Trust and had a lasting impact on the urban character of Westminster.
Slum clearance began with the Rochester Buildings, on the corner of Old Pye Street and Perkin's Rent, which were built in 1862 by the merchant
William Gibbs. They are one of the earliest large-scale philanthropic housing developments in London. The Rochester Buildings were sold to the Peabody Trust in 1877 and later become known as Blocks A to D of the Old Perkin's Rents Estate.
Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts funded an experimental social housing estate, among the first of its kind, on the corner of Columbia Road and Old Pye Street (now demolished). In 1882, the Peabody Trust built the Abbey Orchard Estate on former marshland at the corner of Old Pye Street and Abbey Orchard Street. Like many of the social housing estates, the Abbey Orchard Estate was built following the square plan concept. Blocks of flats were built around a courtyard, creating a semi-private space within the estate functioning as recreation area. The courtyards were meant to create a community atmosphere and the blocks of flats were designed to allow sunlight into the courtyards. The blocks of flats were built using high-quality brickwork and included architectural features such as
lettering,
glazing, fixtures and fittings. The estates built in the area at the time were considered model dwellings and included shared laundry and sanitary facilities, innovative at the time, and fireplaces in some bedrooms. The design was subsequently repeated in numerous other housing estates in London. Other such schemes in the 1880s, where newly cleared sites were sold on to developers, included
Whitechapel, Wild Street,
Whitecross Street and
Clerkenwell.
Interwar period 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". 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. This marked the start of a long 20th century tradition of state-owned housing, which would much later evolve into
council estates. 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
Housing Act 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. 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. Over 5,000 homes (25,000 residents) in the city of
Bristol were designated as redevelopment areas in 1933 and slated for demolition. 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. 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.
Post-Second World War Post-war reconstruction was a catalyst for much urban renewal in the UK.
Since the 1990s The Single Regeneration Budget (SRB) was a project run by the government from 1994 to 2002 to enable regeneration in areas with social and economic problems, with funds allocated through a competitive bidding system. The
Housing Market Renewal Initiative (also known as the Pathfinder Scheme) was in place between 2002 and 2011 and aimed to demolish, refurbish or construct new housing. Areas of housing that were demolished were replaced with new houses aimed towards attracting richer tenants to move to the area, rather than use by the areas' former residents. Other programs, such as The
Castleford Project (2002-2005) sought to enable local citizens to have greater control and ownership of the direction of their community and the way in which it overcomes market failure. This approach supports important themes in urban renewal today, such as participation,
sustainability and trust – and government acting as advocate and 'enabler', rather than an instrument of command and control. Currently there are two main Urban Regeneration projects going on in London, Elephant Park at
Elephant & Castle and at
Stratford.
1900 to 1950s in the early 1960s, showing the area cleared in
Alaska's first urban renewal project Prior to the Urban Renewal policies of the 1950s, 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. 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 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. Moses directed the construction of new
bridges,
highways,
housing projects, and
public parks. Other cities across the US began to create redevelopment programs in the late 1930s and 1940s. 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. In Detroit, the (local) 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. 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. However, the GI Bill was primarily beneficial for white veterans over black ones, so in inner cities where black veterans tried using the benefits from the GI bill to occur housing or jobs, it was much more difficult. 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. Pittsburgh was infamous around the world as one of the dirtiest and most economically depressed cities, and seemed ripe for urban renewal. A large section of downtown at the heart of the city was demolished, converted to parks, office buildings, and a sports arena and renamed the
Golden Triangle in what was generally recognized as a major success. Other neighborhoods were also subjected to urban renewal, but with mixed results. 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. An entire neighborhood was destroyed (to be replaced by the
Civic Arena), displacing 8000 residents (most of whom were poor and black). Because of the ways in which it targeted the most disadvantaged sector of the American population, novelist
James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal "Negro Removal" in the 1960s.
Early to mid-20th century Detroit was a prime area for urban "redevelopers", as much of the city had only decrepit housing available. 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. Black families were thrown out from their homes and not provided relocation services. The "slums" being cleared or being looked at for redevelopment were primarily black neighborhoods. and meant that existing commercial districts were bypassed by the majority of
commuters. Segregation continued to increase as communities were displaced. 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. In
Boston, community activists halted construction of the proposed
Southwest Expressway but only after a three-mile long stretch of land had been cleared. In
San Francisco,
Joseph Alioto was the first mayor to publicly repudiate the policy of urban renewal, and with the backing of community groups, forced the state to end construction of highways through the heart of the city.
