The Impact of Organizational Collective Efficacy on Residents’ Choice of Urban Renewal Mode and Urban Planning

Abstract

With “One Center, One Platform” as the strategic goal, Macau’s development has been an essential part of the 12th and the 13th Five-Year Plan. Even though Macau has achieved a great success in development, it encountered bottlenecks, especially urban renewal. This study made a literature review on relevant theories on urban renewal, the development of Macau’s urban renewal policy, and collective efficacy to construct the research questions. The study will base on a household survey in an old region of Macau and make use of quantitative research to examine Macanese choice on urban renewal option. From the results, organizational collective efficacy can be divided into two subscales, namely neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance collective efficacy and commercial collective efficacy. For Macanese, the latter has a significant impact on their options on urban renewal, which can explain why downtown areas of Hong Kong succeeded at the beginning of Urban Renewal Authority. It is reasonable for Macau SAR government to actively set up Macau Urban Renewal Company Limited. However, urban renewal stresses more on participation of its residents and cities worldwide, all promoting diversified consultation and development patterns in the hope that different public values can coexist upon urban renewal.

1. Introduction

With “One Center, One Platform” as the strategic goal, Macau’s development has been an essential part of the 12th Five-Year Plan and the 13th Five-Year Plan. By taking full advantage of national policies like Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area Program and the Belt and Road Initiative [1], it aims to get a more rapid development. However, its development also encountered plenty of problems, particularly in turning itself into the world tourism and leisure center, where its carrying capacity of tourism is insufficient [2]. How the living quality of residents and tourism quality of tourists in old towns [3], namely the urban renewal, can be balanced has become an important topic of Macau SAR government. In the past, Macau prioritized most of its urban renewal research on urban planning and top-down design, and thus, there were few studies conducted from the perspective of residents. In the light of Macau’s household surveys, this study investigates into Macanese options in urban renewal through the quantitative study of questionnaire results and also proposes an effective way to participation for its residents on urban renewal.

2. Literature review

The study starts by reviewing the research development of urban renewal in Mainland China. It summarizes Macau’s urban renewal development and relevant studies briefly and examines the relevant research direction of collective efficacy. Finally, it sums up some research questions.

2.1. Urban renewal and urban planning

Researches on urban renewal of Chinese mainland are mainly divided into two parts. One is policy design/public management, while the other one is public participation. In terms of system design, America’s experiences recommends to enrich relevant policy toolbox [4], while on the part of residents’ demand, it recommends to develop the Old Town Management Mode, the Internet Plus Mode [5]. Furthermore, these researches have done reviews in relation to urban renewal development experiences of western countries [6] and Taiwan [7], pointing out that urban renewal mechanism was gradually shifted from public management to multi-subject participation, which is characterized by public-private partnership [8] and public participation [9]. Shifts like these also conform to the development of public administration theories. For instance, the theory firstly turned itself from traditional public administration or bureaucracy to new public management, which lay more stress on the promotion of economy, efficiency, and performance on policies [10]. After that, it changed from new public administration to new public governance, which emphasize on absorbing diversified pubic values in policy-making [11]. It is found that this shift generated a positive external effect on social development. Moreover, the improvement of social participation and community involvement is conducive to lifting the security sense of residents [12], where collective efficacy bears a strongly significant relationship with organizational commitment. The abovementioned collective efficacy can be classified into group collective efficacy and organizational collective efficacy. When the goal of the concerned group is consistent with their organizational objective, the group’s collective efficacy can strengthen the consequences of the group’s organizational commitment [13]. Also, residents can improve living environment and neighborhood through organizational collective efficacy [14]. Thus, the role of government in urban renewal features the shift of the decision making from government to residents by empowerment, where they are well informed to choose urban renewal modes appropriately in accordance with their own interests. Similar to urban renewal policy, during urban planning, government faces various challenges, including urban NIMBY (Not in my backyard) [15] and built-heritage conservation [16]. There are some studies to investigate into public participation in urban planning [17], as well as to propose some models for public participation in urban planning, like structuralized inter-network collaboration [18]. Konsti-Laakso and Rantala show that public participation can bring new insights into urban planning and facilitate an open innovation-based strategy in collaboration among stakeholders in urban planning [19]. However, it is lack of empirical study to justify the appropriateness of those models for public participation in urban planning.

