Keeping Creativity Downtown: Policy Learning from San Francisco,Seattle, and Vancouver for Municipal Cultural Planning in Toronto

I examine Toronto's interest in the policy learning process regarding possible solutions to development pressure downtown though understanding policies from San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. Grounded by the analysis of creative city interventions and incorporating a theoretical framework of policy adaptation, the investigation is informed by interviews with fifty-one multi-sector stakeholders, historical and archival materials, and policy documents. Return to urban living and the creative cities movement challenge city centers in preserving creative and cultural businesses and organizations. Emergent data themes include: (1) research and strategic planning; (2) stakeholder partnerships; and (3) economic development incorporating economic benefit and social good.     

What's the Problem in Public Sector Workforce Recruitment? A Multi-Sector Comparative Analysis of Managerial Perceptions

Public sector workforce recruitment is problematic, but the nature of that problem is not clearly defined. Workforce recruitment is essentially a matching problem that requires managers to recruit desired employees in available labor pools. This research asks whether sectoral differences and competition for labor affect whether public managers frame the major problem of workforce recruitment as the size, qualifications, or work ethic of the labor pool. Using survey data from about 2,300 managers from two US states, problem attributions are modeled using multinomial logit. The findings suggest that the public and nonprofit sectors find it more problematic to recruit qualified employees than the private sector, but public and nonprofit agencies hold a comparative advantage over the private sector in recruiting employees with sufficient work ethic. Therefore, public and nonprofit managers should emphasize retention and training to leverage their comparative advantage in recruiting employees with work ethic while addressing a comparative disadvantage in recruiting qualified employees.     

Cultural Planning and Urban Renewal in South Africa

The author explores the role of cultural planning as a planning tool in South Africa. He argues that cultural planning contributes to arts "as an intrinsic part of the way humans operate in the world" (Bamford 2006, 19), thereby focusing on cultural identity, creativity, and the globalization of culture. Arguing that cultural planning, as an engine for community development, is essential in South Africa, the author examines the broad definition and importance of cultural planning; the status of South African cities, particularly Johannesburg and Tshwane in Gauteng Province; and the requirements for successful cultural planning.     

The urban household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–2000: Patterns of family formation in a turbulent century

Starting from census data on co-residence and household composition, the authors analyse principles of family organisation and family formation in twentieth-century urban Russia and the Soviet Union. The article uses an adapted version of the classification of households developed by Peter Laslett and Eugene Hammel to study variation in household structure for successive population censuses. Changes in this variation between cross-sections are explained with the help of additional quantitative and qualitative data and are linked to the fundamental demographic, social and economic shifts which took place in Russian society in the course of the twentieth century. The article finds a family system characterised by a tendency towards nuclear family formation, but incorporating a fairly stable element of household extension. Co-residence of three generations was both an answer to a perennial housing problem and offered important advantages in the sphere of childcare and care for the elderly. Variation and fluctuation in household structure are found to be most pronounced during the turbulent first half of the century. After a period of stability during the post-war decades of Soviet rule, post-Soviet transformations provoke new changes.     

Societal openness during the urban crisis. Partner selection in the 19th-century Belgian textile cities Ghent and Verviers

This paper examines the partner selection of the lower classes during an urban crisis period in early industrial Belgian cities. It was found that in this period characterized by an economic transition, overpopulation, migration and a low standard of living, social heterogamy was high, whereas social homogamy increased, or was ‘restored’, in the subsequent period. The urban crisis effect on partner selection contradicts the claims of modernization theory that there was a gradual increase in societal openness and that societal openness was typically modern, but it fits the idea of the informalization of marriage, a process marked by an increase in unmarried cohabitation and illegitimacy.     

State ‘parenthood’ and vocational orphanages (islâhhanes): Transformation of urbanity and family life

Ottoman urban reform policies not only targeted the rehabilitation and rebuilding of provinces, cities, streets, and squares; they also aspired to refashion the inhabitants of urban spaces. Vocational orphanages (?slâhhanes) of the latter half of the nineteenth century were, in that respect, instrumental in removing minor vagrants, beggars, and street children from urban areas according to redefined borders of urban security and visibility and in reintegrating them into society through training and employment in arts and crafts. As much as this initiative was a significant step on the part of the state to intervene in family life and child-rearing practices, the research also points to the agency of poor parents in demanding and benefiting from state welfare policies.     

Marriage patterns in 19th-century Vila do Conde: The study of an urban centre in northwest Portugal

This article investigates marital patterns in the urban town of Vila do Conde, northwest Portugal, during the 19th century. The analysis, which is based on the application of the family reconstitution method, reveals differences in marital patterns between rural and urban settlements. It was observed that Vila do Conde displayed different patterns of marriage than those that have often been described for the northwestern region of Portugal, with an emphasis on lower levels of celibacy, as well as lower fertility rates. It was discovered that migration played a very important role in these dynamics. It is a fact that the increasing outflow of male emigrants had a distortion effect on the marriage market. Nevertheless, the influx of in-migrants to the town contributed to alleviate the adult male shortage and resulting gender imbalance, generating lower proportions of celibacy and higher levels of total fertility. Although several important publications have already identified demographic trends in many parishes of the region in focus, few have been concerned with urban parishes. This research aims to contribute to a better understanding of the population dynamics of urban centres in northwest Portugal when set within the context of a number of the structural changes specific to that region and Portugal as a whole in the 19th century.     

Lamppost networks*: stickers as a genre in urban semiotic landscapes

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the pragmatics of stickers as a genre prominent in communication in urban public space. Although normally small in size, stickers may quantitatively dominate signage in certain areas of cities. Stickers are examined here as localized communicative events that mediatize social practices through a range of complex multimodal and linguistic processes, based on data from the Digbeth area in central Birmingham, UK. An analysis of the distribution of stickers, their agency, audience, and the multimodal practices involved in their creation reveals that they bring together transgressive, artistic and commercial discourses and form a specific layer of urban communication, especially in areas of pedestrian transit within a city. A large number of stickers also initiate communications that can potentially be continued online.     

Comment on Andrew S. Carron and R. Dan Brumbaugh,Jr.’s “The viability of the thrift industry”

Abstract

Krueckeberg summarizes Hernando de Soto's premise on property rights and offers a critical interpretation of de Soto's work, arguing that it emphasizes efficiency over equity and, ultimately, that enhanced property rights alone are unlikely to significantly improve housing stability or access to capital for households living in informal arrangements. I clarify several of Krueckeberg's discussions of de Soto's ideas from the perspective of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD).

The ILD perspective, informed by de Soto's writings, contrasts with Krueckeberg's in the following five areas: access to utilities and services in squatter settlements, the criminal nature of these communities, the ability of the poor to fulfill the responsibilities of formal ownership, their ability to borrow against formally owned property, and the impact of formalizing property on rental housing. I close by considering how the ILD perspective on formalization might be brought to bear in the United States.