State of the art mass transit systems, such as bus rapid transit (BRT), have appeared to be an innovative solution to meet the mobility needs of many world cities. However, their ability to transform surrounding urban fabric remains less explored in the developing world. This paper examines the impacts of BRT Lahore on land development patterns, considering the phenomena of land use revitalization, densification, and property reconfiguration. We have used quantitative approaches to gauge the changes in the urban fabric, with respect to the local neighborhood conditions and parcel level attributes, using multilevel logit models. The results of the logit models reveal heterogeneous impacts on conversions to commercial plazas, apartment buildings, and mixed-use buildings. The distance to the BRT station and size of the property is significantly associated with these conversions. Overall, one can notice a lack of a sense of place making and an absence of transit-oriented zoning around BRT stations. The desire of sustainable transit-oriented development to intensify land uses according to local conditions requires local urban designers and planners to think ahead of the curve by working on the regulatory and zoning restrictions governing the designs of built environment and also address the issues of gentrification and social inequity.

This paper offers a genealogy of building occupations carried out by occupation movements in central São Paulo to shed light on the particular form of urbanism that emanates from such downtown occupation practices. The main objective is to illustrate how occupation movements played a structural role in the urban recuperation of São Paulo’s central area by re-inhabiting a disaggregated stockpile of vacant buildings with thousands of homeless families, initiating parallel processes of architectural renewal and social reform. To that end, the contribution reconstructs the emergence and subsequent proliferation of occupation movements in central São Paulo between the 1970s and the 2010s. It dwells on particular exemplary building occupations during this period. This contribution draws from extensive discourse analysis, and multiple years of participant observation carried out in close collaboration with multiple occupations movements, especially the FLM (Alliance of the Struggle for Housing) and the MSTC (Homeless Movement of the Centre).

The incompatibility between the microscale-built environment designs around mass transit stations and stakeholders’ preferences causes dissatisfaction and inconvenience. The lack of a pedestrian-friendly environment, uncontrolled development patterns, traffic and parking issues make the street life vulnerable and unattractive for users, and affect the mass transit usage. How to design the streetscapes around mass transit stations to provide a user-friendly street environment is a crucial question to achieve sustainable transit-oriented development goals. To recognize the specific attributes of streetscape environment relevant in local context of BRT Lahore, this paper presents the results of a visual preference experiment in which nine attributes of built environment were systematically varied across choice sets. Multinomial logit models were set up to identify the preferences of three target groups: BRT users, commercial building users and residents at different locations. The research indicates that not only the road-related factors (bike lane and sidewalk widths, crossings facilities, street greenery) have a significant influence on people’s preference but also that building heights, and the typology of buildings and housing projects around BRT corridor have shaped these preferences. When planning and designing urban design projects around mass transit projects, these significant attributes should be considered.

This article will unfold a longe durée spatial biography of the urban area of Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil) to probe the particular role of space in the conflation of different cultural practices and territorial claims. The extended case study bridges indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial urbanization as they amalgamated an intricate assemblage of material and cultural strata. Combined historical urban analysis and fieldwork allow to uncover how the resulting urban milieu integrates discrepant urban worlds, perpetually iterating between centrality and marginality, innovation and degradation, oppression and resistance. Building on Foucault’s (1984) conception of heterotopia, Bixiga will surface as an allotopia, a place that accommodates, cumulates, and celebrates a multitude of differences. It sheds light, this way, on more insurgent histories of urbanism, where urban space is piecemeal forged through contentious struggles over space in the city.

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