Some realities about sprawl and urban decline

Abstract

Many urban analysts believe suburban sprawl has become an important issue because it helps generate two types of problems: growth‐related difficulties like rising traffic congestion, and high concentrations of poor minority households in core‐area neighborhoods. However, a careful regression analysis of measures of both sprawl and urban decline shows no statistically significant relation between these two conditions.

The basic nature of the American urban development process would cause core‐area poverty concentrations even if sprawl were replaced by more compact growth forms. But sprawl does aggravate growth‐related problems. Those problems could be attacked through either alternative overall growth strategies—such as high‐density, tightly bounded growth—or specific anti‐sprawl tactics, such as regional tax‐base sharing and regional coordination of land uses. But no feasible policies are likely either to alleviate traffic congestion much or cause most American regions to abandon sprawl.     

The redevelopment of distressed public housing: Early results from HOPE VI projects in Atlanta,Chicago, and San Antonio

Abstract

The redevelopment of distressed public housing under the Urban Revitalization Demonstration Program, or HOPE VI, has laudable social, physical, community, and economic goals. Three public housing projects in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Antonio demonstrate the complexity and trade‐offs of trying to lessen the concentration of low‐income households, leverage private resources, limit project costs, help residents achieve economic self‐sufficiency, design projects that blend into the community, and ensure meaningful resident participation in project planning.

Although worthwhile and ambitious, HOPE VI cannot achieve all these goals. More of them can be achieved by developing strategies related to the strength of the local real estate market. To that end, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and public housing authorities must use the market‐based tools in the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998. Standards for improved physical design and resident participation and further research on critical supportive services for residents are also needed.     

The contributions of historic preservation to housing and economic development

Abstract

Historic preservation contributes greatly to housing and economic development. Historic preservation has produced almost 250,000 housing units through use of the federal historic rehabilitation tax credit. Additionally, heritage tourism is a multibillion‐dollar industry, and preservation projects help further community revitalization.

Historic preservation also has a downside. Preservation's growing popularity may dilute its imperative and market prowess, and some argue it is used to thwart new development. Preservation requirements may impede affordable housing production and displace area residents. These undesirable consequences are not givens, however. Preservationists are working to become more flexible, and we suggest ways to practice historic preservation while mitigating some of its negative consequences—for example, tax credit changes, more flexible building codes, and a “tiered” system of designating historic properties at varying levels of significance.     

Revitalizing inner‐city neighborhoods: New York city's Ten‐Year Plan

Abstract

This article examines the impact of New York City's Ten‐Year Plan on the sale prices of homes in surrounding neighborhoods. Beginning in the mid‐1980s, New York City invested $5.1 billion in constructing or rehabilitating over 180,000 units of housing in many of the city's most distressed neighborhoods. One of the main purposes was to spur neighborhood revitalization.

In this article, we describe the origins of the Ten‐Year Plan, as well as the various programs the city used to implement it, and estimate whether housing built or rehabilitated under the Ten‐Year Plan affected the prices of nearby homes. The prices of homes within 500 feet of Ten‐Year Plan units rose relative to those located beyond 500 feet, but still within the same census tract. These findings are consistent with the proposition that well‐planned project‐based housing programs can generate positive spillover effects and contribute to efforts to revitalize inner‐city neighborhoods.     

The Mujahideen in Bosnia: the foreign fighter as cosmopolitan citizen and/or terrorist

This article explores the idea of the Mujahideen in Bosnia as ‘cosmopolitan citizens’. During the Balkan War in the early 1990s, these foreign fighters flocked to Bosnia in order to take up arms alongside those whom they understood to be their besieged Muslim brethren. Although this act of transborder mobilization can be framed as an act of cosmopolitan citizenship, the subsequent ‘problem’ of the Mujahideen in a post-9/11 context destabilized their original cosmopolitan act through a re-enactment of borders and the revocation of their (literal) citizenship. Within the larger post-9/11 narrative, where the Mujahideen must necessarily be understood as terrorists/potential terrorists, they are an interesting point of study in an examination of what can be seen as the sinister side of transnational citizenship, and they expose what Appadurai (A. Appadurai, 2006. Fear of small numbers: an essay on the geography of anger. Durham: Duke University Press.) calls our ‘fear of small numbers’. Particularly compelling is that the post-9/11 Mujahid is an unsympathetic figure, and is always already a questionable candidate for ‘citizenship’ as it is commonly understood. Furthermore, his (sic) original ‘cosmopolitan’ act suggests that, although the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ is the achievement of a citizenship that transcends or escapes borders, the cosmopolitical must nevertheless be assigned value in order to be ethically intelligible.     

