Traditional Neighborhood Research Articles

Old and emerging centers

Supermarkets and discount food stores are more than places of supply. They are places to meet and greet those in the community. Kids use spacious parking lots after store hours for skateboarding and playing soccer. The latest news from community councils are posted here. A “For Sale” board in the market is today's neighborhood flea market. Local food markets are anchors for centrality in many small urban centers. In the past decade however, as location and sale strategies are revised, many of these centrally located small and mid-sized food markets close and more spacious and automobile-oriented locations are opened. Results are not only new emerging commercial centers but also declining traditional urban centers. Often they lose their most important anchor business and main local supplier of everyday goods and services. By the German spatial planning law local authorities have to secure the traditional neighborhood centers as places of local supply, identification and heritage. But the structural integration and re-direction of food retail developments into mostly densely built-up central locations creates a dilemma for planners. Planners can see possibilities. Local food markets in general can stabilize traditional neighborhood centers. But there is a large uncertainty in handling the aggressive retail developments and the spatial demands of food market operators, above all the very fast expanding discount food stores of German chains like ALDI or LIDL. Given this general development in food retailing, what can city planners do to keep or to integrate local food markets into central locations? The presented study was designed to discuss: the situation of discount food stores and supermarkets developments in urban centers; the coexistence of old and emerging commercial centers, both very much defined by the location of food retailers; spatial demands and possibilities to integrate the land-consumptive layout of the modern food store developments into the urban texture of traditional urban centers; and fields of action to influence the location and design of food retail developments.

Once Upon a Time in Buenos Aires: Vengeance, Community and the Urban Western

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 All translations from the Spanish are mine. 2 Las torres jardín, built in the middle of central city blocks and offering security and leisure facilities under the guise of retaining the attractions of the traditional neighbourhood barrio, break up the historic city block by occupying space normally taken up by several buildings. As a consequence, they threaten ‘the traditional homogenising inclusivity of the city grid’ (Silvestri and Gorelik 2000 Silvestri, Graciela and Gorelik, Adrián. 2000. “Ciudad y cultura urbana, 1976–1999: El fin de la expansión”. In Buenos Aires: Historia de cuatro siglos, Edited by: Luis Romero, José and Alberto Romero, Luis. 461–99. Buenos Aires: Altamira. [Google Scholar]: 466). 3 As Ludmila da Silva Catela notes (2001 Da Silva Catela, Ludmila. 2001. No habrá flores en la tumba del pasado, La Plata: Ediciones Al Margen. [Google Scholar]), there is as yet no documented case of a vigilante killing of a person who committed crimes during the 1976–1983 military dictatorship by anyone who suffered at the hands of state repression, directly or indirectly. The ongoing trials of officials, debates over immunity and the legacy of disappearance add a further dimension to the context of revenge and justice in post-dictatorship Argentina. 4 The railings surrounding many of the houses in San Justo – including Natalia's – suggest that the city's inhabitants are drawing themselves behind bars in ways similar to Oso's own incarceration. 5 The film also perpetuates the dominance of the superior male evident in westerns. The chain-smoking, tight T-shirted, muscular, gun-toting Oso (the name itself – Bear – is revealing) persists in this male-dominated city. The powerful masculinity of Oso, Alicia's biological father, is placed in contrast to the utterly ineffective nature of the masculinity of her surrogate father, Sergio: the latter is unemployed while Natalia works as the breadwinner and his failed attempt to stand up to the bookmaker only makes him an effeminate other to Oso. The obvious contrast between the two characters is introduced by Sergio's inability to solve the puzzle that Alicia brings home – only for Oso to solve it successfully within a few seconds. 6 Buenos Aires (the city) is divided between two administrative areas: Capital Federal (‘Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires’), the self-governing centre which has a population of around three million inhabitants, and Gran Buenos Aires, governed as part of the province of Buenos Aires, which has a population of around nine and a half million inhabitants. 7 The point is reinforced by comparing Old Boy to Park Chan-wook's later film, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (), in which there is a clear choice offered between state justice and personal revenge. 8 This idea is partially repeated in The Brave One (dir. Neil Jordan ), essentially a remake of Death Wish except with the significant difference that the protagonist is a woman (played by Jodie Foster) and that, at the end of the film, the vengeful Erica Bain eliminates the men who murdered her partner.

