‘Redevelopment’ from low-rise collective housing to free-market-driven towers: Neighborhood-scale urban morphology in Ulaanbaatar

Abstract

Due to the relatively short urbanization history of Ulaanbaatar, urban redevelopment projects are still rare; rather, most of the developments are taking place in the form of urban sprawl in the periphery and infill developments in built-up neighborhoods connected to the central infrastructure system. An evident example among these few redevelopment projects is the redevelopment of Nekhmeliin Shar, a residential neighborhood that was originally built for factory workers in 1956. During the post-socialist transition in the 1990s, the closure of factories and the economic downturn led to the loss of jobs and incomes and the deterioration of housing estates. Since the economy improved slightly in the 2010s, a housing estate redevelopment project has been launched in the neighborhood. As the project has been implemented over the last decade, it has led residents as well as professionals to reconsider the consequences of a redevelopment project. How do former and newly arrived residents adapt to the increasing density? How do stakeholders see the transformation? What methods could support the urban morphological research to study the impacts of neighborhood transformation? This paper uses a multidisciplinary approach to answer all these questions; and discusses how the redevelopment process has changed the current housing estates in Ulaanbaatar as an example of the vertical urbanization trend in Asian cities. In addition, it highlights the key considerations in public and professionals ’views for the future. We used a wide range of data including maps, drawings, photographs, ethnographic interviews and a remote sensing dataset using satellite imageries collected from Google Earth Pro software for the urban morphological analysis. The key findings reveal that, under the guise of ‘redevelopment’ and ambiguity in planning, implementation and control systems, the free market-driven redevelopment projects reinforce not only density, but also more complexity in spatial organization and everyday life.