Understanding community empowerment in urban regeneration and planning in England: putting policy and practice in context

Community involvement in the fields of town planning and urban regeneration includes a wide range of opportunities for residents and service users to engage with networks, partnerships and centres of power. Both the terminology and degree of the transfer of power to citizens varies in different policy areas and contexts but five core objectives can be identified. This article approaches the subject of community empowerment by exploring the theoretical literature; reviewing recent policy pronouncements relating to community involvement in England and by discussing a recent case study of an Urban II project in London. The conclusions suggest that community empowerment is always likely to be partial and contingent on local circumstances and the wider context.

Regeneration: the inner city in context

This chapter (12) reviews key publications by Sir Peter Hall in the period 1967-79. In this period he was particularly interested in the 'inner city' and how problems of deprivation, unemployment, poor housing, and increasingly immigration might best be addressed by public policy. Each chapter in the book reviews Sir Peter's publications over a long and distinguished career in research and policy advice to government in honour of his 80th birthday in 2013.

Context-aware Approach for Determining the Threshold Price in Name-Your-Own-Price Channels

Key feature of a context-aware application is the ability to adapt based on the change of context. Two approaches that are widely used in this regard are the context-action pair mapping where developers match an action to execute for a particular context change and the adaptive learning where a context-aware application refines its action over time based on the preceding action’s outcome. Both these approaches have limitation which makes them unsuitable in situations where a context-aware application has to deal with unknown context changes. In this paper we propose a framework where adaptation is carried out via concurrent multi-action evaluation of a dynamically created action space. This dynamic creation of the action space eliminates the need for relying on the developers to create context-action pairs and the concurrent multi-action evaluation reduces the adaptation time as opposed to the iterative approach used by adaptive learning techniques. Using our reference implementation of the framework we show how it could be used to dynamically determine the threshold price in an e-commerce system which uses the name-your-own-price (NYOP) strategy.