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Full-Text Articles in Urban Studies and Planning

Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Nov 2017

Community-Engaged Operations Research: Trends, New Frontiers And Current Applications, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Community-engaged operations research is an extension of multiple OR/MS traditions to support participatory scholarship, localized impact and social change. It applies critical thinking, evidence-based policy analysis, community participation and decision modeling to local interventions. It emphasizes the needs, voices and values of disadvantaged and marginalized populations. Through a survey of current scholarship in two complementary areas of inquiry, ‘community operational research’ (referring to work by primarily UK-based researchers) and ‘community-based operations research’ (referring to work by primarily US-based researchers), we develop principles for community-engaged OR, present critical questions that represent opportunities to expand the impact of this work, and discuss …


Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright Oct 2017

Improving Decision-Making Skills Of Nonprofit Professionals, Michael P. Johnson Jr., George Chichirau, Jason Wright

Michael P. Johnson

Nonprofits face gaps in organizational capacity, including program design and evaluation, but previous research suggests that capacity-building exercises have a positive effect. We describe a data analytics training workshop with staff from Boston-area nonprofits reflecting a wide range of sectors. Through analysis of participant work on case studies provided by the instructor, we examine how participants made sense of training materials, the various strategies employed by participants to solve three case study problems, and participant feedback about the session. Our findings provide a basis for novel interventions in community based operations research. 


Food Justice Youth Development: Using Photovoice To Study Urban School Food Systems, Krista Harper, Catherine Sands, Diego Angarita, Molly Totman, Monica Maitin, Jonell Sostre Rosado, Jazmin Colon, Nick Alger Sep 2017

Food Justice Youth Development: Using Photovoice To Study Urban School Food Systems, Krista Harper, Catherine Sands, Diego Angarita, Molly Totman, Monica Maitin, Jonell Sostre Rosado, Jazmin Colon, Nick Alger

Catherine Sands

How do youth learn through participation in efforts to study and change the school food system? Through our participatory youth action research (YPAR) project, we move beyond the "youth as consumer" frame to a food justice youth development approach. We track how a group of youth learned about food and the public policy process through their efforts to transform their own school food systems by conducting a participatory evaluation of farm-to-school efforts in collaboration with university and community partners. We used the Photovoice research method, placing cameras in the hands of young people so that they themselves could document and …


Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr. Aug 2017

Decision Modeling For Housing And Community Development: A Methodology For Evidence-Based Urban And Regional Planning, Michael P. Johnson Jr.

Michael P. Johnson

Urban community development corporations and other local institutions routinely face challenging problems in housing and economic development that require substantial expertise in data analytics and decision modeling. Recent research, inspired by local responses to the housing foreclosure crisis, and developed in cooperation with Boston-area CDCs, has resulted in a collection of applications that can assist CDCs and similar organizations to design local interventions for acquisition and redevelopment of housing. This paper describes these applications. The first of these is values and objective design, i.e. the process of identifying decision opportunities. The second of these is data analytics, or …


Environmental Advocacy: Insights From East Asia, Mary Alice Haddad Jul 2017

Environmental Advocacy: Insights From East Asia, Mary Alice Haddad

Mary Alice Haddad


Environmental advocacy in East Asia takes place in a context where there are few well-funded professional advocacy organisations, no viable green parties, and governments that are highly pro-business. In this advocacy-hostile environment, what strategies are environmental organizations using to promote better environmental outcomes?  Using an original database of environmental organizations and interviews with activists and officials throughout the region, this paper investigates which strategies are most common and compares them to the advocacy strategies found in the United States.  It finds, perhaps surprisingly, that (a) environmental organizations across East Asia employ similar advocacy strategies even though they are operating in …


I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan Apr 2017

I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Uniquely interconnecting lessons from law, psychology, and economics, this article aims to provide a more enriched understanding of what it means to “share” property in the sharing economy. It explains that there is an “ownership prerequisite” to the sharing of property, drawing in part from the findings of research in the psychology of child development to show when and why children start to share. They do so only after developing what psychologists call “ownership understanding.” What the psychological research reveals, then, is that the property system is well suited to create recognizable and enforceable ownership norms that include the rights …


Robocar Risks, Michael Lewyn Dec 2016

Robocar Risks, Michael Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

Suggests that policymakers should not widen roads or stringently enforce anti-jaywalking laws in order to accommodate autonomous vehicles.