ABSTRACT:  Artists have been a central theme in recent debates about the causes of urban development. This article shifts attention to the question of context: in what sorts of places are artist concentrations most likely to stimulate the local economy? To tackle this question, we employ a Canadian national database of local amenities. This database includes roughly 1.8 million total amenities in 1,800 distinct categories, across every Canadian locality. By coding these amenity categories on 16 qualitative dimensions (like self-expression, glamour, or neighborliness), we measure the specific cultural “scene” for each Canadian neighborhood. Our main findings are threefold. First, in general there is a strong correlation between artist populations and rising local wages. Second, this correlation is strengthened in more self-expressive, glamorous, and charismatic scenes. Third, in contrast to artists, “creative professionals” are linked with lower local wage growth generally and in such scenes. Finally, synthesizing these results, we conclude with a comment about what it might mean for “bourgeois” and “bohemian” lifestyle preferences to become more tightly integrated in contemporary postindustrial contexts, offering evidence based on the location of artists, graphic designers, and advertising firms that processes of functional differentiation and interchange may provide a more compelling explanation than processes of fusion and conflict.

ABSTRACT:  How do international border cities interact with one another about sustainable development? Existing research suggests international networks play a role in linking cities in a global dialogue about sustainability. Within individual cities, local networks including government agencies and nongovernmental organizations also play a role in sustainability discussions. This research suggests both perspectives on networks can inform the study of how international border cities approach interaction about sustainable development. Detroit and Windsor are examined as a case study. Interviews with government officials and nongovernmental organizations in both cities illuminate how Windsor and Detroit approach sustainable development in different ways. Social network analysis is used to identify organizations bridging the border between Canada and the United States. The research offers new propositions about how networks contribute to economic, environmental, and social policy coordination in international border regions.

ABSTRACT:  This article reports on a study that explored economic development practitioners’ perceptions of competition and cooperation in economic development. The study was conducted against the backdrop of (1) an increasing advocacy by scholars and policymakers for cooperative policy practices in economic development instead of competition and (2) the restrictive institutional environment within which practitioners operate in Ontario. The analysis in the paper is based on in-depth interviews with eighteen economic development directors from a wide range of communities in the province of Ontario, Canada. Findings indicate that practitioners had a strong positive view of regional approaches in the present global economy. These findings contrast sharply with prior studies suggesting that practitioners are unwilling to cooperate in regional economic development. The study offers several possible reasons for a change in thinking. Practitioners also supported restricting financial incentives to businesses in Ontario, arguing that restrictions provide a more even environment for economic development activities in the province. Interestingly, practitioners’ support appears to contradict doubts about the global competitiveness of Ontario communities in such a restrictive environment. In light of practitioners’ positive cooperative attitudes, study findings suggest areas for policy interventions to enhance practical cooperative policy making.

ABSTRACT:  This research is a descriptive assessment of the growth and stability of racially integrated neighborhoods in New York City from 1970 to 2010. The focus of our analysis is on the inclusion of blacks in these integrated areas given that current scholarship has shown that in other venues, Asians and Hispanics are socially separating themselves from blacks and aligning themselves with whites. The predominant pattern of racial integration in the city, and one that appears to have become more stable over time, combines whites, Asians and, to a lesser extent, Hispanics, but typically excludes blacks. We conclude by placing our findings within the broader literature on the emerging black/non-black color line, where Asians and Hispanics are increasingly aligned with whites while distancing themselves from blacks.

ABSTRACT:  The Latino population in the United States has increased dramatically during the past several decades. However, Latino-owned businesses have been understudied. Even less is known about these firms’ spatial distribution. Built on an interdisciplinary literature on industrial locations and ethnic economies, this study examines how the development of ethnic minority–owned businesses is contingent on the local neighborhood as both a work site and habitat. Using a confidential national survey of ethnic minority–owned businesses in the United States, this study compares the spatial distribution of Latino-owned employer firms in the Miami and Atlanta metropolitan areas. Consistent with previous research, results from this study strongly reinforce the importance of a connection between ethnic population concentration and emergence of ethnic businesses. A concentration of local businesses and co-locating with other businesses, regardless of ethnicity, are very important as well. Such agglomeration effects seem particularly important for new immigration destinations like Atlanta where a favorable entrepreneurial environment is still being developed for ethnic minority businesses. However, the positive effects from co-locating with local businesses are not linear. A threshold effect and small count preferences are detected in the two study areas.

