In 2009, Guangdong province initiated a programme of regenerating its blighted urban neighbourhoods, outdated industrial plants and dilapidated villages (also known as “three-old redevelopment”), which continues today. While the academic attention focuses mainly on the city and project levels, few studies give a full and up-to-date account of the overall programme. This paper documents the background, purpose, scope, policy framework, project types, implementation modalities and initial outcomes of the programme. Unlike most urban regeneration projects around the world, the Guangdong programme – the largest coordinated effort in the global history of urban regeneration – is primarily driven not by the potential increases of land value but by an urgent need to find solutions to the conflict between the local demand for urban land and the rigid national land use control. The expected land value increases are harnessed to attract the participation of market players at the project level. The Guangdong experience opens up a new way for urban spatial development in China, especially at a time when China further strengthens national land use control under the newly established national territorial planning system.

A growing appreciation of the potential benefits of experimentation to tame the complexities of urban transformation has led to an increase in related research activity. Building on a “practice-to-policy” experimentation-based framework, this paper investigates the adaptive policymaking process for urban regeneration in Shenzhen since the 2000s. It finds that “explorative experimentation” is used to identify a general direction in the absence of a clear route for the policy process, while “generative experimentation” is sequentially dedicated to specific issues for the improvement of the entire policy package within a particular reform. We argue that understanding the successive roles or hybrid functions of these two types of experiment adds new insights to the development rationales for Shenzhen's urban regeneration and provides inspiration for an experimental model of urban governance. Governments and policymakers can benefit from the experimentation-based approach, as presented in the Shenzhen case, to pursue policy innovation embedded in local contexts.

The attempt to halt the remorseless spread of organised crime in the Italian South should not just be an issue for the judges, investigating magistrates and forces of order; every citizen should feel that they are an integral part of a wind of change, coming from below, that can have a decisive impact on local society. Starting from this premise, art and culture, adopting an approach of participation and involvement, can play a primary role in processes of renewal. In various areas within the provinces of Naples and Caserta, carefully researched works of street art, with the direct involvement of the local population, have provided the means for intervention in decaying and marginal environments where organised crime seemed to be so well entrenched as to be ineradicable. This article presents four case studies, analysing their assumptions, methodology and objectives.

Since the late 1990s, Fener and Balat, two adjacent historic neighborhoods on the shoreline of the Golden Horn (Haliç) in İstanbul, have been the stage of urban regeneration efforts. Following a process of de-industrialization in the mid-1980s, these efforts have aimed to revitalize the area through the promotion of tourism. Today, almost ten years after the initial attempts, regeneration remains incomplete. This essay explores the reasons underlying this “failure.” For this purpose, I focus on the key actors, their interests and power struggles within the context of the project. I argue that one needs to highlight the particularities of the institutional arrangements at the district, city and national levels in order to explain the situation in Fener and Balat. More specifically, due to the absence of relatively autonomous market mechanisms, the lack of the private sector's involvement, the gap between the public sector's interests and the demands of the market, and the effectiveness of electoral politics at the district level, the case of Fener and Balat has been shaped by district mayors and local communities reluctant to implement and participate in the project.