Public Neighborhood Research Articles

“It’s not that I don’t like it here, it’s just that I eventually want to live somewhere else”: young refugees’ contested arrival experiences, local racialized discourses and emergent future selves in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT Although the urban fabric is often associated with relevant infrastructures that foster young refugees’ experiences of settlement and future imagining, a critical notion of place remains largely absent from the literature. This paper investigates refugee youths’ urban arrival and settlement processes by examining the role of public space, place and identity in their imagination of possible future selves. We use place identity as a dynamic, translocal and contested concept to explore how future selves are emplaced in multiple and contradictory ways. The paper reports on an eight-month ethnographic study in an underprivileged neighborhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, that is characterized by functionalism, social housing and a high concentration of refugee arrivals. We find that personal referents of public neighborhood places are important for nurturing young refugees’ specific hardships and traumas that threaten future self-imagination. We further demonstrate how momentary belongings due to diverse yet intertwined neighborhood identities foster the emergence of multiple possible future selves. Lastly, we show how local racialized discourses of place endanger and “trap” possible future self-concepts. We conclude that urban refugee youths’ future self-imaginations develop alongside multiple contested places and temporalities, and contribute to a relational understanding of urban processes and experiences of forced mobility and displacement.

Analyzing the relationship between major public investments and neighborhood change in Atlanta

As many of our residents can attest to personally, Atlanta’s population growth, from about 420,000 residents in 2010 to over 500,000 residents today, has been accompanied by demographic neighborhood change. In the Neighborhood Change Report released by the City in February 2021, we explore how major public investment and design goals are related to changes in where low-income and non-low-income residents live in the city.

Analyzing the relationship between major public investments and neighborhood change in Atlanta

As many of our residents can attest to personally, Atlanta’s population growth, from about 420,000 residents in 2010 to over 500,000 residents today, has been accompanied by demographic neighborhood change. In the Neighborhood Change Report released by the City in February 2021, we explore how major public investment and design goals are related to changes in where low-income and non-low-income residents live in the city.

Who Favors Magnets and Who Favors Charters? Political Ideology, Social Purpose Politics, and School Choice in the Upper South

School choice is an increasingly important feature of the US educational landscape. Numerous studies examine whether a particular form of school choice promotes student achievement or whether a type of school choice discourages or encourages diversity by race, ethnicity, and ability. Studies also examine attitudes toward school choice, but these studies are typically limited to the views of parents, teachers, and administrators rather than public attitudes. We contribute to this literature by studying public opinion about magnet and charter schools in five southern school districts. Using a new and unique dataset, we examine if social background characteristics, political ideology, and attitudes toward the role of public schooling, neighborhood schools, and school diversity influence citizen opinion regarding magnets and charters. We find that more educated, higher income, and older individuals do not support charters, while conservatives and Republicans do. Whites are less likely to favor magnets than other races, while the more educated are more likely to favor them. Those who believe public schools should operate for the common good support magnets, as do those who favor diverse schools. However, those who favor neighborhood schools support both charters and magnets. We interpret our findings within the context of case studies of the respective locations and suggest that public opinion studies motivate public policies regarding educational choice.

Beyond proper political squatting: exploring individualistic need-based occupations in a public housing neighbourhood in Naples

The public and academic debate about urban squatting in Western cities has been dominated by research on collectively organized, politically-motivated occupations. By contrast, occupations promoted to fulfil urgent housing needs by uncoordinated urban poor without any connection with activists (i.e. need-based squatting) have been far less explored. The present paper contributes to filling this research gap concerning squatting as a sheltering strategy by marginalized individuals. To this end, this article focuses on the overlooked phenomenon of the illegal occupation of public buildings for residential purposes in Italy that occurs outside any explicit political framework. In particular, it provides an ethnographic investigation of a case of squatting in an abandoned school located in a public housing neighbourhood in Naples. This investigation is the basis for the conceptualization of a specific type of need-based squatting, that is to say ‘individualistic squatting’, whose specific features (including its distinct political character) are highlighted, together with its peculiarity vis-à-vis other types of need-based squatting.

