http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/new-way-understanding-eyes-street/6276/
Showing posts with label neighborhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label neighborhood. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
A New Way of Understanding 'Eyes on the Street'
You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/new-way-understanding-eyes-street/6276/
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/07/new-way-understanding-eyes-street/6276/
Monday, July 8, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
Neighborhoods and health
*I LOVE THIS*
Neighborhoods (or residential areas more broadly) have emerged as potentially relevant contexts because they posses both physical and social attributes which could plausibly affect the health of individuals (125)
Place of residence is strongly patterned by social position and ethnicity (125)
Behavioral and stress processes operating at the level of individuals are also dynamically related: stress can result in the adoption of unhealthy eating behaviors as coping mechanisms, and some behaviors (such as physical activity) can buffer the adverse effects of stress (126)
The impact of neighborhood conditions on health is likely to be modified by individual-level characteristics. For example, some individuals may have characteristics that make them more vulnerable to adverse neighborhood conditions, while others may have the personal and financial resources that allow them to overcome deficiencies or hazards in their neighborhoods (126)
Research on neighborhoods and health is closely connected to work on residential segregation and health and work on housing on health (126)
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The End of the Neighborhood School
Kids being uprooted from neighborhood schools are often the ones that can least handle the sudden change. "A lot of the children who are affected by this trend are already at risk because of poverty, drug abuse, violence, family upheaval, lack of healthcare," says Julianne Robertson King, a mother of four who lives in D.C.'s Ward 5, which is set to see four schools close this year. "These are people who have not been able to capitalize on the promise of America. When you remove one thing that they can count on... ."
According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.
Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)
"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/
According to researchers from the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, if these students are sent to a similarly under-performing school, test scores will remain low. Moreover, students are more likely to jump around between schools after their first school is shuttered, and may stop attending school altogether.
Five large school districts saw charter school enrollment increases averaging 17 percent over the 2011-12 school year: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
According to a report commissioned last year by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray, despite geographic disparities, two-thirds of all students attend schools within or adjacent to their neighborhood cluster. (For traditional public schools, 74 percent of students stayed within their neighborhood cluster; in charter schools, it was 57 percent.)
"One of the biggest things is the community aspect of it," explains Garrison PTA President Ann McLeod. "You really meet more of your neighbors that way. It helps you enjoy your neighborhood more, you are more rooted in your neighborhood, you've got resources for your kids to have more friends who live around them."
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/02/end-neighborhood-school/4687/
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Brooklyn the Game
rooklyn: The Game will allow people to explore these questions by using their smartphones to tour Downtown Brooklyn, one of New York City’s most rapidly changing neighborhoods. The game turns the city into an interactive learning space while engaging a wide variety of constituencies in virtual and real world conversations about development policy and projects.
Players start by downloading the app and picking a tour such as Brooklyn Undergrounds: From Hip Hop to Abolitionism, A Great Bargain: Shopping Then and Now, or Designing Downtowns: Architecture an Urban Planning. The game’s augmented reality feature allows them to juxtapose the past, present, and future of individual sites by bringing together an array of historic and contemporary materials including images, photographs, film footage, and interview clips. Players travel through layers of time while standing in the actual built environment, giving them a fresh and nuanced perspective on neighborhood change.
The game is also fun and competitive. By answering questions and finding clues, players receive discounts at local businesses, discover “geotags” on buildings that provide information about developer subsidies and public benefit, and are rewarded for sharing their opinions through online social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
Brooklyn: The Game is a companion project to the feature documentary My Brooklyn. Together, these products are parts of a single package that will provide audiences with much-needed tools for understanding issues of race, class, and neighborhood change in historical context.
http://www.brooklynthegame.com/
Players start by downloading the app and picking a tour such as Brooklyn Undergrounds: From Hip Hop to Abolitionism, A Great Bargain: Shopping Then and Now, or Designing Downtowns: Architecture an Urban Planning. The game’s augmented reality feature allows them to juxtapose the past, present, and future of individual sites by bringing together an array of historic and contemporary materials including images, photographs, film footage, and interview clips. Players travel through layers of time while standing in the actual built environment, giving them a fresh and nuanced perspective on neighborhood change.
The game is also fun and competitive. By answering questions and finding clues, players receive discounts at local businesses, discover “geotags” on buildings that provide information about developer subsidies and public benefit, and are rewarded for sharing their opinions through online social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.