2.2. Macau’s urban renewal

Macau boasts of a longer history in opening commercial ports than Hong Kong, and it also owns its historic urban areas, which have been enlisted in the World Culture Heritage List [20]. It can be seen that Macau also encountered the problem of urban renewal. For the sake of balancing its industrial development and the living quality of its residents, Macau SAR government set up the Consultative Committee on the Renewal of Macao’s Old Districts in 2006. According to pertinent documents released at that time, there were four modes of old town restoration plan, namely Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, Conservation, and Street Beautification [21]. These four modes are similar to the 4R theory, which was developed in other parts of the country in this regard, namely Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, pReservation, and Revitalization [22]. In order to facilitate the process of urban renewal and urban planning, Macau SAR Government reviews Land Law, Urban Planning Law and Cultural Heritage Protection Law in 2013 and 2014 [23]. Since then, Macau has set up Urban Renewal Committee to replace the Consultative Committee on the Renewal of Macao’s Old Districts [24] in a bid to enhance the living quality of its residents and the management of its community with a more flexible and effective way.

Now, there are numerous policies and researches in this respect, such as findings on mediating the effect of sense of community on Macanese options of urban renewal [25]. This can be attributed to the fairly strong traditional organizational culture in Macau. Afterwards, there are studies further exploring the influence of the sense of community in depth, among which Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) is used as the fundamental analysis. It is found that the sense of community can be subdivided into two sub-variates, namely identity and mutual support, where the sub-variate identity will generate a more significant impact on the Macanese choice of urban renewal option [26]. Also, there are studies exploring the impact of the sense of community and political efficacy on traditional organizations’ decision making in Macau. However, those traditional organizations in Macau fail to practice professional management; thus, it is necessary to put forward the third-party evaluation [27]. While in terms of urban renewal policy, Macau still lags behind Hong Kong. This may be ascribed to relevant lagging administrative laws and regulations, as well as no-dominated organizations regarding urban renewal [28]. Due to the strong traditional organizational culture in Macau, its residents enjoy achieving goals by means of collective actions, accounting to the appearance of a number of directly elected members from the Legislative Assembly of Macau with the background of traditional organizations [29]. Therefore, this study aims to achieve further understanding of the development factors of Macau’s urban renewal from another perspective.

2.3. Collective efficacy

Generally speaking, organizational collective efficacy can be regarded as an evaluation toward the power of an organization or an institution, while the concept of the collective, which means a group with common beliefs, is not a rigorous one. In this way, if the collective efficacy in one place is fairly strong, then its residents can achieve their common interest by means of its regional power [30]. According to studies and findings from other places, both social capital and public participation will have a strong impact on the community collective efficacy [31]. Meanwhile, it is found that collective efficacy can strengthen organizational commitment [32], and organizational collective efficacy will exert a relatively positive effect [14] on city dwellers and community organizations. Consequently, Macau SAR government has been encouraging the community to set up owners’ organization in the past few years in the hope that owners can more properly manage their properties [33]. Chan Yingdi, who concluded studies on collective efficacy conducted in recent years, found that collective efficacy was composed of the single-factor and three-factor structure [34]. Moreover, studies on collective efficacy conducted in Mainland China mainly focus on education [35] and human resources [36]. Before that, traditional organizations were found in Macau always making a great difference, and old town restoration and its environment were always concerns for its residents. Therefore, this study aims to explore the role of organizational collective efficacy on Macau’s choice on urban renewal options.

2.4. Research questions

Although the past decades witnessed a rapid economic development in Macau, this region falls short of land resources, and thus urban renewal acts as an important way to deal with houses and living problem. Based on that, this study is to identify the factor structure of organizational collective efficacy, to assess the impact of socio-economic status of residents living in old region on the options of Macanese in urban renewal with different social backgrounds (i.e., redevelopment, rehabilitation, preservation, and beautification), and to examine the impact of factors of organizational collective efficacy on the options of Macanese in urban renewal.

3. Study methods

3.1. Questionnaire collection

With all residents from Praça de Ponte e Horta (a region in the southeast of Macau) as the object, it collects data from the authorized research project supported by Macau Old Town Restoration Commission. Because the range of questions in the questionnaire is quite wide, this study chose the household survey as the main study method. In order to get an ideal response rate, not only Macau SAR government launched public promotion but also traditional organizations assisted with the survey, which can naturally account for the response rate close to 70%.