Abstract 236: Gender Disparities in Bystander CPR and Defibrillation Persist in Black and Hispanic Neighborhoods in the US

Introduction: Bystander CPR (B-CPR) and defibrillation for sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) vary by gender with females being less likely to receive these interventions. Despite known differences by race and ethnicity, it is unknown whether gender disparities in B-CPR and defibrillation persist by neighborhood race and ethnicity. Objectives: We examined the likelihood of receiving B-CPR and defibrillation by gender stratified by public location and neighborhood racial/ethnic composition. We hypothesized that in public locations within Black neighborhoods, females will have a lower likelihood of receiving B-CPR compared to males. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the US Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES) registry. Neighborhoods were classified by census tract based on percent of Black or Hispanic residents using the threshold in the definition of “White flight” where Whites leave a neighborhood when it exceeds >30% of a minority population. We independently modeled the likelihood of receipt of B-CPR and defibrillation by gender stratified by public location and neighborhood racial/ethnic composition controlling for confounding variables. Results: From 2013-2018, CARES collected 350,722 US arrests; after excluding pediatric arrests, those witnessed by EMS, or those that occurred in a healthcare facility, 214,464 were included. Mean age was 64±16 and 65% were male; 39% received B-CPR, 9% received bystander defibrillation prior to 9-1-1 responders arrival, and 18% occurred in the public. In Black neighborhoods, females who had SCA in public locations were 22% less likely to receive B-CPR (OR: 0.78 (0.64-0.95), p=0.01) and 42% less likely to receive defibrillation (OR: 0.58 (0.45-0.74), p<0.01) compared to males. In Hispanic neighborhoods, females who had SCA in public locations were also less likely to receive B-CPR (OR: 0.72 (0.59-0.87), p<0.01) and less likely to receive defibrillation (OR: 0.62 (0.48-0.80), p<0.01) compared to males. Conclusion: Females with public SCA have a decreased likelihood of receiving B-CPR and defibrillation, and these findings persist in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. This has implications for strategies to reduce disparities around bystander response to SCA.

Sociabilidad, manifestaciones culturales y conflicto

Este trabajo se desarrolla a partir de la idea de sociabilidad, desde la cual, se establece una conexión conceptual con los estudios urbanos, por medio de las nociones de espacio público, barrio y comunidad. A partir de la relación de estos tres conceptos, se exponen lasmanifestaciones culturales de la sociabilidad, las cuales están conectadas con el espacio construido. En este marco, se pretende entender la relación que tiene el espacio construido —desde su dimensión física y simbólica— con la organización local-vecinal frente al surgimiento, cada vez más frecuente, de los conflictos derivados de la reconfiguración delespacio urbano.

Making the red dot on the map - bringing children’s perspectives to the city planning agenda through visible co-design actions in public spaces

ABSTRACTA co-design process can bring children into the design and development of public neighbourhood spaces as a way to ensure that their perspectives are represented in the design. The co-design process itself can also create resonance beyond the actors immediately involved and form a discursive forum for how visions and perceptions for public spaces are defined and vocalized in the wider community. Our argument is that children’s involvement and perspective produce better and more informed public spaces which benefit entire neighbourhoods; in short, we claim that a child-centred city is also a healthy city. In this article, we will present a co-design process with children involved in the collaborative design and construction of a full-scale mock-up of a playscape in a public green space. We will examine how the process and outcome are not only beneficial for the children, but are also instrumental in engaging a broad range of local stakeholders in the discourse around the future design of the site. Through the notion of ‘matters of concern’ and with a design-anthropological approach, we will trace how the process and the design interventions proved to be vital for aligning a multitude of local actors and interest groups towards integrating a children’s perspective in the planning agenda for the future site transformation.

