Taking Planning Forward Third Edition 2017 - 2018 PhD Community Highlights and Research Projects at the Bartlett School of Planning 5 9 13 16 6 10 14 17 7 11 15 4 8 12 1 2 3 Contents 10. Planning and design of suburban fortunes: Urban policies and suburban socio-economic and spatial transformation in Tokyo Prefecture under three-tier governmental system. Hiroaki Ohashi ...........................35 11. The mechanism of social capital in the participatory planning with diversity: The foundation phase of community-led regeneration of Seoul, South Korea. Hyunji Cho ....................................37 12. Exploring the impact of external knowledge spillover on a catching-up economy. Ilwon Seo .....................39 13. The Role of Built Environment Quality in FDI Attraction: The Case of Paris Ile-de-France, 2010-2015. Jacob Thomas Simpson............41 14. Policing and politicising austerity urbanism in London. Joe Penny ....................................................43 15. Fear of Crime beyond the Walls. Effects of Gated Communities in Neighbouring Public Spaces. The Case of Greater Metropolitan Area of Costa Rica.Karla Barrantes Chaves .............................................45 16. Everyday infrastructures in the in-between territories. The potential of decentralised infrastructures in Santiago de Compostela metropolitan area. Lucía Cerrada Morato ......47 17. Exploring the Relation between Transport and Social Equity: Empirical Evidence from London and Beijing. Mengqiu Cao .................................49 The Bartlett School of Planning .............................ii Foreword to the third edition.......................................iii Forewords to the first and second editions.....iv Preface for third edition..........................................vi Community Highlights.........................................2 Collective Initiatives...........................3 Conference Contributions...........................7 Recent Publications...........................13 Individual Research Projects...........................16 1. The contribution of social capital to the urban ecological resilience of self-help settlements. The case of Nezahualcoyotl, in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City. Alejandro Rivero Villar ......................................17 2. Invisible city: A framework to understand multi- sensory perception in urban public space. Alexandra Gomes .......19 3. How and why do private developers engage in green building practice? The case of Bangkok, Thailand. Alizara Juangbhanich .........................21 4. The Urban Design Principles for Southeast Asian Cities: An Approach from the Metaphor of Urban Footprints. Anon Chaimanee...................................23 5. Urban and social equity impacts from transport: Evidence and approaches from Santiago de Chile. Beatriz Mella Lira .................................................25 6. Searching for an urban sustainability fix in China: A case study of the Pearl River Delta Greenway Project. Calvin King Lam Chung ...................................................27 7. Is English devolution fit for purpose? David Kingman .......29 8. The Morphology of Urban Voids: A Metabolic Approach to Cohesion. The Case of Eleonas in Athens. Dimitris Panayotopoulos .......31 9. Transit Oriented Development Land Policy for Public Transport Funding. Bonvino Gualitero...............33 24 22 25 23 26 27 20 21 18 19 18. Landscape Character Conservation through Local Communities’ Participation: The Case of Colombian Cultural Landscapes. Miguel Hincapié Triviño ........51 19. Social Equality in Urban Conservation: Housing in Mexican Historic Centres of Mexico City and Guadalajara. Mónica López Franco .....53 20. The construction of the housing market: National housing discourse and market mediation. Phoebe Stirling ................................................................55 21. Migrant Integration in Peri-urban Beijing. Siyao Liu ..57 22. Vacant land in London: Narratives about people, space and time. Sonia Freire Trigo ............................59 23. Clusters of Urban Renaissance and the New Geography of Innovation: A case study of Rome. Stefania Fiorentino ......................................................61 24. Governance in housing delivery networks: The case of two pathways of low-income housing programmes in Thailand. Umnaj Thananantachai ..............................63 25. Building the entrepreneurial city: Local politics transformation and Flagship Culture-led Redevelopment in Xi’an, China. Yixiang Sun ...........................................65 26. We are Designing Transport Resilience for whom and for what? Understand Public Transport System Resilience from Joint Perspectives. Yuerong Zhang.....67 27. Migrants’ subjective wellbeing in Urban China. Yuqi Liu .................................................................69 References ....................................................................71 Credits ..................................80 i ii The Bartlett School of Planning The Bartlett School of Planning is a world centre for learning and research about the form, planning, design and management of cities. Our location, history and expertise have made our programmes and research among the most stimulating and sought-after in the field of planning. We are part of The Bartlett: UCL’s global faculty of the built environment. BSP staff currently supervising PhD candidates: Dr Sonia Arbaci / Dr Yasminah Beebeejaun / Professor Matthew Carmona / Dr Elisabete Cidre / Dr Ben Clifford / Dr Claire Colomb / Professor Harry Dimitriou / Professor Michael Edwards / Professor Nick Gallent / Dr Iqbal Hamiduddin / Dr Robin Hickman / Dr Nikos Karadimitriou / Dr Qiulin Ke / Professor Claudio de Magalhães / Professor Stephen Marshall / Dr Susan Moore / Professor Nick Phelps / Professor Mike Raco / Professor Yvonne Rydin / Dr Pablo Sendra / Dr Michael Short / Dr Jung Won Sonn / Dr Tse-Hui Teh / Professor John Tomaney / Dr Catalina Turcu / Dr John Ward / Dr Joanna Williams / Professor Fulong Wu / Dr Filipa Wunderlich / Dr Fangzhu Zhang BSP PhD candidates 2017/18: Alejandro Rivero Villar / Alexandra Peça Amaral Gomes / Alireza Kolahi / Alizara Juangbhanich / Anon Chaimanee / Arifin Zaenal / Beatriz Mella Lira / Bong Kyung Jeon / Brian Garcia / Calvin King Lam Chung / Carina Schneider / Chien-Ling Lo / David Kingman / Derry O’Connell / Daniel Fitzpatrick / Dimitris Panayotopoulos / Dongho Han / Elena Besussi / Elisabeta Ilie / Feng-Shu Chang / Gualitiero Bonvino / Hiroaki Ohashi / Hitomi Roppongi / Hyunji Cho / Ilwon Seo / Jacob Simpson / Ji Hyun Kim / Jingyi Zhu / Joe Penny / Jorge Martín Sainz de Los Terreros / Ju Eun Kim / Juan Alberti Vazquez / Justinien Tribillon / Karla Barrantes Chaves / Katayoun Karampour / Khairul Rizal / Lorna Qesteri / Lucia Cerrada Morato / Maria Eleni Petrakou / Marco Dean / Mengqiu Cao / Michael Manlangit / Miguel Hincapié Triviño / Mónica López Franco / Nan Li / Paul Hildreth / Pheobe Stirling / Reetuparna Sarkar / Richard Timmerman / Ruth Sepulveda Marquez / Seamus Clearly / Siyao Liu / Sizhe Chen / Sonia Freire Trigo / Stefania Fiorentino / Steve Chambers / Terpsithea Laopoulou / Tianke Zhu / Umnaj Thananantachai / Vafa Dianati Maleki / Veeramon Suwannasang / Weilong Zhang / Xiangyu Wang / Xiaoxuan Lan / Xing Gao / Yixiang Sun / Yuerong Zhang / Yuqi Liu Further details of past and current BSP MPhil/PhD research students and their topic of research at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/planning/people/mphilphd-students iii Once again, the research student community within the Bartlett School of Planning have shown in this publication the diversity, originality and scientific excellence of their research activities. These young scholars are at the forefront of research in planning studies and even pushing that frontier outwards with their work. New problematics are being investigated, topical issues are being re-examined and innovative theoretical terrains are being traversed. What is particularly noteworthy is that the links to practice and policy are never far away. This is research that, once completed, has the potential to change our planning, design and management of the built and natural environment. Last year the Bartlett School of Planning inaugurated an annual BSP Postgraduate Research Day at which students approaching the important milestone of upgrade present their research plans during the day and, at a public evening event, students approaching completion and submission of their thesis report on their findings. This evening event, in particular, highlights this contribution of the research student community to planning studies and will be an important landmark each year for the School, one to which all are warmly invited. Please look out for details on the BSP website. Yvonne Rydin London, April 2018 Foreword to the Third Edition In 2014, PhD students at the Bartlett School of Planning came together to catalogue the range of research being undertaken in our school during its Centenary Year. Peter Hall, who wrote the foreword to the first edition of Taking Planning Forward, called it an ‘extraordinary collection of essays’ highlighting the range of projects and places being researched by the school’s PhD community. Many of those projects are now complete but a great many others have commenced. The school’s 60 plus PhD students continue to work the frontiers of planning research, opening up new avenues of enquiry and addressing some of the most pressing questions of urban innovation and entrepreneurialism, neighbourhood change and social equity, housing market processes and housing justice, urban design quality, and future infrastructure need and development. Their projects have the same diverse geographical foci flagged by Peter three years ago, though many are about London and the challenges it will face in the next century. The 2017 edition of Taking Planning Forward contains 26 accounts of projects in progress or recently completed. These range from studies of green building in Thailand and inequities arising from transport access in Chile, through examinations of gated communities in Costa Rica and urban growth and transformations in China, to austerity urbanism and housing market dynamics in London. It is necessarily only a snapshot of the school’s research, but nevertheless indicative of the diverse interests of both students and planning staff members. The publication of this new edition coincides with the launch of the ‘BSP Expo’ in May. The Expo will be an annual gathering of current and former staff members and students and the school’s many friends and partners. It will be a celebration of student success, of which the work of our PhD students is a very significant part. Nick Gallent London, March 2017 Foreword to the Second Edition iv In celebrating the centenary of the Bartlett School of Planning, this extraordinary collection of essays eloquently demonstrates how far our School has travelled. They all come from students on our PhD programme – now a major part of our offering – and show the range, depth and originality of the work our research students are actively undertaking, on topics here in London and more widely across the world. It seems difficult now to comprehend that when Stanley Adshead was appointed as first UCL Professor of Town Planning, in September 1914 – one month into World War One - the School offered a part-time College Certificate in Town Planning to a handful of students. Only half a century later, in the 1960s, when Richard Llewelyn Davies took charge and created the modern Bartlett, did research became at all significant. And it is only in the last decade that the PhD programme has grown to its present astonishing size and range of activity: 60 PhD students, actively engaged on research with huge potential for improving our understanding of the world we are planning for, and the ways in which we can plan better. The 23 essays, carefully chosen by Rodrigo Cardoso to represent the widest possible cross-section, give a picture of the variety of topics and geographical foci: from London’s Silicon Roundabout to Taiwan, from the highly abstract to the extremely concrete, from temporary urban events to long-term urban change. But what unites them