Knowledge Intensive Regeneration versus Sustainable Communities

Regeneration is deemed as the enabler for societies and nations to transform them from industrial age to knowledge. In this regard, knowledge intensive regeneration is one of the latest models, called as New Century Cities (NCC) to make progress and ultimately achieve the transformation towards knowledge societies, which have the features and characteristics of sustainable communities. However, meeting the key features or characteristics of sustainable communities can be challenging due to its complex and interrelated features such as socio-economic requirement, environmental and physical requirements, which are all correlated to each other. This paper aims to discuss the knowledge intensive regeneration model in relation to the sustainable communities in order to highlight the level of match and conformance between them in order to justify the suitability of knowledge intensive regeneration for the sustainable communities' vision. Research methodology adopted in the paper is the case study approach, which is the Mediacity project, and used literature review, observation and interviews for data collection, while concept mapping was utilised for data analysis. Research findings reflect that the level of conformance is relatively high, social aspects is still weakly addressed in comparison to other dimensions. Therefore, paper proposes the stronger attention and strategic planning at the visioning and masterplanning stages of such projects in order to address this most challenging dimension of regeneration projects.