With cooperation between a state-supported agency and local merchants, the downtown shopping area of the village of Oak Park was converted into a car-free mall featuring cultural activities. (JD)

Chronicles the need for and development of an interdisciplinary, integrated neighborhood-level database for Boston, Massachusetts, discussing database content and potential applications of this database to a range of criminal justice problems and initiatives (e.g., neighborhood crime patterns, needs assessment, and program planning and…

Evaluated the impact of a civil remedy program, Beat Health (Oakland, California), on drug and disorder problems under experimental field trial conditions. Findings show some improvement in the experimental residential areas, but possible displacement of drug problems in and around the commercial experimental and control sites. (SLD)

This article examines an effort to use urban schools to promote the revitalization of a large northeastern city in the United States. In order to attract and retain professional families to a regenerated central city, downtown schools are re-branded and promoted to such families as suitable for their children. The article draws on interviews and…

Crime prevention works. This simple fact is often forgotten in the ongoing debate over crime and its causes. Prevention works when individuals take common-sense actions to protect themselves, their families and property. The theme from Crime Prevention Month 1995 goes back to these basics: good home security, self-protection skills for kids and…

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 report evaluates the implementation of the Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization (NPCR) project and presents the major lessons learned in the first 5 years of the NPCR's existence. During the past five years, 161 applied research projects have been completed by 70 neighborhood organizations working with 120 students from 10…

Through a cooperative project of business education, Negroes are assisted in developing successful enterprises while at the same time contributing to the economic rebuilding of the city. (EK)

Describes experiences of the Neighborhood Participation Project (Nashville, Tennessee), which studied citizen participation in using research data for neighborhood improvement. Suggests that creating partnerships between social scientists and citizens can improve social science research, enhance research utilization, and help communities to help…

Physical-economic models of neighborhood change, popularly used by neighborhood planners, are beginning to give way to more politically oriented models. Such models do not call for blind community control, but for facilitating the development of neighborhood political capacities. (Author/RLV)

Explores competing constructions and understandings of the gentrifying neighborhoods on Chicago's near northwest side, noting how Puerto Rican youth are implicated in these changes. Explores contradictory images of neighborhoods, residents' responses to these changes, and various linguistic attempts to refashion new ethno-racial designations in…

Neighborhood service organizations such as Detroit's Hartford Memorial Baptist Church, Franklin Wright Settlements, and Warren/Conner Development Coalition have developed leadership and mobilized resources for collective action. Neighborhoods served by exceptional organizations contrast sharply with surrounding areas in decline. (SK)

Discusses the factors restricting access to the outdoors and the social and environmental aspects of the changing ecology of childhood. It calls for a new sense of child-biosphere relations and points to the international conventions and other venues where this theme is being taken up. (GR)

Explores why service-learning students have only rarely been engaged directly as neighborhood organizers, then employs John Dewey's understanding of democracy to analyze one program which has succeeded in making widespread use of college students as front-line organizers. Describes how the complementarity between what students do at their…