is their sense of purpose: this is research not for its own academic sake – though it clearly aims to achieve that hallowed academic objective, “a significant contribution to knowledge” – but to achieve a practical end in the real urban world we live in and seek in multiple ways to improve. This is serious research to a purpose: a wonderful testament from a great professional school at the height of its powers. Peter Hall London, May 2014 Foreword to the First Edition Urban regeneration Housing Urban infrastructures Urban sustainability Regional development Governance Urban transport and mobility Suburban development Urban design Mengqiu C ao Actor-Network Theory Affordances Block Morphology Boundary Club Theory Collaborative Collective Identities Cultural Representations Decision Support Experiential Gated Communities Land Use Landscape And Infrastructure Legitimacy Neighbourhoods Node-Place Participation Publicness Railway Station Safety Small Towns Strategy Suburbanisation Tools Translation Urban Boundaries Urban Imaginaries User Activity Organisational Behaviour Developer Behaviour Corporate Environmentalism Green Building Bangkok Clusters Urban Economies Creativity Capitalism Urban Voids Morphology Metabolism Cohesion Housing Markets House Price Inflation Social Construction Market Discourse Urban Resilience Social Networks Climate Change Self-Help Settlements Lefebvre Thematic Analysis Battersea Power Station Royal Docks Urban Sustainability Fix Eco-State Restructuring UrbanisationLand Development Greenway Devolution Development Rebalancing City-Regions North-South Divide Urban Conservation Values Significance Transference Travel Vulnerability The Capabilities Approach London And Beijing Sprawl In-Between Territories Infrastructures Post-Networked City Sustainable Multi-Sensory Sensescapes Urban Space Perception Framework New Public Management New Public Governance Thailand Megalopolis Knowledge Collaboration Urban Network Polycentricity The Yangtze River Delta Region Cultural-Led Regeneration Entrepreneurialism Local Governance Urban Policies Architectural Policies Design Governance Europeanization Design Quality Urban Design Social Integration Neighbourly Relations Intergroup Relations Suburban Shrinkage Suburban Revitalization Urban Policy Spatial Planning Economic Development Immigrant Group Community-Led Regeneration Participatory Planning Subjective Wellbeing Neighbourhood Deprivation Sustainable Development Urban Design Quality Landscape Conservation Urban Heritage Bogota Transport Planning Capability Approach Social Equity Transport Project Assessment Social Inclusion Knowledge Production Catching-Up Regional Innovation Austerity Neoliberalism Urban Entrepreneurialism Financialisation Politicisation Migrant Integration Segmented Assimilation Chinese Migrants Neighbourhood Governance Urban Anthropology Social Capital Public Space Rural Migrants Social Justice Urban China China Conceptual/Theoretical Empirical Methodological City Neighbourhood/District Region Asia Europe UK Americas Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros Jihyun Kim Umnaj Thananantachai Justinien Tribillon Tingting Lu Nan Li Ine Steenmans Derry O 'Connell Karla Barrantes Chaves Alizara Juangbhanich Stefania F iorentino Dimitris Panayotopoulos Phoebe Stirling Alejandro Rivero Sonia F reire Trigo Calvin King Lam Chung David Kingman Monica López F ranco Lucía Cerrada Morato Alexandra Gomes Yingcheng Li Yixiang Sun João Ferreira Bento Zheng Wang Hiroaki Ohashi Hyunji Cho Yuqi Liu Miguel Hincapié Triviño Beatriz Mella Lira Ilwon Seo Joe Penny Siyao Liu Topic Location Research Keywords Scale Contribution Researcher The Bartlett School of Planning TAKING PLANNING FORWARD A visual map of recently completed and ongoing PhD research PhD Projects at the Bartlett School of Planning This poster presents 32 of the recently completed and ongoing research projects undertaken by members of the doctoral community at the Bartlett School of Planning. It lays out the projects in the form of a sociogram to capture the intricate linkages among them in terms of their topic, location, scale and nature of contribution. Details of many of them can be read in the second edition of the publication ‘Taking Planning Forward’. Sociogram of recently completed and ongoing research projects at the Bartlett School of Planning topic location scale researcher research keyword contribution v vi Taking Planning Forward returns in its third edition for a review of the new and exciting achievements of the PhD community in the Bartlett School of Planning (BSP) since the release of its second edition in May 2017. Extended abstracts of research projects pursued by PhD students in the BSP continues to form the core part of this book. Apart from reproducing 17 abstracts debuted last year by our continuing students, this edition welcomes 10 new and revised ones, which reflect a combination of aspiration of new students and progress in ongoing inquiries. Themes which have received much greater attention from our community include sociohistorical roots of geographically varied principles of urban design, relationships between built environment quality and foreign domestic investment, and resilience of public transport system, to name but a few. Readers with sharp eyes will also notice the addition of a summary of recent publications from members of the BSP PhD community, a move to celebrate their recognised scholarly and professional contributions to the field of planning. ‘Taking planning forward’ is not only a goal pursued by PhD students in the BSP individually, but also collaboratively within and beyond our base in Central House. To better highlight the latter, this edition launches a new section to recap the wide range of activities to which members of our PhD community have contributed in various capacities. Some of these activities have been a staple in the BSP, such as the ‘Lonely Planner’ talk series, which was first run in 2009. Others, like the Socially Just Planning Doctoral Network, have a relatively short history, but have quickly established its reputation in the Bartlett and other institutions. It is through these activities that more dialogues and synergies are promoted not only among we the BSP PhD students, but also between us and the wider academic community. Speaking of collaborative endeavours, this book could not have been published without the support from many people across the BSP. To begin with, we would like to thank Professor Nick Gallent, head of the BSP, for his sustained support to this publication initiative. We are heavily indebted to Professor Yvonne Rydin, tutor for BSP PhD students, who have heralded and supported various activities for the development of the BSP PhD community. Many of our research works and events reported in subsequent pages rest upon the administrative support from Ms Lisa Fernand and her team in the BSP office, to whom we are most grateful. Our gratitude also goes to convenors of the BSP Expo 2018, in which this edition will be formally launched. Last but not least, a big thanks to all PhD students in the BSP, whose hard work in taking planning forward over the last year lies at the heart of this book. The Editorial Team Karla Barrantes Chaves Calvin King Lam Chung Miguel Hincapié Triviño Alizara Juangbhanich Dimitris Panayotopoulos April 2018 Preface for the Third Edition Community Highlights CollECTivE iniTiaTivES ConfEREnCE ConTRiBuTionS RECEnT PuBliCaTionS Part 01 3 Collective Initiatives The Bartlett School of Planning encourages a lively research culture, and this has been reflected in the range of events and activities organised by members of the PhD Community. They aim to stimulate dialogue among BSP staff, students, alumni as well as the wider academic community. In this edition of Taking Planning Forward, we showcase four recurrent initiatives: the Socially Just Planning Seminars organised by the Socially Just Planning Doctoral Network, the ‘Lonely Planner’ talks, our PhD Away Days, and the BSP Postgraduate Research Day launched by Professor Yvonne Rydin, BSP Graduate Tutor for Research Students. 4 The Socially Just Planning (SJP) Doctoral Network was established in 2017 with an aim to bring attention of the PhD and The Bartlett community about the significance of improving equity and quality standards in planning projects, initiatives and research, thereby contributing to further development of the idea of social justice around the field of planning. This has been done through promoting discussions of on-going research projects and initiatives in the fields of transport, regeneration and public spaces as three different, yet related, domains for socially just urban planning. The Network follows in the footsteps of the Socially Just Transport Doctoral Network, founded in 2015 with support from the Bartlett Doctoral Initiative Fund, which sponsors PhD student-led initiatives in the Bartlett to promote cross-faculty research collaboration. With additional focus on regeneration and public spaces, the Network hopes to encourage more PhD students, as well as staff, from the Bartlett and other faculties from UCL and beyond to develop links and share expertise with their peers on promoting social justice within planning. Central to the Network is a series of Socially Just Planning Seminars, which take turn to cover the three core themes of transport, regeneration and public spaces. With nine seminars this year, each of them is pivoted around one or more invited presentations, followed by a panel discussion involving all attendees where relevant themes are explored to contribute to the discussion of social justice within planning studies. Supervised by Dr Elisabete Cidre, the Network is currently coordinated by Monica Lopez Franco with support from Beatriz Mella Lira and Karla Barrantes, who respectively lead on networking effort in their specialising fields of regeneration, transport and public spaces. Socially Just Planning Seminars Organised by the Socially Just Planning Doctoral Network For more details of the Network, visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/people/bartlett-doctoral-networks/socially-just- planning-doctoral-network. You can also keep in touch with the Network through Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/ sociallyjustplanning/) or Twitter (@just_planning) On 9 and 10 June 2017, about 20 BSP PhD students gathered in Woodlands Park Hotel in Cobham for their much anticipated annual PhD away days. The two-day retreat in the stately 19th century mansion consisted of a combination of outdoor team building activities and conversations on academic and professional development. The group was delightedly joined by Dr Lingqian Hu from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who was then visiting the BSP, and two BSP alumni, Dr Sarah Cary from British Land, and Dr Ine Steenmans from UCL Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy. They and our very own Richard Timmerman, a practising planner for years before returning to the BSP for his PhD studies, shared with the participating students their insights on how to plan and prepare for a successful career in the academia and beyond. Open to all audiences, the ‘Lonely Planner’ is a series of informal talks by BSP PhD students on their personal encounters with the culture, environment and planning issues of where they have lived or worked. Experiences from different parts of the world are brought to life through multi-media presentations, followed by discussions and a post-talk meal held at a restaurant linked to the featured culture wherever possible. The initiative was first brought forward by the BSP PhD community in 2009, and has run for 10 years in a row. For this academic year, we were delighted to have three of our new MPhil/PhD candidates that have enrolled in September 2017 – Jingyi Zhu, Ruth Sepulveda Marquez, and Carina Schneider – sharing with us their international experiences from China, Chile, Germany, and the United Kingdom. This was the first year for a combined Lonely Planner session to be held where each presenter brought their local cuisine with them for a pot-luck dinner. PhD Away Days - 9–10 June 2017 Lonely Planner Talks - 21 November 2017 The very first BSP Postgraduate Research Day was organised on 7 June 2017. Launched by Professor Yvonne Rydin, BSP Graduate Tutor for Research Students, the one- day event celebrates the work of BSP research students across all stages of progression, and further promotes dialogue and rapport across members of the school in their research endeavours. The daytime programme consisted of a series of presentations by students preparing for their PhD upgrade on their proposed research, with questions and feedback from peers and staff. Opened to the wider audience, the evening programme featured talks by students approaching completion of their doctoral studies on key findings from their inquiries, followed by discussion over refreshments. Postgraduate Research Day - 7 June 2017 7 Conference Contributions Every year, PhD students in the BSP participate in academic conferences around the world, sharing their research on urban planning and related disciplines. Over the past year, many of them have attended and presented in meetings organised by American Association of Geographers (AAG), Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), Regional Studies Association (RSA), the UK-Ireland Planning Conference, as well as those organised and supported by the School and Bartlett faculty. Here is a summary of the presentations delivered by current and recently graduated members of the BSP PhD community in these events. 