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The paper proposes a novel approach to dialogue with local stakeholders to maximise the shared value that can be generated by infrastructure investments for the benefit of urban communities. The approach proposes a method for deliberately activating synergies between infrastructure and complementary initiatives through the active engagement of public and private stakeholders. In many cases today, infrastructure is designed, financed and implemented as functionally unitary engineering works that meet a specific need, leaving synergies with complementary initiatives to be activated spontaneously. Moreover, the dialogue with local stakeholders is limited and reductive, aiming mainly at the exchange of some project information and consensus building, thus missing the opportunity to identify and mobilise those ideas, capabilities and resources that are always present within a community. In the proposed approach, infrastructure is the catalyst for a long-term vision and stakeholder engagement is the tool for identifying the synergistic initiatives that can be implemented with the participation of public and private actors to maximise value creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes a five-step effective method for creating sustainable, thriving urban communities, from sky-is-the-limit creative mapping to polished final execution. The underlying belief is that although every urban area is different, the use of the proposed method enables, under certain circumstances, the creation of favourable conditions for sustainable and shared prosperity. Drawing from the author's two decades of high-profile experience as an urban regeneration expert, the paper offers comments and thoughts on each step, sharing some key lessons learned from real-life project examples. It shows how to identify a community's unique strengths and competitive advantages, as well as the needs, motivations, inequalities and weaknesses that can be fundamental ingredients for crafting a strong vision for its future. It also proposes how to ensure communities have real purpose and how a collaborative approach can deliver lasting tangible benefits in all contexts — physical, social and economic — and generate places where people are happy to build their lives. Finally, it touches on how to break silos, dissipate political resistance, and disrupt unproductive decision-making structures and traditionally inefficient procedures, for creating sustainable shared value. One of the crucial aspects highlighted is that the proposed method must be intended not as a process with a beginning and an end, but rather a continuous iterative long-term effort aimed at achieving and maintaining a virtuous condition. The implication is that, as the context continues to change over time, it is necessary to create the conditions for 'strategic urban agility'. This requires the adoption of a culture of flexibility in all regulatory, planning, design, construction and operational dimensions of an urban regeneration initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Substantial research exists on attachments people have to places and the phenomena and objects they value. However, insights on how values vary between different locations and across demographics and how place attachment differs between rural and urban areas are more limited. These understandings are needed to design meaningful adaptation strategies for people and communities at risk from climate change. This study examines attachment to place and things people value in eight communities in Western Australia, using a survey with 403 participants. Results showed that residents across the rural communities shared similar values, but that the values of urban communities were differentiated socioeconomically. Contrary to our hypothesis, place attachment was not stronger among the rural compared to the urban sites. The findings point to the importance of incorporating place-based, lived values and needs, particularly from less affluent residents, into inclusive adaptation planning. • Lived values and place attachment in rural and urban communities was investigated. • The values of urban communities differed significantly along socioeconomic lines. • Place attachment was not significantly stronger in rural than in urban communities. • Place based values are important for planning adaptation to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two premises --the consolidation of the "common" as a political interlocutor with its own agenda and discourse, for which fiscal matters had important implications in terms of legitimacy, and the constitution of cities as key spaces for fiscal negotiations with the Castilian Crown during the Late Middle Ages- this article aims to analyse the "voice" of the common in the construction of consensus/dissent and the configuration of the fiscal structure of the state during the reign of Isabella I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Urbanization has resulted in the loss of natural habitat for many bat species, often placing bats in close proximity to humans. Bats are generally perceived as agricultural and medical pests, despite providing ecosystem services including seed dispersal and pollination. Understanding public perceptions and knowledge of bats as well as responses to bats is necessary for developing suitable educational programs to support bat conservation. Here we examined the urban communities' knowledge of bats and how they perceive and respond to bats in Peninsular Malaysia. A questionnaire survey of 340 respondents revealed that women generally had better knowledge of bats compared with men. Respondents with tertiary education and knowledge of the ecological roles of bats tended to support the conservation of bats. In addition, there was low demand for bat meat in this region. Family-based educational programs could help to improve the perception of bats among women and increase knowledge of bats among men. Educational programs highlighting the biology and ecology of bats should be conducted at primary and secondary schools to raise awareness of bats among children who could share this knowledge of bats with their family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal Architecture & Planning is the property of King Saud University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Learning urban community structures refers to the efforts of quantifying, summarizing, and representing an urban community's (i) static structures, e.g., Point-Of-Interests (POIs) buildings and corresponding geographic allocations, and (ii) dynamic structures, e.g., human mobility patterns among POIs. By learning the community structures, we can better quantitatively represent urban communities and understand their evolutions in the development of cities. This can help us boost commercial activities, enhance public security, foster social interactions, and, ultimately, yield livable, sustainable, and viable environments. However, due to the complex nature of urban systems, it is traditionally challenging to learn the structures of urban communities. