Suburban Neighborhoods Research Articles

Examining the potential to expand wildlife-supporting residential yards and gardens

Research has demonstrated that residential yards can provide important habitat for urban birds, pollinators, and other wildlife. In addition, the motivations and constraints underlying decisions to manage traditional lawns, water-conserving yards, native plants, and other landscape types are well understood. Yet relatively little research has addressed people’s decisions to adopt wildlife-supporting yards. Analyzing survey data from six U.S. cities, we address three related questions: 1) to what extent do residents choose yard features that support wildlife habitat?; 2) how do yard priorities and neighborhood governance, along with socio-demographic factors, explain the adoption of wildlife-supporting features?; and 3) how do residents who have already adopted wildlife-supporting yard features differ in their motivations from those who plan to adopt such features and those who do not? We found significant potential for adding vegetation (specifically shrubs and native plants) and other wildlife-supporting features to increase yard complexity and vegetation diversity. While gardening as a hobby was a significant motivator for people who have adopted wildlife yard features, the desire for low-maintenance yards is a constraint among non-adopters. We therefore recommend promoting the planting of low-maintenance plant species or varieties that provide wildlife habitat but require little upkeep, especially among residents who would like to attract wildlife to their yards into the future. We also found that neighbourhood and homeowner associations increase the local adoption of wildlife-supporting yards. Coupled with other findings, our results underscore the importance of tailoring residential landscape features to diverse lifestyles while leveraging social institutions to expand wildlife habitat across urban and suburban neighborhoods.

Planning at the edge: urbanism and socio-political transition in Chelas, Lisbon

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, many European countries developed public housing policies where planners and architects pursued creative, even radical design. This optimism collapsed within a few decades, re-emerging today as a hope in face of impending urban crisis, housing-access shortages and environmental decline. Here, we observe the urban process of Chelas, the largest social housing area ever planned by the Portuguese State, located in Lisbon. Its ambitious and progressive plan started during a dictatorial regime yet completed during a democratic one. Specific original plan features allowed Chelas to evolve over time, demonstrating the resilience of the territory and of its residents, and testifying to complex political and social changes. To understand this process, we disclose: (i) What territorial conditions existed prior to urbanization; (ii) What solutions were originally planned and under what circumstances; (iii) How the built forms of Chelas have accommodated change over time and which urban processes allowed such changes to occur. Focusing on one of Chelas’s sectors, Zone N, we trace its evolution from planning to reality, while also considering its spatial, social and ecological conditions and highlighting its future possibilities as a sustainable suburban neighbourhood.

The death and life of Australian suburbs: Relationships between social activity and the physical qualities of Australian suburban neighbourhood centres

This paper reports on research into social activity in commercial/retail centres in Australian low-density suburbs. While low-density suburbs have been criticised for declining vitality and sociability, some commercial/retail precincts still thrive there. This study sought to determine the relationship between the physical qualities of the built environment and social activity in such thriving suburban neighbourhood centres. Three areas in Geelong, Victoria, were studied as representative of three common forms of Australian suburban commercial/retail centre. First, behavioural observations identified which of the three centres was the most vital and sociable. Next, semi-structured interviews with users of that centre who resided in its containing suburb explored perceptions of the environment to identify the physical features that contributed to its social affordances. The findings suggest that diversity of uses is key to the vibrancy of commercial centres. Walkability, perceptions of safety and physical qualities such as landscaping, good pedestrian pathways and pavement dining were also found to contribute to vitality. Importantly, it appears that in neighbourhoods with high transient populations, residents do not associate these types of socially active environments with sense of community. • This study focuses on identifying the physical features that contributes to the social affordances of commercial streets. • The findings suggest that diversity of uses is key to commercial streets' vibrancy. • Walkability, perceptions of safety and physical qualities were also found to contribute to vitality of commercial streets.