Health regulations and social experiences of ‘high-risk’ pregnancies among young working-class women in Brazil

In conjunction with aims to reduce infant and maternal mortality, antenatal care in Brazil is based on risk assessment and monitoring. Exploring the reliance of pregnancy management policies on a distinction between ‘low’ and ‘high-risk’ pregnancies, I conducted two ethnographic studies of pregnant women from a working-class background in Recife and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In addition to in-depth interviews with women and professionals, observations were made in public maternity wards and neighbourhood health units. With an approach focused on notions of governance and subjectivity, my data show that risk becomes not only a technique for regulating pregnancies, but also an important dimension of the reproductive experience of women. However, tensions appear between these two dimensions (regulation and experience) of risk. An analysis of my data sheds light on three tensions in particular. Firstly, the notion of risk appears to be a cultural resource for health professionals to transmit norms of parenthood to certain categories of women. Secondly, it allows for distinctions between two registers of care: medicalisation and healthisation. While on one hand the risk approach is aligned with a process of technicisation and pathologisation of pregnancies, it also introduces behavioural and psycho-social perspectives on pregnancy. Thirdly, the risk approach promotes an individualising tendency in the management of pregnancy. Women’s experiences lead them to make pragmatic adjustments to regulations. Women circumvent certain norms and easily articulate the registers of medicalisation and healthisation according to the situation, simultaneously incorporating their experience of risk in a social network of mutual help. This article thus shows that the analysis of pregnancy risk management must take into consideration the difference between expectations regarding the effect of regulations implemented by institutions and the de facto experience of women in a specific socio-cultural context.

The Racial Composition of Neighborhoods and Local Schools: The Role of Diversity, Inequality, and School Choice

In an education system that draws students from residentially based attendance zones, schools are local institutions that reflect the racial composition of their surrounding communities. However, with opportunities to opt out of the zoned public school system, the social and economic contexts of neighborhoods may affect the demographic link between neighborhoods and their public neighborhood schools. Using spatial data on school attendance zones, we estimate the associations between the racial composition of elementary schools and their local neighborhoods, and we investigate how neighborhood factors shape the loose or tight demographic coupling of these parallel social contexts. The results show that greater social distance among residents within neighborhoods, as well as the availability of educational exit options, results in neighborhood public schools that are less reflective of their surrounding communities. In addition, we show that suburban schools are more demographically similar to their neighborhood attendance zones than are urban schools.

Choosing neighborhood schools: Why Philadelphia’s middle-class parents choose neighborhood elementary schools

ABSTRACT Despite decades of sustained underfunding, many urban middle-class parents in Philadelphia are choosing to send their children to public neighborhood elementary schools. In contrast to the dominant idea in the literature that middle-class families bundle their housing and schooling decisions, this research finds that some urban middle-class parents actively choose their neighborhood school. So far, the literature on urban middle-class parents and neighborhood schools has emphasized the social character of the decision-making process, with parents feeling comforted by reinforcement from other parents making the same choice. This research explores a set of more independent choosers who “tune out” the opinions and judgments of their neighbors and who frequently get active in educational volunteerism and fundraising. This research finds that the more independent group may be central to better understanding social processes around neighborhood schools in areas experiencing gentrification. These independent choosers sometimes make their decision when their children are still toddlers or younger, and many in this sample volunteer with Friends of Neighborhood Education (FONE) groups where they actively work to promote and fundraise for their neighborhood elementary school. This article concludes with four parent archetypes representing different kinds of parent choosers corresponding to practical-independent, practical-social, altruistic-independent, and altruistic-social.

A Longitudinal Comparison of Enrollment Patterns of Students Receiving Special Education in Urban Neighborhood and Charter Schools

The purpose of this study is to compare and examine special education enrollment trends across disability categories and grade spans for public neighborhood and charter schools in the City of Chicago. Using multilevel longitudinal data analysis methods, we examined annual school enrollment and demographic reports. Our findings indicated that neighborhood schools serve significantly higher proportions of students receiving special education services (SRSE) than charter schools at the aggregate grade level (i.e., elementary and high school enrollments) and at each grade level. In addition, we found that charter schools enroll equal or significantly higher proportions of students with learning disabilities (LD), speech and language impairments (SLI), other health impairments (OHI), and emotional disturbance (ED), and substantially smaller proportions of students with autism, sensory impairments (SI), and intellectual disabilities (ID), when compared with neighborhood schools. However, we found that these differences vary between grade levels. We discuss the implications of these findings for policies affecting charter school authorization and contract renewal, and for policies establishing special education enrollment targets in charter schools.