FMI image based rock structure classification using classifier combination

Formation Micro Imager (FMI) can directly reflect changes of wall stratums and rock structures, and is an important factor to classify stratums and identify lithology for the oil and gas exploration. Conventionally, people analyze FMI images mainly with manual processing, which is, however, extremely inefficient and incurs a heavy workload for experts. In this paper, we propose an automatic rock structure classification system using image processing and pattern recognition technologies. We investigate the characteristics of rock structures in FMI images carefully. We also develop an effective classification framework with classifier combination that can integrate the domain knowledge from experienced geologists successfully. Our classification system includes three main steps. First, various effective features, specially designed for FMI images, are calculated and selected. Then, the corresponding single classifier associated with each feature is constructed. Finally, all these classifiers are combined as an effective cascade recognition system. We test our rock structure classification system with real FMI rock images. In experiments, with only one training sample per class, the average recognition accuracy of our proposed system is 81.11%. The accuracy is 15.55 percent higher than the traditional 1-nearest neighborhood method. Moreover, this automatic system can significantly reduce the complexity and difficulty in the rock structure analysis task for the oil and gas exploration.

Implantation of Modern Ecological System into Urban Traditional Context: A Case of Huilongwo Area

In order to back Low-Carbon Cities Plan, China’s urban renewal and the protection of traditional neighborhoods, and after literature searching and site survey, spatial evolution and site inspection in Huilongwo area, the authors point out that we should combine modern eco-technological methods such as solar energy application, reclaimed water system, ground source heat pump, solar energy application and so on with the protective measures of historical neighborhoods, and improving the living facilities of the Historic District. Only implant the modern ecological system into the historic context conservation, the city could be reaching the “sustainable development”. It’s a sound sample of urbanization in China.

Population Decline in Polish and Czech Cities during Post-socialism? Looking Behind the Official Statistics

The evolving debate on "urban shrinkage" mirrors an increasing interest in demographic phenomena on the part of urban scholars. This paper discusses ambiguous evidence about recent population decline in the large cities of Poland and the Czech Republic, with a particular focus on Łódz and Brno in general and their inner cities more specifically. By applying a mixed-method approach, the paper identifies indications of inner-city repopulation and socio-demographic diversification which are not yet apparent in register or census data. It is argued that there are indications of a silent transformation of traditional residential patterns and neighbourhoods in east central Europe. In the inner cities, this is reflected, amongst other things, by the presence of new households that may be called "transitory urbanites".

Neighborhood satisfaction in suburban versus traditional environments: An evaluation of contributing characteristics in eight California neighborhoods

We examine characteristics associated with higher levels of neighborhood satisfaction among residents of traditional versus suburban neighborhoods, using an ordered logit model. We find that neighborhood satisfaction is higher among the traditional neighborhood residents, even after controlling for sociodemographics and other characteristics. Differences in the characteristics associated with satisfaction in each group include the perception of liveliness and diversity, contributing significantly only among the segment of the sample living in traditional neighborhoods, and the perception of economic homogeneity, contributing significantly only among the suburban segment. Features such as parking, yards, and school quality do not emerge as important predictors of satisfaction for either group. The most important features for neighborhood satisfaction among both groups are the attractive appearance and perceived safety of neighborhoods, suggesting that any innovative neighborhood designs are most likely to succeed in attracting residents if able to foster these qualities.

Contrast Preservation in dialects of North Levantine Arabic

This paper uses Contrast Preservation Theory to account for two opaque processes in two dialects of Levantine Arabic spoken in Tripoli: (1) a Push Shift effect in a dialect spoken in traditional neighborhoods and (2) a constraint paradox in the standard dialect.

Shift Scheduling Problem in Same-Day Courier Industry

This paper deals with the problem of minimizing the staffing cost of a same-day courier company subject to service-level requirements. The problem has been modeled as an integer program with nonlinear probabilistic constraints. We have devised a heuristic procedure to explore the search space efficiently through an approximated neighborhood evaluation (ANE) model, relying on the estimation (via simulation) of a reduced number of parameters. Computational results show that, compared to traditional neighborhood search procedures, the ANE approach provides significant cost reductions in a typical same-day courier setting.

ON STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF THE OLD CITY OF SANA'A, YEMEN

This paper refers to a few observations on structural features of the Old City of Sana'a in Yemen, focusing on constituent elements of harah/harat, traditional neighbourhood units, and transition of land use. There are 56 harat in the city today. The area of the old city of Sana'a, which developed many times since the Saba era, was figured under the first Ottoman occupation. The main constituent elements of harah are a mosque, a green field called a maqushama which belongs to a mosque, houses, streets, and sharhat, small open square. Under the modernization, such as installation of water supply and sewerage system, Sana'a is changing in traditional harah politically, socially, even physically. Such circumstances affect historic environment of Sana'a.