Skin

Skin Cecilia Woloch (bio) Winner of the 2021 Prairie Schooner Summer Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, selected by judge Dunya Mikhail In French, the word for wounded is blessé, akin to the English blessed. As if to be wounded is to be blessed; as if what wounds us is a gift. If someone had told me this, when I was six years old, bleeding from cracks in the skin at the hinges of my wrists and elbows and knees, I would have thought it was another trick of God, of which there seemed many and none of them good. I remember praying at the side of my bed at night, socks over my hands to keep me from scratching myself raw in my sleep, for God to please take this affliction away. Did I even know what the word "affliction" meant? The rash on my arms and legs and neck and eyelids seemed to me like a plague, like punishment. But what had I done? What was my sin? I was six. I believed in magic more than God, but I prayed, anyway, on my knees. I don't know, now, if my prayers were sincere, but I know they were furious, full of hot tears. In the morning, my skin would have wept and dried stiff, so it hurt just to straighten my arms and legs. The skin was scaly and flaky and itched; it itched all the time and, often, it bled. Blood. Maybe all wounds are spiritual. Our word bless comes from the Old English bledsian, bletsian, based on blōd [blood]; originally as in "to mark or consecrate with blood." If I focus, now, on the mysteries of language, can I avoid remembering the shame I felt, the humiliation and rage and pain? But pain is mysterious, too. The dictionary defines eczema as "a medical condition in which patches of skin become rough and inflamed, with blisters that cause itching and [End Page 14] bleeding, sometimes resulting from a reaction to irritation but more typically having no obvious external cause." (Emphasis mine.) The word derives originally from the Greek ekzema, from ekzein, "boil over, break out." I'm not sure when my skin first began to break out, and I'm not sure even my mother could ever precisely pin it down. The when of it as much a mystery as the why, as the what from? My most vivid memories of having outbreaks of eczema are associated with my first memories of going to school; memories of trying to hide my hot, itching hands in the cool darkness inside my desk. Memories of other six-year-olds sneering, "Yuck, what's wrong with her skin?" Refusing to come near me, making a show of flinching away. I'd entered first grade at five years old, small for my age, and without having ever been to kindergarten. My mother had said, famously, "I thought it was cruel to take a child that young away from her mother." Cruel. Maybe it was prescience on my mother's part. I remember how shocked I felt when she and my father left me at the door of that classroom, filled with kids I'd never seen before, all staring at me in my green-checked dress. In my terrible skin. Starting school, I've often joked, was a trauma from which I've never fully recovered. I went from jumping on the bed with my sisters and brothers to only being allowed to speak when called on, all in one steep and dizzying step. Not long before I'd started school, we'd moved from an immigrant enclave on the South Side of Pittsburgh, where we'd been surrounded by extended family, to a suburban neighborhood where the public schools were "better," and where my large, noisy family never quite fit in. And nowhere was the feeling of not fitting in more acute than it was at school. But my mother wondered aloud, years later, if my eczema had been triggered by events earlier in my life. A neighbor who visited too often with her two rowdy little boys, and stayed too long, while I was still a baby in...

Assessing and Qualifying Neighborhood Walkability for Older Adults: Construction and Initial Testing of a Multivariate Spatial Accessibility Model.

Population aging and urban development pose major challenges for societies today. Joining the literature assessing urban accessibility, the present exploratory research developed a multivariate accessibility model based on four independent variables—related to formal and structural urban space—that influence walkability for older adults (pedestrian network; facilities and shops; public benches; and slopes and gradients). The model used ArcGIS software. For the accessibility calculations, we selected two suburban neighborhoods in the conurbation of Grenoble (France) and selected three types of older adults’ profiles to reflect the variety of aging: an older adult in good health, an older adult with a chronic disease, and an older adult with reduced mobility. The results suggest that the accessibility of a neighborhood depends not only on its physical and urban characteristics, but it is also influenced by the physical and health characteristics of its inhabitants. The originality of the model lies mainly in its ability to estimate the spatial accessibility of a territory by taking into account, firstly, objective data such as the physical characteristics and the built environment of the neighborhood through objectification variables that consider such original variables as the presence of benches or the slopes and gradients and, secondly, specific data such as the physical and/or health characteristics of the study population. The measurement of geospatial accessibility could be of great value for public health in urban contexts, which is why relevant tools and methodologies are needed to objectively examine and intervene in public spaces in order to make them age-friendly.