Brooklyn: The Game is a companion project to the feature documentary My Brooklyn. Together, these products are parts of a single package that will provide audiences with much-needed tools for understanding issues of race, class, and neighborhood change in historical context.
http://www.brooklynthegame.com/
Friday, August 3, 2012
Reimagining an Entire Neighborhood Through Murals
The Dutch art duo Haas and Hahn, comprised of Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn, have embarked on a mural project that is strikingly similar to the high wire act of jazz improvisation.
The artists were commissioned by the City of Philadelphia and its Mural Arts Program to paint a section of Germantown Avenue as part of an ongoing revitalization effort targeted at stagnant commercial corridors. Located in the central part of North Philadelphia a few blocks east of Broad Street, the neighborhood is better known for its abandoned houses than its arts scene. The pair began the project a year ago, moving into a tiny white house directly behind the Village of Arts & Humanities.
Urhahn credits El Sawyer at the Village of Arts & Humanities, a community-based nonprofit organization dedicated to neighborhood revitalization through the arts, with orchestrating the duo's introduction to the neighborhood. “We didn’t just show up and start painting. We showed up and started making friends, talked to people, tried to get to know the neighborhood," says Urhahn. "Basically the first half-year we talked to everybody form the police officers to the guys on the corner and everyone in between. Especially the store owners."
"The point is not to change the neighborhood," Urhahn says. "We don’t bring answers, we have to define questions and to start the conversation."
-The Atlantic Cities
The artists were commissioned by the City of Philadelphia and its Mural Arts Program to paint a section of Germantown Avenue as part of an ongoing revitalization effort targeted at stagnant commercial corridors. Located in the central part of North Philadelphia a few blocks east of Broad Street, the neighborhood is better known for its abandoned houses than its arts scene. The pair began the project a year ago, moving into a tiny white house directly behind the Village of Arts & Humanities.
Urhahn credits El Sawyer at the Village of Arts & Humanities, a community-based nonprofit organization dedicated to neighborhood revitalization through the arts, with orchestrating the duo's introduction to the neighborhood. “We didn’t just show up and start painting. We showed up and started making friends, talked to people, tried to get to know the neighborhood," says Urhahn. "Basically the first half-year we talked to everybody form the police officers to the guys on the corner and everyone in between. Especially the store owners."
"The point is not to change the neighborhood," Urhahn says. "We don’t bring answers, we have to define questions and to start the conversation."
-The Atlantic Cities
Friday, July 27, 2012
Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities
Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds
By SAM ROBERTS
William H. Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, cautioned that “the report sends a potentially harmful message that black-white residential separation is no longer a priority issue in this country.
“While recent modest declines in black segregation levels are welcome, the 2010 census shows that the average black resident still lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black and 36 percent white,” he said. “At the same time, the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 78 percent white and 7 percent black. Black segregation levels are even higher for children, signaling the continued separation of black and white families across communities with different levels of resources available for schools and other services important for nurturing the next generation.”
John R. Logan, a Brown sociologist, said: “If we want to understand the long-term trends in segregation, we have to be aware both of the progress and of the resistance to change. We are far from the ‘end of segregation.’ ”
Still, Professors Glaeser and Vigdor found that only 20 percent of blacks now live in “ghetto” neighborhoods where 80 percent of the population or more is black, compared with nearly 50 percent who lived in similar neighborhoods a half-century ago.
The findings in the report, titled “The End of the Segregated Century,” for the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership did not denigrate decades of desegregation efforts. In fact, the authors said, “there is every reason to relish the fact that there is more freedom in housing today than 50 years ago and to applaud those who fought to create the change.” But they concluded that housing desegregation was not a magic bullet in providing equal opportunity.
“Residential segregation has declined pervasively, as ghettos depopulate and the nation’s population center shifts toward the less segregated Sun Belt,” Professors Glaeser and Vigdor wrote. “At the same time, there has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites.”
The study’s definition of neighborhood was borrowed from the census: a tract that is home to 1,500 to 7,500 people. The analysis relied on the two most common segregation indexes: dissimilarity, or the proportion of individuals of either group that would have to switch neighborhoods to achieve perfect integration, and isolation, which measures neighborhoods where the share of the population of one group surpasses the citywide average.
By the dissimilarity index, Dallas and Houston are the least segregated big cities.
Los Angeles fared best on the isolation index.
Among cities with the largest black population, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis ranked highest in the dissimilarity index. Among metropolitan areas, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia did.
Since 1960, the share of blacks living in neighborhoods where they account for a minority of the population has risen to 59 percent from 30 percent.
“While it may be tempting to see the overwhelmingly white nature of many suburbs as evidence of stagnation or stasis, the presence of even modest numbers of African-Americans in suburbs demonstrates the remarkable change in American society,” the study said. “Indeed, measured by dissimilarity indices, suburbs are often among the most integrated parts of America.”
