Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Producing Space: Block-By-Block Change In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Jen Douglas

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Gentrification of urban neighborhoods is part of an ongoing restructuring of the city, linked to the emerging occupational structure of the service economy and the remaking of built environments that were created for a production economy. It is the name given to processes in which commodification and reinvestment accompany the in-migration of professional and managerial workers, often displacing prior residents and giving altered spatial form to inequality.

This dissertation is a case study of gentrification in Hyde and Jackson Squares, part of Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The emergence of gentrification pressures and their uneven distribution within the area is documented …

Microfinance: A Tool For Financial Access, Poverty Alleviation Or Gender Empowerment ? - Empirical Findings From Pakistan, Ghazal Mir Zulfiqar

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a $70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, resulting in an increased emphasis on profitmaking. This has also led to confusion in the sector around its mission: is it to alleviate poverty and empower poor women or simply to provide the "unbanked" with access to formal sources of finance? This research considers the main debates in microfinance with regard to its mission and presents empirical evidence …