Atlanta lost over 60,000 people between 1960 and 1970 because of urban renewal and expressway construction, but a downtown building boom turned the city into the showcase of the
New South in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1970s in
Toronto, Jacobs was heavily involved in a group which halted the construction of the
Spadina Expressway and altered transport policy in that city. Some of the policies around urban renewal began to change under President
Lyndon Johnson and the
War on Poverty, and in 1968, the
Housing and Urban Development Act and The New Communities Act of 1968 guaranteed private financing for private entrepreneurs to plan and develop new communities. Subsequently, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 established the
Community Development Block Grant program (CDBG) which began in earnest the focus on redevelopment of existing neighborhoods and properties, rather than demolition of substandard housing and economically depressed areas. Until 1970, the displaced owners and tenants received only the constitutionally-mandated "just compensation" specified in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This measure of compensation covered only the fair market value of the taken property, and omitted compensation for a variety of incidental losses like, for example, moving expenses, loss of favorable financing and notably, business losses, such as loss of business goodwill. In the 1970s the federal government and state governments enacted the Uniform Relocation Assistance Act which provides for limited compensation of some of these losses. However the Act denies the displaced land owners the right to sue to enforce its provisions, so it is deemed an act of legislative grace rather than a constitutional right. Historically, urban redevelopment has been controversial because of such practices as taking private property by eminent domain for "public use" and then turning it over to redevelopers free of charge or for less than the acquisition cost (known as "land write-down"). Thus, in the controversial Connecticut case of
Kelo v. City of New London (2005) the plan called for a redeveloper to lease the subject 90-acre waterfront property for $1 per year. Currently, a mix of renovation, selective demolition, commercial development, and tax incentives is most often used to revitalize urban neighborhoods. An example of an entire eradication of a community is
Africville in
Halifax,
Nova Scotia.
Gentrification is still controversial, and often results in familiar patterns of poorer residents being priced out of urban areas into suburbs or more depressed areas of cities. Some programs, such as that administered by
Fresh Ministries and Operation New Hope in
Jacksonville, Florida, and the Hill Community Development Corporation (Hill CDC) in Pittsburgh's historic
Hill District attempt to develop communities, while at the same time combining highly favorable loan programs with financial literacy education so that poorer residents are not displaced.
Niagara Falls, New York An example of urban renewal gone wrong in the United States is in downtown
Niagara Falls, New York. Most of the original downtown was demolished in the 1960s, and many replacement projects including the
Rainbow Centre Factory Outlet,
Niagara Falls Convention and Civic Center, the Native American Cultural Center, the Hooker Chemical (later the
Occidental Petroleum) Headquarters building, the Wintergarden, the
Fallsville Splash Park, a large parking ramp, an enclosed pedestrian walkway, the Falls Street Faire & Falls Street Station entertainment complexes, and the Mayor E. Dent Lackey Plaza closed within twenty to thirty years of their construction. In addition, the
Robert Moses State Parkway cut through the town, dividing it from the riverfront. As in many American cities, some demolished blocks were never replaced. Ultimately, the former tourist district of the city along Falls Street was destroyed. It went against the principles of several urban philosophers, such as
Jane Jacobs, who claimed that mixed-use districts were needed (which the new downtown was not) and arteries needed to be kept open. Smaller buildings also should be built or kept. In Niagara Falls, however, the convention center blocked traffic into the city, located in the center of Falls Street (the main artery), and the Wintergarden also blocked traffic from the convention center to the
Niagara Falls. The Rainbow Centre interrupted the street grid, taking up three blocks, and parking ramps isolated the city from the core, leading to the degradation of nearby neighborhoods. Tourists were forced to walk around the Rainbow Center, the Wintergarden, and the Quality Inn (all of which were adjacent), in total five blocks, discouraging small business in the city.
South Africa From 1938 to 1942, the Central Housing Board and
Cape Town City Council constructed 13,000 flats as part of slum clearance projects. In the mid-1950s, some residential areas of
Johannesburg were to be involuntarily removed by city planners. Black townships were targeted, motivated by residents' participation in civil unrest against the
Apartheid government authorities in 1949 and 1950. In post-apartheid
South Africa major grassroots social movements such as the
Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign and
Abahlali baseMjondolo emerged to contest 'urban renewal' programs that forcibly relocated the poor out of the cities. ==See also==