Why are many urban universities' relationships with their surrounding communities fraught despite university efforts at community engagement? Relationships between the factors underlying university-driven neighborhood change remain largely unexplored. In this article, I take the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a case study and examine the…

Not long after commentators were predicting the "death of neighbourhoods," they are back in policy vogue. Funding was withdrawn, attention went elsewhere. But neighbourhoods are a yo-yo policy idea, in and out of fashion, and they have bounced back under the coalition. Neighbourhoods are now a key focus for the coalition's localism agenda to…

This case study focuses on the way a neighborhood association connects schools to broad change in an urban neighborhood of a large Midwestern city. The first section provides a review of the literature on community involvement in school and neighborhood reform. It reviews the historical origins of the current school-community relationship, the…

The community of East Lake, home to Charles R. Drew Charter School (Drew), is 6 miles from downtown Atlanta. In 1995, crime in East Lake was 19 times higher than the national average. Now, violent crime is down 95 percent. In 1995, 88 percent of residents were unemployed. Now, only 5 percent receive welfare. In 1995, just 5 percent of fifth…

The U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) is one of the Obama administration's major antipoverty initiatives and a core strategy of the White House's Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. It is intended to improve educational outcomes by creating a continuum of school readiness, academic services, and family and…

Explores Milwaukee, Wisconsin's use of community Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using long-term ethnographic research. Overall, the effects of GIS and other digital technologies are quite varied across different community organizations, influenced strongly by factors such as leadership quality, organizational capacity, and resourcefulness in…

In this article, the author discusses a project that turns residents of some of South Leeds' most deprived neighbourhoods into community researchers and is giving people an opportunity to make concrete, positive changes to their communities. Armed with homemade tools, some coloured pens, and masses of post-it notes, the "Community…

The Making Connections initiative, which works to build strong families and strong neighborhoods in 22 cities, promotes an explicit communication policy to get the kind of support and involvement that can make a difference. This guide defines the principles and components of effective communication and shows how communicating can be a critical…

Examines Washington, DC, Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANC) as an illustration of neighborhood involvement in city revitalization and maintenance. Considers (1) hypotheses about neighborhood roles and participation in public issue raising; (2) ANC structure, participation, and decision roles; and (3) likely roles neighborhood governments can…

Healthy and successful cities are built out of blocks and neighborhoods. Cities are too large and varied to be regarded or run as uniform entities. Block associations are proposed to be one of the major tools that are available for stabilizing and maintaining urban neighborhoods in a fashion that is both inexpensive and responsive to the needs of…

A 45-block area of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York was chosen to illustrate how a poor urban community with the physical potential for restoration might be transformed by a local, unconventional college. About 500,000 poor people live in the area, 95% of whom are Negro or Puerto Rican, and almost 50% of these have only a ninth…

The Consumer Resources Environteam has developed this idea handbook as part of the Broad Spectrum Environmental Education Program in Brevard County, Florida. Interest had been displayed by local civic groups, fraternal clubs, and private organizations in identifying environmental improvement projects that could be undertaken by individual groups.…

This article describes how three neighborhoods in the city of New York, through vigorous citizen leadership and active volunteers, converted decayed and abandoned slum areas into attractive recreational centers. (JD)

In many Canadian multi-family residential environments there is often a lack of sheltered space for recreation, other than the dwelling unit, where children can play in inclement weather and engage in those kinds of activities which usually cannot take place in the home. (Such activities include those that are too noisy, too messy, too large to…

The Hartford project, an experimental effort to reduce residential burglary, street robberies, and fear of those crimes in an urban residential neighborhood, is described. Its most distinctive feature is its integrative approach in which police, community organization, and physical design changes were used to increase the willingness and ability…