8 AAG 2017 & 2018 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting The annual meeting of AAG in the United States hosts thousands of geographers, GIS specialists, environmental scientists, and – not to be missed – planners from around the world sharing the very latest in research, policy, and applications with a spatial interest. The BSP PhD community have maintained a strong presence in both its 2017 meeting in Boston and 2018 meeting in New Orleans. Bong Kyung Jeon The role of local public intermediaries in the revival of the Daegu textile industry in Korea Calvin King Lam Chung Urban sustainability fix, city-regionalism, and China’s greenway boom Dimitris Panayotopoulos The morphology of urban voids: A metabolic approach to cohesion. The case of Eleonas in Athens Ilwon Seo The urban dimension of technology adoption: Analysis of Patent Licensing in China Rachna Gupta Lévêque Governing for resilience: Responding to the uncertainties of urban densification Siyao Liu Neighbourhood diversification and variegated integration of migrants in urban Beijing Stefania Fiorentino Makers, entrepreneurialism and urban renaissance Zheng Wang The multiple roles of the state in mega urban developments in China – Reflections from Shanghai Lingang • AAG 2017 - 5 – 9 April 2017 | Boston, MA lwon Seo Exploring the linkage of inward technology acquisition and regional innovative capacity Joe Penny Discussant for the session ‘Reimagining the Local State: theoretical and empirical transitions in local government’ Stefania Fiorentino Urban creative labs sharing the new urban economics’ challenges. Co-working and co- planning the city of Rome Tatiana Moreira De Souza Urban development, small business communities, and the entrepreneurialisation of English local government More on AAG: http://annualmeeting.aag.org/ AAG 2017 Annual Meeting programme: http://www.aag.org/galleries/conference-files/AAG_2017_Printed_Program__ FULL.pdf AAG 2018 Annual Meeting programme: http://www.aag.org/galleries/conference-files/ AAG_2018AnnualMeetingProgram_Final.pdf • AAG 2018 - 10 – 14 April 2018 | New Orleans, LA 9 Calvin King Lam Chung Green infrastructure for China’s new urbanisation: A case study of greenway development in Maanshan Martin Arias Bargaining development in an extractive GPN: Unpacking power asymetries in the Chilean copper mining case Paul Hildreth Place, economy and manufacturing in the ‘city’ and the ‘region’ Stefania Fiorentino The Roman edition of the Maker Faire: An entrepreneurial or an institutional exposure? Yingcheng Li Functional polycentricity and urban networks of knowledge collabation within and beyond the Yangtze River Delta Region in China • RSA Annual Conference - 4 – 7 June 2017 | Dublin, Ireland RSA Annual and Winter Conference 2017 Regional Studies Association BSP PhD students have often participated in the programme of conferences run by the RSA throughout the year to disseminate their research on various pressing issues with balanced and sustainable regional development. In 2017, they presented their latest work in the association’s Annual Conference in Dublin as well as its Winter Conference in London. AESOP 2017 - 11 – 14 July 2017 | Lisbon, Portugal Association of European Schools of Planning Annual Congress The AESOP Annual Congress 2017 was held in Lisbon under the theme ‘Spaces of Dialog For Places of Dignity: Fostering the European Dimension of Planning’. Members of the BSP PhD community contributed to this important forum of exchange in Europe on research, education and practice in planning through a range of presentations on their latest projects. Alexandra Gomes Sensescapes as ‘brush strokes’ of an urban canvas: From soundscapes to a multi-sensory framework of analysis of urban space Edward Jones Revealing local economies in suburban London: Developing effective methodologies to support planning policy Gualtiero Bonvino Transit Oriented Development land policy for transit funding in times of austerity – The cases of Rome and Turin João Ferreira Bento The impace of Europeanization processes on the development of National Architectural Policies in the EU Katayoun Karampour Municipal funding tool and development process Patricia Canelas Place-making with concentrated ownerships Stefania Fiorentino Urban Renaissance and the New Economic challenges. Co-working and co-planning the city of Rome Sonia Freire Trigo Urban public space as a common pool resource: Managing publicness through clubs More on AESOP 2017: http://aesop2017.pt/ Conference programme: http://aesop2017.pt/images/Congresso/abstracts/Abstracts%20Book%20AESOP2017%20 FinalVersion.pdf 10 Paul Hildreth What better provides an insight into place – firms or industrial clusters? A case study from the Mersey Dee cross-border economy More on RSA Annual Conference 2017: http://www.regionalstudies.org/conferences/conference/rsa-dublin-2017 RSA Annual Conference 2017 Abstract Book: http://www.regionalstudies.org/uploads/documents/2017_Dublin_ Abstract_Book.pdf More on RSA Winter Conference 2017: http://www.regionalstudies.org/conferences/conference/rsa-winter-2017 RSA Winter Conference 2017 Abstract Book: http://www.regionalstudies.org/uploads/documents/Abstract_Book.pdf • RSA Winter Conference - 16 – 17 November 2017 | London, UK UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference 2017 11 – 13 September 2017 | Belfast, N. Ireland The UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference 2017 was held at Queen’s University Belfast. The theme of the conference was ‘Transcending Boundaries: Global Flows and Spatial Justice’, which provided a particular opportunity to explore the ways in which planning, development and spatial analysis engages with the multi-level and complex flows of people, finance, environmental assets and other resources across space. A number of BSP staff and PhD students participated in the pre-conference PhD workshop and presented at the event, including Chien-Ling Lo on ‘The role of regeneration policies on the economic sustainability of property market: A case study of Manchester’. More on the conference: https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/PRC2017/ Conference programme: https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/PRC2017/files/Filetoupload,768775,en.pdf Alizara Juangbhanich How and why do private developers engage in green building practice: The case of Bangkok, Thailand Chien-Ling Lo The role of regeneration policies on the economic sustainability of property market: a case study of Manchester More on the conference: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events/2017/jun/2017-bartlett-doctoral-conference 2017 Bartlett Doctoral Conference on Sustainable Built Environment 23 June 2017 | London, UK In the summer of 2017, Dr Alex Opoku of the Bartlett School of Construction & Project Management hosted the Bartlett Doctoral Conference 2017 on ‘SDG2030: Re-Engineering the Built Environment towards the Sustainable Development Goals’. The event sought to bring together PhD students at the Bartlett to share their research on shaping a sustainable built environment. The conference was opened to all UCL staff and students. Two of our BSP colleagues presented their work on sustainability under the following titles: 11 Calvin King Lam Chung China’s greenway development: Where sustainability meets territoriality Ilwon Seo Discussant for the session ‘Reimagining the Local State: theoretical and empirical transitions in local government’ Mengqiu Cao Transport, social justice and the capabilities approach: Empirical evidence from Beijing Siyao Liu Migrant integration in Beijing -- Transition from migrants to residents Tianke Zhu Understanding heterogeneous suburbs in China: A case study of Jiangning New Town Tingting Lu Beyond club theory: Rationalising new residential development in urban China University College Weilong Zhang Urban village redevelopment in China: A case study of Guangzhou Yingcheng Li Megalopolis unbound: Knowledge collaboration within and beyond the Yangtze River Delta Region in China Yixiang Sun Institutional rescaling and community engagement in local state-led urban entrepreneurial place making: A case study of Qujiang New District in Xi’an, China Yuqi Liu Growth of rural migrant enclaves in Guangzhou, China: Agency, informality and social mobility The subjective wellbeing of migrants in Guangzhou, China: The impacts of the social and physical environment Zheng Wang The multiple roles of the state in mega urban developments in China – Reflections from Lingang For highlights of the conference: https://urban-china.org/urbanchina2017/ Conference programme: https://fulongwu.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/ucc-brochure4.pdf Conference abstracts and participants: https://fulongwu.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ucc-abstracts.pdf For updates of events and publications of CPRG: https://urban-china.org/ or subscribe to the group’s event mailing list at http://eepurl.com/-L-l9 2017 International Conference on China Urban Development 5 – 6 May 2017 | London, UK Organised by the China Planning Research Group (CPRG) Co-chaired by Professor Fulong Wu and Dr Fangzhu Zhang, the BSP’s China Planning Research Group (CPRG) hosted the 2017 International Conference on China Urban Development, one of the largest of its kind organised outside China. The two-day conference attracted over 230 participants from 17 counties and regions to take part in debates spanning across a wide range of economic, social and environmental issues which define the trajectory of China’s urbanisation. Members of the BSP PhD community not only played an active role with the conference’s organisation, but also presented their research work under the following titles: Text and information drawn from AESOP, AAG, Queen’s University Belfast, RSA, CPRG and UCL online pages. 12 13 Recent Publications Though busy doing their fieldwork and writing their theses, many in the BSP PhD Community have managed to contribute to scholarly and professional conversations on various issues of planning in the form of journal articles, book chapters and more. For more details on the publications and works delivered by past and current members of the BSP PhD community, visit: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/planning/people/ mphilphd-students 14 Canelas, P. (2018). Place-making and the London estates: Land ownership and the built environment. Journal of Urban Design. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2018.1433531 Cao, M., Chen, C-L., Hickman, R. (2017). Transport emissions in Beijing: A scenario planning approach. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Transport, 170(2), 65–75. Cao, M., Hickman, R. (2017). Car dependence and housing affordability: An emerging social deprivation issue in London. Urban Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098017712682 Chung, C. K. L., Zhang, F., & Wu, F. (2018). Negotiating green space with landed interests: The urban political ecology of greenway in the Pearl River Delta, China. