ABSTRACT
In a rapidly changing and uncertain world driven by globalisation and neoliberalism, the problems, threats and challenges of regeneration spaces are continuously and increasingly becoming complicated and intricate. Under the complex and uncertain circumstances, urban planning, as an academic and professional field, faces difficulties in developing successful policies to achieve sustainable conservation and regeneration, in building SCs in heritage spaces, and in finding ways to effectively deal with the continuously emerging obstacles, challenges and conflicts in regeneration spaces. One of the reasons behind the deficiency of planning is that power relations, governmentality and conflicting interests increase the complexities and uncertainties of these geographies. Additionally, community needs, heritage and governance cannot be sufficiently employed in the planning practice to address these complexities and uncertainties. Raising the need to construct a relational understanding of time, space and cities to develop sophisticated planning actions for places in a contemporary globalising world, the relational approach provides new perspectives to understand the complexities of urban problems and issues related to conservation, regeneration and communities, and to find more equitable and sustainable solutions to these problems. Chapter 3 introduces the relational understanding of urban regeneration in heritage geographies by presenting the interplay between the notions of sustainability, community, community needs, and governance. It draws attention to the need for a dynamic and evolving regeneration approach to address the complexity of the notion of ‘community’ with fixity, fluid and multiplicity characteristics, and that of ‘community need’ with evolutionary and contextual aspects. Finally, it explains the relational approach of urban governance to regeneration spaces regarding the power relations, governmentality, and politics of regeneration, mobility and community needs.
