China’s extended urbanization driven by the 'consumption city' in the context of financialized ecological civilization

This article seeks to address current debates on ongoing China’s urban development and makes a theoretical proposal that links financialization and ecological civilization through the perspective of the increasing role of consumption in today’s transition to an upgraded domestic economy. While both financialized land value capture and the role of quality are now fundamental to the construction of the built environment in Chinese cities, we argue that the “consumption city” refers to an economic and urban production process as well as to a societal transformation. First, the economic upgrading has gone along with a greater mobility of people travelling ever longer distances who spend their income or invest in the places they travel to rather than necessarily their places of residence or of work. To attract these consumers, whether they are residents, tourist or property investors, the quality of the living and consumption environments play a dominant role in the complex urban production and in governance, beyond the classic model of development based on the city as a production place. Simultaneously, the rising role of financialization by external households as investors raises the issue of how and to what extent the construction of consumption places has been a way for the state to further enhance the land value capture in (new or not) cities. Second, as the latest government strategy, ecological civilization is part of a social engineering process aiming to shape people’s lifestyles in terms of both their everyday consumption practices and their mindsets. The current transition aims to “civilize” citizens by enlarging the scope of urban consumers beyond the upper and middle classes to people from rural areas who are encouraged to become urban. Ecological civilization promotes a better quality of life for all, together with new outdoor and experiential activities, although this comes with a high ecological footprint.

Comprendre la construction des périphéries urbaines à Lomé et Yaoundé

Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda

Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa is mainly marked by an extremely high speed. For a couple of decades, it has become more and more difficult to study and control the urbanization processes using the available means due to their rapidity. These conditions do not allow to master social, cultural and economic potentials of urbanization at their best so as to develop the countries in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. The binding speed of urban sprawl that we are witnessing further leads to an accelerated consumption of natural spaces, and more generally, to a degradation of natural ecosystems; while the urgency to tackle the environmental crisis requires the establishment of more sustainable models of cities. Indeed, in addition to the rapid consumption of natural spaces, cities are responsible the most for the global production of greenhouse gases and other negative externalities for the environment. This is why our response to climate change necessarily involves smart choices in urban planning. In my doctoral research the urban peripheries are what constitute the most relevant research objects â the crucial ingredients to debate on the African city of the future. Surprisingly, very little attention has ever been drawn on them. I hold that no urban planning would be effective without a careful study of the shared reality of social, economic, political and cultural dynamics of the cities concerned. This hypothesis further leads me to offer a solid understanding of construction mechanisms in the peripheral areas of such two large cities as LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© in thinking about the models of the future. A two-tier triangulation is used to achieve the study goal. Three different thematic entries namely urban land, mobility and the legal framework for town planning get used at the theoretical level. At the methodological one, a variety of tools are made available for data collection and analysis to deal with the difficult processes of accessing urban data. GPS tracking of motorcycle taxis operating in emerging neighborhoods, participatory mapping for land use and prices at the agglomeration level, Geo-Computation, Geo-visualization, content analysis and more traditional interviews are the main methods used in my research. The thesis shows that the construction of a larger portion of new neighborhoods in the cities of LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© result in a weaving of a sort of âindividual urbanistic projectsâ, which are totally outside the rule of law. The speed and spatiality of this process are also strongly increased by motorcycle taxisâmeans of transport unprecedented in their scaleâwhich come massively along with the new residentsâ home ownership projects. Again, the thesis highlights that the configuration of the land market escapes the administrative limits of cities, thus rendering the lawful measures non-operational in the planning and monitoring of space. All in all, the research results reveal individual strategies to be extremely varied and complex even if all residents of urban peripheries seem like to âbet onâ their urban status to regain it later. This latest finding dispels the myth that the lower middle class moves as far from the city center as possible in search of affordable land. On the basis of major results, the thesis formulates practical recommendations aimed at improving urban planning policies in sub-Saharan Africa, in the sense of making them more in line with the reality of the cityâs production processes.

EPFL2020

Renewable Land: Planning the Evolution of Logistic Areas

Gloria Serra Coch

Land is the support of life and the generator of energy cycles in the planet, also being a finite resource. The first consequence of urban population growth and build environment expansion is land consumption. Present strategies reduce this expenditure, generally by attenuating dispersive growth, favouring compact city models and reusing built inventory. From current urban land, a noteworthy percentage is assigned for logistic use and this proportion is increasing as a consequence of delocalized economies. However, planning strategies seem to overlook these areas when addressing the mentioned issues. The common localization of these zones, well-connected and placed in the influence area of a city, gives them a high probability to be absorbed by the mixed-use urban tissue during the process of city growth. Planning urban logistic land considering its possible future conversion into mixed-use urban fabric becomes a pressing concern. The study analyses industrial areas that have been transformed into mixed-use urban tissue to, subsequently, stablishing a correlation between them and current logistic zones. In the case of logistic areas, special attention should be paid to transportation infrastructures, legislation and land-use organization, ecosystem preservation and mixed-use progressive introduction. The objective is to foster the planning of logistic land considering its potential future re-use and transformation into mixed-use urban tissue with low energy costs.