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12384 Gomes, A. (2018). A framework of analysis for urban sensory aesthetics: Looking at sensescapes as ‘brush strokes’ of an urban canvas. In K. E. Y. Low, & D. Kalekin-Fishman (Eds.), Senses in cities: Experiences of urban settings (pp. 137–153). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. He, S., Chung, C. K. L., Bayrak, M. M., & Wang, W. (2018). Administrative boundary changes and regional inequality in provincial China. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 11(1), 103–120. Hickman, R., Cao, M., Mella-Lira, B., Fillone, A., & Biona, J. B. (2017). Understanding capabilities, functionings and travel in high and low income neighbourhoods in Manila. Social Inclusion, 5(4), 161–174. Hincapié Triviño, M. (2018). Review of the book Attracting visitors to ancient neighbourhoods. Creation and management of the tourist-historic city of Plymouth, UK, by D. Barrera-Fernandez. Journal of Urban Design, 23(1), 161–162. Jeon, B. K. & Phelps, N. A. (2018). From ugly ducklings to beautiful swans? The role of local public intermediaries in the revival of the Daegu textile industry. Geoforum, 90, 100-107. Liu, Y., Zhang, F., Liu, Y., Li, Z., & Wu, F. (2017). The effect of neighbourhood social ties on migrants’ subjective wellbeing in Chinese cities. Habitat International, 66, 86–94. Martín Sainz de los Terreros, J. (2018). Welcoming sound: The case of a noise complaint in the weekly assembly of el Campo de Cebada. Social Movement Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1456328 Penny, J. (2017). Between coercion and consent: The politics of “cooperative governance” at a time of “austerity localism” in London. Urban Geography, 38(9), 1352–1373. Penny, J. (2018). The ‘cooperative’ or ‘cop-out’ council? Urban politics at a time of austerity localism in London. In T. Enright, & U. Rossi (Eds.), The urban political: Ambivalent spaces of late neoliberalism (pp. 147–169). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Raco, M., & Moreira de Souza, T. (2018). Urban development, small business communities and the entrepreneurialisation of English local government. Town Planning Review, 89(2), 145–165. Zuñiga, M.; Barrantes, K., Brenes, M., Zamora, L., Nuñez, O., Sanchez, L., & Castillo, M. (2017). Observación directa de ambientes de aprendizaje en centros educativos costarricenses con distinto desempeño. [Classroom observation of learning environment in Costa Rican High Schools with different performance level] State of Education 2017. State of the Nation Program. San José, Costa Rica: CONARE. URL: http://estadonacion.or.cr/files/biblioteca_ virtual/educion/006/primaria-y secundaria/Zuniga_et_al.pdf Individual Research Projects Part 02 17 1. The contribution of social capital to the urban ecological resilience of self-help settlements. The case of Nezahualcoyotl, in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City. Alejandro Rivero Villar Alejandro is a PhD candidate working under the supervision of Dr Catalina Turcu, and Dr Nikos Karadimitriou. Before starting his PhD, Alejandro worked in a variety of projects as a national consultant for the UN-Habitat office in Mexico, and as a public planner in the government of the Mexican state of Morelos. He has degrees in Urbanism from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and an MSc in Sustainable Urbanism from the Bartlett School of Planning. His research is sponsored by a doctoral grant of Mexico’s Science and Technology Council (CONACyT). keywords: urban resilience, social capital, social networks, climate change, self-help settlements. email: alejandro.rivero.10@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Google Maps 18 This research investigates the contribution that social networks –as agents of social capital– make to the urban resilience of self-help settlements (self-produced settlements by low-income groups that lack adequate infrastructures and services, often occupying areas of high risk) at the municipal scale. Self- help settlements are widely acknowledged as intrinsically vulnerable to the effects of climate change and are foreseen to be the predominant form of urbanisation in the Global South for the 21st century (UN-HABITAT, 2006). UN’s recent adoption of the ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ have placed the resilience of self-help settlements at the top of the global development agenda (UNGA, 2015). Urban resilience is the continued adjustment of cities in an evolutionary fashion through their histories in face of environmental uncertainties and nonlinearities. Urban resilience depends on cities’ ability to transform in relation to those factors driving vulnerability and risk. It is acknowledged that societies have inherent capacities to overcome vulnerabilities, which are bound with their ability to act collectively. Thus, urban resilience scholars recognise the social dimension as central to explain how the inhabitants of a city can act collectively in identifying the sources of their vulnerability, and forward pertinent transformations to increase the resilience of the city. Central to urban resilience’s social dimension is the concept of social capital, which refers to the social rules of trust and reciprocity embedded in social networks that enable them to act collectively. In the context of urban resilience, social capital can explain how social groups living in self-help settlements organise from the bottom to achieve community goals (e.g. accessing adequate services and infrastructures) and overcome the sources of their vulnerability. This research takes as case study the social networks involved in the achievement of the collective goals that shape the urban resilience of Nezahualcóyotl (Neza), a self-help settlement located in the metropolitan area of Mexico City. Neza is considered a successful case of community-driven transformation in response to challenging environmental conditions. In its history, Neza faced multiple hazards, both environmental (the settlement is located on the drained bed of a salty lake, prone to flooding and sand storms) and institutional (at the moment of its formation, the area lacked formal government structures, and secure land tenure). The investigation uses mixed research methods. Social networks were identified and analysed using the theoretical and methodological procedures of Social Network Analysis (SNA), while research on the operation of the network relies on qualitative methods; through interviews conducted with 40 former members of the identified networks. The approach of the research is historical, given that the investigation tracked the evolution of the case-study, from its beginnings (1950s) to the moment in which the main sources of its vulnerability were finally tackled (1980s). Some preliminary findings, coming from the analysis of the identified networks, show that the identified networks have two main characteristics: • Social networks followed a trajectory of three stages: formation, peak, and dissolution. Social networks, in the formation stage, gather participants around a particular topic, which keeps growing and gaining momentum, until social networks reach a peak in size, which allows them to achieve the pursued collective goals. Once a goal is achieved, social networks tend to dissolve. • Social networks evolved towards its formalisation. This means that even when the observed social networks had their origins as informal, local and bottom-up, all of them followed a trajectory in which government actors assumed the most relevant positions in the networks. Even when community actors are present during all the observed period, the number of community participants decreased as government actors concentrated the most relevant positions. This means that government actors assumed the control of Neza’s social networks, and suggests that the evolution of social networks went from governance to government. This may question the relevance of governance approaches for resilience, and recognise the importance of the role of the state in global south’s resilience agenda. It is expected that results from the analysis of the interviews will add relevant insights on the operation of networks. And ultimately contribute to the understanding of the role of social networks as agents of social capital to the resilience of self-help settlements. 19 2. Invisible city: A framework to understand multi-sensory perception in urban public space. Alexandra Gomes Alexandra Gomes is currently finishing her PhD at UCL Bartlett School of Planning. Her thesis intends to go beyond the hegemony of vision in spatial planning and design, and contribute to the analysis of urban space through a comprehensive multisensory approach. She has also taught modules on sustainability, international planning, urban design and research and learning methods at the Bartlett School of Planning. Since 2014, she has been working as a Research Officer at LSE Cities where she is responsible for coordinating the centre’s spatial analysis across a range of projects. keywords: multi-sensory, sensescapes, urban space, perception, framework. email: alexandra.gomes@ucl.ac.uk Photos: Alexandra Gomes 20 The study of senses in the urban realm has been strongly related to the study of the mechanism linking human-environment interaction. However, while authors in other disciplines such as environmental psychology, geography, architecture or history have been studying and discussing these questions, there is still the need for a better recognition and critical understanding of these issues in spatial planning and urban design. Although the sensory question has been debated in urban studies since the 1960s, it has nevertheless been predominantly addressed through a mono-sensory and visual perspective. Therefore, this research intends to go beyond the hegemony of vision and to contribute to a qualitative analysis of urban space through a more comprehensive multi-sensory approach. On the one hand it looks into the urban realm and considers how different elements have been affecting the individual and the collective use of public space through the sensory regimes they can imply. On the other hand, it considers senses as mediators of human understanding and experiencing of space, highlighting the non-visual ‘sensescapes’ of the city with the intent of recognising how these affect the qualities of space. Through the use and adaptation of more innovative urban research methods such as ‘sensetalks’ and ‘sensewalks’ (in-situ interviews) together with the exploration of ‘semantics’ and the language of sensory perception, this research will highlight the structural elements from the individuals’ experience of urban public space. This investigation will start with the creation of a multi- sensory framework; going beyond the simplification of a mono-sensory analysis to a more comprehensive, descriptive (from the user perspective), and adaptable non-spatial structure that highlights key characteristics to explore when analysing the ‘sensescapes’ of any space. Supported by the multi-sensory framework it will then focus on different locations along a walking route in Bishopsgate London to explore the elements or stimuli perceived by interviewees and their qualitative characteristics, patterns, and relations. This research will then end with a more in-depth and spatial analysis of three specific locations within the case study area, and an exploration of urban realm characteristics that have promoted the main differences in spatial qualities of those spaces: positive, negative and neutral. While the complexity of the urban as an object makes it difficult to control variables in order to achieve the full understanding of actions and consequences, this research is nevertheless a qualitative attempt to explore possible relations between elements and individuals in the urban realm through the analysis of the content and language of street users, aiming to provide urban planners with better tools to design or redesign urban spaces. The main proposition is that a multi-sensory approach to spatial planning and urban design is capable of offering a broader understanding of space, describing its character and atmosphere; it also contributes to a more sensuously fitting new way of designing space while strengthening the identity of a place. 