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Using the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston's most impoverished neighborhood as a case stuudy, the authors show how effective organizing reinforces neighborhood leadership, encourages grassroots power and leads to successful public-private partnerships and comprehensive community development.--Prof. Norman Krumholz
In his acclaimed bestselling book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam described a thirty-year decline in America's social institutions. The book ended with the hope that new forms of social connection might be invented in order to revive our communities. In Better Together, Putnam and longtime civic activist Lewis Feldstein describe some of the diverse locations and most compelling ways in which civic renewal is taking place today. In response to civic crises and local problems, they say, hardworking, committed people are reweaving the social fabric all across America, often in innovative ways that may turn out to be appropriate for the twenty-first ...
A number of U.S. cities, former manufacturing centers of the Northeast and Midwest, have suffered such dramatic losses in population and employment that urban experts have put them in a class by themselves, calling them "rustbelt cities," "shrinking cities," and more recently "legacy cities." This decline has led to property disinvestment, extensive demolition, and abandonment. While much policy and planning have focused on growth and redevelopment, little research has investigated the conditions of disinvested places and why some improvement efforts have greater impact than others. The City After Abandonment brings together essays from top urban planning experts to focus on policy and plann...
Raise the Floor shows why so many hardworking Americans can't make ends meet.
This book discusses the revitalization of decayed inner-city neighborhoods. It explores the role of social capital in stabilizing and turning around distressed communities, and it highlights the roles that local actors can and do play in the revitalization process. The Art of Revitalization takes two Chicago neighborhoods, Englewood and North Lawndale, as case studies. Zielenbach discusses them in the context of racial change and urban decay in Chicago since World War II. The account of the changing neighborhoods is fascinating and clear, and the strength of the author's portrayal of Chicago's transformation sets the stage for his detailed analysis.
The core argument of Jean Anyon’s classic Radical Possibilities is deceptively simple: if we do not direct our attention to the ways in which federal and metropolitan policies maintain the poverty that plagues communities in American cities, urban school reform as currently conceived is doomed to fail. With every chapter thoroughly revised and updated, this edition picks up where the 2005 publication left off, including a completely new chapter detailing how three decades of political decisions leading up to the “Great Recession” produced an economic crisis of epic proportions. By tracing the root causes of the financial crisis, Anyon effectively demonstrates the concrete effects of ec...
This practical guide is intended for faculty and service-learning directors, combining the how-to information and rigorous intellectual framework that teachers seek. What distinguishes this volume is that the contributors are writing for their peers. They discuss how service-learning can be implemented within political science and what this discipline contributes to the pedagogy of service-learning. The book offers both theoretical background and practical pedagogical chapters which describe the design, implementation, and outcomes of political science service-learning programs, as well as annotated bibliographies, program descriptions and course syllabi.
America is in the midst of a rental housing affordability crisis. More than a quarter of those that rent their homes spend more than half of their income for housing, even as city leaders across the United States have been busily dismantling the nation's urban public housing projects. In After the Projects, Lawrence Vale investigates the deeply-rooted spatial politics of public housing development and redevelopment at a time when lower-income Americans face a desperate struggle to find affordable rental housing in many cities. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with public housing residents, real estate developers, and community leaders, Vale analyzes the different ways in which four major ...
In 1983, Boston and Chicago elected progressive mayors with deep roots among community activists. Taking office as the Reagan administration was withdrawing federal aid from local governments, Boston's Raymond Flynn and Chicago's Harold Washington implemented major policies that would outlast them. More than reforming governments, they changed the substance of what the government was trying to do: above all, to effect a measure of redistribution of resources to the cities' poor and working classes and away from hollow goals of "growth" as measured by the accumulation of skyscrapers. In Boston, Flynn moderated an office development boom while securing millions of dollars for affordable housin...
Recoded City examines alternative urban design, planning and architecture for the other 90%: namely the practice of participatory placemaking, a burgeoning practice that co-author Thomas Ermacora terms ‘recoding’. In combining bottom-up and top-down means of regenerating and rebalancing neighbourhoods affected by declining welfare or struck by disaster, this growing movement brings greater resilience. Recoded City sheds light on a new epoch in the relationship between cities and civil society by presenting an emerging range of collaborative solutions and distributed governance models. The authors draw on their own fresh research of global pioneers forging localist design strategies, publ...