UNIV POLITECNICA CATALUNYA2021

En quête d'habitat

Marie-Paule Thomas

This doctoral thesis is based on the observation that the individualization of society that is taking place today has led to new differentiations within the domains of lifestyle and residential choice. Our main hypothesis was that lifestyle influences residential choice. What kinds of differentiation with regard to lifestyles are we seeing currently? What connections are there between lifestyles, residential preferences and localization? Theoretically, the typical methods for describing residential choice and environment rely on epistemological, methodological and empirical corpuses that are quite varied and, at times, contradictory. On one hand do we find economic and demographical approaches based on the theory of the "rational" actor who attempts to optimize his localization according to "functional and economic" parameters (i.e. proximity to the workplace, the price and size of the residence depending on income and background); on the other we find sociological and anthropological approaches based on theories of social action where choice as a general rule is "socially" determined based on the individual's family ties, tradition, culture, way of living or even social position (Authier & al., 2010). Above and beyond such rational or social perspectives, other factors also influence the choices we make, including the sensitive dimension related to an individual's physical and emotional experience of space. In order to grasp all three logics of action in a single analytical frame we based our analysis on the postulate that residential choice is "plural." Thus do multiple criteria – accessibility, social rooting of families, social status of the residential residence, appreciation of the morphological qualities of the environment, etc. – figure into the decision. We assumed that based on their lifestyles that households blended one or the other of these logics of action, thus resulting in their ranking their criteria for choice in different ways. We proposed a conceptualization of lifestyle that offers a compromise between classical structuralist perspectives (Bourdieu, 1979) and individualist perspectives (Beck, 1983). In our opinion residential choices are influenced by a three-fold dimension of lifestyle: urban practices and daily life (stylization), values and urban representations (evaluation) and resources/constraints (stratification variables). Thus did we couple classic vertical forms (training, income, gender, etc.) with new horizontal forms (attitudes, opinions, values, practices, etc.) that engender social inequalities. Residential choice therefore results in a compromise (resulting from lifestyle) between the different functional, social and sensitive criteria that are or are not present in the structural, socio-historical, environmental context (potential receptiveness). Methodology The cities of Bern and Lausanne in Switzerland – two cities of comparable size but whose socio-historical backgrounds and urban structures vary significantly, particularly with regard to the quality of public transportation service – served as the field for our study. As families often use long-term residential choices to realize plans for the future, we chose to look at them. We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods for our empirical work. At the macro level we describe the territory using a series of functional, social and sensitive indicators that allowed us to characterize "potential receptiveness" at different levels, from citywide to neighborhood. At the micro-sociological level we conducted: a quantitative telephone survey of 500 households in each agglomeration, a qualitative survey comprised of 40 semi-directive interviews in eight neighborhoods that distinguished themselves by their geographical location (central, suburban, peri-urban) and architectural diversity. Principal findings In general our findings show that income inequalities have a discriminatory effect on the size and price of the residence as well as on the probability of finding a living space that is entirely adapted. These inequalities however only play a secondary role when it comes to explaining differences in terms of residential preferences. Whether or not the households had a weak or strong income, certain areas of the city were never considered if they did not correspond to the individual's lifestyle. To begin we showed that the immediate environment plays an important role in quality of life for families, especially with regard to the presence or absence of elements favoring children's autonomy. Access to public transportation for instance is a decisive factor in terms of localization for most families. Above and beyond these commonalities we highlighted six axes of differentiation for residential preference that indicate the qualities most sought after by families: do they want to live in an environment that first and foremost is safe, densely-populated, convivial, traditional, calm or elite? To identify how families classify choice criteria and in so doing position themselves on the different axes we did a typological analysis, thus allowing us to categorize households into seven major "residential lifestyles," each of which valued the environment's social, sensitive and functional qualities in varying degrees. Thus we found there was not a quality of life that held true for all groups but rather qualities of life. Two main groups stood out, highlighting as such the contrast between ways of living typical of (modern) industrial society, based on classic models of upward social mobility, work and material success, and those originating from (post-modern) post-industrial society, based on self-enrichment, post-materialism and criticism of so-called "bourgeois" values. The groups identified are products of the historical sedimentation of the different ways of relating to the environment that have appeared over time. By comparing our analysis of residential lifestyles and the structural/cultural differences between the cities of Lausanne and Bern we were able to highlight the impact of context on the spatial distribution of lifestyles at different scales (from nationwide to the neighborhood level). We were also able to prove that geographical distinctions such as center, suburban and peri-urban become less important; each area has its own individual functional (accessibility, services), sensitive (urban morphology, architecture) and social (social-spatial diversity, segregation) qualities. Based on these characteristics, an environment is more or less receptive to different types of residential lifestyles (can I do everything on foot in this neighborhood? Can my children go to by themselves? Is there a strong social/community dynamic?). With such a detailed qualitative and quantitative description of areas it becomes easier to determine who would like to live in a given neighborhood and who, on the contrary, would not ("describe where you live and I'll tell you who you are?"). To guarantee the success of urban development or regional policies, those responsible for planning and development need to consider urban planning not only in terms of "social mixing" but in terms of the "mixing of lifestyles" as well. Through this notion of potential receptiveness, the urbanism of lifestyles is one of the main functional conclusions of this study, for which we propose avenues of change and recommendations (how to plan and think about urban development based on use?).