Urban Regeneration

I attended a preparatory meeting on organising a seminar on Urban Regeneration last Thursday. We spoke about inviting eminent speakers to talk about the successful urban regeneration programmes worldwide. While many of them come with distinctive background and vast experiences on the planning and implementation of projects as well as engaging the stakeholders, they are, however people providing consultancy, the developers and authorities. We were not able to identify any beneficiaries such as land owners or communities that directly involved in the urban regeneration process.

We reckoned that it is important and pretty good to identify such individual and group to share their experiences and thought as the saying "from the horses' mouth". Malaysian have a lot of suspicion when it comes to urban renewal or regeneration or revitalisation. Many of them associate these terms to displacement of original residents or communities, tearing down the low rise buildings and substitute with the high rise commercial buildings, taking away the public parks or facilities and even profit making for certain powerful people. Rightly so, as many past projects included the public-private partnership is business-driven and we have not seen a project for the total benefit of the existing community. Even the restoration of heritage buildings has benefited the businesses rather than the dwellers.

Having said this, experiences elsewhere have shown that urban regeneration is an important process to re-energize the city life by injecting new activities while enhancing the special features of the existing urban area. For example, providing better infrastructure to curb urban sprawl. Similarly, to provide better infrastructure and facilities to enhance viability of businesses. Apart from that, to instill new sense of ownership to enhance neighbourhood spirit is also important components of urban regeneration.

Urban regeneration is not only about physical and economy, it is also about human and community. City development is about people. Success or failure of a city is for the people. Hence, urban regeneration without public involvement and people-centric is a failure itself.