Urban Catalyst: Concepts and Requirements

Today, urban transformations have led to general changes due to increasing sensitivities to human and environmental well-being. So far, there have been many approaches to urban transformation that most notably of them include urban revitalization, urban redevelopment, and urban regeneration. Regeneration approach has a more comprehensive and integrated vision for solving urban problems, especially Brownfield which has many opportunities for urban transformation and improving people's quality of life. But its regeneration faces challenges in clean-up and redevelopment. To overcome these challenges, the strategy of urban catalyst can be applied due to being an instrument within the strategies of urban transformation that comes out of the texture and rehabilitates that. This research presents the concepts and basic requirements of urban catalyst projects and their planning (political, management and leadership, legal, economic, social and environmental), design (underlying factors, Sense of location and identity) and implementation (4Ps model or public-private-people partnership) components for the acceleration of urban development. At the end, with the knowledge that every city has unique characteristic and it is not possible to adopt a single instruction for all cities, however, regarding to the global experiences, a common Brownfield regeneration process with the help of urban catalyst projects is presented by a proposed model in this study. If projects are understood and developed in accordance with what the city needs, they can deeply affect on the inefficient urban areas regeneration especially Brownfield.