At the LOFTER studio, you can buy antique items such as old chairs, sign boards, sewing machines, typewriters, old mobile phones and even a genuine Cantonese-style veranda that was removed from one of the old buildings. Proceeds from the sale will go to charity.
Regenerating Urban Land: A Practitioner’s Guide to Leveraging Private Investment looks at regeneration programs from eight cities around the world – Ahmedabad, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, Santiago, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, and Washington DC – documenting the journeys they have faced in tackling major challenges in this area.
How this Hong Kong developer is blending old and new to produce modern buildings
In the 18-square kilometer inner city of Johannesburg (South Africa), a series of targeted regeneration initiatives achieved a decline in property vacancy rates from 40 percent in 2003 to 17 percent in 2008, and a similar jump in property transactions. Since 2001, for every rand (R) 1 million (about USD 63,000) invested by the Johannesburg Development Authority, private investors have put R 18 million into the inner city of Johannesburg, creating property assets valued at R 600 million and infrastructure assets valued at R 3.1 billion.
Buenos Aires (Argentina) found itself on the verge of becoming unsustainable, when urban sprawl moved away from downtown leaving prime waterfront land, with significant architectural and industrial heritage, vacant and underused. To tackle this problem, the city used a self-financing urban regeneration initiative in Puerto Madero to redevelop the unused 170-hectare land parcel to an attractive mixed-use waterfront neighborhood. The total investment reached USD 1.7 billion, with USD 300 million invested by the city through the sale of land.
Seoul (Republic of Korea) experienced a major decrease in residential and commercial activity in its downtown, where small plots, narrow roads, and high land prices made development too costly. From 1975 to 1995, Seoul lost more than half its downtown population, while substandard housing for mostly squatters and renters was more than twice the city’s average. Seoul launched the Cheonggyecheon revitalization project to redevelop an 18-lane elevated highway into a revitalized stream with green public space totaling 16.3 hectares, dramatically increasing real estate values and the variety of uses for the downtown areas.