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Problem, research strategy, and findings: We interviewed 61 practicing planners seeking deeper insights into what motivates their decisions and how they personally determine ethical behavior in the...

At the 50th anniversary of Arnstein’s (1969) field-shaping “A Ladder of Public Participation,” the influence of her article is clear and continues to become more apparent. Her work is pervasive and...

This paper describes environmental exposures of adult participants in the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing (MTO) experiment over a four to seven year period from baseline to the interim evaluation. The MTO experiment randomized participants living in public housing or private assisted housing at baseline into experimental and control groups and provided a housing voucher for experimental group participants to move to neighborhoods with less than 10 percent of the population below the poverty line. However, few studies have examined how this move affected exposures to health promoting environments. We used data on residential locations of MTO participants and archival data on the built and food environment to construct environmental exposure variables. MTO participants in the experimental and Section 8 groups lived in neighborhoods with higher food prices, less high intensity development and more open space relative to the control group. The findings suggest that housing policies can have potential health consequences by altering health-related environmental exposures.

For over 50 years, Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation has offered a simple yet elegant characterization of the problems and prospects for achieving more meaningful participation of communities in the public decisions that affect them. In this chapter, the authors draw on Arnstein for inspiration, for the language of power, for evaluative frameworks, and more. They focus on public engagement efforts as a means of sharing power. Following from the focus on the how in public engagement, Bryson offers insights on defining and identifying stakeholders, including those who have lower levels of power. The literature on public engagement content in urban planning curricula and pedagogy focuses primarily on university–community engagement programs that support students and faculty in connecting with communities. Characterization of public engagement in numerous contexts. The authors offer a similar characterization of public engagement in numerous contexts.

In this study, we examine neighborhood poverty and the problems with which it is associated. Much of housing policy is based on the assumption that poor people need more affluent people around them to solve these problems. We argue instead that individual motivation to better one’s life may have a larger impact on surrounding neighbors, especially if these individuals are similar in race and income. We investigate low-income neighborhoods characterized by a large presence of Habitat for Humanity homeowners in five U.S. cities to determine whether their Habitat residents’ motivation to better their lives has a spillover effect on their neighbors. Through a comparative multiple case study design, we examine the collective efficacy of these census blocks and find that there is a positive “Habitat effect” on these neighborhoods. However, we find that the local Habitat affiliate characteristics, number and development pattern of Habitat houses present, and level of neighborhood disadvantage are also ke...

Problem, research strategy, and ­findings: Ethical considerations are integral to most aspects of planning, but the bases of planners’ ethical decisions are not well understood. In fact, there has ...

The food environment has been associated with fruit and vegetable consumption, however many studies utilize cross-sectional research designs. This study examined 3,473 participants in the Moving to Opportunity experiment, who were randomized into groups that affected where they lived. The relationship between the built environment, food prices and neighborhood poverty, assessed over four to seven years, on fruit or vegetable consumption was examined using instrumental variable analysis. Higher food prices and neighborhood poverty were associated with lower fruit or vegetable consumption. Policies and programs that address food prices should be implemented and evaluated for their effects on fruit and vegetable consumption.

Most social scientists would argue that natural disasters are not natural but rather nature’s forces colliding in a disastrous fashion with human systems, especially human settlements and their bui...

When we began our work on the New Orleans public schools nearly twenty years ago (Miron & Lauria, 1998; Lauria & Miron, 2005), it never occurred to us – nor was it a discourse in the public imagination – that we would witness such radical transformation of pubic education in the city. It was literally unthinkable. Moreover as one of us had argued earlier (Miron, 1992/2010), the near repugnant attitude of dominant political and social elites toward the public sector (city and state government) preempted the implementation of reform-minded public policies, especially when it came to the reallocation of funding that diminished the power of elected leaders such as members of the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB).

In 1995, Judith Innes recognized the increasing influence of a new type of planning theorist. Adverse to “armchair theorizing,” these theorists have taken a fine-grained analysis of planning practice as the basis for reconstruction of planning theory. Despite the proliferation of this theoretical project, its impact on urban planning has yet to be analyzed in a comprehensive manner. The major impetus for the research is to assess the ways that empirical research in planning practice has informed or failed to inform planning theory. Have empirical studies of planning practice resolved existing theoretical contentions? Or have they generated only more conflicting opinions and a lack of resolution of the existing debates? This article presents a meta-analysis of empirical studies in planning theory.