21 3. How and why do private developers engage in green building practice? The case of Bangkok, Thailand. Alizara Juangbhanich Alizara (Lisa) is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Planning under the supervision of Dr Catalina Turcu and Professor Yvonne Rydin. Holding a background degree in architecture (Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University) and MSc in Sustainable Urbanism (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL), her interest in sustainability for the built environment ranges from green building design and practice to research in sustainable urban planning and development. Particular research interest includes exploring pro- environmental behaviour within the context of developing cities which her master’s dissertation (Exploring Behavioural Change in Car-dependency) and current PhD seek to contribute. keywords: organisational behaviour, developer behaviour, corporate environmentalism, green building, Bangkok. email: a.juangbhanich.11@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Alizara Juangbhanich 22 Buildings consume up to 40 percent of global energy and account for one third of energy-related GHG emissions (UNEP, 2014). Sustainable building design and construction has been increasingly adopted as a means to alleviate growing environmental concerns with particular emphasis on green building practice. Despite the growing awareness and rapid increase in number of projects throughout the developed world, integration of green building practice in developing cities in Southeast Asia remain slow (Shafii, Ali, & Othman, 2006). Barriers in green building practice are often referred to as financial, technical, institutional or market- related; with repeated identification of cost premiums, lack of expertise, technology, government incentives, market demand as key concerns (see BCI Asia, 2014; Samari, Ghodrati, Esmaeilifar, Olfat, & Shafiei, 2013). This study contends that, particularly in the context of developing cities, there is limited understanding of the mechanisms behind the behaviour of developers and their responses to green building practice that is found in existing literature. Lack of implementation and effort in green building practice are often addressed as a result of economic and technological impracticalities that limit the viability of a green building project. Academic studies and market research that sought to investigate corporate responses to green building practice have conclusively identified economic, technological, social, and political factors within the external context as key barriers and drivers of green building projects. This is to say that conditions in the contextual environment are the main – or sole – causes that constrain green building efforts. We argue that this belief is an oversimplification of the factors involved therein; one that is derived from a business-orientated perspective that prioritises the focus on financial costs and returns. We propose that developer response to green building practice is far more complex than the amalgamation of contextual factors. Developers – as organisations – are susceptible to the influence of organisational and psychological factors that lie beyond issues of practicality (see Hoffman & Bazerman, 2005; Hoffman & Henn, 2008). Majority of the research found in green building literature ceases to explore developer behaviour under an organisational behaviour perspective and pays limited attention to the extent in which organisational structure, culture, and ‘softer’ psychological constructs may interactively shape decisions to engage in green building practice. Consequently, organisational and socio-psychological factors in green building practice may have been overlooked. This study seeks to readdress the understanding of factors involved in developer decisions to undertake green building practice through a theoretical framework that integrates organisational behaviour theory with the literature on property development. It identifies that developer decisions to adopt green building practice are shaped by the interplay of ‘hard’ pragmatic factors found in the external environmental context and ‘soft’ psychological factors embedded within the organisation and its members, thereby hypothesising that factors rooted in the culture and cognitive constraints of top managers will play an equal – or even larger – role in shaping developer decisions to undertake green building practice. This study therefore attempts to explore the question ‘how and why do private developers engage in green building practice?’ through a qualitative approach under an organisational behavioural framework to generate a more holistic understanding of the factors that shape responses to green building practice. It focuses on uncovering the significance that organisational and psychological constructs may have on decisions to undertake green building projects. Government policies have dedicated large amount of resources to facilitate and promote green building practice through financial incentives and subsidies. We argue that this is a top- down approach to encourage sustainable building practice; and that it may be as equally important to attend to behavioural aspects with an aim to foster efforts from a more bottom-up approach. The research draws on the case study of Bangkok to contribute a better understanding to private developers’ engagement with green building practice in the context of developing cities where sustainable urbanisation is imperative yet limitedly practiced and researched. 23 4. The urban design principles for Southeast Asian cities: An approach from the metaphor of urban footprints Anon Chaimanee Anon is a first-year PhD student at the Bartlett school of Planning under the supervision of Dr Filipa Wunderlich and Dr Michael Short. His thesis intends to develop a set of urban design principles/approaches for Southeast Asian cities that is attuned to cultural background of locals, including historical background, socio-cultural formation and daily life practices. Previously, Anon has worked as a lecturer and researcher at Chiangmai University, Thailand, where he was researching and gaining knowledge in urban morphology, the image of the city and place identity of Southeast Asian cities. Anon has a degree in Architecture from Silpakorn University (Thailand) and an MA in Urban Design from Cardiff University. keywords: urban design principles, Southeast Asia, urban footprints, urban complexity email: a.chaimanee.16@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Anon Chaimanee 24 Southeast Asian cities have a unique urban environment that expresses through the complexity in urban places in various dimensions, such as the informality and intensity on the streetscape, the reflections of religious beliefs on the social life patterns, and the socio-cultural practices of people from multi- cultural background (see Chifos & Yabes, 2000; McGee & Yeung, 1977; Oranratmanee & Sachakul, 2014). Within this context, people know, feel and define the urban place through multi-dimensional devices, such as the interactions between people through architecture and neighbourhoods, daily activities, socio-cultural events, clothing, arts, and so on (Askew, 2002; Sopranzetti, 2009). As mentioned, obviously, the conceptual ideas for the image of the city and urban environment in Southeast Asia are different to the general urban design perspective. From the lens of Western urban design theories, people perceive a place by the physical settings and activities provided by urban practitioners (Canter, 1977; Lynch 1960, 1981; Relph, 1976). However, in Southeast Asia, a place is defined by the variety of means that local inhabitants give to their surroundings (see Forbes, 1996; Rigg, 1991). By this contrast, Southeast Asian cities have been facing visible conflicts between urban design practices and actualities of the urban context. The mainstream of urban design practices mainly concerned city as physical attributes, functionality and spatial uses, but lacks considerations of urbanism, socio- cultural formation, values and meaning of the place. Extant analytical works, with their focus on physical elements, are not responsive to the societal and cultural complexities in the Southeast Asian urban environment. By addressing these gaps, this research proposes a theoretical framework to study Southeast Asian cities’ urban environment from a comprehensive view through the framework of social, spatial, cultural and political aspects, exploring how these urban characteristics affect the urban environment and the image of Southeast Asian cities. In this research, ‘urban footprints’ is selected as the theoretical scope for interpreting the cities, because this urban metaphor resonates with urban notions in Southeast Asia and can facilitate a comprehensive reading of its cities based on two conceptual ideas. First, a city is the contained space of imprints from the past, and it is full of practices and thoughts of histories travelling (Massey, 1999). Over the years, the city becomes memorable (Amin & Thrift, 2002). Second, a narrative of the city has been socio-culturally constructed, and it expresses itself through various factors including social, spatial, political and cultural aspects rather than only the physical characteristic (see Hayden, 1997; Massey, 1999). Given the foregoing context, the study starts with determining the theoretical tools which correspond with the conceptual ideas of urban footprints to read the uniqueness of cities in a holistic approach, considering a city beyond its physical environment to acknowledge its socio-cultural formation and expressions in the urban places. The study then uncovers the uniqueness of urban environment in Southeast Asian cities through their urban history, to explore the evidence of social, spatial, cultural and political events that shaped the Southeast Asian cities in a unique way, and to identify their current environment. After that, the study involves selecting site studies from the ‘city model’ which has been studied from the 1960s by Southeast Asian scholars (see Forbes, 1997; Hall, 1955; McGee, 1967, Ricklefes et al., 2010; Rigg, 1991; Rimmer & Dick, 2009), exploring the range of prevailing urban characteristics and mapping them to the site studies. The fieldwork study will focus on everyday life practices in order to examine how unique feature of urban environment affect the image of today cities. This research will finalise a study model that is sensitive to an urban environment with multi-dimensional complexity. It will provide a better understanding of the urban environment in Southeast Asian cities in a different perspective which, contrasting the usual urban design approach, focuses on the socio-cultural formation, meaning and expression that people give to the cities. 