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Presidency: Barcelona
Vice-Presidency: Sao Paulo

The city transformation process often has diverging consequences. While some areas experience the positive side of urban development, other neighborhoods and districts, and even entire cities, can fall into a cycle of depression and abandonment.
The causes of the depression of a neighborhood are very diverse and can include both structural factors and unwanted results of public policies. Other more specific causes may be: the deterioration of urban infrastructure or the housing stock in historical centers; the worsening of the environmental conditions in an area; the consolidation of informal settlements lacking basic urban services; changes in the neighborhood?s sociodemographic structure; the construction of major infrastructure that alters the balance of the urban fabric, etc.
Today, we often turn to policies based on a concept of comprehensive regeneration applied to a neighborhood or urban area. Such policies make a simultaneous and coordinated impact on the physical environment, the infrastructures, the economy, the environment and the social and cultural reality.

The commission has set the following objectives:

• Gather the experience of cities that have made or which are carrying out comprehensive regeneration projects in neighborhoods.
• Evaluate the physical, urban-planning, economic, social and environmental impacts of comprehensive neighborhoodregeneration projects.
• Assess the impact these projects may have on the city as a whole.
• Assess the factors that may favor or threaten the impact and the lessons learnt from the implementation of other comprehensive neighborhood-regeneration projects.