A Theology of the Parish: The Face of the Church in Challenging Times by William A. Clark

Reviewed by: A Theology of the Parish: The Face of the Church in Challenging Times by William A. Clark Frank P. DeSiano, CSP A Theology of the Parish: The Face of the Church in Challenging Times. By William A. Clark, SJ. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2022. 200 pages. Paperback. $32.95. ISBN 978089155620. William Clark, S.J., has not so much produced "a theology" of the parish as a rather rich book exploring various theological perspectives about that highly-variable entity that we call "parish" in the Catholic Church. Because there are not many theological perspectives published on parish life, this book is particularly welcome. Rooted in Clark's pastoral experience in a variety of cultural (and continental) settings, and in his theological research on parish, this book offers readers a serious reflection containing a succession of distinct perspectives about the parish. Together, the chapters represent a fine review of theological thinking concerning the parish, one that will enrich pastoral theologians and one that potentially can enrich parish ministers and leaders. Notable in Clark's opening remarks is the rather skimpy formal definition of the parish that we have, from the Code of Canon Law (515). Given the actual role that parish plays in Catholicism, especially since the Council of Trent, this skimpiness should come as a surprise. Many Catholics have a "given" experience of parish from their local experiences of worship, but Catholics fail to realize just how flexible their "given" experience can be. Not only does each continent have its own experience, and assumptions, about parish; even within a diocese, experiences of parish will vary widely. Anyone who has worked in a diocesan office knows that speaking of parishes in rather raw urban neighborhoods will evoke language and images quite different from parishes in well-established suburban neighborhoods. Even suburban parishes that began in the United States in the 1950s will vary significantly from the often-oversized parishes that have recently emerged in newer suburbs. Rural parishes, of course, present an entirely other experience. If this is true within a single diocese, how can we appreciate the variations of parishes, say, in Latin America, in India, in older European central cities, or in sprawling African cities? Is there, then, [End Page 211] a theological approeach to parish that can do justice to this variation of experience? Clark's starting point for his reflection lies in that strange Greek word paroikos from which Latin derives its word paroecia. He sees the Greek concept as pointing to "fellow sojourners" who have formed a community which sees itself on a path of pilgrimage, "a community of alien sojourners" as he develops the concept (p. 5). This idea immediately begins to reveal the paradoxical tensions of parish: it is a "community" which sustains itself, but its references are to a fullness of hope that transcend time. The "alien-pilgrim" quality of parish may make it look isolated; but that same "alien" quality forces it to relate to realities that outstrip the particularity of its community toward surrounding communities of believers, the culture in which it lives, and the transcendent vision that underlies its faith. Clark's book then offers a chapter-by-chapter reflection on the implication of this tension between the particularity of parish life and the broader environments to which parish must relate. Discussion of parish throughout the book happens in the face of contemporary realities that parishes have to deal with which Clark returns to several times in his discussion. The two immediate factors are the implication of the sexual abuse scandal which has cut through parish and diocesan life such that it colors, one way or another, all contemporary Catholic experience; and, secondly, the global pandemic which radically altered the ways believers in parishes interact with each other, whether in terms of simply attending worship or in terms of participation in various parish ministries. These factors sharpen the particularity of parish life because they highlight a community of believers standing together as pilgrims in the face of shame and fear. On top of these two factors, Clark frequently alludes to the broader social patterns sweeping modern life such as secularization and suspicion of institutions, which complicate the context...

<b>The Challenges of Improving the Residents’ Use of Parks in the Private Sector-Led Suburban Neighbourhood in the Rapidly Developing Countries</b>

<b>The Challenges of Improving the Residents’ Use of Parks in the Private Sector-Led Suburban Neighbourhood in the Rapidly Developing Countries</b>

