Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Spaces To Breathe, Ryan Rinn

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

The author's vision is of a racially equitable Richmond that looks like every resident having the mental and physical health benefits of green space easily walkable from where they live. He outlines ideas for achieving this vision, with Black and Brown-led onboarding of new parks in neighborhoods and communities where no greenspaces exist within walking distance. Community-led creation of public open space is the inverse of annexation; it is an anti-racist land use strategy that empowers residents to build and enjoy places for the people.

The Case For Meaningful Language Access, Tanya M. González

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

Through her experience working with the immigrant community in Richmond, the author makes the point that the Richmond metropolitan area needs a comprehensive immigration integration policy that centers language access services and that is implemented by localities, nonprofits, and other human service providers to begin to move towards racial equity for immigrant families.

Peace For Communities Of Color: A Conversation Between A Black Woman And A White Woman On Shifting Power And The Need For Radical Imagination In The Nonprofit Sector, Lea Whitehurst-Gibson, Bekah Kendrick

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

The authors discuss their nonprofit sector work towards equity in Richmond, stating that achieving equity requires a culture shift within the nonprofit and philanthropic sector and noting that despite an increasingly diverse nation, white people make up the majority of nonprofit executive leadership.

Between Two Litanies: Equity And Public Education In Richmond, Va, Dennis Williams Ii

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

The author examines white backlash (white resistance to and prevention of racial and educational equity), calling it a social mechanism as persistent as the struggle for racial equality itself.

Toward A Vision Of Racial Equity In Richmond Schools, Taikein Cooper, Genevieve Siegel-Hawley

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

The authors present their vision for racial equity in Richmond schools, including real integration, enabled by stronger and more inclusive advocacy. It is based on their collective personal and professional experiences, research, and best practices from around the country. They believe these strategies will lead us toward greater racial equity in Richmond and the education all of our children deserve.

There Goes The Neighborhood: Combatting Displacement In Richmond’S Historically Black Neighborhoods, Mariah Williams

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: Individual Essays

The author examines the national trend in gentrifying legacy Black cities and neighborhoods across the country (wealthy, white families moving to non-white, predominantly Black neighborhoods). As the city of Richmond undergoes significant transition, achieving racial equity means implementing policies to combat involuntary displacement of Black residents and to preserve the culture embedded within historic Black communities. Creating an equitable Richmond means being intentional about promoting policies that combat involuntary displacement, ensuring that Black households truly have a choice in remaining in their communities and that they can reap the benefits of reinvestment as much as their white counterparts.

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: 24 Visions For Racial Equity In Richmond

Richmond Racial Equity Essays: The Book

This ebook of 24 essays is a component of the Richmond Racial Equity Essays project. The idea was inspired by and modeled after The Just City Essays: 26 Visions of Equity, Inclusion and Opportunity, an ebook of 26 essays edited by Toni L. Griffin, Ariella Cohen, and David Maddox and published by J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the City College of New York, the Nature of Cities and Next City.

Using The Just City Essays as a model, urban planner and consultant Ebony Walden collaborated with Dr. Meghan Gough from VCU's Wilder School …

Role Of Municipal Governance In Stabilizing Mature Inner Suburbs: A Study Of Five St. Louis Municipalities 1970-2015, Napoleon Williams Iii

Dissertations

This study explores the role of municipal governance in municipal-level stabilization of inner suburbs in St. Louis County, Missouri. The data, from 1970 to 2015, include a robust collection of official government archives collected from five municipalities in St. Louis County, historical documents, city-state-national statistical data, and related materials. Interviews of 25 stakeholders were conducted and data were analyzed based on the community power structure framework.

I outline five mature St. Louis inner suburbs’ evolution in municipal-level conditions from 1970 to 2015, and I detail the role each suburbs’ municipal governance played in the evolution of municipal-level conditions. I conclude, …

Vote By Mail By Race And Hispanic Ethnicity In Cuyahoga County, Mark J. Salling Phd, Gisp

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

The current arguments to increase voting by mail rather than at the polls may result in suppressing voting by Black and Hispanic voters unless outreach to those populations can increase their confidence in and preference for using the postal service to cast their votes in the 2020 general election and beyond. This is a particularly important in the coming election due to the likely exposure to COVID‐19 at the polling places should the pandemic be still a significant health risk at places of congregation.

Discussion Questions For Teaching While Black, Pamela Lewis

Education

These discussion questions accompany Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City.

Neighborhood Change Within New Jersey: The Evolutionary History That Led To The New Newark, David Medina

Student Publications

As Newark lies 10 miles west of Manhattan, there is an increased encroachment from investors and gentrifies as surrounding cities such as Hoboken and Jersey City become too expensive and overcrowded. Known as the “Brick City”, Newark has history dating back to 1666. Leading up to World War II Newark was thriving, until an increase in suburban development and white flight that altered the race demographic. After years of racial stigma, the history of Newark is at risk as gentrification and neighborhood change looms over the city and its 282,862 residents, many of which are minorities.