Nyerere's Road to Socialism

The privatisation of Ashanti Goldfields Company (AGC) was an important part of Ghana’s neo-liberal reforms. Privatisation is explicitly intended to alter the balance of power between the public and private sector, and the process revealed much about the relationship between the state and the country’s business community. A close examination of the process confirms widely-held perceptions of the Rawlings government and its reform process as highly state-driven and subject to the personal idiosyncrasies of the country’s president. By contrast, Kufuor’s New Patriotic Party (NPP) demonstrated a less equivocal commitment to boosting the role of the private sector in the economy and employed a more routinely institutionalised set of interactions. While the outcome of these processes was sometimes counterintuitive, overall the privatization of AGC is likely to have shifted power out of the hands of the state and into the hands of an international set of shareholders.     

Knowledge free and ‘unfree’: Epistemic tensions in plant knowledge at the Cape in the 17th and 18 th centuries1

ABSTRACT

This article utilises the same epistemic objects, particular indigenous medicinal plants of the Cape region, to explore the gamut of epistemologies in contested, dynamic tension in the early Cape Colony: That of the frontiersman, the Khoikhoi, the Sonqua or Sankwe, and the slave. Drawing on a transdisciplinary set of literatures, the article puts Africana studies, the study of indigenous knowledge systems, and social studies of science and technology in wider conversation with each other, and argues for the adoption of an epistemic openness, methodologies which ‘braid’ seemingly separate strands of social history and differing knowledge practices, and cross-border collaboration among scholars of African and African diasporic knowledges. The findings and interpretation suggest new ways to view the ‘multiplexity’ of early indigenous southern African botanical, therapeutic and ecological knowledges, as well as the necessity for rethinking both the construction of colonial sciences and contemporary concerns about indigenous knowledge, biosciences and their 21^st century interaction.     

Issues in teaching terrorism as cultural artefact

From a humanities course on terrorism that focuses on how terrorist ideology and acts are transformed into cultural artefacts, several pedagogical–theoretical issues have emerged: the incongruity of viewing terrorist violence as art; 9/11 as an ahistorical event; the impossibility of defining terrorism; the infiltration (trivialisation?) of terrorism into popular culture; subgenres of terrorist works, each with its own paradigm; and the iconoclastic potential of many terrorist texts and films. These issues have implications for the curricular design of terrorism courses and for the role of instructors – in academia and in the larger community.     

Analysis and Discrimination of Single‐Layer White Architectural Paint Samples,

Comparative analyses of 50 single‐layer white architectural paints were conducted to determine the discrimination power using standard techniques and to provide a basis for assessing significance when paints with limited features are not discriminated. Utilizing Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), 68 undifferentiated pairs resulted, yielding a discrimination of 94.45%. Adding stereomicroscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and backscatter electron (BSE) imaging, and pyrolysis‐gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Py‐GC/MS), the overall discrimination was 99.35%. The study included blind verification replicates, which resulted in the only pairs without indications of physical or chemical differences. The remaining groups of undifferentiated samples contained subtle differences by at least one technique, but were considered undifferentiated for the discrimination power evaluations. This study demonstrates a high degree of discrimination of single‐layer white architectural paints using methods of analysis often encountered in forensic science laboratories.     

Establishing Correspondence in Wood: The Challenge and Some Solutions?

Establishing correspondence between the upper portion of a white birch sapling, a suspected weapon, and a potential source from a stand of trees was posed to one of us (GMC). A bending force shattered the sapling, precluding physical matching. Three white birch saplings were taken from the same stand of trees in a similar manner. Correspondence was achieved by measuring the width of the annual rings along four radii from a disk cut above and below the break. The regression coefficient of the data from the two disks from the same sapling was r² = 0.95. Regressing the upper disk against the lower disk of two other saplings resulted in r² values of 0.26 and 0.17, respectively. The various characteristics that are confined to a wood stem as part of its normal process of growth can be used to eliminate candidate saplings and establish correspondence between two pieces of wood.