Changes In Mental Health, Social Engagement, and Physical Activities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The current COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly changed our behaviors and health, especially vulnerable community-dwelling older adults. This symposium includes three presentations that evaluated the pandemic’s impacts on mental health, social engagement and physical activity in healthy community-living older adults and those with dementia. Dr. Wenjun Li and his team examined the pandemic impact on mental health and social engagement among relatively healthy older adults residing in suburban and rural neighborhoods in Central Massachusetts, USA. The study reported significant variations in pandemic impacts by sex, age, race, income, living arrangement, and neighborhood housing density, suggesting the pandemic has had disproportionally negative impacts on socially and economically disadvantaged vulnerable older adults. Dr. W. Quin Yow and her team evaluated the impacts of government mandated social distancing and lockdowns on older adults with dementia and their caregivers in Singapore. The study found significant increases in irritability, aggression and hallucinations among older adults with dementia, and possible deterioration of health conditions and heightened moderate level of stress. The results suggest that social distancing may have resulted in negative outcomes in this vulnerable population with dementia and their caregivers. Dr. Ladda Thiamwong reported her team’s efforts on forming an international aging research collaborative to mitigate heath consequences of COVID-19 crisis from the international perspective. The team consists of ten scholars from five countries, including Hong Kong, Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, and the United States. They collect data using combinations of online and face-to-face surveys. Their important findings will be discussed in detail in this symposium.

<i>Nhà Trọ</i>, Rental Rooms for Fragments of Life. Temporary Footprint of Rural Migrants in Ho Chi Minh City

In Ho Chi Minh City, private complexes of rental rooms designated in Vietnamese asnhtrọform one of the cheapest housing stocks, targeting the working-class, including internal rural migrants. This article combines the insights of both migration and urban studies to analyze the occupation of thenhtrọthrough the concept of temporariness. It addresses the tensions between present constraints and long-term plans of rural migrants as well as their translation into the occupation of the urban space. The method draws upon observations of rental housing and interviews conducted in two suburban neighborhoods of HoChiMinhCity in 2020 and 2021, with migrants coming from deltaic and coastal rural areas of Vietnam. It is found that thenh trọprovide housing for rural migrants who are in a long-term temporary situation, within a tight urban fabric with scarce opportunities for access to urban land ownership. Informants have moved to the city up to thirty years ago. Both the move and the duration are explained by multiple factors, from economic and social mutations to environmental pressures on the deltas and the coast. Relative job stability and trust-based interpersonal relationships in the city may strengthen over time, encouraging migrants to stay. Nevertheless, no matter how long they remain in Ho Chi Minh City, many migrants perceive their stay as temporary before a projected return to the hometown, where their permanent residence registration remains. The occupation of thenhtrọobserved, their adaptations, and the narratives of migrants reveal the relative nature of temporariness in migration and draw the contours of the spatial footprint of low-skilled rural migrants in Ho Chi Minh City.

Dynamics of Mask Use as a Prevention Strategy against SARS-CoV-2 in Panama

Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, many national public health authorities implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate disease outbreaks. Panamá established mandatory mask use two months after its first documented case. Initial compliance was high, but diverse masks were used in public areas. We studied behavioral dynamics of mask use through the first two COVID-19 waves in Panama, to improve the implementation of effective, low-cost public health containment measures when populations are exposed to novel air-borne pathogens. Mask use behavior was recorded from pedestrians in four Panamanian populations (August to December 2020). We recorded facial coverings and if used, the type of mask, and gender and estimated age of the wearer. Our results showed that people were highly compliant (>95%) with mask mandates and demonstrated important population-level behaviors: (1) decreasing use of cloth masks over time, and increasing use of surgical masks; (2) mask use was 3-fold lower in suburban neighborhoods than other public areas and (3) young people were least likely to wear masks. Results help focus on highly effective, low-cost, public health interventions for managing and controlling a pandemic. Considerations of behavioral preferences for different masks, relative to pricing and availability, are essential for optimizing public health policies. Policies to increase the availability of effective masks, and behavioral nudges to increase acceptance, and to facilitate mask usage, during the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and for future pandemics of respiratory pathogens, are key tools, especially for nations lagging in access to expensive vaccines and pharmacological approaches.

