What Constitutes Engaged Dialogue in Urban Research? Thoughts From a Long Time “Outside-Insider”
In this plenary for the new journal Dialogues in Urban Research, I discuss what constitutes (and should constitute going forward) engaged dialogue in urban research. Engaged dialogue is the process of working collaboratively with groups of people, whoever they are, in relation to particular issues that affect them, to understand those issues better. So what does engaged dialogue in urban research look like? Who is engaging with who, where, why, and how? Has it changed over time?
Policing and the Punitive Politics of Local Homelessness Policy
This policy brief investigates the involvement of the police in responses to homelessness in cities across the country. We amass a wide array of data, including a novel survey of mayors and details of Homeless Outreach Teams from the nation’s 100 largest cities. We find that the police are highly influential in city homelessness policymaking and are frequently involved in implementing homelessness policy.
Policy Brief: Policing and the Punitive Politics of Local Homelessness Policy
Authors: Alisa Dewald (Research Assistant; Boston University Initiative on Cities), Dr. Katherine Levine Einstein (Boston University Initiative on Cities; Department of Political Science), and Dr. Charley Willison (Cornell University Public Health) In this brief, the Boston University Initiative on Cities, Cornell University, and Community Solutions investigate the involvement of the police in responses to homelessness in cities across the country. Advocates and researchers […]
Book Review: Defensible space on the move: Mobilisation in English housing policy and practice, by Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick
This is an excellent book that deserves to be read by a wide audience. Its main storyline is the transfer and adaptation of Oscar Newman’s ideas about defensible space to England over a 400-year period. Laced within this narrative are leading characters whose mutual antipathies and conniving would play well in a soap opera. That’s not all: the authors utilize and extend theories of the mobilities of policy and practice. Reading this book should prompt urban academics and policymakers to ponder in depth what drives their research and practice, and how their worlds relate to each other and to the “Guinea pigs” in communities who are on the receiving end of their well-meaning ideas.
Contesting Public Spaces: Social Lives of Urban Redevelopment in London
Public space was a big topic in urban circles in the mid to late 1990s. I remember enjoying Ken Worpole and Liz Greenhalgh’s DEMOS treatise ‘The Freedom of the City.’ Indeed, as a New Labour government instigated an Urban Renaissance, and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) focused on design in cities, public space was debated relatively fully in England. Over 20 years later and indeed after experiencing altered public spaces during COVID-19, it has been interesting to return to urban public space again in Ed Wall’s new book, and in London—a city that has seen significant redevelopment and gentrification since the late 1990s which many have argued has sanitised public space.
Built Design and the Rhetoric of Cities
In Built Design and the Rhetoric of Cities, Kathleen M. Vandenberg explores how cities are imagined, designed, and constructed and analyzes the impact of built design on the movement, behavior, and experience of people in urban areas. Vandenberg argues that becoming attuned to the built environments of cities is critical to understanding and planning for how they might be reshaped to confront the challenges of this century, which include rapid urbanization, the global rise in slums, climate change, and increasing urban air pollution.
2022 Menino Survey of Mayors: Economic Opportunity, Poverty & Well-being
The 2022 Menino Survey of Mayors represents the ninth nationally representative survey of American mayors and is based on interviews with 118 sitting mayors from 38 states. The 2022 Survey explores mayoral views on climate and energy, poverty and rising costs of living, and health and safety. The second and final set of findings, released in April 2023, analyzes mayors’ views on key economic challenges – including poverty and the rising cost of living – and tools they can use at the local level. It also investigates what mayors perceive to be the main public health and public safety challenges in their communities. The 2022 Survey continues with the support of The Rockefeller Foundation.
Women Reclaiming the City: International Research on Urbanism, Architecture, and Planning
The originality of Women Reclaiming the City lies not only in the variety of themes being presented, but also in the variety of all these different highly respected women researchers. This book is the first in which current societal themes revolving around urbanism, architecture, and city planning are put forth solely through female perspectives. It reveals the importance of having female lenses on certain societal debates
Analyzing Child Firearm Assault Injuries by Race and Ethnicity During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 4 Major US Cities
Firearm violence in the United States has increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with particularly large increases in child injuries reported. Racial and ethnic disparities in all-age firearm injuries and deaths also appear to have grown. However, little research has examined how pandemic-related increases in firearm assaults may have disproportionally affected Black, Hispanic, and Asian children.
Cities, Zoning, and the Fragmented Response to Homelessness
America’s cities are facing a pressing homelessness crisis, with insufficient affordable housing as the chief cause. Local governments are critical policy partners in addressing and ending homelessness through their control over land use policy, what housing gets built in a community, and where it can be built. This policy brief explores the fact that there is little coordination of cities’ homelessness and zoning/land use planning policies.