25 5. Urban and social equity impacts from transport: Evidence and approaches from Santiago de Chile. Beatriz Mella Lira Beatriz is a Chilean architect with a master’s degree in urban development from P. Universidad Catolica de Chile. She is currently pursuing her PhD under the supervision of Dr Robin Hickman. Her primary research interests are in transport planning, mobility and social equity in transportation. Beatriz has recently worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster and a research assistant at UCL for the British Council Newton Fund research project ‘Sustainable Cities and Resilient Transport’. Earlier in Chile, she performed as a lecturer, researcher and private consultant, leading projects related to urban infrastructure, participatory urban design and sustainable development. keywords: transport planning, capability approach, social equity, transport project assessment, social inclusion. email: beatriz.lira.14@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Beatriz Mella Lira 26 This research focuses on the relationship between transportation projects and social equity through a critical appraisal of the factors that allow these projects to achieve better standards of social equity. The central questions that guide the research is what are the factors that reduce the gaps of social inequality, and to what extent these factors can be incorporated into transport appraisal. The research has a strong social component, mainly structured around social and planning concepts, with specific engagement with the Capability Approach to explore transport oriented initiatives and for appraising transport projects in the context of Santiago de Chile. Social impact assessment in transport has usually been based on the understanding of changes in physical accessibility, casualties and security. However, more complex factors for measuring the quality of trips have not been fully accomplished yet. These factors include physical and mental integrity, perceptions on wellbeing, perceptions of safety, levels of comfort, decisions over activities and use of technologies, among others. In this regard, Capability Approach (Sen, 1985; 2009; Nussbaum, 2011) has shown the potential to offer a much wider perspective on the social dimensions of equity. This approach is based not only on people’s possessions or access to resources but also the opportunities and freedoms that people have (Anand, Hunter & Smith, 2005; Beyazit, 2011; Kronlid, 2008). Nevertheless, it remains as an open question whether the use of a quantitative approach (e.g. surveys and questionnaires) based on indicators is a valid method to ascertain capabilities and opportunities of people accomplished through transport. The aim of the research is to suggest the use of new and complementary methods (for example, the utilisation of a Transport Capability Survey) as a valid starting point for a more comprehensive transport social assessment, which allows the exploration of more complex and increasingly necessary factors to improve transport user’s long-term quality of living. The central element of the empirical research was the design, piloting and application of a survey to private and public transport users. This method has also been complemented with a qualitative analysis of in- depth interviews with policy makers, local and regional authorities, and different types of users representing various transport profiles. The survey reflects the applicability of some of the variables defined in the list of Central Human Capabilities shaped by Nussbaum and based on the study of the Capability Approach. It is suggested that, in addition to the built environment and socio-cultural factors, those factors will impact user’s propensity for taking certain transport modes. The application of the tool was made in a range of residential and destination areas to capture the diverse levels of income and accessibility to transport infrastructures of people in Santiago. Santiago as a case study was selected because the current barriers of segregation and social inequality seem to be accentuated with long daily communing, affecting a significant portion of public transport users. This group of users coincides with the most vulnerable sector of the population in the city, who are not only disadvantaged in income terms but also more significantly impaired by barriers related to education levels, housing affordability and access to job opportunities in the city. Although Santiago’s transport issues in recent years have been placed at the forefront of public discussion, the importance of social equity in transport has not been raised yet as a priority. Most importantly, transport planning is not yet considered as an essential element able to promote fairer societies. The research is expected to develop a suitable approach for improving the understanding of how social equity might be measured in its relation to transport. This approach will consider evidence from the users’ perspective, including their perceived levels of access to relevant daily activities; their expectations and satisfactions regarding their daily trips; and the assessment of the opportunities achieved as a result of their current accessibility. The results will also suggest the possibility of rolling out this approach as a complementary method for appraising transport projects. 27 6. Searching for an urban sustainability fix in China: A case study of the Pearl River Delta Greenway Project. Calvin King Lam Chung Calvin is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Planning under the supervision of Professor Fulong Wu and Dr Fangzhu Zhang. His current study is supported by a Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship for Overseas Studies from the Hong Kong government, a UCL Overseas Research Scholarship, and a Hong Kong Research Grant from the Royal Geographical Society. His research focuses on the political economy and political ecology of urban and regional planning in China. A winner of the 2014 best paper prize of International Development Planning Review, Calvin has also published in Antipode, Cities, and Environment and Planning C. keywords: urban sustainability fix, eco-state restructuring, urbanisation, land development, greenway email: calvin.chung.14@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Calvin King Lam Chung 28 In China, environmental demands are re-contouring the landscape of urban governance. The narrowly economic form of entrepreneurialism enshrined by many municipal governments is under attack from multiple fronts. Within the state, the central government is increasingly concerned about reducing the environmental costs of growth. Government officials have launched a series of national policies and regulations to press for eco-friendly urbanization (Chang, Leitner, & Sheppard, 2016). Outside the state, pressure is also mounting. A greener, cleaner city is needed not only for global interurban competition (Hodson & Marvin, 2007), but also in response to an upsurge of environmental activism (Economy, 2013). However, the implications of these new trends on China’s urban governance remain largely uncharted waters. Insofar as recent inquiries on flagship eco-city developments (Caprotti, 2014; Pow & Neo, 2013; Wu, 2012) shed important light on the motivations of Chinese cities to incorporate environmental goals into their development agenda, much more work is still required to capture and decipher the specific ways in which the structural intricacies of China’s urban governance have interacted with the emerging environmental requirements. Addressing this lacuna, this research examines the development thus far of the nationally acclaimed Pearl River Delta Greenway Project (PRDGP), launched in 2010 in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in Guangdong province, to determine how political-economic contingencies have governed the incorporation of environmental goals into the governance of Chinese cities. This empirical focus rests on the premise that the conception and implementation of the project, as an extensive environmental intervention producing a staggering 8,909 km of greenways across the PRD as of 2015, necessarily interact with various interests and institutions of urban governance. Investigation for this research was undertaken between 2013 and 2016 in five of the nine PRD cities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Dongguan and Huizhou. It involved interviewing over 50 people within and outside the state who have either directly involved in or well informed about the project, reviewing pertinent government documents, media coverage and academic publications, and making observations along various sections of greenways. This research reveals that the PRDGP represents what While, Jonas and Gibbs (2004) conceptualised as an urban sustainability fix with a ‘win-win’ mentality. Initiated by planners as an economically more attuned way to promote conservation in the PRD cities, the project has evolved since its implementation into an instrument to strategise the environment for economic benefits. One can observe three characteristic aspects of China’s emerging politics of urban sustainability from how the project has come to the ground. First, the negotiation of urban economic and environmental interests is historically embedded in a contentious process of ‘eco-state restructuring’ (While, Jonas, & Gibbs, 2010). Given the failure of two regional plans to appeal to scientific rationality for better municipal environmental care, the PRDGP was introduced through a combination of economically more persuasive discourses and politically more coercive implementation schemes. Second, ingrained economic and regulatory interests on land shape the search for an urban sustainability fix. While greenway was favoured as a remedy of green space shortage that does not consume land development quota of the PRD cities, its development has been shaped by issues on securing land use rights from rural collectives and resource management authorities, and engaging real estate developers for material support. Third, the promotion of urban sustainability is as much about the city as the countryside. Advancing the recreational frontier of the PRD’s urban dwellers into their rural hinterlands, greenways have received increasing emphasis as a catalyst of rural tourism development, leading to rural urbanisation in economic, institutional, physical as well as sociocultural terms. Meanwhile, given the symbolic and material struggles interlacing these findings, the research further proposes that an urban sustainability fix is best analysed as a threefold constellation of discursive, spatial and institutional interventions to illuminate the diverse means through which urban economy- environment conflicts are mediated. 29 7. Is English devolution fit for purpose? David Kingman David Kingman is a PhD researcher at the Bartlett School of Planning who is investigating the impact of the current wave of political devolution to city regions in England on urban governance and spatial inequalities. He has previously earned a BA in Geography and an MSc in Spatial Planning from UCL, and combines his current studies with his work as a researcher for the Intergenerational Foundation, a non-profit think tank which investigates socio-economic problems affecting young people in Britain. keywords: devolution, development, rebalancing, city-regions, North-South divide. email: david.kingman.10@ucl.ac.uk Photo: David Kingman 30 Since 2010, the UK’s Conservative-led governments have implemented a wide range of political reforms which can be broadly grouped together under the rubric of decentralisation. The latest iteration of this evolving and uneven process has involved the devolution of bespoke sets of new powers to city-regions through negotiated settlements (‘Devolution Deals’) between the leaders of city-regions and the central government. This project seeks to investigate: a) what this process of decentralisation actually involves in practical terms and how it has evolved over time; b) what its main aims and motivations are, and; c) how likely it is to achieve them. This project begins by placing the devolution of power within England into its long-term context, examining the historical development of local welfare states under powerful city governments in industrial cities such as Manchester and Birmingham during the era of Victorian ‘municipal socialism’. It then goes on to chart how English cities were largely denuded of power during the post-war period; firstly by the attempt to create a centralized ‘cradle-to-grave’ welfare state which sought to standardize public services across the country, and then subsequently by the Thatcher government’s attempts to minimize urban-led resistance to its neoliberal agenda of state restructuring. Since 2010, Britain’s Conservative- led governments have all pledged to reverse this process of political centralisation by returning powers over a number of policy areas to local areas (in the form of political institutions which operate at a variety of different spatial scales). It is observed that two distinct forms of devolution have been pursued by the Conservatives as part of this agenda: the devolution of powers to people, through the empowerment of civil society groups such as charities and social enterprises, and the devolution of power to places through the creation of new local governance structures such as city regions and metro mayors. The