Unbundling the housing crisis

Problem statement: An unregulated globalized residential mortgage industry imploded upon itself and transformed traditional neighborhood fabrics and ex-urban development tracts into widespread landscapes of mass foreclosures affecting society and our economy across all social strata to a critical point of near institutional financial collapse.

Developer and Realtor Perspectives on Factors That Influence Development, Sale, and Perceived Demand for Activity-Friendly Communities

Although public support for physical activity-friendly Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs) appears to be growing, information is lacking on private sector perspectives and how economic factors (eg, fuel prices) might influence the development and sale of TNDs. A sample of realtors from the National Association of Realtors (n = 4950) and developers from the National Association of Home Builders (n = 162) were surveyed in early 2009 to assess factors influencing homebuyers' decisions; incentives and barriers to developing TNDs; effects of depressed housing market conditions and financing on sales; trends in buying; and energy considerations (eg, green building). Realtors believed that homebuyers continue to rank affordability, safety and school quality higher than TND amenities. Developers reported numerous barriers to TNDs, including the inability to overcome governmental/political hurdles, lack of cooperation between government agencies, and lack of market demand. Yet, realtors believed clients are increasingly influenced by gas and oil prices, and developers reported that clients are looking for energy efficient homes, reduced commute time, and walkable neighborhoods. Respondents reported consumers are more interested in living in a TND than 5 years ago. Activity-friendly TNDs appear to be increasing in demand, but developers and realtors reported significant barriers to creating these communities.

Unbundling the housing crisis

Problem statement: An unregulated globalized residential mortgage industry imploded upon itself and transformed traditional neighborhood fabrics and ex-urban development tracts into widespread landscapes of mass foreclosures affecting society and our economy across all social strata to a critical point of near institutional financial collapse.

An ejection chain algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem

AbstractIn this study, we present a new tabu search algorithm for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) that utilizes an embedded neighborhood construction called an ejection chain. Our ejection chain approach provides a combinatorial leverage effect, where the size of the neighborhood grows multiplicatively while the effort of finding a best move in the neighborhood grows only additively. Our results illustrate that significant improvement in solution quality is obtained in comparison to the traditional swap neighborhood. We also develop two multistart tabu search algorithms utilizing the ejection chain approach in order to demonstrate the power of embedding this neighborhood construction within a more sophisticated heuristic framework. Comparisons to the best large neighborhood approaches from the literature are presented. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, 2010

A compromised large-scale neighborhood search heuristic for capacitated air cargo loading planning

Abstract Cost effectiveness is central to the air freight forwarders. In this work, we study how an air freight forwarder should plan its cargo loading in order to minimize the total freight cost given a limited number of rented containers. To solve the problem efficiently for practical implementation, we propose a new large-scale neighborhood search heuristic. The proposed large-scale neighborhood relaxes the subset-disjoint restriction made in the existing literature; the relaxation risks a possibility of infeasible exchanges while at the same time it avoids the potentially large amount of checking effort required to enforce the subset-disjoint restriction. An efficient procedure is then used to search for improvement in the neighborhood. We have also proposed a subproblem to address the difficulties caused by the fixed charges. The compromised large-scale neighborhood (CLSN) search heuristic has shown stably superior performance when compared with the traditional large-scale neighborhood search and the mixed integer programming model.

In Quest of the Good Urban Life: Socio-spatial Dynamics and Residential Building Stock Transformation in Zurich

This paper discusses socio-spatial dynamics and the transformation of the residential building stock in the global city of Zurich. It deals with five questions. Does Zurich exhibit the type of social polarisation outlined by the global city hypothesis? If so, how does social polarisation become visible in the context of a European city? Which actors in the real estate market are catering to the special tastes of the new urban middle class? With whom does the new middle class compete for space in the city? The paper argues that real estate developers customise the residential building stock and produce residential units for a targeted market—the new urban middle class. Furthermore, a new socio-spatial phenomenon—ennoblement—has evolved, as the new urban middle class takes residence in traditional upper-class neighbourhoods. By investing its own economic capital, this new middle class is hoping to profit from upper-class social and cultural capital.

Stormwater Runoff Quality and Quantity From Traditional and Low Impact Development Watersheds1

Abstract: The quality and quantity of residential stormwater runoff from a control, traditional, and low impact development (LID) watershed were compared in a paired watershed study. A traditional neighborhood was built using typical subdivision standards while a LID design was constructed with best management practices including grass swales, cluster housing, shared driveways, rain gardens, and a narrower pervious concrete‐paver road. Weekly, flow‐weighted, composite samples of stormwater were analyzed for nitrate + nitrite‐nitrogen (NO3 + NO2‐N), ammonia‐nitrogen (NH3‐N), total Kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN), total phosphorus (TP), and total suspended solids (TSS). Monthly composite samples were analyzed for total copper (Cu), lead (Pb), and zinc (Zn). Mean weekly storm flow increased (600x) from the traditional watershed in the postconstruction period. Increased exports of TKN, NO3 + NO2‐N, NH3‐N, TP, Cu, Zn, and TSS in runoff were associated with the increased storm flow. Postconstruction storm flow in the LID watershed was reduced by 42% while peak discharge did not change from preconstruction conditions. Exports were reduced from the LID watershed for NH3‐N, TKN, Pb, and Zn, while TSS and TP exports increased.