Public histories of incarceration: reflecting on museums and social change

ABSTRACTCalifornia has a long history of criminalizing youth of color. Gang injunctions and the policies which structure the “school to prison pipeline” are contemporary expressions of this. As members of the graduate student curatorial team at the University of California Riverside, our contribution to the Humanities Action Lab’s national exhibition States of Incarceration was to chart the genealogy of sites of surveillance and policing of bodies of color, from the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, CA, to the streets of 1940s Los Angeles, to the public schools and diverse urban neighborhoods of the twenty-first century. In Detention: The War on Youth treats the policies, practices, and sites of policing and surveillance of youthful bodies as the building blocks of a carceral state which has as its end goal the social control of particular kinds of racialized bodies. As our nation’s carceral project continues to expand, we, as public historians, are called to respond to the crisis. We must continue to make public the histories of surveillance, policing, and incarcerating black and brown bodies.

“Our Issues, Our People—Math as Our Weapon”: Critical Mathematics in a Chicago Neighborhood High School

This article provides an example of, and lessons from, teaching and learning critical mathematics in a Chicago public neighborhood high school with a social justice focus. It is based on a qualitative study of my untracked, 12th–grade mathematics class, a full–year enactment of mathematics for social and racial justice. Students were Black and Latin@ from a low–income, working–class community with a tradition of resistance. Any neighborhood student could enroll without selection criteria. The class goal was for students to cocreate a classroom in which they would learn and use collegepreparatory, conceptually based mathematics to study and understand social reality to prepare themselves to change it. Through analyzing my practice, I address possibilities and challenges of curriculum development and teaching, examine student learning, and pose questions and directions for further research and practice.

Making place: Muslims in the neighbourhood

Regent Park was built with great optimism in the 1950s as a public housing neighbourhood in Toronto. Over the years, however, it has come to be seen as a failure of this ideal and stigmatized as a poor, crime-ridden, violent neighbourhood with large numbers of visible minorities and immigrants. Recent urban revitalization efforts have aimed to transform the physical space as well as to re-brand the neighbourhood in more positive ways as part of a diverse, multicultural city. This paper critically considers the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a place, between the external representations of the city’s urban developers and the internal, “lived experiences” of its Muslim residents. It analyses the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a Muslim place within the representation of Toronto as a Canadian, multicultural city.

Participatory Democracy and Struggling Schools: Making Space for Youth in School Turnarounds

Background/Context Federal policy, as codified in Race to the Top (RTT) funding guidelines, outlines four types of intervention: turnaround, restart, closure, and transformation. RTT has embraced a technocratic paradigm for school reform that frames choice less as the opportunity for the public to deliberate about what it wants from its schools and more in terms of the freedom of individual families to choose, as customers, from a diverse array of school options. This market-based system has eroded substantive opportunities for parents and students to participate in decisions about their schools. Although scholars have developed compelling arguments about the need to involve parents and teachers in a more deliberative and democratic approach to intervening in low-performing schools, there is little scholarship focused on the role of young people in school intervention processes. Purpose There is widespread agreement among progressive critics that RTT interventions are not sufficiently democratic. More work is needed to develop participatory approaches. In some cases this may require departing from a strict “evidence-based” framework and imagining new alternatives consistent with values of social justice and educational equity. It also requires expanding existing treatments of deliberative democracy theory to include young people. Research Design & Findings: This article makes a conceptual argument rooted in theory, empirical literature, and practical experience in schools. After explaining theories of participatory democracy, youth–adult partnerships, and thirdspace, we propose five practices that should guide a deliberative, participatory approach to public decision-making about schools. These are: border-crossing facilitation, participatory research, multilingual and multicultural discourse practices, authentic decision-making, and joint work and distributed expertise. Conclusions/Recommendations The current school turnaround paradigm, embodied by closures, conversion to charters, and teacher reassignments, has left a great deal of collateral damage in its wake. Teachers work under threat of firing. We propose an alternative approach to improve struggling public neighborhood schools—not just another option in a menu of turnaround strategies, but an alternative frame and set of practices that expands the conversation about intervention. This approach encourages deliberation and communication among diverse networks of students, teachers, and families.

