The impact of sustainable mobility may be considered through the mode of non-motorization, which may vary by spatial environmental conditions, especially accessibility by active mobility in a necessarily safe, comfortable, and pleasant atmosphere. Sustainable mobility comprises willingness to allow commuting behaviors on non-motorized travel for…

This article documents how an MSW student in an introductory community practice course took her class assignment and over the course of two years revitalized, democratized, and transformed a sclerotic, corporate-run Home Owners Association (HOA). While the community analysis assignment required the student to interview six of her neighbors, the…

The Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), launched in 2010, provides funds for public housing authorities and other local entities and aims to redevelop distressed housing projects and transform the neighborhoods surrounding them into "mixed-income, high opportunity communities." From its inception, the CNI has included a strong focus…

Purpose: To equitably transform urban schools of color and the neighborhoods where they are nested requires approaches that promote community equity and foster solidarity among a range of stakeholders. However, most school-community approaches solely focus on improving school-based outcomes and leave educational leaders with little guidance for…

After the 2008 housing loan crisis, many houses were foreclosed/abandoned in Michigan, and specifically Grand Rapids (GR). Our study provides a collaborative and scalable model for collecting parcel-level housing data, in a southeast GR neighborhood within 15 U.S. Census Blocks. Grand Valley State University Geography faculty and students…

Building on a long-term university/community research partnership, this article examines how different ways of conceptualizing, interpreting, and producing murals impacted how an urban community saw itself. Using a participatory action research design, university researchers worked alongside community researchers to ethnographically document 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 Funding was withdrawn, attention went elsewhere.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 article argues that technological innovation is transforming the flow of information, the fluidity of social action, and is giving birth to new forms of bottom up innovation that are capable of expanding and exploding old theories of reproduction and resistance because "smart mobs," "street knowledge," and "social…

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…

As more colleges and universities commit to a public mission, it is critical that our work as anchor institutions have a sustainable and positive impact, and that we collaborate fully with the diverse voices and expertise beyond our campuses--the most valuable assets of our multicultural cities. Taking Syracuse, New York, as a microcosm, the…

NIMBYism, the popular and short form for "Not In My Back Yard", describes the resistance and outright opposition by residents, either within a distinct place such as a neighbourhood, or, more broadly, in a larger civic area right up to a town or city level, against some planned nearby facility, service, or changed land use. NIMBYism is also about…

Distressed urban neighborhoods face challenges on multiple fronts, but most efforts to confront these problems work in isolation of one another. The New Communities Program (NCP) is an exception, helping selected Chicago neighborhoods develop partnerships to address challenges involving employment, education, housing, and safety in a…

The authors examined a strategic policing initiative that was implemented in a high crime Nashville, Tennessee neighborhood by utilizing a mixed-methodological evaluation approach in order to provide (a) a descriptive process assessment of program fidelity; (b) an interrupted time-series analysis relying upon generalized linear models; (c)…

Five years after hurricane Katrina, the City of New Orleans is now implementing a far-reaching plan for the systemic renovation and rebuilding of community programmes and infrastructure. A total of USD 3 billion has now been allocated to public building projects. With the student population down to nearly half of pre-storm totals, a recently…

University faculty and outreach program directors have been called to deliver more effective, equitable, and sustainable ways in which neighborhood and university communities may creatively interact. The authors report on the case of the Pittsburgh Studio, an initiative that matches students and resident stakeholders in researching local issues…