Race And Urban Development Of Arsenal Hill, Sc, Samira Nematollahi

Senior Theses

This thesis is a study on the Columbia neighborhood Arsenal Hill. It is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Columbia, but most of the neighborhood’s history is largely erased. In this paper, I studied the progression of change in Arsenal Hill with the goal of assessing who wielded power and to what extent race played a role in the neighborhood’s development. I find that race was the fundamental mover of change and that all other decisions and factors revolved around it. The initial decline of the neighborhood stemmed from its racial heterogeneity which then progressed into developers seeing Arsenal Hill …

The Tale Of Two Community Gardens: Green Aesthetics Versus Food Justice In The Big Apple, Sofya Aptekar, Justin S. Myers

Publications and Research

There has been a vibrant community gardening movement in New York City since the 1970s. The movement is predominantly located in working class communities of color and has fought for decades to turn vacant land into beneficial community spaces. However, many of these communities are struggling with gentrification, which has the potential to transform access to and use of community gardens in the city and the politics around them. Drawing on separate multi-year ethnographic projects, this article compares two community gardens in food insecure communities in Queens and Brooklyn: one that is undergoing gentrification and one that is not. We …

Affect And Manhattan’S West Side Piers, Ricardo J. Millhouse

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, "Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity" (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York's west side piers queerly affective. I use "queer bodies" to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic …

Making “The Garden City Of The South”: Beautification, Preservation, And Downtown Planning In Augusta, Georgia, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

This article illuminates how a smaller southern city engaged broader planning approaches. Civic leaders, especially women, pushed and partnered with municipal administrations to beautify Augusta, Georgia, a city with extraordinarily wide streets and a long tradition of urban horticulture. Their efforts in the 1900s to 1950s, often in concert with close by planners, led to a confluence of urban beautification, historic preservation, and downtown revitalization in the 1960s. This coordinated activity reshaped Augusta’s cityscape, exacerbated racial tensions, and enshrined principles of the City Beautiful, Garden City, and parks movements long after they receded in large cities, influencing the work of …

Everyday Violence: Catcalling And Lgbtq-Directed Aggression In The Public Sphere, Simone A. Kolysh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation aims to expose how women and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) people are barred from full participation in the public sphere and public life because of catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression on the streets of New York City. The harmful, cumulative, and long-lasting effects of these interactions make it difficult for marginalized people to belong and benefit from a supposedly inclusive and democratic society. Focusing on the public sphere of New York City, this dissertation is a qualitative study of catcalling and LGBTQ-directed aggression. I analyze interviews with catcallers and sixty-seven recipients of everyday violence as well …

The Unbearable Lightness Of The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Accomplishment Of Diversity At An Urban Farmers Market, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

This article provides a critique of work on urban public space that touts its potential as a haven from racial and class conflicts and inequalities. I argue that social structures and hierarchies embedded in the capitalist system and the state’s social control over the racialized poor are not suspended even in places that appear governed by civility and tolerance, such as those under Anderson’s “cosmopolitan canopy”. Durable inequality, residential segregation, nativism, and racism inevitably shape what happens in diverse public spaces. Using an ethnographic study of an urban farmers’ market in New York City, I show that appearances of everyday …

Impact Investment Strategy: Linking Health & Housing, Elizabeth G. Mckinsey

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

The purpose of this plan is to create an impact investment strategy for RMHF that explicitly links health and housing. The strategy will use impact investing, an investment strategy that directs capital to enterprises that generate social and or environmental benefits for the surrounding community. One of RMHF’s goals is for the investment strategy to offer strategies that address the entrenched racism and inequities in the City of Richmond. Impact investing will enable RMHF to be a contributing partner with Richmond as it moves away from a history of unfair housing policies that negatively impact countless citizens to a healthier, …

No. 18: Gender Inequality, Poverty And Urban Household Food Security In Cape Town, Mary Caesar, Liam Riley

Hungry Cities Partnership

This discussion paper aims to advance our understanding of the gendered nature of urban household food security and how it is shaped by the relationships between internal household gender dynamics and external social factors of gender- and race-based inequalities. The manifestation of the gender inequalityfood security nexus at the household level is most evident in the different food-related roles and responsibilities adopted by women and men. These differences typically centre on tasks such as growing, purchasing, and preparing food as well as household members who undertake none of these responsibilities. Other gender-based household food security determinants include the gender of …