Equality and Closure: The Paradox of Local Citizenship

In Bourgeois Utopias, a cultural history of suburbia in America, Robert Fishman states the fundamental paradox about the suburbs: “[H]ow can a form based on the principle of exclusion include every-one?” The promise of the American suburb was that every middle-class family would be able to own a home with a yard, but this egalitarian ideal was illusory because what made the suburbs appealing was precisely what it excluded, namely everything having to do with the city—its congestion, political corruption, and most importantly, its racial diversity. And so, as suburbia was mass-produced and made avail-able with cheap low-interest loans to white middle-class families, racial minorities were rigidly excluded. Although several waves of demographic change have reshaped the suburbs over the generations, this paradox remains evident today. Suburbs are becoming more dense and more diverse as many minorities have migrated from “inner cities” toward first-ring suburbs, and immigrants have found welcoming enclaves in the suburbs. But while suburbs have grown more diverse, they have also grown more segregated. High opportunity suburbs with plentiful jobs and good schools mandate low-density sprawl through zoning regulations, like mini-mum lot size and floor area requirements, parking mandates, and set-backs, that have the cumulative effect of making housing scarce and expensive. Only the very affluent or those lucky enough to have purchased a home years ago are welcome in these places. Racial minorities who, thanks to the earlier generation of suburban exclusion, have not had the opportunity to build the inter-generational wealth that is often a prerequisite to purchasing a home in the suburbs still find themselves locked out of the most desirable communities. The infra-structure of suburban communities, such as roads, sewers, and schools, are designed, perhaps deliberately, to completely collapse if the number of users increases by even a small amount, so these communities fiercely oppose any efforts to densify and permit more housing. Even modest attempts at densification are treated as calls to destroy suburban neighborhoods. But because our society has made a decision, undoubtedly questionable in retrospect, to treat suburban homeownership as the central tool for wealth building in this country, we cannot hope to meet our national aspirations for equality without opening up our suburbs to more housing. And so the question re-mains—how can a form based on the principle of exclusion include everyone?

Estimating spatial and temporal patterns of urban building anthropogenic heat using a bottom-up city building heat emission model

Anthropogenic heat (AH) emission from buildings is a key contributor to the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Although an improved understanding of spatiotemporal patterns of building AH is highly needed for mitigating UHI effect, such information is still limited in high spatiotemporal resolutions at the city level. In this study, a bottom-up city building heat emission model (CityBHEM) was developed to investigate temporal variations of building AH from three components (i.e., envelope convection, zone infiltration and exfiltration, and HVAC system) for all buildings in Boston, United States. First, buildings in Boston were grouped into eleven commercial and five residential building prototypes based on building type, construction year, and foundation type. Second, an end-use-based calibration was developed to calibrate CityBHEM using U.S. Energy Information Administration's survey data. Finally, AH from all buildings in the city under actual weather conditions was calculated using the calibrated CityBHEM model together with building types and sizes. Results indicate that total building AH density of Back Bay neighborhood reaches the maximum value of 526 kWh/m2 in summer (56% of HVAC system and 44% of envelope convection) and the minimum value of 369 kWh/m2 in winter (54% of HVAC system, 24% of envelope convection and 22% of zone infiltration and exfiltration). In contrast, total building AH density of suburban neighborhoods is lower than 30 kWh/m2 in summer and 20 kWh/m2 in winter. Given that key inputs are publicly available, CityBHEM is transferable to other U.S. cities, enabling us to explore practical building energy-saving strategies for mitigating AH.

Solar Thermal Regeneration of Borehole Heat Exchangers in Urban and Suburban Districts

To prevent undercooling of the ground in densely populated areas, regeneration of borehole heat exchangers (BHEs), for example by solar thermal heat, may become necessary. However, the usable roof area is often small compared to the building’s heat demand, especially in urban areas. It was investigated how much regeneration is possible in districts that are supplied entirely by heat pumps with BHEs. Example buildings were modelled based on the buildings of two districts in Zurich. Uncovered PVT collectors and glazed flat-plate collectors were used as regeneration sources. The possible regeneration was determined in a simulation process that included the effects of mutual influences between the BHEs of neighbouring buildings. As expected, glazed flat-plate collectors allow for more regeneration than uncovered PVT collectors. For full regeneration, the required usable roof area relative to the annual heat demand is about 1.8m2/MWh for PVT and 1.2m2/MWh for flat-plate collectors. Large buildings often do not provide sufficient roof area for full regeneration. A sustainable heat supply of the entire district with regenerated BHEs can be possible in suburban neighbourhoods, if the bigger buildings are distributed rather evenly. In urban neighbourhoods, areas may exist in which solar thermal regeneration alone is not sufficient.