devolution agenda has proved controversial, with many authors viewing devolution as a smokescreen for shrinking the state (‘austerity localism’), and others criticizing the lack of democratic participation which ordinary citizens have been offered in a process which is ostensibly about making local governance more democratic. Initial research suggests that the main overall aims of the devolution agenda are to ‘spatially rebalance’ the UK economy away from its perceived over-reliance on London and the South East, and to counteract the perceived democratic illegitimacy of English local politics. This makes the project timely, as renewed attention is being focused upon the problem of spatially uneven development in advanced Western economies following the electoral success of Donald Trump in America and the Brexit campaign in the UK; the success of both having been attributed in part to the growth of regional inequalities. The theoretical inspiration for the current wave of English devolution appears to be a particular interpretation of ideas provided by Paul Krugman’s New Economic Geography (1991) and the New Urban Economics, which have been used to argue that cities require strong political leadership to reap the benefits of increasing returns to agglomeration. The working hypothesis of this project is that decentralisation is being designed and implemented by central government in a way that ignores the wishes of local electorates and pays insufficient attention to the place-specific factors which shape the local economy. These issues will be investigated by applying mixed methods research to one of the city-regions which is receiving new devolved powers in order to investigate whether meaningful devolution is taking place and whether it is likely to result in reduced spatial inequalities. The goal of this project is to produce practical policy recommendations on how implementation of the decentralisation agenda could be improved in the future. 31 8. The morphology of urban voids: A metabolic approach to cohesion. The case of Eleonas in Athens. Dimitris Panayotopoulos Dimitris is a PhD student supervised by Dr Susan Moore and Dr Camillo Boano, investigating notions of ‘void’ and ‘emptiness’ in the urban setting. Trained in architecture, he finished his MA-Arch in 2015 at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) with High Distinction where he later worked in research for a year before embarking on his PhD in October 2016. He has also worked in an array of architecture offices in Brussels, Tokyo and Sendai and has done research through workshops and projects in countries around the world including Belgium, Greece, The Netherlands, India, Taiwan, China and Japan. keywords: urban voids, morphology, metabolism, cohesion. email: d.panayotopoulos.16@ucl.ac.uk Photos: Dimitris Panayotopoulos 32 The urban form, guided among others by political decisions, historical events, and financial interests, is often shaped exclusively following very specific land-use considerations. Eventually this type of urbanisation spurs deep disparities between built and vacant zones, divides the population based on socio- economic and infrastructural assets (Oswalt, Baccini, & Michaeli, 2003) and very often generates inhuman, redundant and marginal spaces, that are ‘urban voids’ (Komninos, 2013). The ‘urban void’ is the central theme of this research. It is seen on one hand as a conceptual construct conveying a notion of emptiness and on the other as a physical entity revealing the absence of specific urban elements. Using the abstract notion of the ‘void’ to characterise urban situations permits a wider range of ‘lacking spaces’ (such as inactive, unbuilt, unplanned, informal or derelict areas etc.) to be included into a singular analytical framework. This research looks at the phenomena of ‘emptiness’ and exclusion from an ontological, epistemological and phenomenological standpoint to debate the meaning of the term when used for urban territories, and to investigate the relation of the ‘void’ with the city and its citizens. Discontinuities and ‘voids’ within the urban and social spheres are at the heart of the post-industrial city where the significance of the historical urban space is replaced with inhuman and ephemeral ‘non-places’ in and around spaces of modern activity (Foucault, 1984; De Certeau, 1990; Augé, 1992; Pope, 1997). In the new ‘connected city’ driven by the optimisation of flows and commodities, a new ‘territorial unevenness’ emerges between the connected valuable spaces and the less-favoured switched-off territories of today’s highly fragmented urbanisation (Castells, 2010; Secchi & Vigano, 2011; Graham & McFarlane, 2014). Beyond the premium spaces, disfigured ones tend to become invisible, eventually becoming spatial gaps (Boyer, 1992, 1995) that deepen social and economic marginalisation (Mingione, 1995; Law & Wolch, 1993; Doron 2000). Reconceptualising the ‘urban void’ can play a role in exploring the agency of urban spaces and their implication in the division of the social and urban spheres. In line with several authors, this research argues that urban voids are part of as well as the result of the broader spatial, physical, political and social systems (Doron, 2000; Graham & Martin, 2001; Talocci, 2011; Foo, Martin, Wool, & Polsky, 2014). But what is the ‘void’ in an urban context? How does it manifest in the urban context? To what extent is it possible to promote a more cohesive urban environment taking into account its form, the underlying urban flows, and its social configurations? This research will look into a single area in Athens, Greece, called Eleonas in order to answer these questions. Strategically located between the city centre and the city’s port, the fast-decaying industrial area ‘Eleonas’ has been chosen as a case study for its long historical significance in the city’s exponential growth in the 20th century (Biris, 1996), the successive stages of growth and decline it went through from antiquity, and how these shaped the incongruous landscape it is today. It will be analysed through attentive analysis of its morphology, metabolism and socio-economic configurations which will attempt to present the ‘urban void’ not as a standalone ‘other’ entity, but rather as an inherent part of urban space and the inhibitor of diverse and complex urban conditions. Dissecting urban voids in morphological, metabolic and social components allows to consider them not only as physical enclaves but also as areas bound by constrains of urban flows and imbued with different perceptions. This conceptualisation gives the opportunity to explore how ‘voids’ are created, appropriated and possibly contested. This research aims to delve deeper into these concepts and unravel the intricate ways placemaking, spatial configurations and social dynamics are interwoven. 33 9. Transit oriented development land policy for public transport funding Gualitero Bonvino Gualtiero is a qualified architect and town planner, with 16 years’ experience in the private sector in Italy as researcher and consultant in planning and property development related matters. In 2009 he moved to London to start a PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning under the supervision of Professor Peter Hall and Professor Stephen Marshall. Since 2014 he is completing his dissertation under the supervision of Professor Yvonne Rydin, while working as freelance consultant, teaching assistant at BSP and lecturer at the South Bank University. His research interests revolve around land use and transport integration, property development and land policy. keywords: transit oriented development, land policy, land value capture, public transport funding. email: gualtiero.bonvino.09@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Wikimedia Commons 34 The purpose of the research is to investigate new approaches to fund public transport infrastructures using value capture mechanisms. Particularly, it aims to explore development-based value capture approaches in joint infrastructure and (transit oriented) property development projects. Hence, the idea of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and land policy are central to the research. The TOD concept entails a tight integration of land use and public transport, and is considered a powerful policy to produce a more sustainable urban form. It has been generally defined as ‘a compact, mixed-use community, centred around a transit station that, by design, invites residents, workers, and shoppers to drive their cars less and ride mass transit more’ (Bernick & Cervero, 1997, p. 5). However, the funding of the basic component of this policy, usually a rail based public transport infrastructure, is often out of reach because of shrinking public finances. This is in contrast with the value created, in terms of land value, by the process of property development intensification around stations that this policy involves. Different families of ‘macro, direct and indirect’ land policy mechanisms have been invented to recapture this value (Alterman 2012, p. 762), and they are considered promising in TOD areas for the process of land capitalisation of accessibility benefits (Suzuki et al., 2015). However, they present important governance capability challenges and usually can cover only a small portion of the infrastructure cost. An exception is when extensive public land ownership is involved, which would qualify as a ‘macro’ value capture approach. Nevertheless, this is a rare circumstance since land-banking is no longer in fashion in most western countries. In the case of private land ownership, ‘direct’ value capture tools, which involve different forms of taxations, are available in many countries. These tools are often used leveraging on the compelling rationale of taxing the betterment created by the increased accessibility attributable to the new transport infrastructure (Medda, 2012). By contrast, development-based approaches, which involve land readjustment (der Krabben & Needham, 2008) or ‘indirect’ value capture tools, where the local authority could negotiate density bonusses in exchange of extraordinary planning contributions, are neither often used, or studied. One of the reasons is that, even in the case of public land ownership, infill urban densification is in general problematic, due to opposition from local communities fearing the congestion caused by additional development. Here is where the rationale of TOD makes a positive contribution. Indeed, a key feature of TOD is that, thanks to public transport accessibility and capacity, the otherwise negative relation between density and congestion is broken. Hence a significantly higher density becomes sustainable, unlocking the potential to create more development rights through revised land use terms, both on public and private land. If this link between additional development rights and benefits from a new public transport infrastructure can be elucidated, there would be a stronger justification to capture the value yield from the new developments for the funding of the public transport infrastructure which make them possible. In this context of joint development of property and transport, this research aims to clarify the process of (land) value creation and challenge the rationale of current value capture mechanisms with an integrated theoretical framework, which includes land use and transport integration on one hand, and land theory and land policy on the other. It explores the difficult cases of Rome and Turin, where the scarcity of financial resources at both national and local level forced local authorities to experiment innovative development-based value capture approaches in the attempt to partially fund a new metro line through a mix of ‘macro’ and ‘indirect’ value capture mechanisms. At present, both experiments can be considered as failures. Nevertheless, there is a long enough joint planning and infrastructure development process to be investigated and to learn from. Using qualitative and quantitative analytical tools, the research examines, in the context of the Italian (prescriptive) planning system and legal framework, how planning decisions and land policies applied in TOD areas have been mobilised to fund public transport infrastructure, whether such attempts were effective, and how can this development-based funding process be improved. The research results highlight the extreme complexity of these integrated policies which require exceptional governance capability for a long period of time, during which the projects are exposed to market fluctuations and political instability, and that the Italian land policy framework is still not supportive enough for these strategies. 