The questionnaire is mainly divided into four parts, namely the choice of urban renewal options, organizational collective efficacy, living environment satisfaction, and social background of interviewees. On the part of organizational collective efficacy is designed by Ohmer, and the study group translates it into Chinese with repeated discussions and revision with working group dominated by the Consultative Committee on the Renewal of Macao’s Old Districts. All these efforts are made by the study group and the working group. The study group will give scores for eight problems with the standard of evaluation ranging from one to five points, among which one point means strongly disagree and five points strongly agree. Main questions in the questionnaire will include public service advice put forward by community organizations, the prevention of illegal and criminal acts by community organizations, the enhancement of regional commercial values by community organizations, and so on [14]. The higher the index of organizational collective efficacy can get, the stronger performance of their organizational collective efficacy is. At last, the study group designs a scale made of six problems based on the environmental topics concerned by Macanese also with the same standard evaluation mentioned earlier. Its problems include the population mobility, fire prevention, environmental protection and greening work, and so on. The higher the environmental satisfaction index is, the greater satisfaction they have on the environment quality.

3.2. Statistical analyses

The analyses of descriptive statistics are mainly used to describe the sample structure and conduct bivariate analysis. It aims to examine the relation between Macanese socioeconomic background and living environment satisfaction, and their choice of urban renewal options, whose analytical method is Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). It can be seen from Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) that the number of sample of this study is adequate (more than 100), which meets the relevant requirement of the five-grade marking system [37]. There are eight questions measuring organizational collective efficacy (see Table 2). It utilizes KMO and Barlett’s Test to examine whether the samples are appropriate for factor analysis. Finally, it will use Cronbach’s alpha to examine the internal reliability of scales used in this study. And the regression analysis used in this study is a multinomial logistic regression model. Furthermore, the dependent variable is urban renewal options and “remain unchanged” serves as the reference value, while the independent variables are divided into three parts, namely the respondents’ socioeconomic background (including gender, age, and status of residence), living environment satisfaction, and organizational collective efficacy. By the results of multinomial logistic regression model, the relationship between organizational collective efficacy and residents’ choice of urban renewal mode can be examined, especially controlling for the respondents’ socioeconomic background and living environment satisfaction; besides, the examined relationship could inspire the process of public participation in urban renewal or urban planning.

4. Study results

4.1. Sample analysis

It can be seen in Table 1 that there are 785 questionnaires with complete answers. The male accounted for 47.8% of samples. With 16.8% whose age is over 65 years old, there are, respectively, 86.4 and 6.9% of samples permanent residents and non-permanent ones in Macau. And the Chinese and Portuguese groups account for 87.5 and 6.6%, respectively. There are 85.6% surveyors living in the present communities over 10 years while 60% with income less than 8000 patacas. It also shows that 73.8% surveyors living in their own houses, among whom 53.5% have owned their houses for more than 10 years.

	Redevelopment	Rehabilitation	Conservation	Beautification	Remain unchanged	Total	p-value
Number	202	351	23	133	76	785
Male	0.495	0.464	0.565	0.511	0.408	0.478	0.513
Age
35–64	0.649	0.570	0.652	0.579	0.421	0.580	0.014
≧65	0.094	0.154	0.087	0.180	0.434	0.168	<0.001
Status of residence
Permanent residents	0.916	0.860	0.696	0.872	0.776	0.864	0.004
Non-permanent Residents	0.050	0.085	0.087	0.053	0.066	0.069	0.500
Race
Chinese	0.906	0.855	0.870	0.880	0.882	0.875	0.534
Portuguese	0.079	0.071	0.043	0.075	0.000	0.066	0.169
Length of residence over 10 years	0.891	0.858	0.696	0.880	0.763	0.856	0.012
Income (patacas)
≤8000	0.574	0.556	0.739	0.609	0.816	0.600	<0.001
>20,000	0.094	0.057	0.087	0.053	0.013	0.062	0.124
Living alone	0.079	0.103	0.174	0.105	0.224	0.111	0.011
Type of house
Rent	0.144	0.174	0.130	0.113	0.355	0.172	<0.001
Lodge	0.079	0.103	0.130	0.075	0.092	0.092	0.787
Ownership of house ≥10 years	0.554	0.530	0.391	0.632	0.382	0.535	0.006
Living environment satisfaction	3.017	3.220	3.029	3.198	3.504	3.186	<0.001

Table 1.

ANOVA of social and economic background and living environment satisfaction toward options in urban renewal.

With regard to variates against social and economic background, the outcome of ANOVA shows that age, permanent residents, length of residence over 10 years, income less than 8000 patacas, living alone, rent, and ownership of houses over 10 years have an appreciable impact on the options of urban renewal. Those over 65 years old with income less than 8000 patacas who like to live alone, pay rent, or relatively satisfy with the living environment are inclined to remain unchanged.