Objective and Subjective Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction in the Context of Retrofitting Suburbs

A strong preference for suburban living has led to extensively developed suburbs that need retrofitting by improving their compactness. However, an attempt to make suburban areas more sustainable only by shaping their spatial form, without considering individual demands and preferences, is usually ineffective. The aim of this research is to better understand the factors that are important for suburban neighborhood satisfaction and to determine the relationship between neighborhood satisfaction and both the objective spatial attributes reflecting different levels of spatial chaos and satisfaction with particular neighborhood characteristics. The factor analysis and a linear multiple regression model have revealed that there are four significant subjective factors explaining neighborhood satisfaction, namely: assessed suburban assets, assessed accessibility, assessed walkability, and assessed mental and social attitude towards the neighborhood. Among these, the assessed accessibility is the most important predictor of the neighborhood satisfaction and synthetic indicator of spatial chaos the least significant one. Although the research proved that subjective measures are more important determinants of neighborhood satisfaction, fighting urban sprawl should be based on the interference in both subjective evaluations and objective spatial attributes, since two of the four subjective factors are likely to be strongly influenced by improving accessibility in the process of retrofitting suburbs.

Local- and regional-scale racial and ethnic disparities in air pollution determined by long-term mobile monitoring.

Disparity in air pollution exposure arises from variation at multiple spatial scales: along urban-to-rural gradients, between individual cities within a metropolitan region, within individual neighborhoods, and between city blocks. Here, we improve on existing capabilities to systematically compare urban variation at several scales, from hyperlocal (<100 m) to regional (>10 km), and to assess consequences for outdoor air pollution experienced by residents of different races and ethnicities, by creating a set of uniquely extensive and high-resolution observations of spatially variable pollutants: NO, NO2, black carbon (BC), and ultrafine particles (UFP). We conducted full-coverage monitoring of a wide sample of urban and suburban neighborhoods (93 km2 and 450,000 residents) in four counties of the San Francisco Bay Area using Google Street View cars equipped with the Aclima mobile platform. Comparing scales of variation across the sampled population, greater differences arise from localized pollution gradients for BC and NO (pollutants dominated by primary sources) and from regional gradients for UFP and NO2 (pollutants dominated by secondary contributions). Median concentrations of UFP, NO, and NO2 are, for Hispanic and Black populations, 8 to 30% higher than the population average; for White populations, average exposures to these pollutants are 9 to 14% lower than the population average. Systematic racial/ethnic disparities are influenced by regional concentration gradients due to sharp contrasts in demographic composition among cities and urban districts, while within-group extremes arise from local peaks. Our results illustrate how detailed and extensive fine-scale pollution observations can add new insights about differences and disparities in air pollution exposures at the population scale.

The changing position of housing estate neighbourhoods in the Helsinki metropolitan area

This paper addresses the under-researched phenomena of investments in the private rental markets in disadvantaged suburbs in Finland. Despite the application of a social-mixing policy in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and the Nordic welfare model, suburban housing estate neighbourhoods built in the 1960s and 1970s have experienced a socioeconomic decline since the 1990s. According to several recent large surveys, housing estate neighbourhoods represent the least popular housing environments among Finns. Nevertheless, as the Helsinki Metropolitan Area is currently facing rapid population growth, these neighbourhoods have now become the target for heavy infill development, and ambitious city-led regeneration plans. Simultaneously, housing investment has become an opportunity in Finland for both national and, increasingly, also international real-estate investment companies, as well as for private households. We explore the resurge to invest in housing estate neighbourhoods through two case studies in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Using statistics and interviews with policymakers and institutional real-estate investors, as well as a review of policy documents as our data, we show the variegated ways in which the marketization and financialization of housing and urban renewal policies change the social geography of housing estates in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

Post-suburban arrival spaces and the frame of ‘welfare offloading’: notes from an Italian suburban neighborhood

ABSTRACT Drawing upon the debates on ‘suburbanisms’ and ‘arrival space’, this article explores the complexities for welfare governance in multiethnic peripheries. The paper bridges two themes of the contemporary ‘suburban century’: the intensified global migration flows and the peripheral condition of suburbs worldwide; the work refers to the Municipality of Pioltello, a multiethnic suburban area in Milan’s region. This double-sided perspective reveals governance dynamics, here discussed through the concept of ‘welfare offloading’. In the observed neighborhood, governmental complexities disclose profound interdependencies with the region’s urban core and across municipalities; welfare tensions are ‘offloaded’ from the central core to peripheral regions.