35 10. Planning and design of suburban fortunes: Urban policies and suburban socio-economic and spatial transformation in Tokyo Prefecture under three-tier governmental system. Hiroaki Ohashi Hiroaki Ohashi is a registered Professional Engineer (Civil Engineering: Urban and Regional Planning), Approved Urban Renewal Planner and registered Real Estate Notary in Japan. He holds a MSc with Distinction (in Built Environment: Advanced Architectural Studies) and MArch (in Architectural Design) from University of London (UCL), as well as a BEng (in Civil Engineering) and MEng (in Civil Engineering) from the University of Tokyo. He has professional experiences in international and domestic consultancy services in planning at two construction consulting firms within the same company group in Japan. His international work experiences include Qatar, Mongolia, Ghana, Vietnam and China. keywords: suburban shrinkage, suburban revitalisation, urban policy, spatial planning, economic development. email: hiroaki.ohashi.14@ucl.ac.uk Photos: Hiroaki Ohashi 36 The aim of this research is to identify policy and planning implications to achieve sustainability and regeneration of the suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture which is now confronted with suburban shrinkage, and to obtain significant lessons learnt from it for the future planning of other large cities worldwide. The suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture is officially called the ‘Tama Area’, which constitutes thirty suburban municipalities, namely 26 cities, three towns and one village. The suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture stretches over one thousand square kilometres and accommodates a population of over four million. In recent decades, Tokyo Metropolis has experienced both socio-demographic transformation such as population ageing and falling birth rates, and economic restructuring such as growing high-tech industries and deindustrialisation under the situation of continuing globalisation. Since the early 2000s, political and policy stress have been shifted to the metropolitan city centre under the global competitiveness agenda. In this trend, a polycentric spatial structure of Tokyo Metropolis has been deforming under a strong back-to-the-city movement of both workplace and residence. Consequently, the suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture, which is now at a very matured stage of urbanisation, long after massive suburbanisation during rapid economic growth, has experienced new multifaceted suburban restructuring in the specific metropolitan contexts. This suburban restructuring has incorporated different trajectories of constituent suburban municipalities depending on their geographical locations and past development paths, some of which has already showed signs of decline. Therefore, it is a big planning issue to examine this suburban restructuring in the context of stagnation and/or decline, and clarify how urban policies should be formulated to avert further suburban decline and/or stagnation and achieve suburban regeneration. The research will explore this suburban restructuring from the following interrelated dimensions: A) urban policy, B) economic restructuring and C) socio-demographic transformation. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the research will employ a two-stage analysis at different scales as follows: 1) all the suburban municipalities and 2) case studies. Firstly, the research will examine their different trajectories by exploring interactions among the three interrelated dimensions. Secondly, the research will investigate influences of urban policies and their changes, which have been implemented under the three-tier governmental system of Japan, on the suburban restructuring. Finally, the research will identify key policy and planning implications for the suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture, and address application of these lessons to other global cities in other advanced nations and/or rapidly growing large cities in Asian countries. The suburban territory of Tokyo Prefecture started to face shrinkage at an earlier timing than those of the other largest cities worldwide, most of which are still growing. In this trend, the contemporary suburban restructuring of Tokyo Prefecture would be conceived as one of the new frontiers of suburban phenomena across the world. Other large cities might encounter similar suburban shrinkage in either the short or long-term. Therefore, this research will attempt to provide significant insights for future urban planning debates of the global society on how to tackle suburban shrinkage and achieve suburban sustainability at a matured stage of urbanisation. 37 11. The mechanism of social capital in the participatory planning with diversity: The foundation phase of community-led regeneration of Seoul, South Korea Hyunji Cho Hyunji is a planner and researcher in urban studies in the field of participatory planning and neighbourhood dynamics. Her interest is in community activism and the micro politics in the urban area including immigrant groups. Her PhD work is under the supervision of Dr Yasminah Beebeejaun and Professor Mike Raco. keywords: social capital, immigrant group, community-led regeneration, participatory planning. email: hyunji.cho.14@ucl.ac.uk Photo: Hyunji Cho 38 This thesis aims at examining the construction of local communities in Korean planning system and marginalisation of immigrant groups from it. This study has a particular focus on mechanisms that were used to involve communities in planning to investigate how inclusion/exclusion of communities was formed. Many pointed out that current participatory planning often failed to engage local communities especially regarding so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, such as ethnic minorities (Beebeejaun, 2006, 2012; Beebeejaun & Vanderhoven, 2010; Brownill & Carpenter, 2007; Coaffee & Healey, 2003; Fincher & Iveson, 2008; Vigar, Gunn, & Brooks, 2017). However, studies on how and why marginalisation occurred and which aspects in planning procedure made the involvement of certain immigrant groups more difficult are limited (see Beebeejaun, 2006). The case study in the neighbourhood, which had a significant Korean Chinese population, who shared ethnicity with Korean but was located in disadvantaged positions as low-income immigrant groups, will help us understand the complex dimensions of the unequal social status of the groups and its influence on the unequal participation. This paper is based on mixed methods research, including document analysis, social network analysis, non-participant observation, and in-depth interviews, in the Garibong-dong community-led regeneration project in Seoul, South Korea during the period 2015-2017. To explore processes of participation, this thesis was designed to investigate how social capital is formed in neighbourhoods and how that social capital was operated in participatory planning. Particularly, the thesis integrates the concept of recognition within an analytical framework of social capital to investigate how wider social perception toward immigrant groups influence their access to social capital. By including the dimension of recognition, this study explores the marginalisation of immigrant groups in processes of building relationships within a consideration of how broader social exclusions related to the practices of everyday life. This framework explores several important questions regarding the formation of social capital in the context of heterogeneous urban communities. Researchers argued that social capital, which has developed in neighbourhoods, facilitated participatory planning by drawing voluntary participation through the networks. However, the social capital remained a highly contested concept by reason that the view overlooked the wider social structure in which the participants are located (Harriss, 2002; Portes, 1998). The actors in the previous social capital studied was frequently understood as atomised units based on the assumption that individual face-to-face contacting can build overall social trust. It similarly appeared in interethnic relationships by focusing on the barriers between the groups based on their cultural differences such as language skills and different cultural norms. However, it is still questionable whether the gap between different ethnic groups occurs only due to the cultural differences that the actors can overcome through individual contacts. Immigrant groups face wider limitations to approach mainstream societies by their legal, economic status, and social subordination based on the cultural understanding of their contested group identities. The findings show that the formation of social capital in participatory planning is highly influenced by the social positions of participants. This thesis aims at shedding new light on the value of social capital, which has a possibility to elucidate the complex mechanisms forming group boundaries among participants. Social capital forms in-group/out-group by building social trust/ limiting the trust networks and reflects it to planning processes. The framework elucidates the formation of groups among local communities in the interplay between wider social structure and face-to-face interactions. The participants in participatory planning cannot be predicted by a pre-fixed understanding of ‘community’ in planning policies, or they cannot be understood by mere scaling up social interactions, in the sense of the frequency of encounters, from local neighbourhoods. The local participants produced the meaning of in-group and out- group relationships in the practice of participation. The processes involved judgements about each other as a social partner, and it was sometimes based on the embedded group identities of participants. The formation of networks and the mobilisation of them in planning procedure have been shown through the processes of social capital, and these processes deeply embed social recognition of participants. 39 12. Exploring the impact of external knowledge spillover on a catching-up economy Ilwon Seo Ilwon is a researcher at the Bartlett School of Planning carrying out his PhD under the supervision of Dr Jung Won Sonn and Dr Soong Moon Kang. He worked as a policy researcher at the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP) and the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) in South Korea after finishing his first PhD at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interest includes knowledge diffusion, technology commercialisation, and innovations in the catching-up economy. keywords: knowledge production, catching-up, regional innovation, China. email: ilwon.seo.15@ucl.ac.uk Image: Ilwon Seo 40 The localised knowledge has been widely accepted as the main factors for regional innovation and growth. In a global context, the economic development strategy of a late-coming country is narrowing the gap in knowledge stock by absorbing the most advanced technologies. Importation of foreign technology makes sense because innovation is costly, risky and path-dependent. This strategy, however, is not always successful because technology diffusion and adoption are neither costless nor simple. This is why the role of indigenous or acquired innovation and its domestic diffusion process in the catching-up process have to be illuminated. Knowledge diffusion is subject to the interactive choices between demanders and suppliers. The ability to trace the process is mostly limited to the insiders of innovation milieu, leaving the transactions mainly within informal networks. These characteristics make it hard for researchers to access the diffusion process. An in-depth understanding of inter-region knowledge flows pattern can help innov