Exploring the knowledge ‘base’ of practitioners in the delivery of sustainable regeneration projects

Abstract

In recent years, sustainable regeneration has been recognised as being of major economic and social concern in the world. In the UK for instance, government has initiated a number of policies and evaluation methods to deal with some of the environmental problems associated with regeneration projects. However, the post construction evaluation of these projects has often resulted in them being seen as not achieving their set objectives. Attempts aimed at evaluating the impact of sustainability by built environment practitioners have primarily been limited to their assessment of the projects’ potential environmental impacts, with the associated socio-economic impacts being neglected. There has not been any well-defined built environment research that has been able to deal holistically with the broader issues of sustainability in terms of benefits/impacts of the regeneration projects to the communities concerned. The findings of an exploratory study that adopted a semi-structured interview approach for data collection, to explore the knowledge and understanding of fifteen practitioners who are often involved in the delivery of these projects are presented. The findings reveal a lack of knowledge and understanding of sustainability as well as structured mechanism/practices for evaluating the socio-economic sustainability factors in relation to regeneration projects.

Does Environment Matter in Smart Revitalization Strategies? Management towards Sustainable Urban Regeneration Programs in Poland

“…The literature on the subject emphasizes that regeneration is an integral part of global sustainable development and it is widely recognized that sustainable development should promote regeneration strategies and activities [58]. In view of the above, the term sustainable urban regeneration appeared, the use of which was to emphasize the comprehensive and integrated nature of the process [48,57]. However, the research invariably noticed that, despite the declared integrated nature of the projects, which aimed to solve the socio-economic problems of the inhabitants of regeneration areas, they focused primarily on improving the technical indicators characterizing those areas [59].…”

“…On the basis of foreign literature, a thesis was proposed that views the resultant environmental sphere of sustainable urban regeneration as the result of the evolution of the specific approach of the country examining it. Most often, the inclusion of the environmental sphere in revitalization programs results directly from the availability of data, and not from the awareness of environmental challenges and sustainable development goals in the municipality [47][48][49][50]. National policies do not help in this respect, because, in their case, an "evidence-based approach" is also limited by the availability of data [51].…”

Towards the delivery of sustainable regeneration projects’ types in the UK: an exploration of the role and level of involvement of key practitioners

“…They argued that most of the existing evaluation methods designed for regeneration projects were based on environmental indicators that were derived from ideas and assumptions of individual practitioners. Numerous attempts aimed at delivering sustainable regeneration have primarily been limited to the environmental performance of the projects (Akotia, et al, 2016;Reyes et al, 2014). Although a number of evaluation systems have been developed over the period, their focus and considerations have largely remained limited to evaluating the environmental impacts of the projects.…”