4.2. Factor analysis

The study has conducted analyses on the scale of organizational collective efficacy’s factor structure and internal reliability. It can be seen from Table 2 that the corrected item-total correlation coefficient of all items of organizational collective efficacy is higher than 0.30, which means that the overall scale and individual items are strongly related to each other. According to Cronbach’s alpha (α), it shows that the internal reliability of organizational collective efficacy, neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance (subscale of organizational collective efficacy), and commercial objective (subscale of organizational collective efficacy) are, respectively, 0.794, 0.783, and 0.702, whose internal reliabilities reach a satisfactory level (the threshold is 0.700). All of their KMO are, respectively, 0.815 (>0.60) and p-value of Barlett’s Test is less than 0.001 (<0.05), which means that it is appropriate for factor analysis. In accordance with factor loading, “neighbors will actively fight for building houses with reasonable price in the old areas” and “neighbors will actively promote commercial values of their community” can be attributed to commercial collective efficacy while other items can be attributed to neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance collective efficacy.

		Average	Standard deviation	Corrected item-total correlation	Factor loading
					Factor 1	Factor 2
1	Neighbors will take the initiative to enhance living environment quality, such as perform some cleaning	2.517	0.841	0.468	0.661	0.091
2	Neighbors take the initiative to care and support others	2.578	0.769	0.581	0.826	0.036
3	Neighbors take the initiative to give the advice of offering better public service	2.821	0.805	0.533	0.604	0.301
4	Neighbors do their best to prevent crimes	2.343	0.734	0.465	0.572	0.223
5	Neighbors take the initiative to make friends with others	2.579	0.772	0.534	0.755	0.075
6	Neighbors will fight for building houses at a reasonable price in the old areas	2.700	0.818	0.467	0.190	0.823
7	Neighbors will actively promote the commercial values of this area	2.861	0.798	0.407	0.090	0.871
8	Neighbors will actively discuss and deal with problems of others	2.720	0.802	0.567	0.575	0.410
Cronbach’s alpha				0.794	0.783	0.702
KMO measure					0.815
Barlett’s Test (p-value)					<0.0001

Table 2.

Internal reliability and factor analysis of organizational collective efficacy.

Factor 1: Neighbor-to-neighbor mutually One; Factor 2: Commercial One.

From Table 3, it can be concluded that ANOVA finds that only commercial collective efficacy has a significant impact on the options of urban renewal, among which the higher commercial collective efficacy is, the more likely it will remain unchanged.

	Redevelopment	Rehabilitation	Conservation	Beautification	Remain unchanged	Total	p-value
No.	202	351	23	133	76	785
Organizational Collective efficacy	2.656	2.621	2.696	2.581	2.740	2.637	0.223
Neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance	2.643	2.561	2.725	2.538	2.631	2.589	0.204
Commercial nature	2.699	2.803	2.609	2.705	3.080	2.780	0.001

Table 3.

Analyses of organizational collective efficacy on the options of urban renewal.

4.3. Multiple logistic regression model regression analysis

Table 4 shows that the appreciable factors of multinomial logistic regression model regression analysis are less than that in ANOVA, which can be seen that each and every independent variate may possibly exert an intermediate effect mutually. Factors like age over 65 years, higher living environment satisfaction, and commercial collective efficacy may be contributed to the respondents’ choice to remain unchanged. Non-permanent residents are likely to choose redevelopment while those with a house over 10 years probably choose rehabilitation and beautification of streets, where respondents paying for rent resist conservation and beautification.

		Redevelopment	Rehabilitation	Conservation	Beautification
		B	B	B	B
Male		0.395	0.253	0.907	0.506
Age
35–64		−0.430	−0.676	−0.149	−0.632
≧65		−2.382**	−1.965**	−2.337*	−1.942**
Status of residence
Permanent resident		1.263	0.671	−1.614	−0.714
Non-permanent resident		0.992	1.394*	−0.549	0.230
Race
Chinese		−0.604	−0.959	−0.781	−0.833
Length of residence over 10 years		0.460	0.855	0.759	1.341
Income (patacas)
≦8000		−0.070	−0.514	0.870	−0.227
>20,000		1.546	0.827	1.921	0.867
Living alone		−0.103	−0.186	0.355	−0.021
Type of house
Rent		−0.617	−0.478	−2.432**	−1.146*
Lodge		0.360	0.599	−0.411	0.184
Ownership of house over 10 years		0.801	0.883*	0.079	1.067*
Living environment Satisfaction		−1.524**	−0.897**	−1.593**	−1.022**
Organizational collective efficacy
Neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance		0.075	−0.277	0.765	−0.249
Commercial collective efficacy		−0.934**	−0.576*	−1.483**	−0.788**
Nagelkerke R square		0.232

Table 4.

