In many European cities, railway stations have become urban hubs in which a variety of functions and uses are focused. These include retail, cafes, offices and housing. They are often also complemented by adjacent amenity open space, in both hard and soft landscaping, alongside a broader provision for other modes, such as public transport, walking and cycling. In this sense, large-scale transport hubs resemble small-scale city centres and, like other urban centres, the public space in stations should meet the needs of a wide range of users. The design and management of railway stations is highly complex and the risk of such nodes failing as quality public spaces is significant. In addition, railway stations play a pivotal role in encouraging public transport use and they have the potential to contribute to a modal shift from more polluting transport modes. We argue that the design and management of such spaces is a key variable in the modal choices many travellers make. Based on empirical research across Europe, this paper presents a set of indicators for assessing the quality of railway stations and their adjacent areas and summarizes our research findings to increase the attractiveness of rail journeys through enhanced public spaces.

This paper focuses on the character of multi-level pedestrian accessibility and walkability within the public and quasi-public realm in Hong Kong, using the particular case of the redevelopment of Taikoo Place in Quarry Bay. In an era when the value of public space as a space for public activity and debate is coming under increasing scrutiny, both in Hong Kong and internationally, this paper explores multi-level interior and exterior public and quasi-public realm, as a hybrid form of interior open and transit space in a commercial setting that has becomes a central part of the city’s planning, designed to both serve and profit from the high level of pedestrian traffic. This paper draws on empirical research of pedestrian behaviour patterns to interrogate the value and significance of linked-spaces within commercial districts, both to the users and the real estate travelled through, using the city of Hong Kong as a reference and the specific case of Taikoo Place.

Equality in the City - Imaginaries of the Smart Future; Interdisciplinary collection exploring cities and urban spaces in the context of technological and digital innovation. An approachable discussion of the issues surrounding smart digital futures and the disruptive potential of smart technologies in our cities; issues of change, design, austerity, ownership, citizenship and equality. 29col and 3b&w.

As a consequence of the rapid, government-led and globally fuelled urban development that is occurring within China, an unplanned form of urbanization is emerging, whereby landless farmers and economic migrants are resettling and occupying both public space and housing in ways that deviate from the community development plan.The paper will use both historical and contemporary urban theory, together with a case study of Zhangjiing in Suzhou Industrial Park, China as means of critiquing and learning from these consequences and the planning and policy instruments in place. The case of Zhangjing can be critically reviewed in the context of Christopher Alexander’s argument that when a new urban development is created which is modelled or predicated on a tree structure to replace the semi-lattice that was there before, the city takes a step towards dissociating itself from its geographical and cultural context.

This paper analyses the importance of commercial signs in contemporary cities, and explores the theoretical concepts that might be helpful in understanding the operation of commercial signage controls in historic places. The focus is on issues that cluster around theories of consumer culture, as well as on the practices of city centre management, city marketing and urban tourism. The discussion is predominantly concerned with commercial city centres because these are places where different functions and meanings coexist. They are often places where different commercial and non-commercial interests have to be managed or reconciled. City centres are also public areas where human experience is given meaning and valorised through signs, symbols and patterns of behaviour, which result from a combination of physical and symbolic factors of the built environment. In many cases, the commercial city centre coincides with the historic core of a city, and the challenge of the local authority is to combine all functions with the preservation of historic buildings and places. At the end, this paper discusses how forms of aesthetic control over commercial signage can be applied to preserve local identity and stimulate commercial and touristic activities simultaneously.

This article argues that many of those changes to the built environment brought about through economic and cultural globalization have resulted in a blurring of national identities expressed through city form, worldwide, including South East and Far East Asian countries. As a reaction to this, local identity has emerged as a central concern among both academics and many built environment professionals for setting the twenty-first century urban development agenda. The focus of this article is to explore place-making in relation to the role of different actors within the form-production process, and the implications of globalization for local identity using as a case the new multifunctional administrative city of Sejong in South Korea. Evidence was collected using a testing survey that aimed at gaining a clear insight into the role of local identity from the perspectives of different key actors involved in the Sejong project; the survey focused on building up a comprehensive narrative of their knowledge, experience, and sense of identity and sustainability in relation to place identity in new place construction. This survey and the findings from it illustrate the importance of user participation in the decision-making process, in achieving social sustainability and the incorporation of local cultural resources. The findings summarized in this article reveal the current poor level of understanding and the limitations in delivering inclusive local identity within the urban design policies of Sejong, and how local identity and the needs of local culture could be incorporated, sustained and developed in contemporary new town development in the South East/Far East Asian context.

This paper is concerned with public perceptions and attitudes to heritage townscapes, and how these might be influenced by investment in such places, focused on their public realm, and building restoration and improvement as a catalyst for urban regeneration. It draws on a ten-year study of the impact of the Townscape Heritage Initiative, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, on a sample of 16 cases across the UK. By comparing an analysis of changes in townscape quality over this period, with changes in public perceptions (captured through the use of a household survey in all 16 cases at three points in the ten-year period), it draws empirically grounded conclusions about the influence of heritage investment on attitudes and perceptions to the quality of the local environment. The findings from the research suggests that public attitudes are positively influenced by programmes of investment in the built heritage, but that this influence is complex and is not as robust as the physical regeneration itself. The paper also reflects on the relative influence of the post-2008 economic recession on public attitudes to place compared with the influence of heritage investment.