공동주택단지의 주거환경적 특성이 주택가치에 미치는 영향 - 대구광역시 수성구 사례를 중심으로 -

The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of apartment complex characteristics on Housing value at Suseong-gu in Daegu. Three Multiple regression models based on Hedonic price model are employed as the empirical analysis on housing value with 948 data of the 30 apartment complexes in Daegu. The major findings are as follows; First, condominium complex variables are the most influential factor on housing value in the same level of housing market. the second is locational variables and the last is housing unit variables. Second, 'Area of exclusive use space' of the housing unit variables which include 'Number of layers', 'The direction of the unit', 'Number of room' and 'Corridor type' is the most heavyweight variable on housing value. Third, 'Number of housing unit' and 'Green and Lot area' of the condominium complex variables which cover 'Green area per person', 'Number of parking lots per person', 'Floor area ratio', 'Building-to-land ratio' and 'Heating system' are more important factors. The last, 'The distance of public transportation and Neighborhood park' are the most significant factors in the locational variables which contain 'Number of School and Neighborhood park within a given range' and 'The distance from City center and Big-box retailer'.

Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Neighbourhoods Visited by Courage, Sleeplessness and Dead Bodies

The ‘Ottoman Neighbourhood’ is the basic social unit for the study of the Ottomans and the social lives they led, and many of these studies have been based on such classic resources as religious archives (şer’i siciller). This work investigates the social life of the Ottomans from a perspective that is ignored in the classic resources, as it uncovers the Ottoman individual's courage, willingness to forgo sleep, and approach to unsolved murders. The individuals who lived within the communal organizations as prescribed by Ottoman law behaved in ways that would seem quite strange today. This paper analyses the response of both public authorities and neighbourhood residents to the kinds of crimes that required meticulous investigation in order to solve them, and the meting out of punishments for these crimes.

Understanding How Universal Vouchers Have Impacted Urban School Districts’ Enrollment in Chile

Findings from this study show that educational and mobility opportunities for families and students participating in the Chilean voucher system are not homogenously distributed. Some families and students use and benefit from the system, while others will remain marginalized. The quantitative results in this study demonstrate that students of relatively higher SES living in mid-high or mid-low poverty districts receive the benefit from vouchers. These students may move from one public school to another, from a public school to private-voucher school in the same area, from one district to another, or from a public school in an area to a private-voucher school in another district. Meanwhile, low-income counterparts living in high-poverty areas are excluded from the system and tend to remain at their public neighborhood school.

Social Housing in Urban Regeneration. Regeneration Heritage Existing Building: Methods and Strategies

The theme of urban regeneration has played a strategic role during the last two decades in European and national urban building policies. Current addresses, also defined in Leipzig Charter on Sustainable European Cities in 2007, indentify the necessity to invest in requalification of degraded residential assets and not in new developments, individuating in urban regeneration the main tool for development of contemporary city. Public neighborhoods have developed, historically, a wide set of common problems. They are not only due to wrong planning but also to the concept of “housing for masses”. The original ambition of modern settlment, developed from GermanSiedlung, was to be an autonomous part, on the point of view of morphology, in urban expansion. Joined by new developments, a lot of neighborhoods became benchmarks for suburban areas and now we can define themas “new urban centralities”. So theirrole in urbandynamics has changed and they can be individuate dasprecious reserves of public spaces and potential incubators for regeneration of larger areas. Analyzing some Italian and European case studies, themostinnovative relate to the densification of open spaces, inserting new services in a general redesign of green areas; concentration of built surfaces, in order to reduce land consumption and introduction of different residential types in order to improve mischbebauung. The reasons for an active recovery are motivated by the criteria of environmental sustainability and saving land, have relaunched compact projects with medium to highdensity.