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Community-Based Initiatives For Neighborhood And Community Rehabilitation: A Case Study Of The Mission District, San Francisco, California, Francesca Monique Gallardo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Through the case study of San Francisco, CA’s Mission District, this research project addresses how community-based affordable housing development is operationalized to rehabilitate communities and neighborhoods experiencing effects of gentrification, mass displacement, and cultural dilution. My goals were to identify how the processes of building a sense of community, trust, and cohesion- rehabilitating and critical to affordable housing development efforts in the Mission District? And, how are nonprofit community development organizations engaging with these processes in collaboration with citizen and community partners? The final objective is to provide evidence-based strategies to assist other at-risk minority communities and neighborhoods in the …

Tommi's Place: An Adaptation And Commentary On Uncle Tom's Cabin, Vanessa L. Jackson

Theses and Dissertations

Harriet Beecher Stowe penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was published in 1852. This book exposed and condemned the atrocities of slavery. Her book became a bestseller and is said to be one of the primary reasons why slavery was eventually abolished. Though slavery has been dismantled the system of oppression which allowed the marginalization of others to thrive has never been eliminated. This system established a dominant culture; one which oppresses those of African descent and has endured for centuries. Tommi’s Place retells Uncle Tom’s Cabin in contemporary corporate America. Tommi’s Place reflects that this system of oppression is still …

Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory And Participatory Budgeting, Celina Su

Publications and Research

Critical Race Theory (CRT) researchers maintain that mainstream liberal discourses of neutrality and colorblindness inherently reify existing patterns of inequality, and that privileging the voices of people of color and the marginalized is essential to addressing issues of equity and equality. Participatory budgeting (PB) aims, too, to include the voices of the marginalized in substantive policy-making. Through a CRT lens, I examine the ways in which the New York City PB process has thus far worked to simultaneously disrupt and maintain racial hierarchies. I pay particular attention to how social constructions of the “good project” shape the discourses around community …

From Porto Alegre To New York City: Participatory Budgeting And Democracy, Celina Su

Publications and Research

Because of its popularity, there is now a large literature examining how participatory budgeting (PB) deepens participation by the poor and redistributes resources. Closer examinations of recent cases of PB can help us to better understand the political configurations in which these new participatory democratic spaces are embedded, and articulate the conditions that might lead to more meaningful outcomes. Who participates? For whose benefit? The articles in this symposium, on participatory budgeting in New York City (PBNYC), highlight both strengths and challenges of the largest American PB process. They focus less on redistribution, more on the dimensions of the process …

Diversifying The Stem Education To Career Pipeline, Adrienne Coleman

Publications & Research

This webinar will provide participants with the results of the Diversifying STEM Think Tank and provide strategies to enhance diversity in the STEM Education to Career Pipeline. It will further focus on the motivation of Black and Latino students to engage in STEM. With an understanding of strategies to diversify, matriculation to higher education may improve, STEM engagement may be enhanced, and visibility in STEM careers may increase. Diversifying the STEM fields may indirectly impact the socioeconomic status of these communities with opportunities to increase their earning potential, have more consistent employment, and obtain leadership positions; while enhancing the industry …

Reclaiming The Streets: Black Urban Insurgency And Antisocial Security In Twenty-First-Century Philadelphia, Jeff Maskovsky

Publications and Research

This article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I locate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” This regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end …

The Impact Of Concentrations Of African Americans And Latinos/Latinas On Neighborhood Social Cohesion In High Poverty United States Neighborhoods, Laurie A. Walker, Daniel Brisson

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

United States research concludes concentrations of Latinos/Latinas and African Americans have a negative impact on Neighborhood Social Cohesion (NSC); however, European research finds higher levels of NSC when controlling for measures of concentrated disadvantage. This study utilizes a longitudinal stratified random sample of 7,495 households in 430 Census Blocks within 10 United States cities that participated in the Making Connections Initiative. Results show higher NSC is associated with higher percentages of residents who are Latino/Latina, African American, and homeowners when controlling for measures of concentrated disadvantage. The study findings challenge the stigma associated with concentrations of racial minorities in …

Race Relations In America: Complacency All Along?, Seong C. Kang

Journal of Public Management & Social Policy

No abstract provided.

Stand Your Ground In Florida: The Effect Of Race, Location And Weapons On Convictions, Kevin M. Wagner, Dukhong Kim, Jeremy C. Hagler

Ralph Bunche Journal of Public Affairs

The implications of laws allowing citizens to respond with deadly force when they believe they are threatened is the subject of significant conjecture in the media and scholarship. The adoption of “Stand Your Ground” laws has increased across the nation despite little data or findings that attempt to capture the ramifications of enacting this policy. This research explores the effect of the “Stand Your Ground” legal defense on criminal convictions in Florida. After exploring the historic assumptions and motivations behind the adoption and use of the Stand Your Ground law in Florida, we use data gathered from local newspapers, the …

Renaissance Fair, Richey Piiparinen

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

As Cleveland moves forward as a city on the rise, we risk leaving too many behind. Creating solutions for greater equity may be our best chance at a sustainable future.