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a collective embedding framework to learn the community structure from multiple periodic spatial-temporal graphs of human mobility. Specifically, we first exploit a probabilistic propagation-based approach to create a set of mobility graphs from periodic human mobility records. In these mobility graphs, the static POIs are regarded as vertexes, the dynamic mobility connectivities between POI pairs are regarded as edges, and the edge weights periodically evolve over time. A collective deep auto-encoder method is then developed to collaboratively learn the embeddings of POIs from multiple spatial-temporal mobility graphs. In addition, we develop a Unsupervised Graph based Weighted Aggregation method to align and aggregate the POI embeddings into the representation of the community structures. We apply the proposed embedding framework to two applications (i.e., spotting vibrant communities and predicting housing price return rates) to evaluate the performance of our proposed method. Extensive experimental results on real-world urban communities and human mobility data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed collective embedding framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data collected in seven local Russian communities in 2011-2015, we discovered several kinds of relationships between legislative and executive branches of local government. In most cases, the executive branches clearly dominate over the legislative ones. The ratio of resources and the politics of federal and regional authorities allow us to consider this pattern of relationship as a norm, while other types of relationships are exceptions. Configurations of power resources and instruments of influence used to exercise control over the legislative bodies significantly vary and provide different variations of local government interactions: "domination based on coercion," "bargaining from the position of strength," "domination based on persuasion," "domination under confrontation." Alternative forms of relationships ("quasi-domination of local legislature," "temporary parity under confrontation," "alliance in the face of 'external threat'") occur when the executive bodies are headed by inadequate and/or inexperienced leaders unable to realize the high power potential of their position. This reflects the important role of personalism and the relative weakness of the institutional framework in Russia's urban politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory text presents the overarching question that informs the articles in this special section: How have notions of neighborhood and community determined urban planning discourse and practice in mid-twentieth century Europe? Against the backdrop of World Wars, crises and recovery schemes, aspirations to repair – or create – social cohesion among urban dwellers were manifest in the parlance and actions of a range of historical actors, many of which were at the heart of urban planning and reconstruction: architects, sociologists, administrators, planners and local officials. This special section covers different temporal and geographical contexts in Europe (and the US) to disentangle multilayered notions of ‘the social’ that have permeated neighborhood and community planning schemes. Moreover, taken together, the articles will show how persistent dichotomies in urban planning historiography, such as top-down versus bottom-up or organic versus mechanic, obscure historical understandings of how urban communities were conceived spatially, socially and politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of modern states was induced by the development of capitalism and the rapid spread of industrial urbanization. In the process of state formation during the XIX and the beginning of the XX century a major role was played by towns and urban communities, whereas towns were the political and cultural and economic centres of power. Lithuanians undertook the construction of their state in the territory that at that time was without the regions of Vilnius and Klaipėda, thus lacking the historical and cultural urban life experience that relates to the political, cultural and economic institutions. The urban centre of the new state became Kaunas, but the place with the deep experience was another symbolic statehood centre - multicultural Vilnius, which was then under Polish occupation. What is the role of urban communities and their cultural memory in the shaping of the broader national identity? What impact was made on the urban communities, their identities and cultural memory by the interwar and Soviet waves of urbanization as well as the prevailing historical circumstances? What are the major traits of the new globalizational capitalist urbanization and how does that process work on the national identity and cultural memory? The building of the State of Lithuania is related to national identity and cultural memory is needed for identity formation. Lithuanians (84 percent) were of a great majority in the country as a whole, but there was a different ethnic composition in towns: Lithuanians amounted to only 57 percent and Jews - 32 percent. The Jews living in Lithuania since the times of the GDL have always been attributed to citizenry, their urban life skills were substantially more developed and diverse. In the thirties a Lithuanian urbanization wave can be detected: new buildings were changing the face of cities and smaller towns and at the same time making visible new features of what it meant to be Lithuanian, which became entrenched in the cultural memory. After the war, the deserted cities of Vilnius and Klaipėda were flocked to by rural people. Only the people of Kaunas maintained their urban cultural memory of independence