ABSTRACT:  Proponents of metropolitan consolidation identify a range of benefits that may be realized through merger, including improved financial health. There is little agreement as to the actual outcomes across localities that have consolidated, even when limiting the scope to the four major urban mergers, including the merger of Louisville, Kentucky with Jefferson County in 2003, which is under consideration here. One likely reason for conflicting results is the limitation of reflexive analysis as a means of assessing financial impact. In the private sector, analysts would use financial ratio analysis to determine whether the new merged entity was financially healthier after merger. Though a political merger differs from a private sector merger, financial ratio analysis can still be used for pre- and post- analysis of merger effects on financial health. Further, when enough time has passed since merger, quasi-experimental designs like interrupted time series can test the hypothesis that merger had no significant financial impact on the entity at all.

ABSTRACT:  Understanding the root causes of homelessness is important for developing effective solutions to the problem. This fact has not gone unnoticed by researchers, who have made numerous attempts to identify the underlying structural determinants of homelessness by modeling inter-community variation in the rate of homelessness as a function of community-level variables. Yet, prior studies in this area have a number of serious limitations, principally their reliance on methodologically flawed estimates of the size of the homeless population. The present study addresses this and other limitations by using newly available and more reliable estimates from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to model variation in the rate of homelessness across a large and diverse sample of communities throughout the United States. In doing so, this study builds on the analysis conducted by Lee, Price-Spratlen, and Kanan (2003), and its findings have implications for policy and future research.

ABSTRACT:  This study explores how the locations and characteristics of neighborhoods affected the process of housing filtering in the Orlando metropolitan area during the 2000s. The results show that racial composition was an important determinant of filtering down and that the foreclosure rate and income composition of neighborhoods became more important factors during the housing market bust period. The filtering process tended to be more affected by neighborhood attributes than by changes in the housing market, especially during the housing market bust period. As the filtering down process was not sensitive to the neighborhood location itself, suburban areas were also susceptible to filtering down processes like inner city areas. Moreover, there was a high probability of suburban decline through filtering down during the housing market bust period. These results may be the reflection of recent trends of central city rebound and suburban decline in the Sun Belt.

ABSTRACT:  Cybersecurity demands are forcing public officials across the globe to focus on two core values that often conflict—transparency (the public good) and privacy (citizen and private sector confidentiality). An e-survey of Florida county government officials measures how cross-pressured they are, identifies the types of information about individuals and government employees that are the most difficult to protect, examines the interest groups (public, private, and nonprofit) that act as watchdogs, and delineates the actions administrators see as critical to promoting balance. The results show intense cross-pressures and greater difficulty in protecting citizens’ bioinformation, medical records, and financial data than in securing employee information. Information technology professionals and their associations are the most active in tracking privacy protection. The media and citizen activists monitor transparency the closest. More funding, personnel, equipment, and training, better software, more rigorous enforcement, and clearer standards and procedures are needed to balance privacy protection and transparency in cybersecurity policy making.

ABSTRACT:  This study examines the processes of revitalization within small cities, using Scranton, a postindustrial city in Northeast Pennsylvania, as a case study. Through qualitative interviews, I examine the motivation factors for key players in the revitalization of Scranton's downtown, such as business owners, city and nonprofit administrators, and cultural leaders. Revitalizers are heavily influenced by Richard Florida's creative class theory in that they strongly believe that promoting arts and culture and creating a consumer-based downtown is imperative for urban renewal. However, revitalizers are also motivated because Scranton has a high level of social capital, especially in terms of bonding capital. Strong social ties (including community, family, and institutional) assist revitalizers in their creative endeavors. This study indicates that small cities attempting to achieve economic and population stability should focus on their strengths: city livability and the thick social ties that maintain communities.

ABSTRACT:  Recent studies in the U.S. context have suggested that political participation is a function of the size and concentration of a city's population. Most of this research focuses on the idea that there is an optimal size and concentration of population that favors active political participation in terms of a higher propensity to vote in local elections, contact local officials, and attend community meetings. The conventional argument suggests a negative relationship between city size and political participation that is mitigated to some extent by the deeper social interactions generated by increased population density. We extend this research by also investigating the influence of population growth on the broader concept of civic participation. Civic participation is a multidimensional concept that requires the use of a broad set of indicators. We expand the number of measures to gauge civic participation at the local level by including data on the formation of volunteer associations, volunteer fire brigades and not-for-profit organizations as well as voter turnout. We test the hypotheses derived from extant research using aggregate data collected from Portuguese cities and discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on local civic participation.

