Assessing transformative capacity for sustainable urban regeneration: A comparative study of three South Korean cities

Abstract

Urban regeneration forms a key approach for coping with persistent sustainability problems in cities. In practice, however, it is often driven by motives other than sustainability transformation. This paper explores the preconditions that allow urban regeneration approaches to become transformative, and suggests a methodology to support this shift in practice. It does so by assessing the capacity available to prepare for, initiate, and steer a pathdeviant sustainability transformation of urban areas in three South Korean cities, jointly with stakeholders. The findings reflect how local policy largely supports a conservative development pathway, favored by national government, sidelining especially ecological implications. Major deficits exist regarding systems thinking, sustainability foresight, and social learning processes, while collective visioning, intermediation, community empowerment, and repositioning science could become instant drivers. In conclusion, assessing transformative capacity offers a crucial lever to design urban-regeneration approaches for unlearning dominant development paradigms and to experimentally reconfigure urban social-ecologicaltechnological systems.

Developing transformative capacity through systematic assessments and visualization of urban climate transitions

“…This signifies limited capacity to overview UCT (Wolfram 2018; Borgström Under review), and a missed opportunity for embedding transformative capacity.…”

Urban transformative capacity: From concept to practice

“…Across all contributions it becomes evident that open and inclusive participation and the (related) empowerment of excluded and sustainability-oriented groups represent the bottom-line necessary condition for urban TC-and should thus be the first concern when approaching its development. Even though the large sample of sustainability initiatives assessed by Castán Broto et al (2019) indicates a comparatively higher incidence of inclusion and empowerment features, this is still at a low level (25-35%), does not represent mainstream urban planning and policy making, and is also unlikely to encompass those requirements emphasized by the other authors in this special issue: the pro-active involvement of children and the youth (Nordström and Wales 2019), of the urban poor (Ziervogel 2019), and of progressive innovators and communities (Wolfram 2019;Borgström 2019). More often than not, conventional governance structures and decision-making practices still reinforce exclusion and disenfranchisement, even if unintentionally.…”

“…Also Wolfram (2019) analyses how urban TC is developed in a multi-level national setting. However, his comparative assessment of three South Korean cities sheds light on fundamental challenges faced in an East Asian context, taking urban regeneration policies and practices as a case in point.…”

“…This is clearly reflected in the very low overall incidence identified (7%-cf. Castán Broto et al 2019), as well as in the detailed qualitative accounts of disjointed, concurrent, or even conflicting stakeholder initiatives in such different national contexts as Sweden (Borgström 2019) and South Korea (Wolfram 2019). The various roles of intermediaries and their requirements are often insufficiently understood in practice, so that they turn out to be ill-equipped, mission constrained, or even entirely absent.…”

“…On the one hand, this refers to its major potential as a cross-sector, multi-scalar, and place-based action domain, linked to an intrinsic aspiration for resolving goal conflicts by applying ''comprehensive'' approaches, and the possibility to draw in diverse resources, skills, and competencies (Wolfram 2018). These are essential features that make urban planning a critical lever for practically fostering inclusion (Nordström and Wales 2019;Ziervogel 2019), identifying and addressing the intermediation gap (Wolfram 2019;Borgström 2019), applying novel formats and methods for co-producing system knowledge (Glaas et al 2019;Withycombe Keeler et al 2019), and overall strengthening especially ecosystem literacy and stewardship across urban development tasks and processes (Castán Broto et al 2019).…”