‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The East Asian miracle: Economic growth and public policy: By the World Bank. (New York: Oxford University Press for the World Bank, 1993. 389 pp. $19.95, paper.)

The Rise of the Creative Class

Despite the recognition of cellular automata (CA) as a flexible and powerful tool for urban growth simulation, the calibration of CA had been largely heuristic until recent efforts to incorporate multi-criteria evaluation and artificial neural network into rule definition. This study developed a stochastic CA model, which derives its initial probability of simulation from observed sequential land use data. Furthermore, this initial probability is updated dynamically through local rules based on the strength of neighbourhood development. Consequentially the integration of global (static) and local (dynamic) factors produces more realistic simulation results. The procedure of calibrated CA can be applied in other contexts with minimum modification. In this study we applied the procedure to simulate rural-urban land conversions in the city of Guangzhou, China. Moreover, the study suggests the need to examine the result of CA through spatial, tabular and structural validation.

Calibration of stochastic cellular automata: the application to rural-urban land conversions

Cellular automata (CA) simulation has become a popular method of exploring the behaviour of all kinds of self-organising systems. The city may clearly be viewed as such a system but one with a particularly complex set of transition rules. Many natural processes such as the spread of fire or vegetation can be modelled by a simple set of local rules. Insofar as the development of a piece of land depends on the neighbourhood situation as well as on the characteristics of a site, urban evolution can be treated in much the same way, with transition rules translating the evaluation of the location into a land conversion outcome. If this modelling paradigm is to be used to gain insight into real-world urban development processes, there is a need to discover ways of capturing the richness of land conversion behaviour in the simplifying mechanisms of CA. Our paper contributes to this research agenda by integrating multicriteria evaluation (MCE) into a CA simulation in order to define nondeterministic, multidimensional, and multilevel transition rules. An analytical hierarchy process is used to implement MCE-derived transition rules. The integrated MCE - CA model may be used in a gaming mode to explore how urban form evolves under different development regimes caricatured by the set of multicriteria weights. We use it to test loosely hypotheses about the nature of the regimes that have governed the expansion of a fast-growing southern Chinese city.

Simulation of Land Development through the Integration of Cellular Automata and Multicriteria Evaluation

China's urbanization is undergoing profound neoliberal shifts, within which urban redevelopment has emerged in the forefront of neoliberalization. This study aims to understand China's emerging neoliberal urbanism by examining the association between urban redevelopment and neoliberalism. Rather than a deliberate design, neoliberalization in China is a response to multiple difficulties/crises and the desire for rapid development. The neoliberalization process is full of controversies and inconsistencies, which involve conflicts between neoliberal practices and social resistance, and tensions between central and local states. Nevertheless, China's neoliberal urbanism has a responsive and resilient system to cope with the contradictions and imbalances inherent in neoliberalism. Meanwhile, neoliberal urbanism is more tangible at the sub-national scale, since the local state can most effectively assist neoliberal experiments and manage crises. This study not only contributes to the understanding of China's neoliberal urbanism, but also has multiple implications for neoliberalism studies in general. First, in examining the interrelationship between the state and market, it is the actual effect of legitimizing and facilitating market operation rather than the presence (or absence) of the state that matters. Second, a new nexus of governance has formed in the neoliberalization process. Not only the nation state but also the local state is of great significance in assisting and managing neoliberal projects. Third, this study further validates the importance and necessity of scrutinizing neoliberal practices, in particular the controversies and inconsistencies within the neoliberalization process.

China's Emerging Neoliberal Urbanism: Perspectives from Urban Redevelopment

Urban redevelopment in China has experienced great transformation. Government-backed redevelopment has been replaced by privately funded and property-led redevelopment. This article discerns the impetus of ongoing property-led redevelopment. A case study of the Xintiandi project in Shanghai reveals how property-led redevelopment actually works. Pro-growth coalitions between local government and developers are formed. Despite its role as capital provider, the private sector is still regulated by the government due to its negligible influence on local governance. The government controls the direction and pace of urban redevelopment through policy intervention, financial leverages, and governance of land leasing. Property-led redevelopment is driven by diverse motivations of different levels of the government, e.g. transforming urban land use functions, showing off the entrepreneurial capability of local government, and maximizing negotiated land benefits. Driven by profit seeking, some thriving urban neighborhoods are displaced by high-value property development, and suffer from uneven redevelopment.

Fulong Wu

Papers

Calibration of stochastic cellular automata: the application to rural-urban land conversions

Simulation of Land Development through the Integration of Cellular Automata and Multicriteria Evaluation

China's Emerging Neoliberal Urbanism: Perspectives from Urban Redevelopment

Property-Led Redevelopment in Post-Reform China: A Case Study of Xintiandi Redevelopment Project in Shanghai

Urban villages under China's rapid urbanization: Unregulated assets and transitional neighbourhoods