ABSTRACT:  This study compares the nature of local stories that were presented on television newscasts across 17 television markets in the United States. It is an extension of the localism research that was conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2004 and the Local Television News Media Project at the University of Delaware in 2007 and 2009. The focus was on the cost characteristics of the stories that were identified as “local” using the definition adopted by the FCC. I specifically examined those attributes of the stories across the television markets that would affect the cost of presentation to the station—the proverbial bottom line. Those attributes were story type, story placement, story duration, and the presentation mode. What types of stories were covered? What was their duration? Where were they placed in the broadcast? What presentation mechanisms were used to present them to the audience? What were the differences, if any, in these attributes across television markets? What are the implications for public policy and citizenship in local places?

ABSTRACT:  This paper endeavors to create a better understanding of the barriers to employment faced by disadvantaged urban women in the post–welfare reform era. Using data from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, a unique geographically linked, longitudinal, multicity set of survey data, logistic regression models weighs the relative importance of individual barriers to employment (e.g., poor health, childcare, family responsibilities) and contextual or neighborhood barriers to employment (e.g., poverty rate, joblessness rate) on labor market outcomes. Results reveal that several neighborhood characteristics are predictive of employment outcomes, including automobile access, female-headedness, vacancy, and disorder. Results suggest a more complex, nuanced interplay between neighborhood-level variables and individually measured variables in preventing some women from obtaining both modestly paying employment with few allocated hours of work per week, and also better-paying jobs with more hours of work per week.

ABSTRACT:  This article explores the potential dangers of parochialism in using community-based associations to represent community interests and the role of these organizations in advising on citywide policies in urban governance. Based on recent theoretical debates on citizen participation at the local level, we analyze whether community-based participation potentially leads to parochial pursuit of community interests at the expense of broader regional goals by investigating the effect of organizational and community characteristics. Using Los Angeles neighborhood councils as an empirical case, this exploratory analysis finds that the nature of neighborhood council members’ civic activities is related to the degree to which they may potentially pursue parochial interests. A similar relationship is found between the geographic location of communities and such pursuits. Lastly, neighborhood council members’ civic activities and other community characteristics also influence their activities concerning advice on citywide policies. These findings suggest ways that neighborhood councils might play a greater role in advising on citywide policies in urban governance.

ABSTRACT:  Legacy planning in preparation for the Olympic Games has significantly grown in importance for host cities and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) because of wasteful investments for some previous Games. Since the late 1990s, the IOC has actively sought to prevent such overspending through a Transfer of Knowledge program, in which valuable lessons are passed from one host city to the next. This paper analyzes the transport legacies of the Olympic Games, using original archive material and interviews with key decision-makers in five cities. While previous research into the effects of the Olympic Games on host cities suggests that infrastructural legacies are place-specific, the main argument of this paper is that the transport legacies of the Olympic Games are much more uniform across the host cities. Even though host cities’ transport systems were intrinsically different pre-Olympics, the author finds that similar features of Olympic transport systems, developed through the Transfer of Knowledge program, produced similar legacies. In explaining the creation of transport legacies through Olympics-motivated drivers, the author suggests the Olympics might trigger similar transport developments in future host cities. Therefore, city planners can use Olympic transport features as powerful catalysts to accelerate their urban and transport plans.

ABSTRACT:  This article details the transformation of the urban rust belt over the course of economic restructuring. It begins by building typologies of cities at the starting point of restructuring and by showing how cities vary in socioeconomic performance by the endpoint. Multiple methods and data sources are then used to provide a general and detailed story of change for successful and unsuccessful performers. Results show that, in general, deindustrialization is not associated with performance. However, manufacturing still matters. Detailed stories show successful cities of one type have diversified manufacturing, becoming post-industrial producers. Successful cities of another type have specialized, retaining old manufacturing in branch plants. For the first type of city, policies aimed at developing the labor force and encouraging collaboration between local manufacturers is recommended. For the second type, policies targeted at improving the local business climate are encouraged. Results also show all unsuccessful cities have become healthcare-based economies.

ABSTRACT:  Studies have demonstrated links between the accessibility of food and multiple health outcomes. Policymakers engaged in local community development may use public health concerns as a strategy to procure funding for food retail initiatives. Few studies to date have demonstrated the impact that a new food retailer can have on geographic and economic access to nutritious food in a community, evidence which could support the case for new food retail. This paper examines the price and availability of food before and after the opening of two new grocery stores in a former food desert in Flint, Michigan. The results indicate a substantial improvement in both geographic and economic food accessibility, and show no statistical difference between prices at average grocery stores and the new stores. Discussion suggests that investment in poorer neighborhoods can be beneficial to the local population and the community at large by creating a local multiplier effect through increased spending in the community.

