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The Business of Place: Critical, Practical and Pragmatic Perspectives
1 Introduction
Urban renewal or regeneration has emerged as one of the effective means of combating the challenges of urban decay, infrastructure and housing shortage as well as for reviving declining social and economic status of urban areas across the globe. Most particularly in the developing countries, where physical deterioration, infrastructure obsolescence ([37] World Bank, 2006; [34] UN-HABITAT, 2010), poor housing conditions ([28] Rondinelli, 1990; [32] UN-HABITAT, 2006) and disaster vulnerability ([12] Ibem, 2011a) pose serious threats to public health and sustainable urban development ([33] United Nations Population Fund, 2007); urban renewal has been suggested as a tool for slowing down the rate at which these challenges are escalating in these countries ([7] Dimuna and Omatsone, 2010; [10] Gbadegesin and Aluko, 2010). For instance, in Lagos, Nigeria, where many of the challenges confronting cities in the "Global South" have led to stark deterioration in quality of life ([40] Gandy, 2006); [9] Fadare and Oduwaye (2009) made a case for comprehensive rebranding of this city through urban regeneration.
Interestingly, several studies ([30] Sule, 1990; [1] Agbola and Jinadu, 1997; [11] George, 2006; [8] Fadairo and Taiwo, 2009; [26] Olawepo, 2010) have shown that past and present governments in Lagos have applied different urban renewal strategies ranging from slum clearance and redevelopment, road and city beautification to the rehabilitation of other physical infrastructure. [26] Olawepo (2010) specifically noted that current efforts in rehabilitating transportation infrastructure in Lagos are based on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and these have resulted in the construction of bus rapid transit system and other related facilities. It is however noted that most previous studies have focused on the identification of the different types of urban renewal projects in Lagos with little or no attention given to the evaluation of their sustainability. Although the term sustainability is a highly contentious term in the literature as [20] Marcuse (1998) pointed out; in this study, it is used to describe the possibility of maintaining, replicating, continuing and institutionalizing the long term social, economic, physical and environmental benefits of social intervention programmes ([29] Savaya et al. , 2008; [14] Ibem and Azuh, 2011). By putting this definition in context, sustainability can be conceived of as a measure of...