We use New Orleans as a case study to explore residential mortgage foreclosure as one mechanism linking prior black population and changes in employment levels with changes in aggregate income, housing tenure, vacancy rates, and black population size. Mortgage foreclosure data are merged with 1980 and 1990 census data aggregated at the block group level. Structural equation modeling results indicate that both economic change and prior racial composition are associated with reductions in median block group incomes. Racial transition and loss of employment and income also increased foreclosure rates. Economic change and prior racial composition together impact neighborhoods through their effects on income and foreclosure rates, which in turn differentially affect vacancy rates, the change in black population, and the housing tenure status of residents. The differential effects of these variables point to the persistence of a dual housing market for blacks and whites in New Orleans.

Communicative planning theory, with its emphasis on collaborative processes and consensus-building, has become widely accepted as a new and dominant paradigm for planning practice. It appeals especially to planners concerned with the potential for creating social change through planning processes. It also attracts those trying to escape from the narrow confines of traditional rational policy analysis. It avoids the pessimism of structuralist notions of the role of planners by identifying cracks in the structure that allow agency to survive. However, there are pitfalls in the communicative emphasis on reaching consensus which need to be avoided. This is illustrated through a study of recent debates about the character of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the role of plans in sustaining this. Qualitative research, utilizing conversations with neighbors in New Orleans' French Quarter as well as documentary sources, demonstrates the limitations of consensus-building processes when conflict between visions...

In this article, the authors explore residential mortgage foreclosure as a mechanism that links economic shocks and the process of racial transition (Lauria 1998). Their analysis indicates that housing foreclosures added momentum to an ongoing process of racial transition, net of the effects of exogenous economic shocks and such other variables as median income of residents, change in the value of owner-occupied housing, and the existing racial distribution of population. Foreclosure appears to have the strongest effect on racial transition in block groups where resident incomes are above the lowest levels and there is a preexisting and increasing black population.

In this article we describe the results of a comparative case study of two inner-city high schools located in the southeastern United States. One school, a citywide school with high admission standards, enrolls an all-African American lower-to-middle-class population. The other school enrolls a more ethnically and racially diverse population of students from a single lower-class neighborhood. Using Grossberg's notion of identity politics, we describe how students' racial/ ethnic identity to a greater or lesser degree becomes both a means of resistance and accommodation to white hegemony.

New Orleans, a highly segregated city with low homeownership, experienced a tremendous number of housing foreclosures between 1985 and 1990. This study highlights the process and impact of foreclosure in the urban housing market, which contributes to an understanding of their impact on the spatial structure of the city. Two aspects of foreclosure are examined: the differential impacts of foreclosure on low‐income and African‐American householders and changes in socioeconomic conditions (neighborhood change and the spatial structure of the city) resulting from foreclosure. Conventional wisdom holds that urban neighborhood transformation is driven largely by white flight. The data presented in this article suggest a counterhypoth‐esis. Middle‐income professional whites employed in businesses impacted by recession who had recently bought housing with high loan‐to‐value ratios were forced to sell or have their houses foreclosed upon. The depressed market, in turn, made such housing affordable to midd...

In large-scale economic development projects, less powerful groups absorb the majority of negative impacts. One reason is that communication between actors is distorted by misinformation. Forester's (1989) adaptation of Habermas' (1979, 1984) critical theory of communication is used to investigate the role of misinformation and power in the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal Lock site selection process in New Orleans The methods we apply incorporate both deconstructive and nondeconstructive approaches The result is an account of the use of misinformation by actors in the site selection process. We conclude with recommendations to counteract misinformation and help equalize power relations in future development scenarios

Investigating the conditions that foster organized expressions of power and the circumstances that students exploit to engage in political, collective forms of resistance warrants researchers' serious attention. Inner-city schools are uniquely situated as changing demographics and global and national migration continue to reconstruct schools as host sites of identity politics. In this article, the authors investigate the sites of inner-city schools where contests over identity are waged. Their findings indicate that the experience of being African American in the neighborhood school, where students feel stuck “back here,” is vastly different from the experience of being African American in the citywide school where the all African American population feels a part of its cultural community and the wider society. Denied equality and difference in both school settings, students from the same neighborhood and students from various neighborhoods demand their equal rights with varying degrees of intensity.

Public housing, if located proximate to the central business district or other valued development sites, is often seen as a threat to urban regeneration activities. Growth coalitions may develop strategies to remove the threat to increase the value of the land and probability of reinvestment. In cities with an African-American majority electorate, like New Orleans, the electoral coalition of the governing regime is inherently unstable and has to pursue its development strategies carefully. Public housing poses a more intractable political barrier to regeneration strategies than do privately owned slum neighborhoods. In New Orleans, the governing coalition has been forced to retreat to its previously faltering spatial-containment policy.