Alternative Agri-Food Systems under a Market Agencements Approach: The Case of Multifunctional Farming Activity in a Peri-Urban Area

(1) Background: A large body of literature is available on the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of alternative food systems, but not much of it is devoted to the dynamics underlying their design and implementation, more specifically the processes that make an alternative food system successful or not in terms of its sustainability aims. This gap seems to be particularly critical in studies concerning alternative food systems in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA). This paper explores how the design and implementation of multifunctional farming activity in a peri-urban area surrounding the city of Reggio Emilia in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy impact the achievement of its sustainability aims. (2) Methods: The environmental, social, and economic components of this project are explored in light of the sociology of market agencements. This method brings up the motivations of the human entities involved in the project, the role played by nonhuman entities, and the technical devices used for the fulfillment of the project’s aims. (3) Results: The alternative food system under study lacked a robust design phase and a shared definition of the project aims among all the stakeholders involved. This ended in a substantial mismatch between project aims and consumer expectations. (4) Conclusions: When a comprehensive design stage is neglected, the threefold aim concerning sustainability might not be achievable. In particular, the design of alternative food systems must take into account the social environment where it is intended to be put in place, especially in UPA, where consumers often live in suburban neighborhoods wherein the sense of community is not strong, thus preventing them from getting involved in a community-based project. In such cases, hybridization can play a role in the sustainability of alternative food networks, provided that some trade-offs occur among the different components of sustainability—some components of sustainability will be fully achieved, while others will not.

Toward suburbs: Examining neighborhood-level changes in naturally occurring affordable housing stock in Florida, USA

Due to a severe shortage of affordable housing in the United States, insufficient funding for housing programs, and the growing importance of preserving market-affordable rental units, it becomes increasingly imperative for housing scholars and policymakers to capture neighborhood-level changes in unsubsidized privately-owned affordable rental housing stock, also widely called naturally occurring affordable housing (NOAH) stock. In this study, first, we propose a unique way to estimate changes in the number of NOAH units at a neighborhood level by using the Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy and other secondary datasets. Second, applying this approach, we analyze neighborhood-level changes in NOAH stock based on the four largest core-based statistical areas in Florida from 2000 to 2016 with a particular emphasis on identifying the relative growth of NOAH units in suburban neighborhoods. Results derived from multivariate census-tract-level regressions reveal that although a large proportion of NOAH units is still located in urban neighborhoods, newly generated NOAH tends to be disproportionately located in suburban neighborhoods. The proposed approach to estimating changes in NOAH stock can help local municipalities that desire to identify neighborhood-level needs for affordable housing preservation align resources with changes in NOAH stock within a metropolitan area.

Discovering the ‘heart’ in heartland tourism

ABSTRACT The emergence of the Singapore heartland as a tourist environment is explored. The ‘heartland’ refers to suburban residential neighbourhoods, often sited away from mainstream attractions and iconic landmarks, and seldom visited by mass tourists. The increasing trend of visitors to the heartlands and companies offering heartland tours is studied. Applying the concepts of ‘frontstage’ (featuring mainstream attractions) and ‘backstage’ (offering alternative sites), the production and consumption of heartland spaces are interrogated. The notion of ‘tourism place making’ is also introduced as we look at how tour companies attempt to ‘make places’ in the heartlands that appeal to visitors, and how tourists in turn ‘place make’ as they experience the landscapes. We argue, however, that there are limits to place making. Just as tour companies are incapable of transforming spaces into affective landscapes of tourism, likewise travellers encounter cultural shocks and other difficulties that mitigate against their place attachment. Further research on tourism place making in non-mainstream sites is required if we are to fully appreciate the complex relations between tourism, people and places.