ABSTRACT:  This article examines residential vacancy patterns in Buffalo, NY, using data from a unique data set. It includes variables from HUD Aggregate USPS Administrative Data on Address Vacancies, the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates for 2005–2009, housing choice voucher (HCV) records of local public housing agencies, and municipal in rem property records. Multiple regression is used to identify significant relationships between vacancy patterns, socioeconomic characteristics, and institutional factors. The findings from this analysis suggest that the percent of vacant residential properties increases in census tracts with elevated poverty rates, higher percentages of renters receiving rental assistance, and long-term vacancies. They also suggest that the percent of abandoned residential properties increases in census tracts with highly concentrated black populations, elevated poverty rates, long-term vacancies, and higher percentages of business addresses. We conclude that these relationships are unique to older core cities experiencing systemic population and job losses. These cities struggle with a distinct type of long-term vacant and abandoned structures, which we label zombie properties. They can be contrasted with vacant and abandoned properties in transitional or regenerating areas. We offer recommendations for further analysis of zombie properties in these urban settings.

ABSTRACT:  Ownership fragmentation in multiowned housing (MOH) necessitates collective actions from homeowners for management and maintenance of the communal facilities. Yet, rationality dissuades individuals from participating in collective action which provides no positive net benefit. Rational homeowners in MOH tend to free-ride on others’ efforts and, in theory, no collective action in housing management will take place. In fact, however, some homeowners of MOH do actively participate in housing management. It is thus worthwhile to examine why some are willing to participate and others are not. This study identifies determinants of homeowners’ willingness to participate (WTP) in MOH management using the collective interest model (CIM). Based on the findings of a structured questionnaire survey in Hong Kong, the explanatory analyses suggest that homeowners’ WTP is generally a function of beliefs about self and group efficacies, value of the collective good, and selective benefits and costs of participation, but the results are sensitive to the type of management activity. Although the existence of neither homeowners' associations nor property management agents is found to have significant impacts on homeowners’ WTP, a research agenda which extends the CIM to study how the perceived efficacies of these management agencies affect WTP is proposed.

ABSTRACT:  We intend to build on previous work in planning and geography to develop a new framework for characterizing the everyday spaces that queer people move through and to capture their experiences of the city. Our hypothesis is that all spaces reflect social norms around gender identity and sexual orientation. We will explore how these norms play out in urban spaces by adapting a Lynchian framework that characterizes space by performance characteristics, such as fit, access, and control, using Kansas City, Missouri as a case study. Our results show that queer people read most spaces as heteronormative. They also show that there is a set of spaces with common performance characteristics that are preferred by queer people in Kansas City. We conclude with recommendations for future research and suggest connections to planning practice.

ABSTRACT:  Economic arguments are now at the center of child care policy discussions in the United States and Canada. We review the main economic logics applied to child care, namely long-term studies of child development on school readiness and future workforce, and short-term analyses of impacts on the regional economy. We analyze a sample of economic development–focused child care studies to demonstrate how they draw on a new discursive frame, authorize new coalitions of actors and champions, and introduce new policy tools at the state/provincial and local levels. Such economic logic makes the regional level a new priority for child care development, marking a shift in scale. We find the economic development approach is reshaping discourse and is leading to changes in public policy at both the state and local levels. The new paradigm of promoting child care as economic development has potential to strengthen child care as a social right and to enhance gender justice.

ABSTRACT:  Across the country, urban leaders are developing arts-focused urban policy, but much remains unknown about artists’ geography—particularly in contracting, rustbelt cities. Using Cuyahoga County, Ohio, this article describes the geography of artists and explores methodologies for predicting artist-concentrated neighborhoods. The research questions if, and how, scholars can predict artist neighborhoods and design policies to support and nurture these locations. It maps and analyzes existing patterns using survey, property, and Census data, and predicts artist-friendly neighborhoods via a regression model. The analysis reveals neighborhoods’ residual capacity for artists and directs initial policy recommendations for an artist-focused vacant land reutilization initiative. For scholars, the findings contribute to a rapidly growing body of literature about the relationship between artists, neighborhood revitalization, and urban policy. For practitioners, the research investigates one strategy for shaping land policy in the post-2008 housing market.