A theoretical problem remains in the urban regime literature in that the connection between fiscal strain and regime fragmentation and thus the potential for coalition breakdown is not fully elaborated. Whelan et al. (1994) demonstrate that a shifting electoral coalition, in particular the emergence of a black majority electorate, can also lead to regime instability and fragmentation and the subsequent political struggles for dominance in an emerging governing coalition. In this paper a second mechanism for regime change is suggested; that is, that under conditions of economic restructuring and the subsequent fiscal strain, non-local actors, in this case national political actors operating primarily through party connections, can manipulate local political dependencies to forge governing coalition fragmentation and a regime change in a particular direction. This first finding is important because it highlights the often neglected role of party politics in the governing coalition/urban regime and the local state literature. Secondly, the complexity of state relations uncovered here does not bode well for a theoretically coherent concept of the local state but does display how the historical development of local social relations interacts with the state apparatus at the state and national level to create a particular ‘local’ politics. Finally, this transformation requires a shift in the location of political consensus building from the local democratic political electoral arena to a non-democratic quasi-public arena: a corporate-led governing coalition.

Introduction - Mickey Lauria Reconstructing Urban Regime Theory PART ONE: CONCEPTUALIZING THE REGULATION OF URBAN REGIMES Concrete Research, Urban Regimes, and Regulation Theory - Mark Goodwin and Joe Painter Spatial Structures of Regulation and Urban Regimes - Marshall M A Feldman A Neo-Gramscian Approach to the Regulation of Urban Regimes - Bob Jessop Accumulation Strategies, Hegemonic Projects, and Governance PART TWO: RECONSTRUCTING URBAN REGIME ABSTRACTIONS City Politics in an Era of Globalization - Christopher Leo Governance, Urban Regime Analysis, and the Politics of Local Economic Development - Kevin R Cox Regulation, Regime, and Practice in Urban Politics - Joe Painter PART THREE: CONCRETE RESEARCH: REGULATING URBAN POLITICS IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY Coalition, Market and State - Cynthia Horan Postwar Development Politics in Boston City Planning and the Postwar Regime in Philadelphia - Robert A Beauregard Cleveland the `Comeback City' - W Dennis Keating The Politics of Redevelopment and Sports Stadiums amidst Decline Regulating Suburban Politics - Andrew E G Jonas `Suburban-Defense Transition', Institutional Capacities, and Territorial Reorganization in Southern California PART FOUR: REGULATING URBAN REGIMES Regulating Urban Regimes - Mickey Lauria Reconstruction or Impasse

Community-controlled implementation organizations are necessary to initiate redevelopment in many urban areas, but because of their dependency on external sources of capital they may be transformed into organizations that enhance the extraction of private profit rather than community reinvestment. Internal social and political processes may generate another transformation process with similar results. A contradiction may develop because the social power relations within the organization-defined by its morphological structure—are a mirror image (reversed) of those in society. This incongruence in social relations disrupts the legitimation and reproduction of the organization's morphological structure. If these internal problems are not understood and ameliorated, either the organization will be transformed into a bureaucratic, professionalized organization, or it will dissolve during the transformation process. A case study is presented to demonstrate the intricacies of this process. In this case, the professional bureaucratic transformation process was interrupted by the Office of Economic Development's termination of their funding. Suggestions are made to assist urban planners in minimizing their interactive effect on community-controlled implementation organizations, while facilitating the organization's effort to minimize the internal transformation process.

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological framework for a "social constructionist" analysis of the role of gay communities in the "urban renaissance." We suggest that this is important both because as a substantive area of research the role of gays in the "urban renaissance" has been neglected, and because it highlights the need to overcome the structure versus agency debate in social theory. Structuralists have tended to regard the role of cultural identity in the "urban renaissance" asepiphenomenal, while voluntarists have regarded it as indicative only of personal choices in "lifestyles." An analysis of the social construction of the gay identity is stipulated, and an argument is made that gay involvement in the "urban renaissance" constitutes part of a spatial response to a historically specific form of oppression. An enumeration of what needs to be done to more fully implement our approach is provided.

Community-controlled implementation organizations are necessary to initiate the process of urban redevelopment in deterio rated low-income urban neighborhoods The Classical Economic Urban Redevelop ment Model includes a set of parallel development actors who compete to affect and control this redevelopment process A major component of this competition is the extraction and subsequent utilization of rent The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical basis for this com ponent of the competition and to use it to suggest strategies for community- controlled redevelopment The theoretical model suggests that community-controlled organizations should focus their opposi tion on absentee landlords and private developers rather than on realtors and financial institutions It also suggests that the avenue for opposition should entail community ownership and control through land trusts, development corporations, and neighborhood improvement associations