Urban Redevelopment Concept For Existing Neighborhoods

Europe faces a huge challenge in renovating the energy hungry concrete suburbs built in the 60s and 70s. These suburbs were constructed in Europe during a greatest rehabilitation project. Especially, in Nordic countries the concrete suburbs represent the largest single housing stock, which is now facing extensive renovations. The deficiencies of the traditional sequential planning to cope with this major challenge are becoming more and more evident and new ways to improve the dialogue between all the actors for low energy urban development are becoming crucial. Similarly, the studies in real estate development field have mainly concerned the feasibility of low-energy design options from the construction costs and process perspective. However, hardly any studies have approached the issue from the opportunity, i.e. value creation perspective. The purpose of this research is to rethink the ìsuburb challengeî and to innovate a value creation strategy for the concrete suburbs. The study presents an Urban Redevelopment Concept (URC) that tries to maximize the value of renovations to the users and owners of the buildings. The URC recognizes the multi stakeholder environment of urban innovations and presents a new urban development framework based on urban design management thinking. The new concepts tests the role and requirements of an external urban manager, as well as, a new financing approach based on logics of investment markets instead of traditional loan and credit markets. The URC concept was tested in one major neighborhood development project. The first results of the framework show a significant change in the direction of the suggested urban planning and design solutions. Instead of adding costs to the owners and tenants the framework has produced a solution where urban planning supports urban design innovations and value creation for both the internal (tenants and owners) and external (investors, authorities, customers) stakeholders.