Multiple logistic regression model regression analysis on the options of urban renewal (“remain unchanged“as the reference value).

*

p-value <0.05

**

p-value <0.01

5. Conclusion

The results of this study coincide with the previous ones. For instance, since the elderly (over 65 years old), to some extent, depend upon the living environment, most of them are likely not to change their original living environment [38]. The quality of living environment also has a direct impact on the residents’ options in urban renewal mode [39]. The higher the commercial collective efficiency is, the more likely they will not change their status quo. This may contribute to the full embodiment of commercial values of the communities where residents are now living. Actually, this is also what is happening now. On the part of tenants, they show little interest in urban renewal because it does not bring any direct tangible benefits to them. So are the Conservation and Beautification. This study found that organizational collective efficacy can be divided into two sub-variates, which are, respectively, neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance and commercial efficacy. Such a result is consistent with the one done in the west, which means collective efficacy can be divided into group collective efficacy and organizational collective efficacy. The former is a bottom-to-up concept while the latter is an up-to-bottom one; thus, the former one can be regarded as a relatively common integration of concrete interests and the latter can be something considered in the long run. In this way, group collective efficacy has a greater impact on organizational commitment [32]. Furthermore, it is found that commercial collective efficacy can be regarded as group collective efficacy, focusing on commercial interests while neighbor-to-neighbor mutually one will be more likely to focus on the long-term development of a region. With this in mind, commercial collective efficacy will be more influential in choosing the urban renewal mode.

It can be seen from the above that the urban renewal mode will be easier to achieve its efficacy by stressing on its commercial nature and efficiency. A typical case can be seen in Hong Kong’s Urban Renewal Authority. At the beginning of its establishment, it made a remarkable achievement [40]. However, with the further development of the society, the number of redevelopment projects with high economic returns has been reducing year by year. Besides, there were more demands on Urban Renewal Authority from residents. In order to respond to the growing demands, it had to offer extensive community consultation [28]. With regard to community consultation on urban renewal, it had no longer been pushed by a single channel but diversified ones. With different channels dominated by administrative organs, experts, and residents, it hopes that the urban renewal mode will be chosen by residents not only considering their private interest [41]; thus, they could select a relatively appropriate one. Apart from the channel of consultation, Hong Kong’s urban renewal mode is surging toward a more diversified direction, and the government will seek cooperation and development together with private developers, non-private organizations and social entities, and so forth in a bid to strike a balance on its commercial nature, originality, and economic vitality [42].

Macau SAR government has always set store by the urban renewal mode to improve the living environment of old regions [43]. Since Macau quite depends upon private developers in this regard, it leads to no official or semi-official organizations with unified authority to push relevant tasks, which made all these tasks too fragmented [28]. In recent years, Macau has learnt lessons from its past and considered setting up organizations like Hong Kong Urban Renewal Authority. That is why Macau Urban Renewal Company Limited was established. It aims to unify relevant work on urban renewal through this measure [44]. Besides, Macau SAR government carried out a new round of economic guidance measures including A Research on the Proportion of Housing Reconstruction Ownership, Reinforcement of Housing Maintenance Fund Sponsorship, and other schemes, aiming to encourage private developers, civil entities, and residents to participate in urban renewal and speed up the urban renewal [44].

By combining Hong Kong’s related experience [28], structuralized inter-network collaboration [18], and innovation-based strategy [19], Macau SAR Government can make use of Macau Urban Renewal Company Limited to mobilize stakeholders’ commercial interests (Networks within Economic Domain in Structuralized Inter-Network Collaboration) to reach consensus on urban renewal mode, because commercial organizational collective efficacy has higher impacts on residents’ choice on urban renewal mode than neighbor-to-neighbor mutually assistance. After reaching stakeholders’ consensus on urban renewal mode, Macau Urban Renewal Company Limited can mobilize stakeholders’ social interests (networks within civil society in structuralized inter-network collaboration) to recruit innovative ideas in agreed urban renewal mode or urban planning, because Macau has a lot of folk organizations serving residents in old districts for a long time, and it is much easier for the company to mobilize folk organizations to provide inspiring ideas for an agreed urban mode. The revised structuralized inter-network collaboration shown in Figure 1 could be used for urban planning consultation process.

Figure 1.

Revised structuralized inter-network collaboration in Macau.