and their urban roots. Soviet urbanization rapidly changed the land - in 1970 half of the population had become city dwellers. They increasingly began to care about their historical roots. Regeneration projects to revive Vilnius, Klaipeda and Kėdainiai inner cities were pursued, thus strengthening the historical self-consciousness of urban communities and expanding their cultural memory. Liberation from Soviet occupation marked a new wave of globalizational capitalist urbanization, tearing people from their places of residence, disembedding them, severing urban communal ties, deteriorating urban communities' cultural memory, and thus weakening the national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Lehen is the largest district of City of Salzburg, close to the city centre and with high quality of infrastructure of public transport. Since the last decades the district was confronted with essential changes. The use of the area of the former utility means a huge potential for further development of the district. High share of renewable energy should be the main focus of the project, considering existing heat supply with district heating. High standards of buildings and large-scale solar system are the main elements of the energy concept. The use of a heat pump ensures an efficient increase of solar gains and leads to low primary energy demand resp. CO2-emissions. The new building area was also seen as a chance for modernization activities in existing building stock around. Energy efficient pumps and lightning as well as PV modules in the facades ensure high share of renewable energy also for electricity demand. First results show the way for further projects – concerning effective steering of complex processes and technologies to achieve total CO2-reductions in urban areas. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article looks at political trust in rural and urban China. Particular focus is given to the roles of so-called strong ties, which are based on shared social characteristics, and weak ties, which are not, in building and maintaining such trust. Details on the relationship between social cooperation and institutional trust are also presented. According to the authors, trust among poor urban populations and the middle class in local authorities is produced largely through social participation and the provision of social security. It is suggested that village elections in many rural areas have also produced better public goods provision and greater political trust. Topics discussed include shequ, or neighborhood communities, and the local institutions known as Residents' Committees (RC).

The article presents abstracts on planning literature which include approaches to empirical work in regional economics, understanding the barriers to social adaptation, and management of large city regions.

Objective: Given that small food stores may be important retail food sources in low-income urban communities, our objective was to examine cross-city comparative data documenting healthy food availability within such facilities, particularly those located in low-income areas and nearby schools. Design: Food stores in Baltimore, Maryland; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; Oakland, California; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania were selected for assessment based on proximity to low-income schools. Stores were defined as: (i) single-aisle (n 45); (ii) small (2-5 aisles; n 52); and (iii) large (≥6 aisles; n 8). Staff conducted in-store audits to assess the presence/absence of twenty-eight healthy items, organized within five categories: (i) fresh fruits/vegetables, (ii) processed fruits/ vegetables, (iii) healthy beverages/low-fat dairy, (iv) healthy snacks and (v) other healthy staple foods. Results: The availability of healthy food items was low, particularly in single-aisle and small stores, and there was significant cross-site variability in the availability of healthy snacks (P<0·0001) and other healthy staple foods (P<0·0001). No cross-site differences existed for fruits/vegetables or healthy beverages/low-fat dairy availability. Healthy food availability scores increased significantly with store size for nearly all food/beverage categories (P<0·01). Conclusions: Overall, healthy food availability in these venues was limited. Region-specific factors may be important to consider in understanding factors influencing healthy food availability in small urban markets. Data suggest that efforts to promote healthy diets in low-income communities may be compromised by a lack of available healthy foods. Interventions targeting small stores need to be developed and tailored for use in urban areas across the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The academic library mission is defined based on the need to support the larger parent university mission. In the case of the urban university, which has been the focus of relatively little discussion and research in the library and information science literature, the research component of the mission potentially influences research agendas as well as the decisions of faculty who choose to teach and do research in such a setting, with a particular focus on "applied scholarship" or research that is community-focused, considering social problems. Of the urban issues that have shaped the urban university mission, crime is also a key determinant of the resilience of urban areas. The breadth and depth of the research issues related to crime have been well-documented. