Overcoming inertia for sustainable urban development

Overcoming inertia for sustainable urban development: Understanding the role of stimuli in shaping residents' participation behaviors in neighborhood regeneration projects in China

Fu, X. (TU Delft Design & Construction Management)
Qian, QK (TU Delft Design & Construction Management)
Liu, Guiwen (Chongqing University)
Zhuang, Taozhi (Chongqing University)
Visscher, H.J. (TU Delft Design & Construction Management)
Huang, R. (Chongqing University)

2023

Neighborhood regeneration has become essential component of environmental improvement, and promoting resident participation is a key aspect of effective environmental management. However, in China, the legacy of the former housing allocation system and specific cultural contexts have led to residents' psychological inertia towards participating in neighborhood regeneration. Although there has been extensive research on encouraging resident participation, most studies fail to recognize that cultivating active participation behavior among residents usually requires overcoming their existing reluctance or psychological inertia first. Grounded on the innovative notion of psychological inertia, this paper puts forth the perspective that to foster resident participation, it is imperative to initially disrupt their current participation inertia and subsequently facilitate the reconfiguration of their participation behavior. Specifically, it addresses two key research questions: (i) which factors are conducive to stimulating residents to overcome inherent psychological inertia and stimulate their positive participation attitudes? (ii) How do these stimuli shape and reconstruct residents' participation behavior? Based on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) theory and structural equation modeling (SEM), this paper unveils the mask of intrinsic mechanism for overcoming psychological inertia and reshaping residents' participation behavior. The empirical results show that three stimulating factors (information acquisition, social norms, and perceived grassroots government support) directly impact residents' participating attitudes; these stimuli reconstruct participation behavior by triggering individual psychological changes and then inducing behavioral changes. With the new insight of “overcoming psychological inertia” and the incorporation of behavioral psychology in restructuring resident participation behavior, this paper presents implementation strategies for promoting resident participation in neighborhood regeneration.

Neighborhood regeneration
Overcoming psychological inertia
Resident participation behavior
Stimulus-organism-response theory
Structural equation modeling

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0cfa72c1-deac-48f3-b220-7d07be0dae55

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2023.107252

2024-02-09

0195-9255

Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 103

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care. Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2023 X. Fu, QK Qian, Guiwen Liu, Taozhi Zhuang, H.J. Visscher, R. Huang