Urban Planning
Sajjad Fallah Zadeh; Farzin Mahmoudi Pati
Volume 4, Issue 15 , August 2015, , Pages 5-16
Abstract
An urban regeneration project is defined as a series of actions determined to accomplish urban regeneration aims that lead to a reduction of the problems of an area through the improvement of socio-economic, physical and environmental conditions (Roberts & Sykes, 2000; Yu & Lee, 2012). "Today, ...
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An urban regeneration project is defined as a series of actions determined to accomplish urban regeneration aims that lead to a reduction of the problems of an area through the improvement of socio-economic, physical and environmental conditions (Roberts & Sykes, 2000; Yu & Lee, 2012). "Today, urban regeneration is one of key principles in act of planning and it is beyond the urban renewal, urban redevelopment or urban rehabilitation processes because of its longer-term and strategic approaches and its socioeconomic goals beside physical ones" (Tarkay, 2010; 22). In the context of participating actors and stakeholders, the transition of urban regeneration policies has shown that from the 1950s to the beginning of the 21st century, in each decade, the policies had a tendency toward cross-sector partnerships amongst private sector, public sector and community. From 1990s until the present participatory approach has dominated, local authorities have been empowered and coalition amongst the main actors and stakeholders has been enhanced (Roberts & Sykes, 2000; Tsenkova, 2002; McDonald et al, 2009). In fact, participation, strategic planning and sustainability form a triangle and provide a basis for actions in urban regeneration. In other words, participation (public, inter-organizational and participation among organizations, people and other stakeholders), strategic planning (combating urban decline, problem solving and involvement of all stakeholders) and taking into consideration sustainability goals (socio-economic, environmental and sustainability of acts in planning) are the main elements in urban regeneration (Nourian and Ariana, 2013). The essence of urban regeneration projects is very different from other urban development projects due to their complexity, in particular from the perspective of uncertainties because there are various actors and stakeholders such as local government, private developers, public organization and local communities who are involved in planning of these projects. For example, it is possible when one policy needing actors' participation is running, then several conflicts can occur amongst stakeholders due to the complexity of relationships. The results of these conflicts will increase costs, lowering efficiency and delaying implementation schedule (Carley, 2000; Yu & Lee, 2012). One of the complexities of participatory urban regeneration projects is to bring the key actors and stakeholders together to participate. This will need cooperation between local government, public organizations, private developers and local residents (Carley, 2000; Ball and Maginn, 2005). Therefore, one of the main reasons for the failure of urban regeneration projects is the occurrence of conflicts of interest amongst various key stakeholders in order to implement its participatory-oriented policies of the project. To this end, the present research seeks to assess participatory policies of an urban regeneration project and then prioritizing them based on the rate of possible conflicts-risk among stakeholders via offering a method of risk assessment. This method is a combination of FMEA and VIKOR methods in fuzzy environment with a proposed process. Applying this synthesis method to assess five participatory policies has shown that, based on the Q index, the low conflict-risk policies are desirable and they can be prioritized for implementation. Additionally, based on the Q index, the high conflict-risk policies are undesirable and they need to be corrected. Consequently, the combined method has been shown that the projects or the policies facing less risk can be prioritized for implementation.