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the research findings, indicating the complexity of the research and findings, as well. Design/methodology/approach - The research related to crime ranges from the basic documentation of crime statistics, to the analysis of trends in the data, to attempts to understand why factors as divergent as economic downturns, media coverage, drug use, population reductions, weather or season of the year, and sentencing guidelines impact crime rates. The research also addresses issues, such as the use of DNA and other forensic evidence in crime investigation and juror opinions and the fallibility of eyewitness accounts. The paper presents an overview and analysis of crime-related research, reflecting the breadth of such research and examples, which indicate the fact that the research is frequently characterized by complexity, often manifested in findings that are inconclusive and conflicting, and rarely reflecting causality. The paper presents an analysis of the research related to crime, intended to be representative, not exhaustive, of a broad range of examples of findings and analyses, across a range of academic disciplines and professions, supported by academic libraries. Findings - The analysis of research related to the causes of increases and reductions in crime, why crime rates vary by city, and a range of other related issues reflects broad interest in enhanced understanding of issues related to crime, among researchers across disciplines, public policymakers and law enforcement, as well as members of the general public. This interest is reflected, not only in the amount of published research, the publication of such research in disciplinary, scholarly sources, but also in the general interest literature, and the growth in research following increases in various types of crimes. The analysis also reflects interest in a number of specific research questions and the extent to which models, such as the broken windows theory, possibly the best known theory of this type, are effective in reducing violent crime. The results of research related to crime indicate the complexity, breadth and interdisciplinarity of the concepts studied by scientists and social scientists, as well as the complexity of research findings, as represented in inconclusive and conflicting findings and difficulty in isolating variables and representing causality. Originality/value - The analysis of the nature, breadth, complexity, and interdisciplinarity of the research related to crime provides the basis for a more informed approach in considering the role of the urban university library, in particular, in supporting fulfillment of the larger institutional mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The changing role of government in infrastructure provision and the need for community-based approach are widely gaining increasing recognition, but the extent to which local communities are involved in urban infrastructure provision in developing countries has not been given adequate attention in the literature. This study examines how community-based organizations are filling the gap created by partial withdrawal of the state from urban infrastructure provision in six low-income urban communities in Ohafia, Nigeria. Drawing on the role of social capital in community development, this paper reported how, and in what context situations the organizations are addressing the infrastructure challenge in their communities. Relying on the data from a survey, the study identified six organizations and three funding arrangements in urban infrastructure provision in the communities. Using this case-study, this study attempted to identify how the mobilization of resources in project initiation, design, implementation and funding influenced the type of infrastructure projects. The findings have conceptual and policy implications for understanding the socio-economic and political dynamics in harnessing local resources and integrating community-based approaches into urban development process in developing countries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

For the first time in 50 years, young people are coming back to cities. But what happens when they have children? This paper describes how CEOs for Cities and students from the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design took a fresh look at how cities can better serve families. They suggested ways for urban leaders to leverage inherent city strengths in three key areas of safety, space and schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to fruits and vegetables by low-income residents living in selected urban and rural Minnesotan communities was investigated. Communities were selected based on higher than state average poverty rates, limited access to grocery stores, and urban influence codes (USDA ERS codes). Four communities, two urban and two rural, were selected. Data were gathered from focus group discussions ( n = 41), responses to a consumer survey ( n = 396 in urban neighborhoods and n = 400 in rural communities), and an inventory of foodstuffs available at stores located in all the communities and at large grocery stores in neighborhoods adjacent to the urban communities. In the two urban neighborhoods, a significant number of foods (26% and 52%) were significantly more expensive than the Thrifty Food Plan’s (TFP) market basket price (MBP). Additionally, a significant number of foods in the two rural communities were more expensive (11% and 26%). In focus groups, participants identified major barriers to shopping in their community to be cost, quality of food, and food choice limitations. Results of the food inventory show that foods within the communities were costly, of fair or poor quality, and limited in number and type available, supporting complaints verbalized by focus group participants. Through focus groups and surveys, participants expressed concern that healthy food choices were not affordable within their communities and believed that people in their community suffered from food insecurity. The absence of quality, affordable food for low-income residents in these four Minnesota communities prevents or diminishes their ability to choose foods that help maintain a healthy lifestyle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents abstracts of several studies on environment and planning. "Explaining the Growth of British Multiple Retailing During the Golden Age," by Carlo Morelli; "Cities in the Shade: Urban Geography and the Uses of Noir," by Matthew Farish; "Geographers and the Tennessee Valley Authority," by Ronald Reed Boyce.

This paper focuses on the decay and subsequent regeneration of Harlem, New York. It identifies the importance of retail provision in residential areas, not only in terms of service provision, but also in terms of its social and economic function. Furthermore, it reveals how residents view retailing activity as a health indicator, whereby low levels of retailing provision are signs of unattractiveness and disadvantage and, as such, the increase in retail activity is seen as indicative of regeneration and of affirmation of a community's "worth". Finally, the paper highlights the high levels of awareness of the community in recognising the processes of decay and regeneration, and its role in arresting the spiral of decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]