Upgrading historic cities by integrated and innovative solutions

During the ongoing rapid urbanisation process, many Chinese cities have redeveloped their inner city with large-scale demolishment and relocation. Yangzhou has adopted a different approach, and is actively taking measures to save and improve its historic centre. A substantial historical area of 5·1 km2 with about 110 000 residents, characterised by one- to two-storey traditional courtyard buildings and narrow lanes, remains. The old city is a rich heritage resource attractive to both tourists and residents. However, the houses are in disrepair, the infrastructure is insufficient and the historic area is facing an increasing risk of deterioration. To link heritage preservation with the improvement of living conditions, the Yangzhou municipal government, German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) and the Cities Alliance have embarked on a programme of sustainable urban conservation by upgrading traditional urban neighbourhoods and supporting self-help initiatives. In a pilot block, integrated concepts were developed. Innovative technical solutions appropriate to the narrow lanes were designed and tested. Infrastructure was installed and standards were developed. Concepts and measures of ecological water cycle management were introduced at the municipal level. Residents were involved through a community action planning (CAP) approach. They agreed on appropriate standards and became involved in upgrading their houses and lane façades. The initial successful experience is being planned for use throughout the entire historical area. Expanding the process as a model for other historic cities in China is also being considered.

Industry and the smart city

These days, U.S. city planning exudes an audacious air. The suburban sprawl that has dominated U.S. development since the Second World War is under assault from a multitude of policy makers and activists bent on protecting the environment and revitalizing city life. Rallying to varied watchwords—smart growth, new urbanism, sustainable development, green development, livable communities, traditional neighborhood development—the insurgent urbanists share key goals: mixing land uses, raising density, and ramping up public transit. In place of auto-centric, single-use districts reached only via traffic-choked roads, they put housing, shops, and offices close to each other and to ample transit options. Given such options, they contend, people readily abandon their cars and walk or bike to and from work or to the bus, train, trolley, ferry, or light or heavy rail that will carry them to and from work. Only "densification" and "infill"—building at higher densities, preferably in already settled areas—can provide mass transit with the substantial number of riders it needs to be financially feasible. The widespread realization of this scenario, say its proponents, will not only revive urban America; it will benefit the environment at large. By drawing people out of their private vehicles, compact, transit-oriented development will reduce traffic congestion, cut down air pollution, and diminish global warming; by concentrating new construction in city centers, it will protect farmland and open space from being further devoured by suburbia.

Examining the Impacts of Residential Self‐Selection on Travel Behaviour: A Focus on Empirical Findings

Numerous studies have found that suburban residents drive more and walk less than residents in traditional neighbourhoods. What is less well understood is the extent to which the observed patterns of travel behaviour can be attributed to the residential built environment (BE) itself, as opposed to attitude‐induced residential self‐selection. To date, most studies addressing this self‐selection issue fall into nine methodological categories: direct questioning, statistical control, instrumental variables, sample selection, propensity score, joint discrete choice models, structural equations models, mutually dependent discrete choice models and longitudinal designs. This paper reviews 38 empirical studies using these approaches. Virtually all of the studies reviewed found a statistically significant influence of the BE remaining after self‐selection was accounted for. However, the practical importance of that influence was seldom assessed. Although time and resource limitations are recognized, we recommend usage of longitudinal structural equations modelling with control groups, a design which is strong with respect to all causality requisites.

Public-sector Intervention in Embodying the New Economy in Inner Urban Areas: The Barcelona Experience

This article investigates the urban and economic revitalisation of a traditional industrial working-class neighbourhood into a knowledge-based economic district. It explores why and how this new district is the result of an assertive public policy led by Barcelona's city council and implemented by a quasi-public agency. The project represents the most important urban-growth strategy in the city at the turn of the century and also exemplifies the advantages and shortcomings of many of the policy elements that have contributed to the radical transformation of Barcelona in recent decades. The article further highlights methodological challenges regarding the conceptualisation and operationalisation of new economic activities and it discusses the spatial and uncertain economic consequences of this ambitious approach by the local government.