This paper draws on extensive longitudinal empirical research into the effectiveness of heritage-based urban investment in the regeneration of socially deprived communities. The Townscape Heritage Initiative research project, has examined 16 cases across the UK over a 12-year period, monitoring and evaluating the impacts of investment in the built fabric across a range of themes, including quality of life, economic activity, confidence and appearance. The 16 cases were surveyed in 2000, 2006 and 2011, which is to say, prior to any investment activity, at the point of most positive change and three or four years into the current recession. The research has produced some robust findings in relation to the effects of the recession and the resilience of regeneration benefits accruing from the programme. In presenting and discussing these findings, the paper draws some grounded conclusions regarding the capacity of heritage-led regeneration initiatives to withstand the impacts of the economic downturn, and proposes a number of criteria for assessing the likely resilience of regeneration initiatives in deprived communities.

The impact on land use of area-wide regeneration spending related to historic conservation is largely under-researched. This paper is intended to make a contribution to this subject within the context of conservation studies. It arises out of the findings from a longitudinal investigation into the more general impact of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Townscape Heritage Initiative across the UK. This research has examined 16 cases where significant investment has been made in the built fabric in order to improve the townscape and other aspects of the heritage. Through an analysis of changes in land use mapped at three points over a ten-year period, the paper presents findings from a selection of seven of these cases, and highlights patterns of change in terms of land use, and the relationship between newly prioritised uses and their ‘fit’ with the historic identity of place. The value of the research lies both in these generalisable findings and in the methods described to arrive at them.

The Townscape Heritage Initiatives (THI) was launched in 1998 to assist places where heritage buildings predominated but were also experiencing social and economic distress. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) not only set out to help such places but also to determine whether the aid was achieving the Fund's goals. In 1999, the HLF engaged Oxford Brookes University (OBU) to undertake a multi-year evaluation of the success of the THI programme. To date, the THI has provided over £170 million to 175 different locations throughout the United Kingdom. In 2004, an article outlining the methodology being used by the OBU team appeared in the academic literature. Seventeen representative sites had been selected and baseline reports prepared between 1999 and 2001. In 2007, the first series of follow-up studies were completed. This article addresses three questions: was it possible to gather the data that the researchers proposed when the evaluation was planned, was it possible to use that data to evaluate the degree to which the stated HLF goals for the programme were met and, finally, in what way is the research likely to be useful to the funding agency? The article presents findings from the research that relates economic, demographic, townscape and other characteristics of places to their potential to benefit from investment in heritage at the urban scale.

Following the rapid growth throughout the UK in adopting the concept of town centre management (TCM) over the last few decades, TCM has made a dramatic shift from its original 'janitorial' (managerial) function to a more strategic role in the regeneration of public space as well as the rebranding of town centres. Much of the recent research literature has highlighted TCM's effectiveness when judged against the intentions as those of recent regeneration programmes. Place marketing, retail and leisure development, surveillance measures and evening and night-time economies are all activities that involve TCM partnerships and initiatives. Consumption-based economic revitalisation and physical upgrading alone, however, are not sufficient for identifying the potential contribution of TCM within broader urban regeneration agendas. This paper examines the capacity of TCM to contribute towards the social as well as the economic and physical enhancement of local places and communities – that is, beyond its generall...

There is a growing recognition of Town Centre Management (TCM) as one of the several mechanisms to regenerate town centres in the UK context. However, in practice the role of TCM is diverse, ranging from day-to-day maintenance of urban centres to strategic contributions to economic regeneration and developing future vision of the town as a whole. TCM's contribution and capacity to regenerate town centres depends both on the nature of the TCM strategy applied on local regeneration problems and challenges and on local socio-economic circumstances. Drawing on research completed in 2005, this paper presents evidence from four contrasting town centres of the distinctive roles played by TCM in town centre regeneration. The paper demonstrates that under certain conditions TCM has the potential to go beyond its typical focus on town centre enhancement and leverage, to a focus much close to the wider social objectives of regeneration in the UK context. The paper also outlines a predictive model for understanding which types of town centre are likely to benefit from TCM as an approach to regeneration.

‘Townscape’ as an approach to understanding one aspect of quality in the built environment has had mixed fortunes over the last few decades. Nonetheless, it remains a useful category within which the question of how places work at an aesthetic level can be considered. The problem has been, however, the absence of a comprehensive and relatively objective system for recording and representing the findings from townscape evaluation in the field. This paper presents the evolution of one such approach, and illustrates how it has been applied as part of a more general impact assessment research project to determine the effectiveness of the Townscape Heritage Initiative (THI) regeneration programme in the UK. The paper concludes with a discussion of the utility of the method for future built environment monitoring and evaluation programmes.

As a result of various social and economic factors, many historic townscapes in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have declined over the last half century. There have been many attempts throughout the world to revitalise such urban heritage areas, but the actual effectiveness of few of these schemes has been systematically evaluated. Good public policy choices would greatly benefit from such evaluation. The UK's Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) decided in 1999 that their Townscape Heritage Initiatives would be an exception. A research team from Oxford Brookes University was engaged to undertake a ten-year study of the £52 million being spent in about sixty British towns and cities. A sample of about one third of projects receiving HLF support are being scrutinised. The evaluation methodology is outlined, along with explanations of some challenges faced in such a large programme. The four mechanisms for gathering research data are explained, the origin and rationale for the sixteen indicators being employed are described, and the approach to overall evaluation outlined. Finally there is an overview of the baseline stage of the work, highlighting key issues from a research perspective, and briefly reflecting on findings to date.