Only 424 of the nation’s 72,531 census tracts recorded no black residents. More than half were either in rural areas or in metropolitan regions where blacks account for less than 1 percent of the population. Every census tract in Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire recorded at least one black resident.
By SAM ROBERTS
William H. Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution, cautioned that “the report sends a potentially harmful message that black-white residential separation is no longer a priority issue in this country.
“While recent modest declines in black segregation levels are welcome, the 2010 census shows that the average black resident still lives in a neighborhood that is 45 percent black and 36 percent white,” he said. “At the same time, the average white lives in a neighborhood that is 78 percent white and 7 percent black. Black segregation levels are even higher for children, signaling the continued separation of black and white families across communities with different levels of resources available for schools and other services important for nurturing the next generation.”
John R. Logan, a Brown sociologist, said: “If we want to understand the long-term trends in segregation, we have to be aware both of the progress and of the resistance to change. We are far from the ‘end of segregation.’ ”
Still, Professors Glaeser and Vigdor found that only 20 percent of blacks now live in “ghetto” neighborhoods where 80 percent of the population or more is black, compared with nearly 50 percent who lived in similar neighborhoods a half-century ago.
The findings in the report, titled “The End of the Segregated Century,” for the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership did not denigrate decades of desegregation efforts. In fact, the authors said, “there is every reason to relish the fact that there is more freedom in housing today than 50 years ago and to applaud those who fought to create the change.” But they concluded that housing desegregation was not a magic bullet in providing equal opportunity.
“Residential segregation has declined pervasively, as ghettos depopulate and the nation’s population center shifts toward the less segregated Sun Belt,” Professors Glaeser and Vigdor wrote. “At the same time, there has been only limited progress in closing achievement and employment gaps between blacks and whites.”
The study’s definition of neighborhood was borrowed from the census: a tract that is home to 1,500 to 7,500 people. The analysis relied on the two most common segregation indexes: dissimilarity, or the proportion of individuals of either group that would have to switch neighborhoods to achieve perfect integration, and isolation, which measures neighborhoods where the share of the population of one group surpasses the citywide average.
By the dissimilarity index, Dallas and Houston are the least segregated big cities.
Los Angeles fared best on the isolation index.
Among cities with the largest black population, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis ranked highest in the dissimilarity index. Among metropolitan areas, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia did.
Since 1960, the share of blacks living in neighborhoods where they account for a minority of the population has risen to 59 percent from 30 percent.
“While it may be tempting to see the overwhelmingly white nature of many suburbs as evidence of stagnation or stasis, the presence of even modest numbers of African-Americans in suburbs demonstrates the remarkable change in American society,” the study said. “Indeed, measured by dissimilarity indices, suburbs are often among the most integrated parts of America.”
Only 424 of the nation’s 72,531 census tracts recorded no black residents. More than half were either in rural areas or in metropolitan regions where blacks account for less than 1 percent of the population. Every census tract in Connecticut, Maryland and New Hampshire recorded at least one black resident.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Can Sculptures Fix Buffalo's Urban Farming Program?
Like so many U.S. cities, Buffalo is replete with empty land. It's estimated that more than 20 percent of the city's land sits vacant. These mostly residential plots are becoming an unfortunate 21st century trademark of 20th century industrial power.
Some cities are attacking this problem by converting the empty space into urban gardens. But soil contamination makes growing edible food in the ground next to impossible. Currently, growers get around this by using raised beds, which limits how much they can produce.
That's where Brooklyn-based architect David Lagé comes in. Lagé and a team of designers would like to install sculptures that can double as above-ground growing structures. Lagé says these Artfarms will help the farms increase their yields and meet health standards for selling at farmer's markets and to restaurants.
And, he says, they could help turn the Buffalo's troubled East Side neighborhood, where much of the property is vacant, into a cultural destination.
Video here
The Atlantic Cities
Some cities are attacking this problem by converting the empty space into urban gardens. But soil contamination makes growing edible food in the ground next to impossible. Currently, growers get around this by using raised beds, which limits how much they can produce.
That's where Brooklyn-based architect David Lagé comes in. Lagé and a team of designers would like to install sculptures that can double as above-ground growing structures. Lagé says these Artfarms will help the farms increase their yields and meet health standards for selling at farmer's markets and to restaurants.
And, he says, they could help turn the Buffalo's troubled East Side neighborhood, where much of the property is vacant, into a cultural destination.
Video here
The Atlantic Cities
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